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  • Feeling the Pain:Coming to Terms with Suffering in America’s Civil War
  • Frances M. Clarke (bio)

Producing mass suffering is one of the main objectives and most prominent outcomes of modern wars. Whatever the political or moral results that wars seek to promote, and whatever else they produce, to inflict pain and suffering is war’s means and its consequence. Yet until relatively recently, this obvious fact was not of central concern or interest to historians of war. As John Keegan complained half a century ago, most studies of war depicted their subject as a gigantic chess game in which disembodied actors—faceless and immune to complex emotions—moved here and there seeking strategic advantage. Suffering appeared only in its most sanitized form, as lists of names or numbers of dead and wounded. Since then, scholars working on conflicts in every time and place have taken up Keegan’s call to study the “face of battle.” Many have also embraced the agenda of critical war studies that Keegan’s work helped to inspire—namely, that of connecting what happens on battlefields to wider structures, cultures, and populations beyond them.1 In the field of American Civil War history, certain aspects of this shift have caused more than a little unease. In this forum, we take up the question of how the immense suffering produced by this conflict has been analyzed, redefined, and contested over the past few decades.

I first began studying the Civil War in the late 1990s, in the midst of a burgeoning interest in the field. Social and cultural historians had recently discovered this conflict, producing the first sizeable output of books focusing on politics and life on the home front, draft riots, ordinary soldiers, newly freed slaves, southern women, guerrilla war, voluntarism, labor relations, and postwar memory. The cause of this interest [End Page 181] was varied, ranging from international trends in the study of war, the release of new source material, the publication of a number of groundbreaking studies, and the unexpected popularity of Ken Burns’s Civil War series, which attracted forty million viewers on its first airing in 1990. The overriding imperative for many scholars at this time lay in challenging the lost cause myth, which held Confederates to be noble freedom fighters standing up for states’ rights against the oppressive power of an industrializing North. Erasing the suffering of the enslaved, this myth depicted slavery as a benign and temporary institution, destined to wither of its own accord. By the end of the 1990s, a new body of Civil War scholarship had laid waste to this myth while also showing that Southern and Northern home fronts were less united, soldiers more ideologically driven, slavery more central to the coming of the war, and freedmen and women more active in the conflict’s unfolding and meaning than previously assumed.

Yet in popular culture, older versions of the Civil War have continued to hold considerable sway. According to a Pew Research poll conducted in 2011, almost half of the respondents (48 percent) suggested that states’ rights were the main cause of the Civil War, while far fewer (38 percent) believed that slavery played the most fundamental role. Overall, those who identified as white were more likely to accept the states’ rights argument than those who identified as African American (48 percent to 39 percent). Alarmingly, the states’ rights interpretation has been gaining credibility among the young, with a full 60 percent of Americans under the age of thirty viewing the struggle in these terms.2 Little wonder, says James W. Loewen, since states’ rights arguments remain embedded in the textbooks children read, the museums they visit, and the monuments that surround them.3 Pondering why the Civil War has never attracted much interest among African Americans despite its monumental role in black history, Ta-Nehisi Coates recently suggested that popular culture continues to present the conflict as a vast tragedy—not for slave families who had experienced generations of capricious violence, stolen labor, attempted dehumanization, and enforced sale, only to find themselves subject to new regimes of labor control and white supremacy in the postwar era—but for soldiers who died in large...

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