THE CIVIL WAR BOOM

...There are collected essays of contemporary historians—Lincoln Images, Why the North Won the Civil War, and a voluminous tour de force, Lincoln for the Ages...

...It was dangerous to open old wounds...

...Federal Union and the birth of the new American nation...

...The Christian Century, surveying the ballyhoo, recently counseled against attempts to fictionalize or romanticize the Civil War...

...More significant in the long run than the military changes, and as extensive as the constitutional alterations, were the war's modifications of the American economy...

...The Civil War was important as the turning point in the military history of the world...

...In addition there are the anthologies, endlessly repetitive, which gather shorter accounts into single volumes...

...It was the first war in which the industrial potential of the victor was a primary factor in determining the outcome...

...Surveying the literature, one wag suggested that he couldn't tell whether the North or the South was going to lose the Civil War, but he knew the publishers were winning it...

...Out of the decisions made by the war have come a century of consequences...

...As might be expected, there were objectors...

...Fomenting and fostering the "commemorations" is a National Civil War Centennial Commission, headed by Major General Ulysses S. Grant III—third in both direct and apostolic succession—and with a onetime advertising man as executive officer...

...It saw the introduction of iron-clad ships, of military aviation, and of the intricate logistics of later combat...

...Graduate students write biographies of generals for doctoral dissertations...

...Otherwise, someone might start using live ammunition at the re-enactment of the Battle of Manassas, and this time Joe Johnston and Stonewall Jackson might take Washington...

...In support of this interpretation there are many facts...

...The advice, of course, is fundamentally sound: leave it to the historians...

...Already there are "Revolutionary War Round Tables," and a steadily increasing number of books about the American Revolution, whose bicentennial will take over as soon as the final scenes at Appomattox have been re-enacted in 1965...

...It would be better, said the weepers, to forget the whole thing...

...It was both an end and a beginning—the death of the old WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE, professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin, is a distinguished authority on the Civil War...

...The United States is today the result, its society the product, and its problems the progeny of the Civil War...

...Much of the activity should be of interest to the cultural anthropologist...

...Beyond the boundaries of the United States the conflict had its consequences...

...They were to witness the rise of trusts, the growth of labor unions, the coming of cattle and wheat kings and robber barons...

...Arguments have been made—and commonly accepted—that the Civil War was economic in its origin, that it was promoted by business entrepreneurs, and that skillful and designing men directed its course and reaped the rewards of victory...

...It was a war against civilians...

...One recent estimate declares that Civil War books are coming out at the rate of one a day...

...There are "reading books" for college students...

...it would devote its erudite pages to the solemn pundits who knew the answers to Africa...

...As students of history, the Americans are attempting to understand their own roots...

...Many of the new books are reprints of volumes published long ago, which have stood unread in the stacks of libraries or were drugs on the shelves of secondhand book dealers...

...The wag was wrong...

...He has for years been active In the Civil War Round Table of Madison, Wisconsin, end his books include "Lincoln and the War Governors," "Confederate Leaders in the New South," "Ulysses S. Grant, Politician," and, with Hazel C. Wolf, "Blue and Gray on the Nile...

...It freed millions of men of African descent from chattel slavery, yet it established precedents for the subversion of the freedoms of speech and the press...

...They are listening to concerts, buying recordings of Federal and Confederate songs, visiting battlefields, collecting mementos, witnessing re-enactments, watching Civil War programs on television, and in other myriad ways of folk education they are "studying history" and coming to an understanding of the central event in the experience of the nation...

...The American people are winning the Civil War...

...They are, moreover, going beyond the conflict of a century ago, to "study" other aspects of American history...

...These conventional observances, ludicrous or dangerous as they may appear to the observer without insight, indicate that the American people have adopted the Civil War...

...And yet, at the same time, it was the last of the old wars wherein professional soldiers waged chivalrous combat and valorous deeds of individual derring-do won acclaim...

...But the editors of the religious journal failed to consider that in America every man is an historian...

...The years after the war were to witness the completion of railroads to the Pacific coast, the extension and consolidation of rail lines east of the Mississippi, the rise and proliferation of petroleum, the development of new systems of business organization, the mechanization of agriculture, the management and stabilization of currency and credit, and the concentration of financial power in Eastern banking houses...

...We are here, not to celebrate or to mourn, but to understand...

...We are products of that war," declared Leslie Fishel in reply to the Christian Century...

...It was the last, say the armchair strategists who pretend to pass judgment on military affairs, of the old wars, and the first of modern wars...

...It saw the importation of conscription to America...

...Taken together, the transformations wrought by, or accompanying, the Civil War amply warrant the interest, the civic festivals, and the pilgrimages to the holy places...

...There is a Lincoln Reader, a Lee Reader, a Union Reader, a compilation called An American Iliad, another agglomeration named The Blue and the Gray, and a volume on The Women and the Crisis...

...Bell Wiley and Seale Johnson discovered the literary quality and commercial possibilities of semi-literate Confederate soldiers who spelled by ear and began a press of their own to exploit the innovation...

...In many ways, the Civil War was the central experience of the American people...

...Grant's Memoirs, the campaign biography of Lincoln, Jefferson Davis' Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, regimental histories, Murat Halstead's Caucuses of I860, Frank Moore's stupendous Compendium, the diaries of nurses and of that strange genus of female whom we would now call "social workers," and the polemic writings of propagandists in the slavery controversy have been reprinted, with and without editorial deletion and commentary, in paperbacks or in deluxe and boxed editions...

...It loosened the shackles on men in Asia, and it gave new breadth to the dignity of human labor...

...Small wonder it is that in 1961, a century after the war's beginnings, thousands of Americans and hundreds of Europeans gather in Civil War Round Tables, that more than forty states have Civil War Centennial Commissions, that the number of visitors to Civil War battlefields should run into hundreds of thousands, that Civil War symbols should appear as motifs on curtains, rugs, bath towels, and children's toys, that television should ready-up horse operas and even its so-called educational programs to fit Civil War themes, and that city fathers should grow beards and solemnly participate in "re-enactments" of dramatic scenes of a hundred years ago...

...More than a year ago, the South Atlantic Quarterly, which was never abreast of the intellectual currents of its day, announced that it would have nothing to do with the Civil War...

...If, as a nation, we are to know ourselves, we must know what shaped us...

...University presses vie with commercial publishers in turning out books of soldiers' letters...

...Here, ten decades after the event, the American people are engaged in a curious set of tribal rituals—celebrating, with appropriate rites and solemn ceremonies, a civic mass...

...The Civil war stands as a paradoxical landmark in the history of human liberty...

...It saw thousands of men arrested without warrants and imprisoned without trial on the mere suspicion of opposition to the government...

...It had far-reaching constitutional significance, giving new meanings to the established document that came from the Founding Fathers...

...The Civil War altered the relations between the states and the Federal government, establishing forever that the states were limited in their rights and in their spheres of action, and arrogating to the Federal government not only functions which had been exercised by the states but also others which had not hitherto belonged to any political organization...

...Nearly every American thinks in historical terms, relates present to past events, and makes his judgments on his evaluation of experience...

...Yet a skeptic might question whether the war was the primary cause of the revolution, whether there was anything in the economic picture of 1880 that had not been foreshadowed in 1840, and whether the same development might not have occurred had John Brown never seized Harpers Ferry, Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter, or Pickett's valiant men made their desperate charge across the bloody field of Gettysburg...

...Neither the weepers nor the cynics need be concerned...

...It was a war with military campaigns directed against the resources of the enemy...

...Leave the Civil War to the historians and to those cysts of sectional chauvinism which feed upon the past," it advised...

...The study of the Civil War is leading to a broader knowledge and, let us pray, to a more mature understanding of America's problems, its failures, and its successes...

...Beneath the civic celebrations, going deeper than the tourist traps and the hot dog history, lies the recognition that the tragic conflict of 1861 to 1865 was the focal point of American development...

...The processes of economic change and the phenomenal growth of American wealth before the Civil War had been astonishing...

...Housewives sit at breakfast-room tables to write books about strategy, and one I know is intermittently compiling a Civil War Cook Book...

...The New York Public Library, says another estimate, has 18,000 volumes on the War...

...The attempt to understand takes many forms, and one of the more noticeable is the literary outpouring...

...A few other journals and columnists brayed in echo...

...One group was composed of the self-conscious cynics...

...It was the last war, as T. Harry Williams puts it, about which men could afford to be romantic...

...Because this revolution in American economic life came at the same time as the Civil War, it is an easy conclusion that there was a causal relationship—that the war caused the rise of new masters of capital and produced the new economy...

...Revolution had followed revolution in transportation, in agricultural production, in the spread of the factory system to textiles, to metals and mining, to leather goods, to food processing...

...It marked the rise of a new nation to the ranks of the great powers of the world, increased American prestige, caused the khedive of Egypt to seek the advice and services of veteran experts, set European soldiers to studying American campaigns, and stimulated the growing of cotton in the valleys of the Nile and the Ganges...

...Joining the ranks of the critics came the weepers—scared editors and frightened script-writers—who affected to think it awful that the wounds of a century should be reopened, old controversies re-examined, and old sparks of hatred fanned into a new blaze...