Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen C. Guelzo (review)

Shortly after receiving news of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, an Ohio editor predicted that “Whatever else may have been sown and reaped in this war, we shall certainly gather from its broad, blood-soaked fields a literary harvest, fiction, personal adventure, history, poetry, so plentiful that it will nourish vast numbers of people for generations” (4). Allen C. Guelzo, the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College, has contributed much toward the fulfillment of that prophecy, and two of his books have won the Gilder Lincoln Prize.

Guelzo’s work under consideration here will not likely win another Lincoln Prize, but that was probably not his expectation. It appears that his goal was to provide a book suitable for use in a college classroom for a Civil War and Reconstruction course, or by those seeking an intermediate level of knowledge regarding that period. Those who are experts will find little new from a substantive standpoint. Guelzo was necessarily forced by the Procrustean Bed of publishers–word and page counts–to omit discussion of some key antebellum events – most notably the successful slave rebellion on the Caribbean island of St. Domingue in the 1790s that haunted white southerners throughout the 1800s, and the bitter division between Southern National Democrats and the more radical Southern Rights Democrats during the secession crisis that would hinder Southern white solidarity when the war became long and difficult, and facilitate southern Republicanism after it finally ended.

Guelzo’s discussion of President Lincoln’s mobilization of the North to put down the rebellion is full and rich, and his comparison of the resources of both sides of the conflict is spot on. Guelzo demonstrates his extensive knowledge of the war’s eastern theater but does not ignore the war in the west or its impact on the Confederate desertion rate. As Guelzo notes, insufficient manpower ultimately forced the Confederacy to seriously consider the heretofore unimaginable: arming the slaves for the defense of the slave-holding Republic.

Guelzo’s book contains a fair amount to tempt social historians. The wartime roles of women, Native Americans, Hispanics, intellectuals, various religious denominations, and African Americans are examined. But the involvement of these groups is lumped into a single chapter; not woven by Guelzo into the chronological spine of his narrative.

Guelzo, like many loyal Lincoln historians, blurs the President’s true position on black suffrage for the post-war South, making him appear as more supportive than he actually was. By contrast, Guelzo discusses Lincoln’s fear in 1865 of the collapsing Confederate armies devolving into a huge number of guerrilla bands and describes how that fear led Lincoln to push for surprisingly mild peace and reconstruction terms. But he fails to recognize that this same threat also forced the hand of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, to (like Lincoln) avoid permanent, provocative changes in the South’s social, political and economic order beyond the completion of slavery’s destruction. This is odd given Guelzo’s adventurous posit of an important counterfactual—“what might have happened if Andrew Johnson had obeyed his original impulse in the spring of 1865 to hang a dozen, or even more, of the Confederate leaders” (509). Guelzo does not address the reasons that did not occur, much less analyze “what might have happened.” He also omits the primary reason why Northerners– as he and others put it–experienced a “loss of interest” (506) in Reconstruction in the 1870s. Their rage over Lincoln’s ghastly murder, which had initially fueled support for punitive measures in the form of radical political change in the South, had finally cooled.

Guelzo’s epilogue, consisting of a discussion of the impact on the United States of the Civil War and its aftermath, is thought-provoking. His bibliographic essay regarding leading...