Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War
By James M. McPherson
Oxford University Press, 1996. 258 pp., $41.95 (hb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/12871
The United States Civil War still tends to evoke the romantic figures of the dashing Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara with their faithful black servants in the old south of Gone With the Wind. Military buffs inhale the whiff of grapeshot from the battles under famous Generals like Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. Astride all this stands the northern president, Abraham Lincoln, basking in hero status as the Man Who Freed the Slaves.
James McPherson is one of the better US historians of the Civil War. His latest book is a collection of essays which challenges most of the war's romanticised images and myths.
The Civil War broke out in 1861 when 11 southern states seceded from the Union after the election of the Republican Party's Abraham Lincoln as president. The advent of the first Republican president signalled a fight for dominance between the industrial northern states and the agricultural, slave-labour southern states.
By war's end four years later, the north was victorious. The human and material cost was huge — more than 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers had been killed, only slightly less than the 680,000 US military killed in all other wars over three centuries. The strategy of total war brought death and property destruction to large civilian populations.
The victory of the north, however, also meant "the freeing of four million slaves and the uprooting of the social structure of half the country". McPherson calls it a revolutionary war, the United States' Second Revolution, because of this outcome. Karl Marx and other European revolutionaries and progressives, and British workers' organisations, supported the north. The mass of slaves supported the north — 179,000 of those who escaped fought in the Union army.
Victory to the north gave heart to those struggling for more democratic and just societies elsewhere. The north's victory contributed to expanded suffrage in Britain, the toppling of emperors in Mexico and France and the demise of slavery in the last Western Hemisphere slave states of Cuba and Brazil.
The fighting, as McPherson says, was "not pretty, not glorious, not romantic", but the North's victory did advance the cause of humanity, particularly the black segment, however hedged with contradictions and later regression on civil and economic rights. Non-slave industrial capitalism was a giant step up from slave-based agricultural capitalism, but it was still capitalism. The struggle moved on to new planes.
It is, however, a leap of political logic to infer from the broad historical progressiveness of the Civil War that the north's political and industrial rulers were knights in the shining stuff. McPherson tends to lionise Lincoln, arguing the populist view that "Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves".
Lincoln, however, had to be pushed to turn the war from its limited aim of containing a rebellion to preserve the Union (and its Constitution which allowed slavery) into an anti-slavery crusade. Lincoln had earlier disavowed racial equality, and one year into the war wrote, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it".
After 17 long months, the goals of the Civil War eventually changed, in 1863, with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, though even this declared the freedom of slaves only in the rebellious states — i.e., in those places where the proclamation could not yet be enforced. This was forced on Lincoln by hard circumstance. Unable to defeat the south, he decided to weaken its economic resources, including by freeing of slaves. Defeat of the Confederate States would be decided, said Lincoln, by whether the slaves are "with us or against us".
It was a "military necessity" to expand the war aims to liberating the slaves. It was not conceived as an act of justice. Blacks in the Union army had to struggle for equal pay, promotion opportunities, medical care and for a front-line military role.
After Lincoln's historic decision, however, the military and social justice goals of the war became interlocked. Freed blacks were necessary to the north's victory, and the north's victory was necessary to black liberation.
As well as painting Lincoln in a kind light, by excusing Lincoln's pragmatism as caused by "constitutional and political restraints", McPherson also assigns to Lincoln "the greatest single cause" of the north's victory rather than more structural factors. McPherson is a liberal, not a Marxist, so the great individual takes over from materialist factors such as the north's vast superiority in population, labour and economic resources, which McPherson regards as necessary but not sufficient to explain the victory.
It isn't just Marxists, however, who look behind the great man myth. The southern General, Robert E. Lee, saw the north's victory as due to "overwhelming numbers and resources" which were able to overcome the advantages that the south had in a better army and better generals fighting a defensive war.
McPherson also departs from Marx by rejecting historical generalisations in favour of explaining the war's outcome in terms of historical contingency, a basically random lottery of causes that lie in "each battle, election and campaign decision".
The issue of accident in history, of which the issue of the individual in history is a subset, is a fascinating one. If Lenin had been run over by a tram in March 1917, would there have been an October Revolution? If Lincoln had choked on a turkey sandwich, would the slaves have been freed?
Marxists have never denied the historical role of accident or particular individuals, nor have they favoured a crude economic causality. Humans make history and humans are accident prone. But great historic trends and social forces express themselves through a number of leaders and events which can alter the shape and timing of historic developments, though rarely the basic trend.
Social tensions in the US were ripe for erupting from the friction of two antagonistic social-economic systems. If not Lincoln, and if not the exact years 1861-1865, then some other individual, or battle, or decade, would have served the purpose and released the structural pressures of history.
McPherson, for all his liberal faults, is, however, more than redeemed by his challenge to the "moonlight and magnolias" image of the south with its "false and stereotyped lessons about slavery and the Civil War", a romantic veneer which serves to paper over the reality of slavery then and racism now.
He also has interesting analyses of class and race in the Civil War. In the south, racism aligned the poor white non-slave-owning farmer with the wealthy plantation-slaver against black slaves and the labouring white poor of the north. In the north, employers used unemployed blacks as scab labour during a dock strike, turning the Irish dock workers' struggle against Republican industrialists into riots against their black brothers and the war of slave liberation.
With the Hansons of this world singing "Dixie" all over again, it is well to be reminded of the victory against racial oppression 130 years ago and the historical progress this meant for ordinary people the world over.