The Quirks of History
Eastland, Terry
The Quirks of History The month the Civil War ended BY TERRY EASTLAND The struggle at Gettysburg— where, over three days at the beginning of July 1863, the Union army turned back Robert E. Lee's...
...Even so, Winik's command of the war makes the book compelling: an engrossing narrative history, a valuable refresher on how the war ended...
...Lee's plan turned on the delivery by train of 350,000 rations at Amelia Court House...
...In stating that a month saved America, Winik obviously means that America was saved during that particular month, not that the month was the agent of the saving...
...Winik's emphasis on such contingencies is essential to the book's central argument that April 1865 was the month that saved America...
...Most civil wars end badly, begetting a "vicious circle of more civil war and more violence, death, and instability...
...It's not hard to imagine April 1865 coming to a movie theater near you...
...Northern generals—Grant and Sherman notably— showed magnanimity toward the defeated Confederate soldiers, and Southern generals, with Lee leading the way, showed good judgment in laying down their arms...
...Tellingly, as Winik points out, there was a shift in usage, by the war's end, from saying "the United States are" to saying "the United States is...
...Consider, for example, the fate of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia...
...Imagine, as Winik does, the Union trying to occupy the entire Confederacy: America in time might have "come to resemble a Swiss cheese, with Union cities here, pockets of Confederate resistance lurking there, ambiguous areas of no-man's-land in between...
...Yet Winik's book is more than that...
...The passage of time—and we are now 136 years from April 1865—tends to confer on big events like the end of the Civil War a kind of inevitability, as Terry Eastland's most recent book is Freedom of Expression in the Supreme Court: The Defining Cases (Rowman & Littlefield...
...The Quirks of History The month the Civil War ended BY TERRY EASTLAND The struggle at Gettysburg— where, over three days at the beginning of July 1863, the Union army turned back Robert E. Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania—remains the best-known battle of the Civil War...
...Deeply moved by faith as the war progressed, Lincoln began to see himself as "an instrument of providence," satisfied that "when the Almighty wants me to do or not do a particular thing, he finds a way of letting me know it...
...Winik comments: "Amid the scourge of conflict, this provided some of the lubricant of presidential leadership...
...By making clear the contingencies of a momentous chapter in our history, Winik's book April 1865 The Month That Saved America by Jay Winik HarperCollins, 496 pp., $32.50 teaches the uncertainties of history...
...But Winik pauses in his account of these events to think about those ammunition-filled boxcars: "What if Lee had found an abundance of food at Amelia Court House—and safely made his way south to link up with Joe Johnston...
...Winik reminds us that though a central government was established by the Constitution, the country was not really a nation before the Civil War...
...though they could not have turned out any way other than they did...
...What emerges from the panorama of April 1865 is that the whole of our national history could have been altered but for a few decisions, a quirk of fate, a sudden shift of luck...
...There have been innumerable books about the Civil War, many of which have led to films...
...April 1865 contains a series of vivid sketches of those who figured in the big stories of the month: Grant and Lee, of course, but also such generals as Sherman, Johnston, and Nathan Bedford Forrest...
...Sectional tensions broke out early: There was the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and New England states opposed to the War of 1812 actually were the first to flirt with secession...
...Slavery proved the issue that cracked the underpinnings of the fragile union...
...It was not inevitable that our Civil War should end as it did, or that it would end at all well...
...A choice available to Lee, one urged by the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, was to head west to the mountains and organize a guerrilla resistance throughout the South, which could have persisted for years...
...The Civil War continued for two more years, and it is April 1865, the last month of real fighting, that Jay Winik contends is the most important month in American history...
...Winik credits Lincoln's greatness, but he observes that Lincoln was "ill-prepared for his job," his resume thin and his moods often dark...
...Likewise, Winik has a keen eye for the choices men on both sides made...
...But I would recommend you read the book first...
...The twentieth century suggests part of the answer, for the United States was there—was it not?—to counter the evils of fascism and communism...
...Still, on the decisive issue of his time—the very future of the country—no one was more dedicated than Lincoln to keeping it together...
...the month the major Southern armies surrendered, the month President Lincoln was assassinated, and the month the task of reuniting the riven country fell to a new president, Andrew Johnson...
...We know, of course, what happened: Lee's ravenous, weakening army got only as far as Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered...
...Books on presidential leadership today are many, but few dare speak openly of a leadership importantly lubricated by faith...
...Indeed, words like "nation" and "national" were rarely used in political discourse, as Americans were more attached to states and even regions...
...Wars," Winik writes, "can turn on such seemingly minor things" as the "mere administrative mix-up" that Lee clearly understood "threatened to do him in...
...The Civil War settled the issue of whether a state may secede, and, in doing so, established a "nation" (a word Lincoln used no fewer than five times in the Gettysburg Address...
...That was the month Richmond, the Confederate capital, was evacuated and burned...
...But to recognize that America was saved invites the question of the purposes for which it might have been saved...
...The portrait of Lee is an admiring one, and Winik is insightful about Lincoln...
...The bad ending was avoided, however, not so much by fate or luck, as by a "few decisions" made by Union as well as Confederate leaders...
...Winik uses religion to explain Lincoln's "dogged tenacity" in behalf of union...
...But Gettysburg didn't end things...
...But upon arrival there he found the boxcars loaded not with food but ammunition...
...He breaks down events to make clear the paths not taken...
...the two presidents, Davis and Lincoln, and even Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, the most famous actor of the time...
...Yet his book provokes reflection on this point...
...A pretty big news month, you could say, and Winik's April 1865 captures it in such detail and with so much context as to seem, at times, like an overbuilt house...
...Unable to defend Richmond any longer, Lee decided to retreat forty miles west to Amelia Court House, where his hungry troops would eat, before turning south to Danville and then into North Carolina where he would meet up with Joe Johnston and his army, and open a new phase of the war...
...Winik doesn't pursue the matter of providence further...
...The America thus saved was able to become a single nation after its civil war...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 31
