April 1865: The Month That Saved America, Jay Winik. HarperCollins, 496 pages, $32.50
In January 1913, the 50th anniversary of the EmancipationProclamation, Dudley Miles, a professor at Columbia University, published anessay titled "The Civil War as Unifier." The "true significance" of the war, Mileswrote, was how quickly sectional reconciliation had been achieved. Unlike civilwars and separatist conflicts in other parts of the world, the American Civil War"deepened and spread the sense of nationality" throughout the country. Miles madeno mention of slavery. Nor did he discuss the lynch mobs rampaging through theSouth attempting to enforce Jim Crow. Focusing on white Americans, Miles saw onlya nation reconciled, the wounds of war healed.
Miles wrote at the height of the Progressive Era, when pragmaticreformers appealed to the language of romantic nationalism--celebrating "thegreat fighting qualities of our race," as Theodore Roosevelt put it--to transcendthe radical egalitarianism of the Reconstruction era and the bitter class warfareof the late nineteenth century. Amid the flourishing of sentimental patriotism,people were newly fascinated with the Civil War, the event that marked the "birthof the nation."
Led by William A. Dunning and John Burgess, the first generation of academichistorians of the Civil War and its aftermath argued that the war was provoked bya defense of regional identity, not slavery, and that the North fought for thenoble project of national reunion. But the goal of forging the nation was brieflythwarted during Reconstruction. The Southerners were not to blame; the villainswere the Northern radicals. Blinded by moralistic fervor, these ideologues brokewith Abraham Lincoln's wise statesmanship and demanded that the freed slaves beincluded in the civic and political life of the nation. In the eyes of theDunning school, giving blacks the right to vote and other basic civil rights washarsh punishment for the South, a sign of the vengeful nature of the radicals.
Prior to the 1960s, historians challenging the racist history of theDunning school were at odds with a profession in thrall to its celebratory myths.But after the civil rights movement, more historians came to believe that slaverywas the central cause of the Civil War, that it was the defining institution ofSouthern society, and that it determined how the war was fought. DuringReconstruction, the nation strove to live up to the promise of emancipation andto incorporate black Americans into the body politic. This effort endedtragically, as white supremacist violence swept the South, Reconstructiongovernments were upended, and the federal government turned its back on AfricanAmericans. Reconstruction now stands as an "unfinished revolution," in EricFoner's phrase, a brief window of interracial democracy before the long night ofsegregation and Jim Crow.
In April 1865, Jay Winik, a popular historian with a background in international relations, has written an account of the Civil War era that revives many of the Dunning school's tropes about the causes and effects of the Civil War. As its title suggests, the book tells the story of the tumultuous month that saw both Appomattox and the death of Abraham Lincoln. Far from being vanquished in April 1865, says Winik, the South was prepared to go on fighting guerrilla-style warfare against the North. But Southern military leaders steered the war to a gentle close. What we should be most proud of about the Civil War, says Winik, is how it ended. Looking across the Atlantic to the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and other European regions racked by civil war and national collapse, and to long-simmering conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, Winik, echoing Dudley Miles, writes: "Far too many civil wars end quite badly, and beget a vicious cycle of more civil war and more violence, death and instability. But these civil wars were not ours; ours, ultimately, was quite different indeed."
Slavery, for Winik, was not, at heart, what either the war or the peace wasabout; nationalism was. Winik acknowledges that slavery was the "primary wedge"dividing North and South (and it should be noted that one of the better sectionsof the book is a description of the fall of Richmond, where freed slaves throngedthe streets to meet Abraham Lincoln). But he is quick to argue that it was notthe only one. Citing the Confederate decision, in the last weeks of the war, tofree slaves in return for their military service, he maintains that independencewas ultimately more important to the Confederates than preserving slavery was. InWinik's mythic history, the Confederacy was "a separate nation, sharing notsimply a common language but a common culture, heritage, identity," and theConfederates were "lively, hotheaded, hot-blooded, vivacious, [and]...proud oftheir eccentricities, of their fanciful customs and ingrained sense of tradition,of their antique etiquette and equally antique honor."
In classic Lost Cause style, the Confederate leaders are the heroes of the warhere. Robert E. Lee is compared to King Arthur, El Cid, and Richard theLionheart; Jefferson Davis to Martin Luther, Galileo, Magellan, and Napoleon.Nathan Bedford Forrest, an antebellum slave trader and Confederate general whoseprincipal claim to fame is that he led the Fort Pillow massacre of blackprisoners of war, is described as a "daring rebel cavalryman," even though Winikis well aware of his war crimes. In Forrest, he writes, "the proudest and darkestsides of the Confederacy walked ... boldly and comfortably hand in hand."
The radical republicans, by contrast, were rigid ideologues inWinik's view. He distinguishes between Lincoln's flexibility regardingReconstruction--"a word that more adequately captures his spirit isreconciliation"--and that of the radical Republicans, who would brook nocompromise regarding "black suffrage, black civil rights, or a harsh treatment ofthe South." For Winik, "the moral fervor over slave emancipation" collided with"the urgent practicality of quickly healing the nation." He suggests that "theradicals wanted to recast the entire social structure of the South, while Lincolnwas principally looking to reincorporate the rebellious states back into theUnion fold, absent slavery."
Winik devotes a few paragraphs in his conclusion to the 100 yearsof "terrible brutality, horrific violence, and often unspeakable racialrepression" that followed the end of Reconstruction, "on which," he notes, "thestrands of reconciliation often rested." But even though he is aware of this, hedoes not think that these unpleasant events "vitiate" the "central fact":National reunion created "a diverse and democratic country, inspiring quests forfreedom around the globe." The narrative section of the book closes with thesaintly Lee kneeling to take Communion next to a black man. "The othercommunicants slowly followed in his path, going forward to the altar, and, with amixture of reluctance and fear, hope and awkward expectation, into the future."The outcome of the Civil War, the story suggests, was a unified nation, in whichblacks and whites would ultimately come to live together in peace.
Such anecdotes tell us nearly as little about the war or the peace as do thesolemn handshakes at Appomattox (especially since, in a footnote, Winik asks,"Did this scene happen? Or is it myth?" He's not sure). For it is impossible tounderstand the Civil War or its aftermath without placing slavery andemancipation at the center of the narrative. Slavery motivated secession; itshaped whatever patriotic feeling the Confederacy inspired; it even determinedmilitary tactics. Jefferson Davis's dreams aside, guerrilla warfare was not arealistic possibility for the Confederacy. Waging a long guerrilla war requires alevel of communal solidarity that is simply incompatible with holding more thanthree million people in bondage. Winik's suggestion that the war's aftermathmight have spiraled into an extended separatist struggle is a way of evading thebasic choice the Confederacy faced: between protecting slavery and winning thewar. The secessionists chose the former--keeping slaveholders on largeplantations out of the war and refusing to conscript slaves until the war was allbut lost. And so, when it seemed that the cost of victory was the end of slavery,there was no longer any reason to fight. Far from being full of pluck andpatriotism, thousands of Confederate soldiers deserted the army in the lastmonths of the war.
Similarly, the fate of the freed slaves is integral to any story of reunion.Winik is right that the post-Civil War era created a single nation of sorts. Yetit did so not by subduing Southern separatism but by accommodating whitesupremacy. After Reconstruction, the South forced blacks back into a subordinateposition, violently repressing black political activity with the help of rovingwhite militias bearing a curious resemblance to the guerrilla armies that Winiksays never materialized. As a result, the radical promise of the Civil War--theequality of citizens before the law--would not be fulfilled for nearly a hundredyears. When the last federal troops left the South in 1876, the foundation waslaid for the reunion of the nation--and for Jim Crow. The cost of thereconciliation that Winik celebrates was the political freedom and civil rightsof African Americans.
Most of Winik's arguments are as old as the war itself. Whatis surprising, though, is how well his book has been received, despite itsdiscredited interpretation. It spent more than five weeks on The New YorkTimes best-seller list. Richard Bernstein--a decorated veteran of the PC wars--waxed enthusiastic in the Times about Winik's "fresh, intelligent recasting" of American history, agreeing that the United States was indeed different from nations where "the wounds of domestic strife didn't heal for decades." Another Times reviewer celebrated the "brilliant freshness of the argument." Such vigorous praise indicates that Winik's views are not those of a maverick historian out of step with the mainstream. Instead, his errors suggest the amnesia of our age.
The Dunning school dominated American historiography in the earlytwentieth century, just after Southern states had disenfranchised their blackpopulations and erected the labyrinthine system of legal segregation. The storyof triumphant reunion after the Civil War helped justify the South's nullificationof the 14th and 15th Amendments. Today, the United States is embarking on asimilar retreat. The Supreme Court appears to be on the verge of striking downaffirmative action. A booster of Southern Partisan magazine is the nation's attorney general. A U.S. president was elected thanks to what were apparent violations of black voting rights in Florida, and his contested election evoked calls for renewals of an 1877 electoral commission that traded the end of Reconstruction for eight more years of Republican sovereignty in the White House. Perhaps, then, it is not a coincidence that 30 years after the climax of the civil rights movement--the second Reconstruction--there should be a new popular historiography of the Civil War that once again glorifies a national reconciliation wrought from reaction and the suppression of black freedom.
