Earlier versions of this review incorrectly described when Daniel Webster declared, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” This version has been corrected.
This exceptionally fine book is in effect a companion piece to its author’s “The Confederate War,” published in 1997. In that volume Gary W. Gallagher argued that despite the obvious advantages enjoyed by the Union in manpower, materiel and industrial production, the Confederacy was not doomed from the start to lose the war, as so many of his fellow historians insist. To the contrary, he overturned the conventional wisdom by documenting the passion with which the Rebel armed forces embraced their cause and the extraordinary determination and valor with which they fought for it.
Now, in “The Union War,” Gallagher is back to take issue with what has become the new conventional wisdom, that the North fought the war in order to achieve the emancipation of the slaves. While welcoming the post-civil-rights-era emphasis on “slavery, emancipation, and the actions of black people, unfairly marginalized for decades in writings about the conflict,” Gallagher makes a very strong case — in my view a virtually irrefutable one — that the overriding motive in the North was preservation of the Union. “Students and adults interested in the Civil War,” he writes, “are reluctant to believe that anyone would risk life or fortune for something as abstract as ‘the Union.’ A war to end slavery seems more compelling.” Indeed it does, but it embroiders historical truth in order to suit the cultural and ideological mood of the moment.
‘The Union War’ by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard Univ. 215 pp. $27.95)
Part of the problem lies in the understandable difficulty that many people have in distinguishing causes from motives. There was “a very widely held belief among Union soldiers that slavery had caused the war,” and indeed as Gallagher correctly notes, “it is beyond dispute that controversies relating to slavery precipitated secession and by extension the outbreak of fighting in 1861.” But it is one thing for rank-and-file soldiers to understand why the war started and quite another for us to attribute motives to them that in fact only a minuscule percentage actually felt. Gallagher writes:
“Much recent Civil War scholarship obscures the importance of Union for the wartime generation. Two interpretive threads run through such literature. The first and more prominent suggests the Union of 1860-61 scarcely deserved to be defended at the cost of any bloodshed. The second argues that a major shift in war aims occurred when northerners realized that only emancipation made their level of sacrifice worthwhile. In both instances, modern sensibilities distort our view of how participants of a distant era understood the war.”
Thus one historian, Orville Vernon Burton, advances the currently fashionable notion that “the republic threatened by southern secession in 1860-61 was ‘grounded in ruthless ideas of inequality of race, class, and gender,’ ” while another, Walter A. McDougall, insists that “if preserving the Union was the war’s deepest meaning, then it merely restored the status quo ante bellum.” In other words, since the Union was an imperfect place before the war and remained one in “a postwar era dominated by rampant racism, nationalism, and imperialism,” if the war was fought to restore the Union, in the words of Barbara J. Fields, a star of Ken Burn’s TV series about the war, it was “a goal too shallow to be worth the sacrifice of a single life.”
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
Loading...
Comments