Catton Bruce - American Heritage History of the Civil War

Nearly 150 years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the courthouse at Appomattox, Virginia, we remain fascinated with the Civil War.

The sheer drama of the story, the momentous issues at stake, and the tragic cost of human lives still resonate. More than 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the war, nearly as many as the number of American soldiers killed in all the other wars this country fought combined. The number of casualties from the Battle of Antietam alone was nearly four times greater than those of the Allies landing on the shores of Normandy on D-day

As the horrors of war recede into the past, notions of romance, honor, and glory make their way into the foreground of our collective and cultural imagination. But if our perception of the Civil War can include romance, it must also include the poignancy of families facing each other on the battlefield. The war pitted brother against brother, cousin against cousin, even father against son. Their tales are heartbreaking.

Indeed, the uncensored descriptions of that war by participants help explain the fascination it engenders. Civil War armies were the most literate that had ever fought a war whereas twentieth-century armies censored soldiers mail and discouraged diary keeping. Consequently, we have an unparalleled view of the Civil War by those who experienced it.

The Civil War was fought mainly by volunteer soldiers who joined before conscription went into effect. In fact, the volunteers the Union and Confederate armies mobilized made up a larger percentage of their manpower than any other war in American history. And Civil War armies knew what they were fighting for and why. What were they fighting for? If asked to define it, many soldiers on both sides would have answered liberty. Northerners and Southerners alike wrapped themselves in the mantle of freedom bequeathed to them by the Founding Fathers in 1776. But each side interpreted that heritage differently, and at first, neither side included slaves in their particular vision of liberty. Slaves did, however, and by the time of Lincolns Gettysburg Address in 1863, the North also fought for a new birth of freedom.... These multiple meanings of freedom, and how they dissolved and reformed throughout the war, provide the central meaning of the war for all Americans.

When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 on a platform of excluding slavery from the territories, Southerners compared him to George III and declared their independence from oppressive Yankee rule. The same spirit of freedom and independence that impelled our Fathers to the separation from the British Government, proclaimed secessionists, would impel the liberty loving people of the South to separation from the United States government. A Georgia secessionist declared that Southerners would be either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it. Young men from Texas to Virginia rushed to enlist in this Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence and to raise the standard of Liberty and Equality for white men against our Abolition enemies who are pledged to prostrate the white freemen of the South down to equality with negroes. From the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us, declared Jefferson Davis at the outset of war, let us renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.

But most Northerners ridiculed these Southern claims to be fighting for the ideals of 1776. That was a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of 76, said antislavery poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant. The Founding Fathers had fought to establish the rights of man... and principles of universal liberty. The South, insisted Bryant, had seceded not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism.... Their motto is not liberty, but slavery. Northerners did not deny the right of revolution in principle; after all, the United States was founded on that right. But the right of revolution, wrote Lincoln in 1861, is never a legal right.... At most, it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause. When exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power. In Lincolns judgment, secession was just such a wicked exercise, precipitated by his election by a constitutional majority. As Northerners saw it, the Southern states, having controlled the national government for most of the previous two generations through their domination of the Democratic Party, now decided to leave the Union because they had lost an election.

For Lincoln and the Northern people, the Union itself represented the ideals of 1776. The republic established by the Founding Fathers was a bulwark of liberty in a nineteenth-century world dominated by kings, emperors, czars, and dictators. Most republics had eventually been overthrown; some Americans had seen French republics succumb twice to emperors and once to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Republics in Latin America came and went with bewildering rapidity. The United States in 1861 represented, in Lincolns words, the last, best hope for the survival of republican liberties in the world. Our popular government has often been called an experiment, Lincoln told Congress on July 4, 1861. But if the Confederacy succeeded in splitting the country in two, it would set a fatal precedent that would destroy the experiment. By invoking this precedent, a minority in the future might secede from the Union whenever it did not like what the majority stood for, until the United States fragmented into a multitude of petty, squabbling autocracies. The central idea pervading this struggle, said Lincoln, is the necessity... of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether, in a free government, the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.

Many soldiers who enlisted in the Union army felt the same way. A Missourian joined as a duty I owe my country and to my children to do what I can to preserve this government as I shudder to think what is ahead of them if this government should be overthrown. A New England soldier wrote to his wife on the eve of the First Battle of Bull Run: I know... how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing - perfectly willing - to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.

In the process of preserving the Union of 1776 while purging it of slavery, the Civil War also transformed it. Before 1861, the words United States were a plural noun: The United States are a large country. Since 1865, United States is singular. The North went to war to preserve the Union; it ended by creating a nation. This transformation can be traced in Lincolns most important wartime addresses. In his first inaugural address, he used the word Union twenty times and the word nation not once. In his first message to Congress on July 4, 1861, he used Union forty-nine times and nation only three times. In his famous public letter to Horace Greeley of August 22, 1862, concerning slavery and the war, Lincoln spoke of the Union nine times and the nation not at all. But in the Gettysburg Address fifteen months later, he did not refer to the Union at all but used the word nation five times. And in his second inaugural address, looking back over the past four years, Lincoln spoke of one sides seeking to dissolve the Union in 1861 and the other sides accepting the challenge of war to preserve the nation.

Even if the veneer of romance and myth that has attracted so many Civil War followers were stripped away, leaving only the violence and suffering that remains, the Civil War would continue to be the most dramatic and crucial experience in American history, ensuring its importance so long as there is a United States.