BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

LINCOLN AND THE CIVIL WAR

Daniel Hertzler

When in the Course of Human Events, by Charles Adams. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald. Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Phantoms of a Bloodstained Period, edited by Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster. University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.

For quite some time I have had doubts about Abraham Lincoln. Many persons seem to regard him as near to a saint. The legends include one where he is said to have walked several miles to return a few cents. He is presented as a kindly man who was decent to people who disagreed with him. His rhetoric in the Gettysburg address and the Emancipation Proclamation is held up for admiration.

My doubts about Lincoln developed slowly. They may have begun in response to the likenesses of Washington and Lincoln which dominated the front of my elementary school room. Without anyone in our family or church criticizing them, it eventually came to me that this man did not fit comfortably in our church peace tradition. My view of Lincoln was not enhanced by the Ken Burns series on public broadcasting which highlights the death of 600,000 soldiers in the Civil War. But I guess I was waiting for something more specific. I believe I have found it in the book by Charles Adams.

All of history is interpreted history. Adams writes as one who learned the usual historical clichés but has dug more deeply and found some facts which his history teachers had not revealed to him. He begins by quoting the English author Charles Dickens, who identified the Civil War as a conflict over money. "We Northerners like to read about Lincoln the martyr and the dying god, but do we want to know about Lincoln the dictator who circumvented the Constitution to wage war on the South? His best generals would have a difficult time avoiding conviction by a war crimes tribunal according to the laws of that time for their plunder of Southern civilization" (3).

Adams adds on the same page that wars are typically "justified" for patriotic causes since, as he writes, soldiers would not rally for an economic war. Yet "the Civil War, like most wars, had a rational basis and was objectively grounded in the economic realities of the time. If the Gulf War in the 1990s was justified for economic reasons, so was the Civil War."

He asserts that the war did not begin as an effort to free the slaves. Slavery was well-protected by the federal government. And we remember that the Emancipation Proclamation was not announced until well into the war. The basic problem, says Adams, was tariffs. The North was strong in manufacturing. The South was not. Beginning in 1828, the government enacted tariffs which protected the northern manufacturing but caused hardship for the South which had to pay more for manufactured goods. If the southern states had been permitted to cut loose, they could have imported these goods from Europe at considerable savings.

Yet secession and violent resistance were tactical errors on the part of the South. The tariffs would have been a small matter in comparison with what they lost through the Civil War. This war "was a tragedy unparalleled in American history that has repercussions to this day" (29).

Adams describes at length Lincoln’s assaults on civil liberties and the U.S. Constitution. The right of habeas corpus was suspended and "The Republican administration began making arrests based on unfounded rumors" (45). Ten thousand men were put in prison for opposing the war (52).

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, as Adams points out, was long on rhetoric, but as H. L. Mencken observed, "The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves" (199).

As for slavery, Adams says it was doomed anyhow, and the slaves would eventually have freed themselves had the North let them alone. So the Emancipation Proclamation also served as empty rhetoric.

What would have happened in the South if Lincoln had lived we will never know. It would seem that he would have surely been more generous than his successors were.

In any case, the results were disastrous. Adams reports that Robert E. Lee, the defeated Confederate General, said near the end of his life, "Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand" (219, 220).

I had an opportunity to show this book to Samuel Horst, a history teacher retired from Eastern Mennonite University. It surprised and did not fully convince him. But he implied that he would want to think about it further. Horst called my attention to the book Lincoln by David Donald, so I turned to it. It is written, the author says, "based largely on Lincoln’s own words, whether in his letters and messages or in conversations recorded by reliable witnesses" (13).

Donald’s book is much more comprehensive than the Adams book, following the life and career of Lincoln from beginning to end. Donald indicates that he "seeks to explain rather than to judge" (13) but on the next page he asserts that Lincoln had "an enormous capacity for growth, which enabled one of the least experienced and most poorly prepared men ever elected to high office to become the greatest American president" (14).

As the story unfolds, the reader cannot avoid emotional support for the cause of this unusual man who was born in poverty and seems to have lived most of his life just ahead of the bill collector. But he had intelligence and determination which enabled him to become a successful attorney and politician. Much of what Adams holds against Lincoln is identified by Donald but given a different interpretation. Characteristics of Lincoln highlighted early in the book help to account for why he functioned as he did after he became president.

Donald reports Lincoln’s "fatalism" which he says was the source of "some of his most lovable traits: his compassion, his tolerance, his willingness to overlook mistakes" (15). He describes also Lincoln’s belief in "predestination," which was a doctrine common in the theological atmosphere where he grew up. He did not adopt the doctrinal version or join the hairsplitting debates. "He felt more comfortable in thinking that events were foreordained by immutable natural laws than by a personal deity" (48).

This concept apparently fit well with his basic fatalism and guided his responses to the terrible issues thrust upon him. In a quotation from the year 1864 on the presentation page of the book, Lincoln says, "I claim not to have controled events, but confess plainly that events have controled me."

But Lincoln had several important convictions. It would appear that when events pushed him to act, these convictions also guided him. One was a belief in a protective tariff (109, 110). Another was opposition to slavery (176) and one more the preservation of the Union (192). When his Whig party died and the new Republican Party was organized as an antislavery party, Lincoln fell right in line.

Lincoln’s statement about events controlling him was only half true. His own unwillingness to consider the southern states as any sort of valid entity separate from the Union and his unwillingness to negotiate with their emissaries surely prolonged the war. Donald recounts what is well known, that Lincoln had trouble finding competent generals. He finally settled on Grant, who won battles but lost thousands of his own men: 13,000 Union casualties at the battle of Shiloh (349) and 100,000 lost in a later six weeks of fighting (513).

Lincoln’s bid for reelection was hampered by the difficulties in prosecuting the war. "Many considered him an inefficient administrator who tolerated looseness and inefficiency throughout the government. The best evidence was that, after two-and-a-half years of costly, bloody warfare, the 20 million loyal citizens of the North were unable to overcome 5 million rebellious white Southerners" (477).

Donald reports what Adams has also noted, that in the end Lincoln blamed the Almighty for the war. "If there was guilt, the burden had been shifted from his shoulders to those of a Higher Power. The war continued because ‘the Almighty has His own purposes which are different from men’s purposes.’" If this seems incredible, perhaps it may be accounted for by reference to Lincoln’s personal fatalism and early orientation to theological predestination.

The Civil War was most assuredly based in part on miscalculations combined with blind determination on both sides. It was a tragedy that some of the most determined suffered less than the soldiers who volunteered or were drafted to fight. Phantoms of a Bloodstained Period represents the case of one of those who fought. The subtitle is "The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce."

Bierce was a volunteer from Indiana who signed up again after his first three months of volunteer service were completed. He stayed in the Union Army until January 1865, only months before the end of the war. The book is a compilation of disparate writings done over a period of years: some essays, some short fiction, some poetry.

It is not exactly a comprehensive presentation, but it provides flashes of insight based on experiences at the front. How he survived when more than 600,000 died is surprising. Evidently he himself wondered about it. The first of the essays is titled "A Sole Survivor." He was finally wounded at Kennesaw Mountain after which doctors took a "lead ball from his skull," but he recovered to join the army again (11).

He became a writer and editor after the war, but his writings did not appear immediately. As the editors of the book observe, Americans were not yet ready for his point of view. When they came, his essays and stories covered the brutality and stupidity of the war. "The memory of the war as put forth by romantics and accepted by the American public incensed him." When he was asked "to write an accurate history of the war" his response was "The fools would probably not understand a word of it" (21).

Bierce was present at the battle of Shiloh Church where the Union Army lost 13,047 out of 62,000 men and the Confederates 11,694 out of 44,000. It is reported that "More Americans had been killed in two days at Shiloh than had died during the Revolution, War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined" (89).

His description of the battlefield which he visited on the day after is sickening. All the men found were dead except one, and he "lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks, piling itself alongside his neck and ears. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this his brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain" (103).

Later he describes a forest in which the dry leaves had caught fire and killed the wounded lying there; "scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture" (106). On one occasion, Bierce got leave to go into a ravine and inspect the remains of a regiment. Some he found "in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame. . . . The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin" (107).

In his own cynical realism Bierce reflected on the relative bravery of fighting men. "When two lines of battle are fighting face-to-face on even terms and one is ‘ forced back’ (which always occurs unless it is ordered back) it is fear that forces it: the men could have stood if they had wanted to. . . . As a rule the Confederates fought better than our men. On even terms they commonly defeated us; nearly all our victories were won by superior numbers, better arms and advantages of position" (274).

These were the men who were constrained to face each other with guns in hand because of the miscalculations and rigidities of their elders. Most of the men were young. Bierce observes that the average age of the Union soldiers was no more than 25 and maybe only 23. Both sides sent out their most virile young men to kill and to be killed.

Many today seem to have a romantic fascination with the Civil War. There are reenactments in our area every year. This is all good fun, but I do not perceive that the slaughter is publicly acknowledged. I have never given the battle of Gettysburg a careful study. Maybe I should do so.

Also I have said to myself that the next time I’m in Washington I should visit the Vietnam Wall. It would be an opportunity to ponder the phenomenon of organized killing which continues unabated to this day. The Vietnam memorial is unique in that it includes the names of all Americans killed in the war. (What would Bierce say about that?)

From October 28 to November 10, 2002, Peter Eash Scott, Pittsburgh Mennonite Church pastoral intern, did a Peace Walk from Pittsburgh to Washington. It ended with a service at the Lincoln Memorial on the same day veterans was reading the names on the Vietnam Wall. Peter reported later that there was conversation between the two groups, and the peace people were able to assure the veterans that this was not a protest against their effort. It was rather a statement against the warlike bluster of the Bush Administration.

Not unlike predecessor Abraham Lincoln, George W. Bush has certain basic assumptions which make him unwilling to compromise. But now instead of the American union it is the American empire he must preserve.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, writes a monthly column for the op ed page of the Daily Courier (Connellsville, Pa.) and has been a regular contributor of biblical background articles for Builder (a Christian education curricular guide slated to discontinue in May 2003). He is also author of A Little Left of Center: An Editor Reflects on His Mennonite Experience (DreamSeeker Books/Pandora Press U.S., 2000).