Drawn With the Sword
McPherson, James M.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Drawn With the Sword" Reflections on the Bloodiest of Presidents Drawn With the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War James M. McPherson Oxford University Press / 258 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Joseph...
...of freedom," he was making the case for a "Second American Revolution" which would complete the first by abolishing slavery and ending the power of the planter class...
...Reflections on the Bloodiest of Presidents Drawn With the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War James M. McPherson Oxford University Press / 258 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan Wby did the South secede from the Union in 1861...
...Bradford's, who charged that Lincoln played "the central role" in transforming the old Union "into a unitary structure" which "might easily threaten the liberties of those for whose sake it existed...
...Again, textbook accounts have stressed the North's overwhelming superiority in numbers and resources on the one hand, and the disunity of a Confederacy committed to states' rights on the other...
...We are in love with Lincoln's image, an idealized cultural artifact that stands for whatever is currently politically correct...
...Anyone who shuns compromise in favor of unconditional victory, as Lincoln did, is obviously a hopeless ideologue...
...For Americans the outstanding example, of course, was the war of independence against a mighty Britain...
...Lincoln the revolutionary...
...His g refusal to consider a compromise peace g, very nearly cost him his second presi- g. The American Spectator • July 19 9 6 73 dential term...
...If the election had been held in August 1864 instead of November," McPherson observes, "Lincoln would have lost...
...In her autobiography, the actress Lauren Bacall recalls how, visiting Washington's Lincoln Memorial one morning, she suddenly and unaccountably began to weep...
...But while Bradford saw him mainly as a wily opportunist who used his tremendous rhetorical gifts to disguise his will to power, McPherson (echoing the views of pro-Lincoln scholars such as Harry Jaffa) argues that everything Lincoln did derived from an unwavering adherence to political principle...
...McPherson maintains that when Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg of "a new birth44 Far from disavowing Sherman's brutal methods, Lincoln became the spokesman for a remorseless 'total war' against the South...
...With their vital interests not at risk, what made the South take its fateful plunge...
...With the North's failure to win a decisive victory at the outset, the Civil War became a bitter and protracted conflict—the bloodiest war not merely in American history, but in the entire Western world between 1815 and 1914...
...As McPherson sees it, this permanently altered the political balance of power in the United States: The old decentralized republic, in which the post office was the only agency of national government that touched the average citizen, was transformed by the crucible of war into a centralized polity that taxed people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect the taxes, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a federally chartered banking system, drafted men into the army, and created the Freedmen's Bureau as the first national agency for social welfare...
...Thus while the immediate reason for war's outbreak was the president's refusal to countenance the expansion of slavery, its underlying cause was the fear and loathing felt by the rural, agricultural South over the North's leap into modernity—what McPherson calls "Northern exceptional-ism...
...That he won the 1864 election, and was able to pursue the war to a successful conclusion, was the result of Sherman's capture of Atlanta and Sheridan's spectacular successes in the Shenandoah Valley—victories that transformed Northern morale and vindicated Lincoln's hawkishness...
...The central vision that guided him," he writes, "was preservation of the United States as a republic governed by popular suffrage, majority rule and the Constitution...
...Why did the North ultimately prevail...
...Many of us, I suspect, are like that...
...Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether...
...The honest answer is that our self-indulgent, morally-relativist culture probably doesn't believe that any political cause is worth so many lives...
...These words are so beautiful, and so familiar, that we tend to pass over their meaning...
...This is one of many questions that James McPherson answers in his splendid and thought-provoking collection of essays, Drawn With the Sword...
...Far from disavowing Sherman's brutal methods, Lincoln became the spokesman for what McPherson calls a remorseless "total war" against the South...
...The North's victory was a close-run thing...
...Southern culture, he believes, "valued tradition and stability and felt threatened by change...
...Other precedents also came easily to Southern minds in 1861: the Netherlands against Spain in the sixteenth century...
...They regarded Lincoln's Republican Party as a revolutionary party, and not without justification—its ideology was capitalist, egalitarian, and free-labor...
...Greece against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820's...
...As McPherson sees it, the South enjoyed one tremendous advantage over the North: In order to prevail, Union forces would have had to destroy the South's will to resist—to wage a brutal war against Southern civilians...
...But McPherson makes it clear that Lincoln was justifying the kind of scorched-earth policy from which "enlightened" people today would recoil in horror...
...The textbooks tell us that Lincoln's i86o election platform opposing the extension of slavery to the western territories so enraged white Southerners that they established the Confederacy...
...Among its many virtues, Drawn With the Sword helps us to understand that the man was far more interesting, and more complicated, than the myth...
...After Lincoln's election, they opted JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...
...As for the notion that the South was too divided against itself to wage war effectively, "a good case can be made that, to the contrary, the Confederate government enforced the draft, suppressed dissent, and suspended liberties and democratic rights at least as thoroughly as did the Union government...
...74 July 1996 • The American Spectator...
...Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government...
...For us, the ability to compromise, to strike a deal, to be "pragmatic" — like Bob Dole—is the ultimate political virtue...
...Indeed, Lincoln's "finest hour," according to McPherson, came while withstanding humanitarian pressures for a negotiated settlement and continuing the war despite its growing unpopularity in the North...
...Nonetheless, we continue to revere Lincoln's memory—and the less certain we are about the reasons for our reverence, the more intense does it become...
...To carry out this revolution, Lincoln had to increase the powers of the central government...
...In our own post-Vietnam generation we are familiar with the truth that victory does not necessarily ride with the biggest battalions...
...It also required Lincoln to display a steely ruthlessness...
...In fact, Americans in the war of 1776 were more divided than Southerners in the war of 1861...
...That the architect of this second revolution had initially sought to avoid it—that by containing slavery's expansion he hoped to somehow achieve its gradual demise, and that he decided to free the slaves only after concluding victory without emancipation was impossible—in no way detracts from Lincoln's being responsible for the most far-reaching social revolution in American history: the liberation of four million slaves and the uprooting of an entire political and social order...
...Yet his ascension to the White House in no way threatened slavery in the South itself, which then dominated both Congress and the Supreme Court...
...six of the next seven, starting with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, radically expanded those powers at the expense of the states...
...To a Southerner contemplating secession in 1861, he writes, "History offered numerous examples of a society winning a war against greater odds than the Confederacy faced...
...If the Confederate rebellion succeeded in its effort to sever the United States in twain, popular government would be swept into the dustbin of history...
...there was nothing inevitable about it...
...But was the survival of popular government worth the lives of 62o,coo Union and Confederate soldiers—not to mention the "substantial number" of civilians—who perished in the Civil War...
...When Southerners claimed they were seceding in order to protect "traditional" values, they were being perfectly sincere...
...His Democratic successor would undoubtedly have sued for peace, and Lincoln would "have gone down in history as a loser, a failure unequal to the challenge of the greatest crisis in the American experience...
...A Princeton professor who in 1989 won the Pulitzer Prize for his Civil War history, Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson argues that by 186o the North and South had for all practical purposes become two distinct civilizations...
...McPherson discounts both explanations...
...Is this the Lincoln that today's conservative, peace-loving, decentralizing GOP venerates as its founder...
...The architect of Big Government...
...Even had he wanted to, Lincoln could have done little harm to the "peculiar institution...
...Did the North really have the stomach for such butchery...
...for secession as a "preemptive counterrevolution to prevent the Black Republican revolution from engulfing the South...
...Black Republican" was the South's abusive way of referring to Lincoln and his allegedly pro-black supporters...
...Besides being a reluctant advocate of total war, Lincoln also unwillingly became what his Southern detractors accused him of being all along—a dangerous revolutionary...
...Most Northerners did not but, to the Confederacy's great misfortune, Lincoln did...
...McPherson's "clash of civilizations" thesis (the phrase is Samuel Huntington's) explains why, to Lincoln's surprise, South-em "moderates" did not quickly step forward to bring the war to a speedy end, as they might have done over a simple "political" disagreement...
...McPherson's Lincoln seems to have much in common with revisionist critiques, such as the late M.E...
...As he put it in his second inaugural address: Fondly do we hope fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war might speedily pass away...
...The implacable war-hawk...
...the North's modernizing culture enshrined change as progress and condemned the South as backward...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
