"An Important, albeit Halting Step"

November/December 2006 Historically Speaking 31 tions for both past and present. This is no leftist diatribe or pacifist polemic. Echoing Abraham Lincoln , Stout ends the book with a moving statement of faith in America as "the world's last best hope," and he credits die outcome of the Civil War with ensuring the preservation of "a nation where people's ideas count" (458). That said, the book's conclusions nevertheless directly challenge the sanitized and comforting way in which Americans prefer to remember this defining moment in our history. We like to recall the soldiers' common courage and devotion ; Stout acknowledges these but stresses instead the war's "wanton destruction," "inhuman suffering ," and "raw and cynical persecution of innocents" (457). We acknowledge the staggering deadi toll but justify it as the price for ending slavery; Stout maintains that Lincoln ended slavery only to justify the staggering death toll, embracing emancipation to further "the draconian military course he had already set" (168). We are wont to discern in the war "the origins of our better selves";- Stout finds as well the seedbed of an "American-led Christian imperialism that was not without costs in later American history" (189). This is a cautionary tale, and I believe that the author is right: we ignore it "at great peril." So does diis mean that the book succeeds as a "moral history"? Absolutely—up to a point. With eloquence and passion Stout forthrighdy raises questions of right and wrong—in the process reminding us of the power of history as a vehicle for moral reflection —and in diis respect he succeeds marvelously . And yet to proceed from hard moral questions to persuasive moral judgments requires at least three things more: an accurate understanding of whathappened in die past, a plausible explanation of why it happened, and a compelling moral framework for evaluating the what and the why. On the whole, Stout's description of the general trend toward total war is persuasive (if, as I would maintain, overstated), as is his testimony to die "conspiracy of silence" in both North and South as this trend unfolded . When he shifts his focus to the particular decisions of key civil and military figures, however, his explanations often lack complexity and nuance. Stout's treatment of Abraham Lincoln is particularly problematic. In explaining the evolution toward total war, Stout sets up a false dichotomy between Lincoln and George McClellan, pitting die general's commitment to "taking the moral high ground" against the president's "taste for blood" (136-37). Although he acknowledges McClellan's well known "timidity" and even "pathological caution " (127, 151)—grounds for dismissal in and of themselves—he nevertheless explains Lincoln's removal of his slow-moving general from command as a clear-cut choice of victory over a "principled war" (138). Similarly, when Stout turns to emancipation , he ignores the myriad of personal, political, constitutional, and military factors that influenced Lincoln's decision—not to mention the radical assertiveness of the slaves themselves—and sees only emancipation's potential to lend "unprecedented moral stature" (187) to a policy of unprecedented killing. The temptation to such stark oversimplification is not unique to an explicidy moral history, of course, but to the degree diat its practitioners search for "lessons for life today," diat temptation is likely magnified. Simple lessons, not complex ones, promise the greater popular impact. For a self-proclaimed "moral history," Upon the Altar of the Country is also surprisingly short on systematic moral analysis. Readers will not find die kind of sustained, careful application of moral principles to particular occurrences that characterized Michael Waher'sJustand Unjust Wars, for example. This is not all bad, for it allows Stout to write a much more readable and engaging narrative, and I applaud his obvious efforts to reach as broad an audience as possible . That said, I would argue that one of the most important lessons that an overdy moral history can convey is to teach—by example as well as by precept —how one might go about applying a coherent moral framework to derive a reasoned moral assessment of a complicated past. To get from what was to what oughtto have been, the...