Was the Civil War Necessary?

Was the Civil War Necessary?
By ANDREW DELBANCO
New York Times
March 25, 2011

Writing about what might have been is something historians tend to avoid. You may find the occasional counterfactual sentence in a serious history book — What if Lee had accepted command of the Union army? What if Lincoln had lived? — but that sort of speculation is usually left to novelists, as when Philip Roth, in “The Plot Against America,” imagines a United States gone fascist under President Charles ­Lindbergh.

AMERICA AFLAME
How the Civil War Created a Nation
By David Goldfield
Illustrated. 632 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $35.

“America Aflame,” David Goldfield’s account of the coming, conduct and consequences of the Civil War, is not a book about things that never happened. It is a riveting, often heartbreaking, narrative of things that did. Yet it also compels us to ponder choices not made, roads not taken — always with the implicit question in mind of whether the nation might somehow have spared itself the carnage of the war and, if so, what kind of nation it would have become.

At the outset of his masterly synthesis of political, social, economic and religious history, Goldfield tells us that he “is ­antiwar, particularly the Civil War.” Then he shows, in painfully vivid prose, young men marching into fields “fat with corn and deep green clover” only to be burned alive or torn by shrapnel, survivors left to breathe “in spurts, a frothy saliva dripping creamily from their mouths down to their ears, strings of matter from their brains swaying in the breeze,” or to die in their own blood and excrement or, if sufficiently alive to be carried off the field, to be treated by surgeons who, without knowledge of anesthesia or antisepsis, slice off mangled limbs with knives sharpened on “the soles of their boots.”

Many other books (one thinks of Charles Royster’s “Destructive War” and, more recently, of Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering”) have sought to convey, without glorifying or glossing it over, the battlefield truth of America’s four-year descent into organized savagery. What is distinctive about Goldfield’s book is that he believes the 600,000 deaths and countless mutilations could have been avoided. A war fought over the future of slavery did not have to happen because “the political system established by the founders would have been resilient and resourceful enough to accommodate our great diversity sooner without the tragedy of a civil war.” In advancing this thesis, Goldfield is returning to a view once held by eminent historians, including his teacher Avery Craven, that the war was an avertable catastrophe rather than, as Senator William Henry Seward of New York called it in advance, an “irrepressible conflict.”

In Goldfield’s telling, the force that drove the nation toward apocalypse was evangelical fervor of one form or another — in the North, faith in the righteousness of the abolitionist cause, in the South, faith in slavery as a guarantor of a threatened way of life. “Faith reinforced the romance of war” until “war had become a magic elixir to speed America’s millennial march” toward Armageddon.

But Goldfield’s belief that the “political system” could have solved the problem of slavery is a leap of faith of his own. Secessionists, after all, left the Union precisely because they rejected a constitutionally valid election that placed slavery, as Lincoln put it, “in the path of ultimate extinction.” In his first Inaugural Address, which Goldfield aptly calls “a walking-on-eggshells speech,” Lincoln tried to reassure slaveowners that he would not interfere with their peculiar institution where it already existed, but would only limit its expansion into territories over which the federal government held authority. But slaveowners did not concede the constitutional legitimacy of that authority — and the United States Supreme Court, in its notorious Dred Scott decision, had agreed with them.

Goldfield’s heroes are those who, in the face of this impasse, sought a solution short of secession — men like Alexander Stephens, a congressman from Georgia, later a reluctant vice president of the Confederacy, who was, in his words, “utterly opposed to mingling religion with politics,” and Stephen Douglas, a figure “of selfless patriotism and personal courage” who, recognizing his impending defeat in the election of 1860, campaigned through the South in an effort to save the Union and, after the attack on Fort Sumter, threw his support to Lincoln.

In the end, the war did put an end to legal human bondage in America. But emancipation came slowly — first as a military measure to deny the Confederacy the coerced manpower of its slaves, only later as a war against the institution itself once the valiant service of black soldiers had made the thought of restoring slavery after the fighting was over unthinkable.

AMERICA AFLAME
How the Civil War Created a Nation
By David Goldfield
Illustrated. 632 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $35.

According to Goldfield, the war reduced the North to a sort of postorgiastic exhaustion, leaving former slaves at the mercy of terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan in a South determined to return them to subjugation. After a failed experiment in reconstruction on the basis of racial equality, some of the hottest antebellum abolitionists became apostates to their once-professed faith. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “passion for the plight of the slave” gave way to a preoccupation with decorating houses. Horace Greeley, who had once goaded Lincoln to act more decisively against slavery, wondered if his own enmity to slavery “might have been a mistake.”

Lamenting the horrors of the war, Goldfield computes its total monetary cost at around $6.7 billion in 1860s currency, and asserts that if “the government had purchased the freedom of four million slaves and granted a 40-acre farm to each slave family, the total cost would have been $3.1 billion, leaving $3.6 billion for reparations to make up for a century of lost wages. And not a single life would have been lost.” But this computation proceeds from some dubious assumptions. Such a transaction can be made only if there is a willing seller as well as a willing buyer — and, as Goldfield himself notes, all attempts at compensated emancipation, even in the small border state of Delaware, where slaves were a minor part of the local economy, failed because slaveowners had no interest in such a deal. And even if they had, just where would the 40-acre farms be located? In the South? Or in the western territories, where abolitionist sentiment was often mixed with racist animus — a sentiment, that is, in favor of excluding black people, whether slave or free?

Throughout Goldfield’s book, one sees the present peeping through the past. In his allergy to the infusion of religion into politics, and his regret over the failure of government to achieve compromise, he sometimes seems to be writing as much about our own time as about time past. Yet even looking through his eyes, one finds it hard to imagine that the post-Civil War constitutional amendments by which black citizenship rights were advanced could ever have been ratified if the slave states had remained in the Union. The “secession war,” as Walt Whitman called it, would seem to have been a necessary prelude to the process of securing black equality — a process still unfinished ­today.

Despite its implausibilities, Goldfield’s thought experiment in alternative history is provocative in the best sense. Most history books try to explain the past. The exceptional ones, of which “America Aflame” is a distinguished example, remind us that the past is ultimately as inscrutable as the future...


Andrew Delbanco, the editor of “The Portable Abraham Lincoln,” is the Levi professor in the humanities and the director of American studies at Columbia.
A version of this review appeared in print on March 27, 2011, on page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review.