Pride in Popular History: The Case for Holding the Course

He was perhaps the greatest writer ever to tackle the story of the Civil War, and he was born less than three months before the turn of the 20th century. It is easy to forget that he had known Civil War veterans, and that he had grown up amid their Decoration Day commemorations and talked to them as a young man. In those days, Michigan boasted a proud plethora of such Union veterans. In the preface to the centennial edition of his landmark Army of the Potomac trilogy, Bruce Catton wrote in Mr. Lincoln's Army:

As a small boy I had known a number of these men in their old age; they were grave, dignified, and thoughtful, with long white beards and a general air of being pillars of the community. They lived in rural Michigan in the pre-automobile age, and for the most part they had never been fifty miles away from the farm on the dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they had been everywhere and had seen everything, and nothing that happened to them thereafter meant anything much. All that was real had taken place when they were young . . . . This was too much for an adolescent to understand. Perhaps it is too much for anybody to understand, in a skeptical age.¹

Catton was right. The Civil War, like any war, was inexplicable. The wretched experience of combat and day to day life as a soldier, the paralyzing worry of those on the home fronts both North and South, as well as the emotional journey from slavery to an uncertain future—all were beyond description uncertain future—all were beyond description and impossible for the generations that came later to understand. But there was another element Catton noted, which was the fact that the war was a transcendent experience for a generation coming of age in the 1860s.

A decade and a half before Catton was born, an aged Civil War veteran named Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., delivered one of the most memorable speeches of the post-Civil War era. Then an associate justice of the Brandeis Supreme Court, Holmes had served with great distinction in the colorful 20th Massachusetts Regiment. He had watched his best friends—some of the best and smartest men he knew or ever would know—be ambushed in the West Woods at Antietam and in a dozen other actions. In 1884 he spoke on Memorial Day to the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, intoning many memorable and eloquent anecdotes about those who served with him:

I see a fair-haired lad, a lieutenant, and a captain on whom life had begun somewhat to tell, but still young, sitting by the long mess-table in camp before the regiment left the State, and wondering how many of those who gathered in our tent could hope to see the end of what was then beginning. For neither of them was that destiny reserved. I remember, as I awoke from my first long stupor in the hospital after the battle of Ball's Bluff, I heard the doctor say, "He was a beautiful boy."²

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-47817].

Of course, Holmes was speaking to the veterans, not to the entire community. Perhaps even then, in the days when the war was still a living thing in the minds of men and women who had experienced it, the wider public and the youth had little patience for long and eloquent speeches. More likely, though, Holmes knew that only veterans could understand and appreciate his words. "The generation that carried on the war," Holmes noted famously, "has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire."³ To modern eyes and ears, the phrase "set apart by its experience" seems to indicate that Holmes believed the war was inexplicable for its horrors and trials, as surely it was, and that it had opened a gulf between...