The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. By George M. Fredrickson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Pp. viii, 277. $6.95.) This study of the Civil War's impact on the thinking of two dozen articulate northerners advances some provocative hypotheses about American intellectual history. The book divides northern intellectuals of the war generation into two general classifications—conservatives and reformers. The conservatives, including such men as Henry Bellows, Orestes Brownson , Horace Bushneil, and Francis Parkman, believed in an ordered society tightly controlled by an elite leadership exercising power through the institutions of church and state. These men were alarmed by the uncontrolled material expansion of America and the proliferating reform movements that rebelled against all established institutions in the years before the Civil War. They viewed the war as a providential opportunity to educate the masses in the virtues of authority, discipline, suffering, sacrifice , and deference toward their betters. Out of the war experience, they hoped, would come a unified nationalism purged of crass materialism and radical social heresies. The reformers, on the other hand, hoped the war would free mankind from the oppressive restraints of the past and would pave the way for the final realization of utopia. Borrowing from Stanley Elkins and John Thomas, Fredrickson views the reform movements in terms of the anti-institutional impulses of Emerson's transcendentalism, Garrison's abolitionism, and Whitman's democratic romanticism. For these reformers, the institution of slavery and the institutions of church and state, tainted by slavery, were the chief obstacles on man's road to perfection. Despite their pacifism, they welcomed the Civil War as a cataclysm that would purge society of corrupt and outworn institutions. Both the conservatives and reformers were disappointed in the outcome of the war. The increasing secularism of the postwar generation frustrated the quasi-theocratic desires of such men as Bellows and Bushnell , while the corruption and materialism of the Gilded Age dashed their hopes for the emergence of a disciplined, deferential, self-sacrificing populace. The reformers' expectations suffered even greater setbacks. True, slavery was abolished, but emancipation was achieved not by the voluntary action of individuals converted to the equalitarian, antiinstitutional tenets of the abolitionists, but by the instrumentality of the state acting from pragmatic motives through the institutions of govem67 68CIVIL WARHISTORY ment and the army. The iron necessities of war strengthened rather than weakened the major institutions of society and created, in Allan Nevins' phrase, an organizational revolution that had its counterpart in an intellectual revolution of northern reformers. Even Emerson abandoned his transcendental anarchism and began to praise the strengthened institutional framework created by war. Younger intellectuals like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Francis A. Walker, who had been touched by antebellum reform currents, came away from their war experiences with a disdain for idealistic "sentimental" reformers and a new tough-minded, conservative, institutional approach to social problems. The Civil War, in Fredrickson's words, "thwarted the drive for "humanitarian democracy' "; it "led to assumptions which obviated the anti-institutional philosophy that had been the basis of abolitionism" and "turned the genuine radicalism of the prewar period into an obvious anachronism ." At first reading, Fredrickson's arguments have a compelling logic and symmetry. But under the surface there are several unresolved contradictions in the book. For example, on page 60 the author writes that James Russell Lowell abandoned the anti-institutional assumptions underlying abolitionism in 1851 when he traveled in Europe and was "awakened to the value of tradition and social organicism." But on page 121 Lowell suddenly reverts to a "prewar idealist" trying to "nurture a transcendental fire" in the Republican party of 1860, and who is transformed by the war into a moderate pragmatist who approves of Lincoln's institutional policies. After asserting that the war's results were a defeat for the anti-institutional radicals and a partial victory for conservatives like Orestes Brownson , who desired to strengthen the national state, Fredrickson innocently refers on page 190 to Brownson's retreat in 1864 to a Calhoun-like theory of the concurrent majority because of his opposition to the Radicals' plans to use the government...