Civil Warriors

Last week a group of historians met in Columbus to discuss the interpretive framework for Ohio’s observance of the Civil War Sesquicentennial.  (The Ohio Historical Society organized the event; the Ohio Humanities Council sponsored it.)  The first order of business was to offer our initial thoughts on “An Overarching Theme:  The Big Picture.”  On a scratch pad I scribbled “Democracy is hard” and “War as an engine of social change.”  We wound up discussing these and other potential themes — “Memory” and “Transformation” — and at the end of the day, “Democracy is Hard” was one of those we decided to explore in more detail.  I was tasked to write a brief summary, reprinted below:

The Civil War, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman insisted, stemmed from an “excess of democracy.”  He had a point.  The Founders had established a republic, not a democracy.  Well aware that, historically, most republics had failed, they were convinced that success depended upon the restriction of political participation to those with “civic virtue”:  the capacity to understand the complexities of government and a willingness to make choices based not on narrow self interest but on what was best for the commonwealth as a whole.  To ensure this, they instituted property and residency requirements so that only those with a strong stake in the community could vote.  Further, they placed a premium on consensus and had no conception of political parties as we understand the term.  Instead they regarded strong differences in political opinions as evidence of a destructive “spirit of faction.”

Despite the Founders’ wishes, the American Revolution unleashed forces that by the late 1820s had transformed the republic into a democracy characterized by universal white male suffrage.  (Women and African Americans remained largely excluded.)  Political parties emerged, with strongly contrasting views on government and an ability to mobilize voters seldom matched in American history — voter turnout frequently reached 80 percent.  The parties flattered the common (white) man.  They argued, in effect, that the common (white) man had the requisite civic virtue precisely because he was common.  They relentlessly exploited the fears of voters and routinely portrayed the opposition as a threat to liberty, a trait since characterized as the “paranoid style in American politics.”  Shamelessly partisan, newspapers of the day slanted the news in favor of their preferred political party.  They were little more than extended editorial pages.

Initially this system worked.  The two major parties — the Whigs and Democrats — were about equally matched and enjoyed support in all parts of the country.  Well aware that slavery had the ability to split the country along sectional lines, for two decades Whigs and Democrats managed to exclude it from national political life.  The War with Mexico (1846-1848), however, raised a vexing issue: whether to permit slavery in the vast territories the United States had acquired as a result of its victory.  From then on, politicians never found a way to contain the slavery question, and by 1854 a major new party — the Republicans — had emerged, largely on the basis of its opposition to slavery in the western territories.  At stake was a fundamental question about the nature of the United States.  Was it, at bottom, a free republic with pockets of slavery; or a slaveholding republic with pockets of freedom?

Compromise on this issue was possible.  Most Republicans did not object to slavery per se, and only a small minority regarded as a moral imperative the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of slaves and the extension of full legal, political, and social equality to African Americans.  But hotheads on both sides exploited the “paranoid style” for all it was worth.  Tempers flared.  Mob violence became common — lethally so in some cases, particularly “Bleeding Kansas.”  In its Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court unsuccessfully tried to resolve the slave issue.  The victor in the 1860 presidential election, Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, consistently denied any intent to abolish slavery, candidly regarded African Americans as inferior to whites, and thought the racial problem could best be solved by sending the African American population to colonies in Africa or the Caribbean.

The Deep South, however, regarded Lincoln’s election as a mortal threat.  During the winter of 1860-1861 seven states seceded from the Union rather than accept the verdict of a fairly conducted election whose winner was never in dispute.  Last minute efforts at a compromise solution went nowhere, and when Lincoln attempted to “hold, occupy, and possess” federal installations in the seceded states, the newly created Confederacy fired upon the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.  Lincoln’s call for 75,000 militia to suppress the rebellion led four states of the Upper South to join the Confederacy.  A full-scale war began, heartily welcomed by most of the American population, who saw it as an opportunity to cleanse the republic.  It took four years, ten thousand military engagements, and 620,000 dead to resolve through violence an issue that the democratic process had utterly failed to solve.

Nowadays when Americans think about the Civil War they typically do so with a sense of nostalgia.  To them democracy seems easy.  They see little problem with exporting it to other countries, even those devoid of the history, institutions, or political culture necessary to sustain it.  Nor do they see danger in the extreme present-day partisanship — a renewal of the paranoid style of politics — that between 1830 and 1860 pushed the republic off a cliff.  In so doing they overlook a central lesson of the Civil War:  Far from being easy, democracy is extraordinarily hard.

Cross posted from Facing the Demon

What follows is an after dinner talk I gave last week to a group of academics at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. I’d been asked to offer some reflections on an exhibition in Capital’s Schumacher Gallery concerning the lives of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. (It was, incidentally, a traveling exhibit organized by the Virginia Historical Society and New York Historical Society, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and supplemented by artifacts fom the Motts Military Museum.)

I dislike giving presentations that don’t build toward projects underway, and since the next speaking engagements on the horizon have to do with mental health advocacy, I decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with one. The talk was something of a high wire act, interweaving personal observations of Grant and Lee with those concerning bipolar disorder. But judging by the response I received, it worked.

It’s a pleasure to talk with you this evening about Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, particularly in light of the exhibition at the Schumacher Gallery. I’ve heard it said that an exhibition, even when installed, is not really an exhibition. It becomes one only people come to experience it. They see in it, and take from it, meanings that the designers of the exhibition did not necessarily intend to impart. This is so because people bring to it their own experiences of life, their own concerns, and above all their own imaginations. Were this not the case, I doubt if exhibits would be at all worth the investment of time, money, and energy required to create them.

During the Civil War a pair of Union officers climbed atop a mountain to survey through telescopes the Confederate encampment beneath them. They saw soldiers brewing coffee, writing letters, reading newspapers, and washing clothes. To one of the officers this was a revelation. “My God, Adjutant,” he said to the other. “They’re human beings, just like us!” The Grant-Lee exhibition invites us to reconsider these two icons of the American military tradition, these central characters in the American Iliad. Their lives had the same common place experiences and the same complexities as our own. They were human beings, just like us.

I grew up with Grant and Lee. I got to know them through children’s books, and particularly got to know Lee through a biography entitled Robert E. Lee and the Road of Honor, written for young people by the Southern progressive journalist Hodding Carter, which I read at the age of eight. But the really critical experience occurred when I was twelve and first read A Stillness at Appomattox, Bruce Catton’s brilliant evocation of the epic struggle between these two commanders in the Civil War’s final year. When I say that I grew up with Grant and Lee I I mean this, of course, in an imaginative sense, and yet the imaginations of the young can be so vivid and intense that I still sometimes feel as if I grew up with them in a literal sense. And in terms of their impact on my life, that is quite likely true in the deepest sense of truth.

Recently I turned fifty years old. That makes me just seven years younger than was Lee in 1864 and actually eight years older than Grant when he led the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan River and into battle against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. My life has gone in directions very different from theirs and has taken a very different shape. But in dealing with the challenges of my life, I have often looked back on these two men, both what I thought I knew of them as a youth and what I think I know of them now.

The biggest challenge that has faced me in life began to confront me in 1986, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder — what used to be called manic depression. For reasons I’ll explain in a bit, it has become important to me to talk about what it is like to live with the disorder, but at the time it was something that I simultaneously acknowledged and ignored, with an odd kind of doublethink that, I have discovered, is not uncommon with people confronting facts that are unavoidable and yet still something one wishes to avoid. For the first few months I saw a psychiatrist and took medications, but then I simply stepped away from that and for eleven years thought and lived as if bipolar disorder were something I had in theory, not in fact.

A hypomanic episode I had at age 38 finally brought me to reality. With hypomania a person can be charismatic, unusually creative, and brilliantly high functioning. But those who know them well recognize that something I wrong. And if the person is wise, so does he. So early one morning, refreshed and wide awake after only two hours of sleep — notwithstanding the fact that given the pace I’d been keeping and the sleeping pill I’d taken I should have been out cold — I came to realize, and I mean really realize, that I had bipolar disorder and always would have it and was lucky during the preceding decade not to have met with disaster. I sat down at my computer and composed a sort of memorandum to myself. I’m going to read some of it here. At first it will seem to have no relevance to Grant or Lee, but then it will take a turn that should surprise you. It certainly did me.

(Continued)

With two weeks left before the deadline for submissions for the Society for Military History Book Awards:

Part 1

Well, it’s October, a most exciting month for many sports fans.  College football, a mainstay to many people, is in its heyday, although not until November 14 will Rebels square off against Volunteers in the Manning Family Bowl.  Of course, once you’ve attended a number of colleges and worked at others, it’s a bit hard to keep things straight, and I’m not passionate about college football, anyway.  Sometimes, as with college basketball, I find it more fun to watch the football teams that play for the universities whose presses have published my work (this becomes especially tense in basketball season, between UNC and Kansas).  Actually, I could have a pretty impressive college athletic association if I put all those places together (UNC, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Kent State, Southern Illinois, Indiana, and Tennessee).  And, of course, there’s professional football, where Civil War connections are a bit more difficult to make.  Many of us are also absorbed by the MLB postseason, where the linkage between the well-supplied Yankees and the rest of the world seems to be a prevailing theme, and several Civil War bloggers are serious baseball fans. 

But it remains the National Hockey League where the Civil War has pride of place, because several NHL teams owe their nicknames to Civil War (or Civil War-related) themes.  Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis took part in the Black Hawk War, with Black Hawk’s profile adorning the jersey of the Chicago Blackhawks, who have not touched the Stanley Cup since 1961 (the year of the the opening of the Civil War centennial).  The New York Rangers are named after the Texas Rangers, believe it or not.  The clearest examples remain the Calgary Flames, who were originally the Atlanta Flames, a not-too-concealed nod to what happened to that city in 1864, and, of course, the Columbus Blue Jackets, who sport a Union kepi on a secondary logo.  So congrats to goalie Steve Mason, who tore up the league last year as a rookie netminder, winning the Calder Cup as rookie of the year, and who this year has a Civil War-themed mask.