Civil War (1861 – 65): Changing Interpretations

This entry is a subentry of Civil War (1861 – 65).

The Civil War had not even ended before it was being interpreted, although in many cases, the earliest interpretations of the war sprang directly out of the justifications Northerners and Southerners had offered for beginning and sustaining it. Resentful Southerners like Edward Pollard in The Lost Cause (1867) announced that the South had waged the war in defense of a genteel, noncompetitive agrarian society, and only the brute force of Northern numbers and weapons had defeated it. Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens defined the “Lost Cause” as a political one, in which the Confederacy stood for a strict reading of the federal Constitution and resistance to the centralization of power in the national government. The place of slavery in these Southern interpretations was reduced to a pretext Northerners had seized upon for provoking the war.

By contrast, Northerners in the first two decades after the war interpreted it primarily as a moral crusade against slavery. Isaac N. Arnold in his History of Abraham Lincoln and the Overthrow of Slavery (1866), John W. Draper in his History of the American Civil War (1868–70), and former Senator Henry Wilson in his History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power (1872–77) all insisted that the war had been caused by the wicked ambitions of a “slave power” conspiracy to subvert American republican virtue.

By the end of the century, as Americans were faced with the problems of industrialization, immigration, and labor unrest, it became easier to downplay the divisiveness of the war and recast it as the painful but necessary forge in which a single, unshakable American national identity was created. Academic historians, from James Ford Rhodes—History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1893–1919) to Arthur C. Cole—The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865 (1934), urged that slavery be seen as an institutional problem which the war removed in the interest of achieving national unification, rather than as the basis for a conspiratorial “slave power.” However, professional historians who were shaped by the economic Progressive tradition and the horrors of World War I took this as evidence that the moral rhetoric of the war, whether for abolitionism or the “Lost Cause,” had been hollow from the start. In Avery Craven's The Repressible Conflict, 1830–1861 (1939) and James G. Randall's multivolume history of the Lincoln administration and his long‐lived textbook, The Civil War and Reconstruction (1937), the war became a needless conflict, triggered by a generation of blundering politicians, since slavery would have eventually proven economically unprofitable, they argued. Or worse than that, Charles and Mary Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), declared that the real agenda of the war had been the dominance of the national economy by Northern industry and finance. Southern historians like Charles Ramsdell and Frank L. Owsley, who were inspired by the unrepentant anticapitalism of the Southern agrarian movement of the 1930s, converted the Beards's thesis into an unintended echo of the “Lost Cause” myth, in which the South appeared as a helpless victim of Northern cultural and economic aggression.

The economic emphasis of the Progressive historians was itself challenged by the moral commitments of World War II. The defeat of totalitarian ideologies abroad, and later the power of the civil rights movement to shake the conscience of the nation, once again made it possible to see the Civil War as a moral moment. Kenneth Stampp's And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (1950) defiantly insisted that the moral argument over slavery was, after all, the vital element in the making of the war. Allan Nevius, over the course of his multivolume Ordeal of the Union (1947–50) and The War for the Union (1959–60), also gradually moved slavery back to the center of the war's meaning. James M. McPherson's two single‐volume histories, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982) and Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), similarly shifted from treating the war as a Beardian conflict between a “modernizing” North and an underdeveloped South to describing it as the solution to the ideological contradiction of slavery in a liberal republic.

The tremendous upsurge in Civil War literature which began shortly before the centennial of the war in 1961, and which was renewed in the late 1970s and 1980s, encouraged the exploration of a number of new interpretations of specific aspects of the war. Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson resurrected the older arguments about the South's cultural uniqueness and applied them controversially to Southern military tactics, arguing that the South's “Celtic” culture explained the Confederacy's propensity for costly head‐on offensives. By contrast, political and intellectual historians argued that the Confederacy had not been unique enough: David Donald, Drew Faust, Paul Escott, Emory Thomas, and the authors of Why the South Lost the Civil War (Richard Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still) inverted the old nationalist argument and claimed that the Confederacy was as much an example as the North of an experiment in nation‐building. George Rable, in The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (1994), argued that the Confederacy actually saw its political experiment in the war as a struggle to resist ideological uniqueness and reassert the pristine virtues of eighteenth‐century republicanism.

The question of the Civil War's significance in military terms has taken on particularly new force in recent studies. The impact of British military social historians like John Keegan in the 1970s set off calls for the application of a “face of battle” interpretation to Civil War combat studies, and helped produce innovative studies of Civil War soldier behavior from Reid Mitchell and Gerald Linderman. Much more subject to debate were challenges to two cherished notions about the overall strategic significance of the war. One of these, beginning with David Donald and T. Harry Williams, claimed that Civil War field strategy had been dominated by the ideological lessons of Antoine Henr Jomini and Dennis Hart Mahan, both of which fostered a passion for Napoleonic‐style headlong offensive that had been rendered out‐of‐date by the rifled musket. Both Williams and Donald believed that a handful of federal generals, headed by Ulysses S. Grant, learned to ignore Jomini and Mahan, and to master the new lessons of industrial technology and communications sufficiently to lead the North to victory.

A second and related interpretation of Civil War strategy located the center of the Civil War's “modernity” in its development into a “total” war. From T. Harry Williams in Lincoln and His Generals (1952) up through McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and Philip S. Paludan's “A People's Contest”: The Union and the Civil War (1988), the Civil War was repeatedly portrayed as the first example of warfare consciously directed at civilian as well as military targets.

Both of these views, however, came under strenuous criticism during the late 1980s: Edward Hagerman's The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare (1988) and the authors of the massive 1983 study How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones) downplayed the extent of Jomini's influence on Civil War strategy. Paddy Griffith, a British military historian, argued that technology, whether in the form of the rifled musket or the railroads, could have made little difference on the small‐scale battlefields of North America, where, he said, the decisive factor was the sheer amateurism of Union and Confederate officers and volunteers. Above all, Mark Neely sharply criticized the notion that the Civil War had involved “total” warfare by questioning whether the Civil War had ever involved in any significant way the targeted destruction of enemy civilian lives and property or the curtailment of domestic civilian civil rights by the military.

One last major debate has concerned the quality and substance of Civil War military leadership. Robert E. Lee and Grant had been held up in many popular histories as antitheses in Civil War leadership, with Lee cast in Douglas S. Freeman's four‐volume R. E. Lee (1934–35) as a de fensive patrician who carefully hoarded the Confederacy's limited human resources, and Grant portrayed in biographies like William S. McFeely's Grant: A Biography (1981) as an unimaginative “butcher,” willing to achieve victory by using the North's numerical superiority to grind down the Confederate armies through attrition. Lee's image, however, began to crumble in 1977 with Thomas Connelly's The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society, which portrayed Lee as a fatalist always willing to yield to aggressive and costly impulses for the offensive. Grant, by comparison, was defended by biographers as diverse as Bruce Catton and Brooks Simpson as a swift‐moving strategic thinker, whose triumph over Lee in 1865 was a demonstration of superior management and operational skill.

Similarly, comparative evaluations of Presidents Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln as commanders in chief have usually favored Lincoln as the better overall strategist, with David Potter and T. Harry Williams holding up Lincoln as a model of strategic wisdom and even the head of the first “modern” staff system. But throughout the 1980s, Jefferson Davis's star rose considerably, with Ludwell Johnson, Hattaway and Jones, and Steven E. Woodworth all underscoring that Davis was an intelligent risk taker who ably managed and cooperated with his generals.

The controlling factor in these interpretations, apart from the debates over the merits of certain commanders or the details of specific battles, has been the place and understanding accorded slavery. The weight given to the motives of leaders, the role of economic conflict, and even the significance of civilian and troop morale, have all in the end contained judgments about the role of slavery. In the interpretation of a war so charged with political meaning, and which so clearly involved political direction‐giving, this not likely to change.

[See also Commander in Chief, President as; Disciplinary Views of War: Military History.]

Bibliography

• Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War, 1954.
• David Donald, ed., Why The North Won the Civil War, 1960.
• Marvin R. Cain, A ‘Face of Battle’ Needed: An Assessment of Motives and Men in Civil War Historiography, Civil War History, 28 (March 1982), pp. 5–27.
• Joseph T. Glatthaar, The ‘New’ Civil War History: An Overview, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 115 (July 1991), pp. 339–69.
• Gabor Boritt, Why the Confederacy Lost, 1992.
• Gabor Boritt, ed., Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures, 1992.
• Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War, 1997.
• Allen C. Guelzo, The Crisis of the American Republic: A History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1994