"The Judgments of the Lord": On the 150th Anniversary of the Start of the American Civil War

My twelve year old daughter believes I am “obsessed” with the American Civil War. I have explained to her that out of the vast, vast library of words written about the war—battlefield reports, interpretations from every conceivable angle, biographies, plays, fictional novels—I have read only a small handful. I have told her there are individuals whose idea of a summer vacation is to tramp about the battlefields of the great conflict, and that I have visited, years ago, only one of those fields. And I have tried to convey a portrait of the thriving subculture of Civil War “re-enactors,” of which I have no part.  I am not what anyone would call a “buff.”

But I suppose my interest would qualify as at least a “fascination.” Today marks the 150^th anniversary of the first shots of the Civil War when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, in South Carolina in 1861, so possibly the war is on other minds. The Washington Post has been “tweeting” the events leading up to the conflagration, public television is reprising Ken Burn’s masterful public television series, and the New York Times began, in October, a blog called “Disunion” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/) to  chronicle the unfolding of the war in honor of the sesquecentential.

My own small homage to the anniversary is to have read Bruce Catton’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1954 work, “A Stillness at Appomattox.” It is a remarkable read. Catton is, I believe, the grand poo-bah  of Civil War historians, rivaled only by Shelby Foote (who played such a large part in the Ken Burns series). Catton wrote three grand trilogies—The Army of the Potomac (of which “Stillness” is the third), A Centennial History of the Civil War, and a trilogy of Ulysses S. Grant—and a great many other single-volume works on the war (as well as a few stray texts on historical subjects other than war).

“Stillness” chronicles the last campaign of the war, the bitter and savage battles of the Wildnerness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Cold Harbor, and the Battle of the Crater during the Siege of Petersburg, up to the exhaustion of the Confederate forces and the somber surrender at Appomattox. Catton was a forerunner of today’s “narrative historians” making use of the diaries and unpublished letters of everyday soldiers to give a graphic description of the fight from the ground up. Some quaint, slightly anachronistic rhetorical flourishes give his writing a slightly dated quality, but his work remains definitive. 

What stands out most from the story and constitutes the theme of “Stillness” is that this campaign was, finally, “war with the varnish taken off.” Up to that point, the North had been, in Shelby Foote’s words, “fighting with one hand behind its back.” Robert E. Lee had humiliated one Union general after another and the war had about it the slightly perfumed scent of a gentleman’s gallant dueling match.

Uunburied dead at the Battle of the Wilderness

That would end with Grant’s campaign of 1864-65. Lincoln had finally found, in Grant, a general willing to use the North’s industrial and numerical advantage to pummel the rebels to death, and after the South’s decisive loss the year before at Gettysburg, Grant was determined to do it. From Wilderness to the end at Appomattox, the war would be a slugfest, a bloodletting, vicious and unrelenting and unrefined and very, very, very un-pretty. With each successive battle, Grant moved south and east hoping to cut Lee off from Richmond and finish him off; accordingly Lee kept going in the same direction, hoping to keep ahead of Grant, so that the two armies were in close proximity for the rest of the war, following each other throughout central Virginia and bumping into each other in a series of savage brawls.  

What also stands out from the work is how much earlier the war might have been won, and how many lives saved, were it not for the nearly criminal and certainly heartbreaking and positively shocking ineptitude of the Northern army.  Grant himself is reported by Catton to have wondered at one point, “What is wrong with this army?”

In fact, as Grant and his men would prove many times the Union army was much better than it had come to believe about itself after so many defeats at the hands of Robert E. Lee. But that there was “something wrong” in the Union war machine is clear from Catton’s account. One of the things wrong, surely, was the role played by bureaucrats in the War Department in Washington, which directed the Union effort in a way not notable for efficiency, decisiveness, and a capacity to respond quickly to changing circumstances. And which invariably infected military decisions with politics and personal ambition.

The other trouble was that in addition to the many brave and ferocious warriors in the Union ranks, there were also shirkers, laggards, criminals, and mercenaries of dubious conviction—or, at least, there were many more than the South fielded. However weird and unholy we may think of the Southern “cause” today, the rebels were fighting for what they considered their property—their slaves and their land—and for a way of life that they believed was mortally threatened. These were tangible assets, the kind that are bound always to inspire conviction and a willingness to die; though far smaller, the rebel army was, by Catton’s and every other report, remarkably, uniquely fierce and committed, and  composed almost wholly of boys who were true believers in the cause. The Union, on the other hand, was fighting to end slavery or to preserve the Union—these were more abstract moral imperatives. The men who understood these imperatives deeply, like Joshua Chamberlain, the theology professor from Bowdoin College in Maine and the hero of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, were among the most “American” of Americans, and real heroes of the war. But they were bound to be outnumbered by the many whose major motivation was to finish their service and return home.

The combination of bureaucratic and individual ineptitude—even if the individuals were a minority—created an army that was error prone. At the Battle of the Crater, a plan was undertaken by engineers in the Union army to dig a tunnel underneath the Southern trenches during the siege of Petersburg and mine the tunnel with explosives, blowing a hole in the defenses and opening the way to capture the city. It was not an entirely fantastical plan. The explosion went off blowing a gaping hole in the southern defenses. But, inexplicably, the order for the Union forces to move into the breach was never given until the rebel army had time to regroup. And when the union did move, there was no plan for scaling the walls of dirt created by the explosion, so that the men were trapped. One entire division of black soldiers was slaughtered. The officer who was supposed to be responsible for the assault was said to be far away from the fighting, getting drunk. Grant called it the “saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.”

Catton’s narrative is heavy on battlefield maneuvers, which can be difficult to envision and a slog to read. I will venture to say, hoping the thought police aren’t watching, that this book does not find a lot of female eyes. And I wonder if in fact what my daughter calls an “obsession” isn’t a peculiarly male one. War has always been an affair of men, the less brilliant of the sexes.

But in the case of the American Civil War, this is unfortunate if it’s true (that women don’t take as much interest in it). It was the defining event in our history, and its reverberations are everywhere today, from racial politics to the Tea Party movement. In a funny, but deeply thoughtful work, “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,” Tony Horwitz explored this subject. It is primarily a portrait of “re-enactors,” the folks who show up on battle anniversaries to re-fight the war in battle garb, but it is ultimately a meditation on the ways in which the Civil War continues in our day. (Incidentally, Christopher Hitchens also wrote a funny and interesting piece about re-enactors called “Rebel Ghosts.” It can probably be found online somewhere, but it’s included in his collection of essays, “Love, Poverty and War.”)

Certainly in slavery the war engaged a grave moral issue for which men were willing to die. And for this American, much of the fascination of the war derives from the fact that the dying was done, in terrible numbers, on fields that Americans can drive to or past¸ and beside which some Americans live.  The proximity of the enormous, enormous carnage that was the war lends to these spaces—these prosaic fields and farms and woods and valleys, dirt roads and creeks and rivers—something sacred, something that should, if we were paying attention, give us continual reason to be reverential. Actually, if we were paying attention we might be utterly ashamed of the smallness and shrillness of our politics today, which amounts to a squabbling over the takings of a privilege that has largely been handed to us by previous generations.

Because something happened in the war that went beyond what was expected or realized at the time by the men who fought it. It’s this that Lincoln, with his literary genius, captured.  Certainly it is possible to be cynical about the Civil War—that it was about economics and power politics and about keeping a big country big. And reading Catton’s book about the last military campaign will certainly dispel any sentimentality about the war—it was brutal, even vicious, sometimes (as at the Crater) squalid and disgustingly wasteful, and always filled with misery. But it took Lincoln to articulate, in his second inaugural address, that in this all too human affair something beyond what humans could have wrought alone was at work.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained….Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding....If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."