This Mighty Scourge

My introduction to the American Civil War was in eighth grade history class. Battle history lectures were the specialty of my middle school history department. History classes throughout seventh and eighth grade were punctuated by by lectures on significant battles of western history, including Thermopylae, Crecy, and Bunker Hill. All this culminated at the end of eighth grade with a month or two of lectures on significant battles of the Civil War given by our teacher, Mr. Peterson, complete with multiple blackboards providing battlefield diagrams and little blocks to represent troop movements. The detail and passion our teacher brought to these lessons was remarkable. Clearly this was a labor of love.

Two things about these lectures stand out to me today. First, we were never tested on this material. It was one of the rare times in my formal education when I was asked to simply absorb material for its own sake with no threat of evaluation attached. Second, the lectures were all presented from an explicitly pro-Southern perspective. Our teacher romanticized the Confederate Lost Cause and taught us to identify with the valor and bravery of Robert E. Lee, J.E.B Stuart, and "Stonewall" Jackson. Given that this was at a school in northern Illinois, where annual Memorial Day parades always ended with ceremonies around a memorial to local soldiers who fought for the Union armies, such an approach was hardly what one might have expected.

In the past few years I have renewed my interest in the Civil War mostly through reading the works of historian James McPherson. McPherson is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning work Battle Cry of Freedom, considered by many to be the best single-volume Civil War history now available. Although it goes on for over 800 pages, Battle Cry of Freedom is highly readable and engaging, even for a general audience. This is one of McPherson's great strengths: his ability to write serious scholarship that is nonetheless accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. Reading his work has given me a greater appreciation for Lincoln and the struggles of the Union armies, an appreciation that I ironically didn't receive while being educated in the public schools of the self-proclaimed "Land of Lincoln!"

Just a few days ago I read McPherson's most recent book, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. The title of the work comes from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. As with so much of Lincoln’s writing, the passage is both eloquent and profound:

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 bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood draw 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.’

Throughout his writing on the Civil War, McPherson has developed a single thesis, that the Civil War was in fact what he calls the Second American Revolution and that, contrary to the claims of many Southerners, the central struggle of that revolution was not over states rights or sectional interests but rather over the question of whether a republican form of government, that "last best hope of Earth" that Lincoln held so dear, could survive in a world even in the nineteenth century dominated by empires, kingdoms, and petty principalities, and whether such a republic could bring itself to uphold in practice its highest ideal, the belief that "all men are created equal."

This Mighty Scourge is not a single narrative but a collection of essays, many of which were written for The New York Review of Books. Although the essays are all focused on questions related to the Civil War, they touch on many issues of burning contemporary national importance, including the role of the president as commander in chief during times of war, the suspension of habeas corpus rights, the relationship of the country's intellectual, political, and economic elites to the war effort, and arguments for states' rights.

I'll try in the next few weeks to comment on some of these ideas in McPherson's book because I believe they demonstrate a basic sense that I've been feeling with more and more urgency in recent years, namely that we as Americans must thoroughly immerse ourselves in an understanding of our past struggles if we are going to begin to see our way through our current difficulties. In the meantime, I'm including a link here to a lecture given by McPherson on This Mighty Scourge. Enjoy!