Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War. By James M. McPherson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 258. $25.00.) The study ofthe Civil War itself, rather than its causes and consequences, surely now occupies the highest station in academia it has held since World War II and perhaps that it has ever held. No person is more responsible for this than James M. McPherson. Civil Warhistory also enjoys an enviable reputation among general readers for accessible and well-written books. Again, no one has contributed more to this phenomenon than Professor McPherson. An indefatigable writer and public speaker, he has spread the gospel ofserious scholarship on the Civil War. He has not entirely bridged the gap between scholar and hobbyist. No one can. He examines the whole of Northern and Southern societies in the light of ideology, politics, economics, race, and diplomacy The hobbyist often prefers to read about the Civil War regiment by regiment and hill by hill, uncluttered by political and social considerations. Despite his broad focus, Professor McPherson deals with the subject at a level of precision few can match: there were 166 black regiments in the Civil War, we read in one of the essays in this book, for example. He brings to bear the findings of social history, women's history, Afro-American history, political history, and labor history, while he has likely read more soldiers' letters and diaries than any other living practitioner. These essays and book reviews reveal the command he has gained of the unmanageably vast Civil War literature. Subjects in this book include: the South, Uncle Tom 's Cabin, "total war," social history and the Civil War, why the Confederacy lost, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War in European eyes, and (in the only previously unpublished essay) the problems of writing Civil War history for academics, hobbyists, and general readers. Some of the essays are a little slight: book reviews, fairminded and rendering a good sense of the value of the works perhaps, but not delving as deeply as a full-fledged article. All fifteen of the articles are stimulating and useful. Taken as a whole, they reveal Professor McPherson's interpretive viewpoints, which usually do not intrude much on his extremely skilled longer narratives. His pro-Union, proRepublican , pro-emancipation, pro-Lincoln-Grant-Sherman-Sheridan stance contrasts with his anti-Confederate views. The South is depicted as an aggressive protonation more akin to the aristocratic and monarchical countries of BOOK REVIEWS7I Europe than to the democratic North. Robert E. Lee, though not as bad as Alan Nolan would have readers believe in one of the books under review here, is still a tarnished hero in McPherson's eyes. It is fitting that the publication of this volume should fall so near the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, for Professor McPherson's work stands as the highest statement of the dominant post-World War II version of the American Civil War: The Civil War mobilized human resources on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history except, perhaps. World War II. For actual combat duty the Civil War mustered a considerably larger proportion of American manpower than did World War II. And, in another comparison with that global conflict, the victorious power in the Civil War did all it could to devastate the enemy's economic resources as well as the morale of its home-front population, which was considered almost as important as enemy armies in the war effort. In World War II this was done by strategic bombing; in the Civil War it was done by cavalry and infantry penetrating deep into the Confederate heartland. (67) James McPherson helped create and synthesize the still-reigning orthodoxy in interpretation ofthe Civil War suggested by this comparison. That interpretation holds that the war began as a limited war and became a "total war." By "total war," at least in McPherson's scheme, two things are meant: widespread destructiveness (a "program of 'being terrible on the enemy'" [78]); and the social reconstruction ofthe South ("the conflict had become remorseless as well as revolutionary...