Southern Catastrophe, American Triumph
When the Civil War is being discussed in polite company, striking an elegiac note for the South is just not done; such a breach of etiquette would suggest in the speaker a glaring moral deficiency. There is nothing good, nothing redeeming, that one can say about the Southern cause, which was first and foremost and forever slavery. The Confederacy's vast losses do not entitle it to assume the poignant aura of honorable sacrifice; the pity of the tragic does not apply to the suffering and death of Southern multitudes. The prevailing feeling dictates that the Confederates got exactly what they deserved; such perfect justice waives the losers' customary entitlement to democratic compassion.
A dear friend of mine — a scholar trained at Yale and Harvard in the tortuous legalities of 19th-century constitutional racism — has long advocated issuing reparations to the descendants of black slaves. When asked whether 600,000 Civil War dead were not satisfactory atonement for the evils of slavery, he replied that some 250,000 of those were Confederates, who gave their lives for the perpetuation of slavery and are therefore excluded from the moral calculation. There ended the discussion; the mere 350,000 Union dead is a self-evidently inadequate sum.
Some in the South calculate their moral reckoning rather differently. A billboard that stood for several years on a back-country road in South Carolina demanded justice for the "war criminals" Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln. The location might seem arbitrary, until one recalls that William Sherman's march to the sea through Georgia — famous or infamous, according to taste — was merely a practice run for his less-well-known ravaging of South Carolina. As Sherman would recall years later: "My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us." During the march north from Savannah, he told Union Army chief of staff Henry Halleck: "The whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her."
As Sherman's troops advanced upon the state capital where secession got its start, they sang out eagerly: "Hail Columbia, happy land!/ If I don't burn you, I'll be damned." With wholesale arson they averted damnation — though the city's residents would likely say they earned it. As one historian recounts:
Columbia was burning, and burning fiercely, in more than a dozen places simultaneously. Hampton's mansion was one of the first to go, along with Treasury Secretary Trenholm's, and lest it be thought that these had been singled out because of their owners' wealth or politics, the Gervais Street red-light district was put to the torch at the same time, as well as Cotton Town, a section of poorer homes to the northwest, and stores and houses along the river front.
Most of the city was left an ashen waste. Sherman would later insist that he never ordered the conflagration nor wished it, but he did appreciate what it did to hasten the end of the conflict. His infantry had translated into action the doctrine of total war, according to which enemy civilians are considered just as culpable for the general misery as enemy combatants and thus are made to endure the torments typically reserved for fighting men.
The quotations above are all found in The Civil War: A Narrative, the splendid three-volume history by Shelby Foote. Foote grew up partly in Greenville, Mississippi, where in adolescence he entered into what would become a lifelong friendship with Walker Percy — perhaps the most widely admired Southern novelist since William Faulkner. Like Percy, Foote attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but unlike Percy, he studiously avoided much obligatory schoolwork, reading only what he pleased and leaving after two years without a degree. An accomplished writer of fiction himself, Foote published five novels; the most famous, Shiloh, depicts the 1862 Tennessee battle that would turn out to be one of the bloodiest encounters of the war.
In 1954, two years after Shiloh was published, Foote accepted a contract to produce a one-volume history of the Civil War. The project, which he figured would take him two years, wound up taking 20, running 2,900 pages and comprising 1.5 million words — roughly the size of Edward Gibbon's imperial Roman colossus. Although Foote risked the guild's disfavor by eschewing the customary scholarly apparatus — footnotes he dismissed as cumbersome distractions; an enumeration of sources he replaced with a "bibliographical note" — his account stands among the leading works of America's historiographic masters, perhaps just a head below the likes of W. H. Prescott, Francis Parkman, and Henry Adams, who were renowned for both their literary excellence and historical learning.
Foote represents the culmination of a distinguished Southern intellectual tradition: 20th-century men of letters turning their hands to writing Civil War history. While mastering the task of the sympathetic historian — telling the heroic and tragic story of the countless Americans, Northern and Southern alike, who endured the great struggle — Foote avoids the pitfalls of many of his Southern peers, neither yearning for antebellum glory nor demonizing the North. By comparing his work with that of other Southern historians of his era, we may better appreciate the literary legacy he left us.
THE AGRARIAN HISTORIANS
The Southern intellectual tradition to which Foote contributed had its origins at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s — the matrix of the Southern Agrarian movement and its sprawling manifesto, I'll Take My Stand. That book, published in 1930, contained essays by 12 Southerners, among them Andrew Nelson Lytle, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren — all three of whom, as young men, wrote biographies of principal military and political figures of the Civil War.
The 12 essayists shared a profound suspicion of the modern gospel of endless progress, which they claimed had been inflicted upon an energetic New England by wrongheaded European Enlightenment sages. They believed it had propelled the industrial might of the North (contributing tremendously to the Union victory over the Confederacy), and now threatened to permanently befoul the South with its smokestack hideousness, money hunger, disrespect for the leisure necessary for high culture, and obliteration of religious feeling.
The Agrarians promoted the Jeffersonian ideal of a society of yeoman farmers, whose grappling with the land conferred on them a solid, unassuming nobility — the bedrock of personal and political virtue. Though critics of the movement accused it of harboring a poisonous nostalgia for institutions and folkways proven vicious, the longing for a return to the antebellum South had no place in most Agrarians' program. As essayist Stark Young insists in "Not in Memoriam, But in Defense":
If anything is clear, it is that we can never go back, and neither this essay nor any intelligent person that I know in the South desires a literal restoration of the old Southern life, even if that were possible; dead days are gone, and if by some chance they should return, we should find them intolerable. But out of any epoch in civilization there may arise things worth while, that are the flowers of it.
No sensible person would stomp on such flowers — the charming, convivial arts that make daily life agreeable: "manners, affability, friendliness," "an at-homeness among others," "a lack of suspicion," "the wish that the other person may be happy in our company." The post-war South, the Agrarians believed, had preserved some happy wisdom about living well that the unquiet North never possessed.
ANDREW LYTLE
Closely examining two of the Agrarians begins to erode this view of Southern moral excellence. The first, Andrew Lytle, made his name as a novelist, playwright, and essayist, and as the editor of the Sewanee Review, which he elevated to national prominence. Lytle chose as the exemplary hero of his first book General Nathan Forrest, who rose through the ranks from private to brigadier general, and whose exploits as cavalry commander in the Army of Tennessee are legendary: 30 kills with the saber, 29 horses shot out from under him, victory after victory against all odds, and feats of cunning that beguiled an enemy of superior strength into surrendering to Forrest's much smaller force.
Robert E. Lee called Forrest the finest soldier to serve under him; Shelby Foote thought Forrest and Abraham Lincoln the two most successful men in the war. Lytle depicts Forrest as the perfect gentle knight: chivalrous by nature, compassionate as a leader, and roused to indignant ferocity by officers who were profligate with their soldiers' lives. "This was one thing [Forrest] was never able to abide, the useless sacrifice of his men," he insists. "To him they were not numbers in squads but personalities, and his treatment and demands were patriarchal." Had Confederate president Jefferson Davis made the daring but wise choice to raise Forrest to command of the entire army, "the plain people" of the South might have rallied in dark times and won the war.
Impressive so far, but there is much about Forrest that makes Bedford Forrest: And His Critter Company (1931) — the critters being horses — worse than unsavory. However natural, unexceptionable, and even divinely sanctioned black slavery was considered in the South, slave trading was thought a debased activity. Forrest, who enjoyed a lucrative career as a trader, was sufficiently distressed by the occupation's smear that he gave it up, starting over as a morally unimpeachable slave-owning planter. Lytle takes pains to emphasize how generous of heart Forrest was as a trader, "mitigat[ing] the usual evils of the bargaining as much as he could" and bringing a sort of honor to the business — a case of the biographer's gilding the excrement if there ever was one.
But such is a necessity of the Southern apologist's vocation. The most egregious of wartime atrocities — the massacre at Fort Pillow in Tennessee — was carried out by Forrest's troops, who took control of the Union-occupied fort and slaughtered survivors with unseemly zest. Black Union soldiers, whose very presence was an abomination, were their chief target. To make matters worse, some blacks had violated an earlier truce, and then taunted their foes, "jeering, making grimaces, and doing insulting things with their hands." These "insults of former slaves" offended Southerners' manly sensibilities. To Lytle's mind, that seems to justify the bloodshed, which he allows was more than customary. He further absolves Forrest of any part in the mayhem and blames the yellow journalism of Northern newspapermen for grossly exaggerating accounts of the killing. Virtuous Southern manhood bristled at such manifest untruth, which was to be discounted as a matter of course.
The peril to Southern manhood did not noticeably lessen with the end of the war. For the Black Republicans — the Confederates' moniker for the abolitionist politicians who had "forced the South into secession" — peacetime politics was just war by other means. The further outrage these Northerners were planning — "a reconstruction which aimed at complete destruction of the Southern States," in Lytle's words — had to be resisted. From the depths of despondency and danger, the South preserved the core of its God-given nature with a stroke of strategic brilliance: public gatherings of a secret order of men who concealed their identity with long, white, hooded robes that spooked the black citizenry, who "took them for spirits from the other world." Thus began the Ku Klux Klan.
As the Klan's reach and ambition expanded, the need arose for a leader of special mettle, probity, and vision. The obvious choice was Forrest, who in due course "became the Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire." For Lytle, Forrest's election was providential:
At the most tragic moment of Southern history, when all seemed lost beyond redemption, he appeared, unexpectedly, mysteriously, almost supernaturally and snatched the enjoyment of victory from the enemy's hands, from those Black Republican politicians who had set out to destroy the South and the Old Political Union. The triumph of the Ku Klux Klan was the triumph of the political genius of the South, a genius that had failed, because of its limitations, to save the Union but which, at last, had managed to save itself by following the most typical, the greatest, leader its feudalism had fashioned.
The organization was so successful, Lytle contends, that in five years it achieved all of its objectives, dissolving in 1870. He says nothing about its successful latter-day revival, which had been flourishing at the time he wrote. His biography of Forrest certainly didn't hurt that cause.
ALLEN TATE
Allen Tate's understanding of the Civil War and its aftermath was similarly unreconstructed. Tate was a noteworthy poet, novelist, and critic whose reputation today rests on a single poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead," and his sole novel, The Fathers — a powerful family tragedy set in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., before and during the Civil War. His two biographies, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier and Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall, are important less for their studies of character — the former a hagiography, the latter a demolition — than for their reflections on the Civil War's origins and the comparative moral stature of the two combatant peoples.
Tate's first biography tells of the young Tom Jackson, who worked his way out of poverty as an "inflexible" but "just" bill collector at a time when "rumors and some evidence of a powerful revolutionary party growing up in the North" were swirling. This abolitionist movement, according to Tate, was the work of blind fanatics bent on subverting American political and social order in the name of a god fabricated to justify their base scheming. Tate's exposition of the facts is simple as can be: He marshals them in an argument that a clever but unschooled youth (like the adolescent Jackson himself) might follow and make his own. Yet there is no doubt on the author's part that he is offering the reader solemn, incontrovertible truth:
There were people in New England who wanted to destroy democracy and civil liberties in America by freeing the slaves. They were not very intelligent people; so they didn't know precisely what they wanted to destroy. They thought God had told them what to do. A Southern man knew better than this. He knew that God only told people to do right: He never told them what was right.
Guided by respect for "history and all decent traditions," the Southern man, according to Tate, embodies the right, while the abolitionist flounders among abstractions and sinks into mad zealotry. The experience of slavery down the generations creates a racial memory, imposing a moral duty on the master that the Northern captain of industry who hires wage slaves does not recognize. In Tate's words:
This historical sense of obligation implied a certain freedom to do right. In the South, between White and Black, it took the form of benevolent protection: the White man was in every sense responsible for the Black. The Black man, "free", would have been exploited.
In the North, the historical sense was atrophied, and the feeling of obligation did not exist. The White man, "free", was beginning to be exploited.
The Northern wage slave enjoyed a grossly mistaken confidence that he was a free man. He also cultivated a grossly mistaken confidence that he was intellectually superior to the Southerner, who he believed had stumbled into the Civil War by wrongheadedness.
Sound men, Tate declares, do not live by abstract ideas. Rather, they accept the best wisdom of their fathers, and of their fathers before them — a wisdom perhaps rough hewn in origin but refined by the passage of time, as a stone in a streambed is shaped and polished by flowing water. By such wisdom General Jackson, when praised for winning the Second Battle of Manassas by his "stark and stern fighting," replied that the day had been "won by nothing but the blessing and protection of Providence." For Tate, such humble piety is the polar opposite of abolitionist prating about divine will, epitomized by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin without ever setting eyes on a slave or setting foot in the South but who "said God had given her all the scenes in a vision." Even if one finds dubious Northerners' vaunted self-assurance that in their killing and dying, "His Truth is marching on," it is downright chilling how passionately so many Southerners believed God was on their side.
Tate's inversion of the conventional — that is to say, Northern — reckoning of war guilt is so bald faced and doctrinaire as to seem almost comical. In his biography of Jefferson Davis, Northern aggression is reviled for snuffing out the untold marvels that might have arisen had the South been left alone. The North's imperious effort to bring the South to heel offends against human variety and freedom, which John Stuart Mill and Walt Whitman declared the supreme democratic virtues.
The Lower South by 1860 was a distinct nation. It differed from the North as deeply as the United States differs from Great Britain to-day. The war for the Union was justified by a fiction — that the states were one nation. When historians are far enough from the event, they will speak of the years 1861-1865 as the period of the dual Presidency. Their vision cleared, they will see the Lower South in its unique quality, and wonder what, if it had been left alone, it might have become.
Tate is unforgiving of what he considers Northern moral presumption and self-regard. In Allen Tate: A Recollection, Walter Sullivan relates a 1971 encounter between Tate and William Wimsatt — another Confederate stalwart whose "family had owned the house at Appomattox where Lee had surrendered to Grant" — on one side and the Yankee interloper R.W.B. Lewis on the other. Tate and Wimsatt were reliving the worst of the war, "and had not yet said they wished the South had won, but they were tending strongly in that direction....Lewis reprimanded [Tate] and [Wimsatt] for their Confederate fervor; he said the southern cause had been corrupt and the war had ended as it should have." The two good old boys stood up in unison, Wimsatt immense, Tate diminutive, both radiating menace. "'You don't know anything about it,' Allen said to Dick Lewis. 'Absolutely nothing,' Wimsatt added. 'Don't try to discuss it.'" Lewis was silenced, and the mourners of the Lost Cause sat down to continue their threnody for the extinguished civilization.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Robert Penn Warren, the most famous of the Agrarians, wrote about the war with less nostalgia and more insight than his Confederate-leaning peers. Much lauded as a poet and novelist, his 1946 masterpiece, All the King's Men, is a portrait etched in acid of a Louisiana redneck demagogue (based loosely on Louisiana governor and U.S. senator Huey Long) whose touch corrodes every last trace of gentility, loveliness, decency, and honor.
Like Lytle and Tate, Warren got his career underway with a Civil War biography. John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, written in the 1920s while Warren was a 23-year-old Rhodes Scholar, renders vividly the overheated pre-war atmosphere where decent moderation struggled to draw a breath. Bleeding Kansas, a newly created territory where the residents would determine whether it would enter the Union as a slave state or free soil, became violently contested ground in the 1850s. "There were murders and reprisals on both sides," writes Warren, "with little to choose between them on the score of humanity or justice. Those things — humanity and justice — were a little too much to expect at such a time." Brown and his sons went to Kansas to see "if something would turn up," and contributed notoriously to the territory's reputation for lethal madness.
Like many prominent abolitionists, according to Warren, "Captain Brown was a 'higher law man'" — one who saw himself as an agent under divine guidance, a soldier in a just and holy war. Whereas the Southerner finds positive law in the constitutional "bargain" that acknowledged the legitimacy of slavery, the unyielding righteousness of the abolitionist condemns the Constitution as, to use the words of William Lloyd Garrison, a "covenant with Hell."
The dispute at hand is plainly a theological question, which reason cannot fathom nor resolve. And according to Warren, "[t]here is only one way to conclude a theological argument: bayonets and bullets." Warren makes the reader feel the full horror of this argument's conclusion as he describes the remains of the five men Brown and his sons mutilated and murdered at Pottawatomie Creek:
Old Doyle had been found in the road with a pistol shot in his forehead and his breast hacked by the sabres, but his death had been more merciful than that of his sons; Drury's fingers and arms had been completely severed and the head and body slashed, and the corpse of William was similarly mutilated. Everyone knew by this time how Harris had found the gigantic body of Dutch Bill lying in the creek, whose waters had washed out some of the brains from the clefts in his skull and carried the blood away from the stump of his left arm.
Warren never neglects to emphasize the ironic disparity between high-flown words and gruesome deeds. The grandiose ideas of imposing orators like Garrison find a bitter and bloody upshot among men not nearly so lucid in thought nor gifted in speech but brutally eloquent in action.
Such was the case with Brown's signature exploit: the failed 1859 guerrilla assault on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Ralph Waldo Emerson would consecrate Brown's sacrifice in those high-flown words of his, declaiming that the gibbet on which Brown was hanged would in time be as glorious as the cross to which Christ was nailed. At Lincoln's funeral service, Emerson averred that Brown's speech to the court that sentenced him to death would stand with the Gettysburg Address in the annals of golden oratory.
Warren rejects the false allure of contentious men gripped by master ideas. In The Legacy of the Civil War, a book as short as a novella but crammed with a lifetime's worth of serious thinking, Warren argues that the 1860 election — in which "social, sectional, moral, and philosophical forces found logical projection into the party setup" — was a dangerous anomaly that Americans would regret presently and for good:
They learned that logical parties may lead logically to logical shooting, and they had had enough of that. The American feels that logicality, when not curbed and channeled by common sense, is a step toward fanaticism; it tends to sharpen controversy to some exclusive and vindictive point. Chesterton said that logic is all that is left to the insane; the American is almost prepared to go him one better and say that logic is the mark of the insane, at least of the politically insane.
By 1865, writes Warren, war weariness had restored the nation's psyche to a modicum of health. For the most part, political sanity would prevail. Sickened and chastened by the holocaust of the Great War they had recently endured, the Americans of the 1920s tended to see the Civil War as a conflict that need not and ought not have taken place. This view, writes Warren, was especially prevalent among Southerners, for whom it may serve as "a device to share the guilt — just as emphasis on racism in the North may make the Southerner feel a little less lonely in his guilt about slavery."
Warren's life of John Brown presses the case that the abolitionists' self-righteous war madness plunged the nation over a precipice. William Seward, who would be Lincoln's secretary of state, called the fight over slavery "the irrepressible conflict," and many virtuous men concurred: The more firmly they believed that slavery was the moral horror of American life, the more passionately they demanded its end. Unfortunately, other equally passionate men insisted it continue not only to thrive, but to spread. Cooler heads, like Warren's own, might have averted the catastrophe of the war.
But what Warren saw as temperate, others scorn as tepid, and the lukewarm are warned in Revelation that He shall spew them from His mouth. Warren considered slavery a matter susceptible to reasoned compromise — no sensible American today finds this remotely acceptable.
SHELBY FOOTE
Was slavery worth killing and dying for on a scale vaster than Americans had known before or have known since?
Shelby Foote suggests that neither the preservation of slavery nor the usual Southern cover stories — "States Rights or even Independence" — explains the Confederate part in the war. The best explanation he found came from a "ragged Virginia private" taken captive during a retreat. When his captors harried him to give his reasons for fighting, he replied, "I'm fighting because you're down here."
Foote gives the "theological questions" that most historians identify as the root of the conflict short shrift. He doesn't ignore the war's great moral stakes, but he places his emphasis elsewhere. Why the Union soldiers should have made their way "down here" didn't really interest the captive private, but there they were, and that was reason enough for him to risk his own life to kill them. This suffering and death of ordinary fighting men on both sides, and the fortitude with which they faced the terror of modern warfare, constitute the heart of Foote's history.
Great democratic historians of war appreciate the importance of political leaders and generals, but they reserve their most fervent eloquence for the principal objects of their admiration and compassion: ordinary soldiers plunged into the ruck of unthinkable violence. Lincoln could sit in his office and calculate what he called the "awful arithmetic" of war — the acceptable casualties each side would sustain in the course of the fighting — until the numbers became unacceptable and the army couldn't continue on. This calculation exacted an awful psychic toll on the president, a man of profound humanity. But the common soldier learned this arithmetic in his own body, in the experience of pain and mortal fear, in the frightfulness of losing comrade after comrade, and in the disturbing excitement of killing the enemy at close quarters.
Foote's account of the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania, Virginia — a "slaughter pen" lasting for 16 unabated hours of "concentrated terror" — displays this reality at its most horrific:
Neither victory nor defeat was any longer a factor in the struggle. Men simply fought to keep on fighting, and not so much on instinct as on pure adrenalin. Slaughter became an end in itself, unrelated to issues or objectives, as if it had nothing whatever to do with the war. Troops were killed by thrusts and stabs through chinks in the log barricade, while others were harpooned by bayoneted rifles flung javelin-style across it. Sometimes in this extremity even the instinct for self-preservation went by the board. From point to point, some wrought-up soldier would leap up on the parapet and fire down into the opposite mass of blue or gray, then continue this with loaded rifles passed up by comrades until he was shot down and another wrought-up soldier took his place.
Butchery of such a fearsome order did not keep General Ulysses Grant from hurling his troops into one burning ordeal after another. At Cold Harbor a few weeks after Spotsylvania, the Union offensive cost 7,000 dead and wounded in a day — most of them in the maniacal attack of the first eight minutes. The Confederate defenders lost merely 1,500. However repellent such callousness might seem, these were not intolerable numbers to Grant, who had many more men available to sacrifice than Lee. Foote seizes the perfect macabre detail to memorialize the battle's carnage: "A blood-stained diary, salvaged from the pocket of a dead man later picked up on the field, had this grisly final entry: 'June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed.'"
The most famous words of some of the war's greatest generals have to do with the hellishness of their occupation. Surveying the battlefield at Fredericksburg, Lee quietly declared: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it." Responding to the mayor of ravaged Atlanta, who protested the agonies suffered by sick and aged civilians, Sherman said bluntly: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it....You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war." Foote took the titles of two of the longest and most wrenching chapters in his final volume from Sherman's apothegm. The words echo throughout his history.
Against the granite wisdom of these commanding figures Foote poses the plaintive gentleness of a young lieutenant from Maine. George Wood, a three-year veteran of the Army of the Potomac who had been through the worst of it, became one of the last soldiers killed in the war when, on the way home from Appomattox, he was accidentally struck by a carbine round. Upon learning he was dying, his chief regret was "that he had spent the past three years as he had done," engaged in something quite different from the Lord's work. "'Chaplain,' he said, 'do you suppose we shall be able to forget anything in heaven? I would like to forget those three years.'"
Shelby Foote's readers will not soon forget the heroism and tragedy of men such as Lieutenant Wood and countless others, both Southern and Northern, whose names remain unknown to us. The best of the Southern Civil War historians, he tells a story more sympathetic to the losers than a conventional Northern historian's would be, but he does so without provincial special pleading; rather, he agrees with nearly all modern Americans that the right side won in an unavoidable war — the most agonizing trial the nation has ever undergone. A particular catastrophe for the South, then, but a resounding triumph for America. God grant that we may yet prove worthy of it.
