Themes of the American Civil War

symbols and its use of the Revolution that had created the Union for its own secessionist ends. Northerners had, in a sense, to return to first principles,
not so much to reconstruct but rather to reinterpret the ideology of the
American Revolution and the actions of the Founding Fathers in order to defend themselves against the criticism that, in seeking to suppress secession, they were acting against the basic tenets of Americanism As George
Fredrickson has shown, northerners soon found themselves led into far- reaching speculations on the deeper meaning of such current bywords as loyalty, patriotism, and nationality.”
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In effect, Northern politicians,
soldiers and intellectuals found themselves forced to look far longer and harder at the basis of American national construction than they would otherwise have done. Although one of the most widely published propagandist pamphlets of the Civil War argued that the true solution of our whole difficulty, the only force which can give vitality or permanence to any theory of settlement was military success, in fact the problem that the Union faced stretched far beyond the battlefield.
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The outbreak of the Civil War had highlighted the fault lines in America’s national fabric. Ultimately, North and South could not agree on either the form or the function of their federal union. As a result, their nation, qua
nation, between 1861 and 1865, ceased to exist. The issue was complicated by the fact that the threat to American national survival came not from an external foe but from within. The problem that the North faced between and 1865, therefore, was twofold the defense of the political Union went hand in hand with the defense of the ideological nationalism which supported that Union. Forcing the South back into the federal fold required military success justifying the attempt to do so required a different approach entirely. In the face of the South’s desire to wreck the republican experiment,
to dissolve the Union handed down to Americans by the revolutionary generation, those who supported the Union felt rightly indignant. Barely a month after the fall of Fort Sumter, a Boston Post editorial argued that it was the age of nationalities. Fired by our example, the oppressed of the world would have aspired to the dignity of nationalities. Shall the first to set the example, and the grandest in the procession of the nations the paper asked,“suffer its nationality to depart, at the bidding not of a foreign foe, but of rebel traitors of the soil?”
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There was no easy or immediate answer to this question. As events were to show, the federal forces were able to save the
Union on the battlefield, but military victory was only one part—admittedly the major part—of the process of American national construction.
The ideological issues accompanying the war forced the North to move toward a redefinition of nationalism that both justified its actions in the face of the challenge offered by the Confederacy and offered a basis for postwar reconstruction of the American nation. The centrality of the Revolution,
to American as well as Confederate and Union nationalism, meant that the
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Union had to find someway of showing that the original Revolution had been the result of a legitimate nationalistic impulse which bore no relation whatsoever to the act of secession that had prompted the Civil War.
Northerners had, in short, to show that the American Revolution was over and that revolutionary ideology had no further application to American society.”
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In the process of addressing this problem, intellectuals like the
German political exile Francis Lieber and New England minister Horace
Bushnell gradually shifted the ground on which American nationalism was constructed. In arguing against the South’s right of secession and in favor of loyalty to the Union, these conservative intellectuals sought to bring
American nationality down to earth, as it were. The Union, they asserted,
merited support not because it represented the hope of liberty for the world but because it provided the rather more tangible and traditional basis of American national power. Further, since their arguments in support of loyalty to the Union were directly linked to their support of the federal war effort, the logical conclusion of their deliberations was to show that the ultimate America to which allegiance was due was not some vague and improbable democratic utopia but the organized and disciplined North that was going to war before their eyes.”
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The intellectual debate over American nationalism, however, although undoubtedly persuasive in terms of both defining and defending the North’s position, offered little that would help North and South come together again once the fighting was over. Although informed by the experience of war, the debates of intellectuals took place in a world far removed from the harsh reality of the battlefield. Northern thinkers and writers such as
James Russell Lowell may well have believed that the Civil War had increased the power and confidence of the nation and certified to earth anew imperial race but their view of the war was, as Richard Marius somewhat harshly concludes, humidly sentimental . . . like war imagined in a greenhouse.”
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Equally sentimental is the description, frequently employed, of the Civil War as a brothers war This glib phrase, so redolent of childhood arguments, disguises the brutal reality of a conflict in which Americans killed
Americans in appallingly large numbers and in fairly gruesome ways. There was little brotherly sentiment in the reaction of one Southern officer who,
after the battle of Fredericksburg, described how he enjoyed the sight of hundreds of dead Yankees. Saw much of the work I had done in the way of severed limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains of all kinds.
Doing my soul good. Would that the whole Northern Army were as such
& I had my hand in it.”
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Finding some basis for national reconciliation in the light of such deep-rooted hatred was hardly going to be a straightforward matter.
In the end, sentimentality too frequently acts as a hindrance to an understanding of the American Civil War, both of the issues involved and of
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the outcome. Frequently the relative positions of the North and South during the war are oversimplified. In particular, the cause for which the South was fighting is too readily romanticized. In recalling the Lost Cause of the
Confederacy, Americans and Europeans frequently think of Robert E. Lee,
“Stonewall” Jackson, and Gone with the Wind. Of course, the South also stood for slavery, a brutal system of coerced labor which denied the most fundamental human rights to the slave and bequeathed to the South a racist outlook which was extreme even by the standards of the nineteenth century.
There was, therefore, a certain moral justice in the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Yet the tragic overtones of that defeat, the hubris that afflicted the South, is too often seen to reside in its aspirations to separate nationhood, not in its essential racism, and so the romance of the Lost Cause”
prevails. The North, by contrast, represents the pragmatic element in the uneasy equation that comprised the antebellum American Union. More firmly wedded to the practicalities of Union, less overtly racist, although hardly enlightened in that regard, the North is seen as being more in tune with and ahead of the sweeping changes that were transforming nineteenth- century America. If Confederate nationalism was a dream, Northern nationalism was the reality. There was no romance in the Northern soul,
scholars conclude, and so during the Civil War the issue for the Northern states, clearly, was one of the territorial and political extent of the American nation, rather than its ideals.”
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Certainly this was the logical conclusion of much of the Northern intellectual debate that took place during the Civil
War. Similarly, Lincoln’s famous declaration to Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Tribune, that his paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery can betaken at face value to support this interpretation of Northern war aims.
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However, if the Confederacy was, in reality, rather less romantic than history has chosen to portray it, then the North was certainly more idealistic than it sometimes appeared. His deceptively straightforward answer to
Greeley notwithstanding, Lincoln knew very well that there was more involved, and much more at stake, in the federal war effort than the maintenance of the Union. American national ideals represented the heart of the
Union’s position. The North continued to hanker after that more perfect
Union” of the nation’s Founding Fathers, and saw the Civil War as the means to achieve it. This was the essence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,”
and the reason that Lincoln chose that occasion to emphasize the nation over the Union. In the Gettysburg Address it was the nation’s ideals that concerned him, and he reminded his audience not only that the Founding
Fathers had brought forth anew nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal but that men had given their lives to consecrate that nation and that proposition. Obviously enough,
when Lincoln spoke on the battlefield at Gettysburg he was not addressing
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a truly national audience, but he was certainly reaching out to one with his carefully chosen words. It was not the first or the last time that he did so.“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies Lincoln urged in the emotive conclusion to his First Inaugural and, as at Gettysburg, he invoked the revolutionary generation and the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave which bound the American nation together.
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In these statements, and in others made throughout the war,
Lincoln set out his belief in the inspirational side to the American Union,
his reverence for the nation’s ideals, and the importance of the struggle to live up to them.
Lincoln was not alone in seeing the Civil War as an opportunity not just to save but to improve on the federal Union. The African-American writer and activist Frances Harper argued fora radical transformation of the American nation:
This grand and glorious revolution which has commenced, will fail to reach its climax of success until, throughout the length and breadth of the American Republic, the nation shall be so color-blind,
as to know no man by the color of his skin or the curl of his hair. It will then have no privileged class, trampling upon and outraging the unprivileged classes, but will be then one great privileged nation,
whose privilege will be to produce the loftiest manhood and womanhood that humanity can attain.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe, similarly, expressed the hope that the Civil War would bring America forth to a higher national life.”
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The North’s victory in the Civil War gave impetus to such aims, and hope for the future. The war was seen to have settled, once and for all, the lingering questions over slavery and states rights which had undermined the Union. The Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner certainly saw the outcome of the war as an unqualified victory for the nation, asserting that if among us in the earlier day there was no occasion for the word Nation, there is now. A Nation is born.”
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As a result of the Civil War, the federal vagueness of the antebellum
Union was replaced by an integrated state with both territorial and political sovereignty. Yet the enmity between North and South, both a cause and a consequence of the Civil War, was not so easily dispelled. American nationalism was, therefore, left in an extremely fragile position in the years immediately following Appomattox. Ultimately, North and South used the war that had driven them apart as one means of bringing them back together again. For the troops who had fought, battlefield commemoration ceremonies provided some ground—both literally and figuratively—on which the opposing sides could meet. For Confederate veterans, particularly,
such ceremonies offered away back into the American nation. This was not,
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however, a quick process, but one which took several decades and which involved a certain amount of compromise, to the detriment of those ideals which Lincoln held to be so important to the American nation. It would be going too far to say that the outcome of the Civil War was a pyrrhic victory for the North, but it was certainly not all that Lincoln himself might have hoped for.
The revolutionary generation had passed on a divided legacy to the nation, and the Civil War generation did the same. As the Civil War took its place alongside the Revolution in the civic religion of the American nation it came to be seen less as a brutal and bloody conflict, and more as a process of redemption, as the war that had preserved the nation and made it both better and stronger than it had been before. Certainly the nation that emerged from the conflict was very different from the Union that had entered it. The emancipation of the slaves had not only been effected, but consolidated in important amendments to the Constitution. The validity of the American experiment in democratic government had been established.
As Lincoln had hoped, the federal government had proved to the world that those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a rebellion—
that ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”
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The antebellum Union had been open to interpretation, but after the Civil War the nation was built on firmer ground. Yet the transition from Union to Nation was not without cost,
and not just in lives. By resorting to warfare to compel a national identity that was clearly not going to be established by voluntary means, the North found itself in the paradoxical position of breaking the original contract of the Declaration of Independence in the process of defending it. Further,
the emancipation of the slaves, and the passage of the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Amendments, was not accompanied by any obvious lessening of racism, and it was not too many years before the South had managed to establish the racial status quo antebellum in all but the strictly legal sense;
ultimately, although the North’s victory in the Civil War succeeded in welding
North and South together more firmly than before, the transition from
Union to Nation left a legacy of racial and sectional bitterness that to this day continues to divide America’s national landscape.
Notes
1.
Henry James, Hawthorne (London, 1879), p. 144, quoted in George M. Fredrickson, The Inner

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