Drum-Taps That Still Echo

Drum-Taps That Still Echo

Was the Civil War a just war? Yes. But three quarters of a million soldiers lost their lives, and the nation nearly extinguished itself.

By Richard Snow in the Wall Street Journal

The shooting will have been over for a century and a half this spring, but the casualties keep mounting. As recently as a decade ago the best estimates of the soldiers killed in the Civil War put the number at 600,000; today’s scholarship has increased the toll to three quarters of a million. That was 2.4% of the American population when the war began. As James M. McPherson observes in his brisk and engrossing book, “The War That Forged a Nation,” if the same percentage of Americans were killed in a war today, “the number of war dead would be almost 7.5 million.”

But the appalling mortality rate is hardly the only reason the war lives on in our culture. Mr. McPherson sees the war as lying at the heart—and the midpoint—of the American past, a terrible clarification of the ideals on which the country had been established in 1776. “Founded on a charter that had declared all men created equal with an equal title to liberty,” the author writes, America had by the 1850s “become the largest slaveholding country in the world,” an irony that vexes us even today, so long after Appomattox.

Mr. McPherson has been writing about this war for 50 years, and in “The War That Forged a Nation” he distills a lifetime of scrupulous scholarship into 12 essays—two new, the others extensively revised from previously published versions. Yet the book has none of the haphazard feel of an anthology, and readers will finish it with the sense that they have received a succinct history of the whole struggle, as well as numerous fresh and occasionally controversial observations.

One chapter is called “A Just War?” The author’s answer is an unqualified “yes.” But the judgment is by no means facile or triumphalist. The next chapter, “Death and Destruction in the Civil War,” is fully cognizant of what that justice cost and how the conflict that meted it out continues to form our own times, from its well-known legacy of racial inequities to its surprising role in the development of the modern funeral “industry.”

Our war also affected the entire world. The watchers overseas were very much aware that democratic republics had not fared well in the past, and America’s seemed on the verge of extinguishing itself. Indeed, its fragility came close to bringing on a world war, and the book is particularly interesting on the eagerness of Britain and France to join the struggle with their navies.

The naval role in the Civil War is in general overlooked. This is hardly surprising: The seaborne forces on both sides suffered fewer casualties in the entire conflict than could be harvested during a single bad day on land. Yet, Mr. McPherson says, the dimly remembered Adm. David Glasgow Farragut should stand with Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman in the pantheon of victorious commanders.

The author is just as interesting about the widely disparaged Union “political generals”—leaders with few qualifications who were given the command of troops. Most notorious is perhaps the flamboyant Tammany Hall politico Daniel Sickles, who nearly lost Gettysburg on the second day of fighting by moving his men out of the Peach Orchard into what turned out to be an indefensible position.

The Union Gen. Henry Halleck, who had spent his life in the military, said that “it seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such men.” But as Mr. McPherson notes: “The main purpose of commissioning prominent political and ethic leaders [many of them German and Irish] was to mobilize their constituencies for the war effort.” When the war broke out, the U.S. Army was a little over 16,000 strong. A year later, “the volunteer Union army consisted of 637,000 men. This mass mobilization of volunteers could not have taken place without an enormous effort by local and state politicians as well as prominent ethnic leaders.” Nor were all volunteers useless: Gen. Sherman was one.

The last chapter in the book, “War and Peace in the Post-Civil War South,” is as lucid and lively as it is dispiriting. It details how the conquered South dismantled Northern attempts to establish equality for the freed slaves. The long, slow fuse lighted during the doleful Reconstruction years sputtered and smoldered but never quite died and finally ignited the civil-rights battles of the mid-20th century. It was during this time that Mr. McPherson began to be drawn to the Civil War. While a graduate student in Baltimore, he came to realize that the “civil rights movement eclipsed the centennial observations during the first half of the 1960s.”

Abraham Lincoln towers over “The War That Forged a Nation,” as he towered over his own era. Mr. McPherson is especially good—and consistently fascinating—on how the president’s thinking, both strategic and moral, evolved during the war, as he moved from using the emancipation of the slaves as one more weapon against the South to seeing it as the mainspring that drove the cause he led. Lincoln knew that American freedom was always imperfect, a work continuously in progress.

Shortly after his first election, speaking of the weaknesses of a Declaration of Independence that did not embrace the enslaved, Lincoln said that although the Founders knew their work was flawed, “they meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be . . . constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” He also made clear that he saw his own efforts in the same way: “The struggle of to-day,” he said in his first message to Congress, “is not altogether for to-day; it is for a vast future also.”

Mr. Snow is the author, most recently, of “I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford. ”