Reflections on “Where Do We Stand?”

The Civil War field has been buzzing for the past year about the role of military history. Those who worry that the war is dropping out of Civil War courses argue that omitting military history from books and classes removes the feature event. We cannot understand the period without understanding what happened on the battlefield, cannot understand the consequences of war without understanding the war itself. I agree with the general thrust of the argument, but it carries the risk of flattening our understanding of the period. Because while we should absolutely keep the military matters in mind, we should not abandon what have been very fruitful studies of the home front, politics, religion, and soldier motivation. We cannot understand what took place on the battlefield without understanding what happened in the halls of power and in homes and towns across the Union and the Confederacy. I dislike this debate because it tends to be binary. My call is for us to abandon the “A or B” approach and embrace a third way: “A and B,” or, better yet, “A and B and C.” Rather than isolate military, political, or social history, I would like to see more of us employ Carl von Clausewitz’s “paradoxical trinity” as an analytical device to understand the Civil War.

A central feature of the Prussian theorist’s classic, On War, the paradoxical trinity envisions war as an event that involves three elements: the people, the government, and the military. Imagine a conflict as a stool. One leg is the civilians, who pay the taxes, buy the bonds, elect the officials, and send their sons (few daughters, in the case of the American Civil War) and husbands to war. The second is politicians, who determine the national strategy and the war aims, decide how to raise troops and money, allocate funds, articulate the war’s goals, and keep morale high. The military, the third leg, does the fighting. If one leg of this breaks, the entire stool collapses, and the war is lost. As long as the war continues, though, the relationship among them is ever-shifting. The influence of one on the others is so fluid, Clausewitz said, that portraying any correlation as fixed renders the picture “totally useless.”1 The paradoxical trinity is a highly illuminating paradigm for thinking about war. By forcing historians to examine how these critical elements pushed and influenced each other, they prompt us to produce a richer, more nuanced, and holistic representation of history, one that may be more recognizable to the people who lived at the time.

A variant of paradoxical trinity is to conceive of the war as a set of information loops. When I read letters from civilian soldiers to their friends and family, I am often struck by how much a particular company was a remote fragment of a community. Because of the way troops were raised, companies—sometimes whole regiments—were satellite elements of towns or neighborhoods. We all read pedestrian-sounding letters from home when we are in the archives, but these kept a soldier tied to his family and community. He had one foot at home, the other at war. In this loop, news from home affected a soldier and vice versa. Another loop works on a larger scale. Those telegraphs between commanders and Washington or Richmond could alter the perception of the war (or the generals) in either White House. And certainly orders from either capital could change actions in the field, on the battlefield, or—as in the case of emancipation—off it. A third loop is the press, reporting military and political actions to both the common people and the decision-makers. These reports could shape reactions in Congress or at home. Think of Lincoln after hearing the news of Chancellorsville: “My God! My God! What will the country say!”² And just as newspapers affected the war, they were affected by it as well. Northern editors who strayed too far in their criticism of the president could find themselves in jail or their presses destroyed. William Sherman famously hated newspapermen and regarded their...