Intestine Shock: A Comparative Study of Civil Wars

king. No more the thirsty entrance of this soil Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood . . . Those opposed eyes, Which like the meteors of a troubled heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred, Did lately meet in the intestine shock

And furious close of civil butchery, Shall now in mutual well-beseeming ranks March all one way, and be no more opposed Against acquaintance, kindred and allies. —King Henry iv: act i, scene i

Well might that English king celebrate an end of the “intestine shock . . . of civil butchery.” Henry iv by his own confession had won the crown by “crooked ways” in a contest with Richard ii (an ineffectual and treacherous poeticizing dandy, as Shakespeare portrays him in the preceding play). Henry Boling-broke’s triumph marked the Lancastrian victory in a bloody civil war; but the peace he yearned for was denied him—and for good reason. His usurpation of the English crown and his suspected collusion in the murder of his predecessor initiated the long and bloody struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York known as the Wars of the Roses. According to what scholars call the “Tudor myth,” that conflict ended happily almost a century later in 1485 with the victory of the obscure Henry Tudor, duke of Richmond, at Bosworth Field over the wicked Richard iii. It culminated in the reigns of his son Henry viii and granddaughter Elizabeth i. The evils of civil war constituted the chief theme of the moralizing chronicles of the Tudor era and, above all, of Shakespeare’s history plays. Thus the only response to royal evil and civil war was the ultimate triumph of royal virtue.

Civil war is invariably bitter; and it is not uncommon for civil conflicts to be refought in print and speech for decades after the last shot, as were the Wars of the Roses and our own Civil War of 1861–65. In our case the old army friendships of many commanders, North and South, tempered its bitterness. And, for all the bloodshed, the American conflict hardly held a candle to the Thirty Years’ War of seventeenth-century Europe—a conflict inflamed by religious differences that lent itself to a special vindictiveness and was finally settled by a cynical formula: cuius regio, eius religio (the religion of the principality would follow that of its ruling prince). In that case the outcome was paradoxical: “After years of disorder and civil war, in which the Emperor had tried and failed to accomplish the miracle of uniting rival theologies, exhaustion and realism had propounded their own solution,” writes J. E. Neale. “A country which in law was a federal state became . . . a confederation of states. German unity had to wait until the 19th century—or perhaps one should say, until the 20th.”

Civil wars obviously differ from era to era and from place to place and certainly from issue to issue. But do they nonetheless exhibit certain common features? One, beyond doubt, is the horror they stir among plain people who find them in some sense metaphysically disturbing. Edward Hall, whose chronicle played an underrated role in sourcing Shakespeare’s history plays, offers a vivid sense of disorder and the reversal of natural hierarchies: “What mischief hath insurged in realms by intestine division, what depopulation hath ensued in countries by civil dissension, what detestable murder hath been committed in cities by separate factions, and what calamity hath ensued in famous regions by domestical discord and unnatural controversy, Rome hath felt, Italy can testify, France can bear witness, Bohemia can tell, Scotland may write, Denmark can show, and especially this noble realm of England can . . . declare. . . . What misery, what murder, and what execrable plagues this famous region hath suffered by the . . . dissensions of the renowned houses of Lancaster and York.”

The historian Crane Brinton once proposed a taxonomy of revolution and outlined its categories in The Anatomy of Revolution. If one were essaying a taxonomy of civil wars, the American and English instances of “civil butchery” might suggest themselves as prototypes, in spite of salient...