A Major Result Of the Civil War

Author-historian Aüan Nevins retired recently from the Columbia University faculty and is now on the staff of the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. In November, 1957, he organized and directed a conference on the CMl War asa feature ofthe 125th anniversary of Gettysburg College. This lecture was one of *ix presented to the large popular audiences which attended the the conference. A Major Result Of the Civil War ALLAN NEVINS Thomas carlyle shrank in horror from our Civil War. The fact that multitudes of Americans should take to butchering one another seemed to him an indictment of our democracy; the issue of the Negroes' status struck him as far from justifying such a holocaust of lives and property. His remark that the war was a fire in a dirty chimney, and his little fable called "Ilias Americana in Nuce" deeply offended the North. Among the Northern soldiers who gave their lives were two gallant young men, Robert Gould Shaw and Charles Russell Lowell, who had warmly admired Carlyle. Shaw, leader of Massachusetts colored troops, died in trying to capture Fort Wagner; Lowell, who had married Shaw's sister Josephine, was slain at Cedar Creek. Both were graduates of Harvard. Three years after the war short biographies of them, and of ninety-five others who had been killed, appeared in the Harvard Memorial Biographies, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Thereupon Charles Lowell's young widow, Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, sent the volumes to Carlyle, with a note describing their admiration of him, and a request that he read their lives, and reconsider his views on the war. Carlyle replied, in a letter here published for the first time: Chelsea—10 March, 1870 Dear Madam I rec'd your gende, land and beautiful message, and in obedience to so touching a command, soft to me as sunlight or moonlight, but imperative as few eld be, I have read diose lives you marked for me; with several of the odiers and intend to read die whole before I finish. Many thanks to you for 237 238ALLAN NEVINS these Volumes and diat note. It would need a heart much harder than mine not to recognize the high and noble spirit that dwelt in diese young men, dieir heroic readiness, complete devotedness, dieir patience, diligence, shining valour& virtue in the cause they saw to be the highest—while alas any difference I may feel on diat latterpoint, only deepens to me die sorrowful and noble tragedy [tiiat] each of their brief Uves is. You may believe me, Madam, I would strew flowers on tiieir graves along with you, and piously bid tiiem rest in Hope. It is not doubtful to me tiiat tiiey also have added dieir mite to what is the eternal cause of God and man; or that, in circuitous but sure ways, all men, Black & White, will infallibly get their profit out of the same. With many thanks & regards, dear Madam, I remain Yrs sincerely T. Carlyle. They "added their mite" to the "eternal cause of God and man." So Francis Parkman had earlier written Mrs. Robert Gould Shaw, saying that he envied her husband his death, so eloquent of the highest consecration . Many of the gains and losses of any great war are intangible and incomputable . No one can say whether the gain to society of the work two such rare spirits as Robert Gould Shaw and Charles R. Lowell would have done, had they lived, was greater than the gain from the heroic example they set. Other gains and losses, some material, some moral, can partly be appraised. But in looking at the effects of the war, it is safe to lay down two generalizations at the outset: The tremendous magnitude of the change it wrought was not anticipated in its early phases, and the nature ofthe change was not and could not be accurately analyzed when it closed in 1865. To be sure, some of its consequences were foreseen. Shrewd men perceived in 1861 that if the war was protracted and ended in Northern victory, it would strengthen not only the Union and the federal government , butthe spirit ofnational unity. They perceived that it would result in...