The Civil War at the Sesquicentennial: How Well Do Americans Understand Their Great National Crisis?

I am delighted to be here tonight to receive the Tom Watson Brown Book Prize for The Union War. Few things could be more satisfying than to receive such an honor from the principal professional organization in my field. I look around and see how far the society has come since its origins—a testament to the vitality of Civil War–era scholarship. I’ll express thanks at the outset to the Watson-Brown Foundation—and more particularly to Tad Brown—for this dinner, and to the Society of Civil War Historians and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University for overseeing the myriad details relating to the prize and tonight’s program.

Because I first felt the siren call of the Civil War as a ten-year-old at the outset of the centennial commemoration, I chose to revisit that time for my talk tonight. I went to National Geographic’s coverage in 1961–63 and in 2011–12 in search of comparative insights. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some interpretive emphases remain about the same, others—more important ones—do not. Both the early 1960s and the early twenty-first century underscore how, in their long relationships with the memory of the Civil War, every generation of Americans has found what suits its needs and overlooked or marginalized things that do not. Our current preoccupation with race, as a profession and a society, is much in evidence as we navigate the sesquicentennial.

I can date my lifelong engagement with the war to an article titled “The Civil War” in the April 1961 issue of National Geographic. Written by Ulysses S. Grant III, it struck a reconciliationist tone reminiscent of the speeches Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered on the fiftieth and seventy-fifth anniversaries of the battle of Gettysburg. “Our forefathers fought to the limit of endurance for four years;” observed the preeminent Union military hero’s grandson, “when the echo of the last shot died away, they saw in the unity of their land something that overshadowed the bitterness of the struggle.” Out of the unimaginable carnage of the Civil War, continued Grant, “emerged a more firmly united country—a country that has become the leader of the Free World.”¹

Just more than two years later, in July 1963, National Geographic recalled the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in an issue featuring an essay by Carl Sandburg, the poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg alluded to “little American burgs named for long-forgotten settlers, Gettys and Vick . . . towns with no special claim to be noted or long remembered, till events wrote them red for all time as the turning point in the Civil War.” Lincoln’s address in November 1863 further sanctified the ground at Gettysburg: “No wonder,” reflected Sandburg, “that—100 years later—we honor the great events that made us not a parcel of quarreling states, but a united Nation.”²

For anyone who might worry that Gettysburg no longer gets sufficient attention as the war’s great turning point, I am happy to say that National Geographic offers comfort. A beautiful map inserted in the May 2012 issue pronounces 1863 to be the “Turning Point of the Civil War,” and accompanying text explains that “the Union began to gain the upper hand only in July 1863 with its victory at Gettysburg, the largest battle ever fought in North America.” Thus does National Geographic sustain a hoary distortion regarding Gettysburg’s preeminence—a distortion propped up by Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War, and Ron Maxwell’s Gettysburg, the four-hour cinematic translation of The Killer Angels. Thanks to Shaara, Burns, and Maxwell, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain now enjoys a position in the front rank of Union heroes—something William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan, I think it safe to say, might find odd.³

Recent issues of National Geographic also mirror the most obvious—and noteworthy—change in popular understanding of the conflict between the...