America Goes to War: The Civil War and Its Meaning in American Culture

Introduction

Introduction T is perfectly possible that we are spending a little too much time nowadaysin talking about the American Civil War. It compelsour attention, to be sure.As an historical pageant it still has power to stir our emotions; as a fearful object lesson in the dire things that can happen when our political machinery breaks down, it continues to be worth detailed examination ; as an example of the tragic price we have paid for an expanded ideal of the worth of human unity and freedom, it deserves all the attention we can give it. Yet we seem to be transforming it into a conversation piece. More and more it is being looked upon as a mine of source material from which books—best-sellers, and otherwise—radio shows and television dramas can be made. It isbecoming to us, what it never was to the people who had to take part in it, something romantic, a bright and colorful splash in the center of the slightly drab story of this country's nineteenth-centurydevelopment. It is a museum piece, replete with old-fashioned flags, weapons, uniforms , and people, tinkling with sentimental little songs, set off by heroic attitudes, a strange and somehow attractive nevernever land in which our unaccountableancestors chose to live for four picturesque years. It does no particular harm, to be sure, for us to look at it in II J. America Goes to War that way, although a good many of the participants in the Civil War might well turn over restlessly in their graves if they could know what we are doing with it. The only real trouble is that in romanticizing the Civil War in this way—in looking on it as, essentially, something that we contrived in the high and far-off times for our own amusement—we are missing the real point of it. And the real point is a matter that we can very profitably meditate on for a time, because it still has a lesson for us. For the Civil War is not a closed chapter in our dusty past. It is one of the great datum points in American history; a place from which we can properly measurethe dimensions of almost everything that has happened to us since. With its lights and its shadows, its rights and its wrongs, its heroic highlights and its tragic overtones—it was not an ending but a beginning. It was not something that we painfully worked our way to, but something from which we made a fresh start. It opened an era instead of closing one; and it left us, finally, not with something completed, but with a bit of unfinished business which is of very lively concern today and which will continue to be of lively concern after all of us have been gathered to our fathers.Forget the swords-and-rosesaspect, the deep sentimental implications, the gloss of romance; here was something to be studied, to be prayed over, and at last to be lived up to. As the war drops farther and farther into the past, it becomes clearer that in an incomprehensible way—almost as if we did something without quite intending to—we won some12 Introduction thing prodigious. There was a victory there: not just die legendary victory of North over South, but of democracy itself over a fatally constrictive limitation—a limitation, by the way, in which the North had just as big a share as the South. The victory was achieved clumsily, at dismaying cost, without full comprehension of its true meaning, and it may indeed be true that what was won might have been won without bloodshed, if the men of the i86o's had been wiser and more patient and tolerant than anyone could logicallyexpect them to have been. No matter; in the end something profound was accomplished. We are not really a military people in America, yet now and then we do make war with unbridled energy and determination . Here was the war that went closer to the bone and left a deeper imprint on the national spirit than any other war we ever fought. How did we approach it, how did we fight it, and what did we do with the baffling combination of triumph and defeat with which the war left us? Despite all that has been written about the Civil War, these questions still need further exploration. The papers...