Civil War Military History: A Few Revisions in Need of Revising

Abstract

The recent revolution in the historiography of the Civil War era has perhaps been more extensive than is generally realized. The revisionist school of the 1930's, with its thesis of an avoidable and undesirable war, is being supplanted by historians who revert to the Manichaean outlook so prevalent among the men of the 1850's and who regard the war as a struggle between good and evil, thus making it both an inevitable and a desirable conflict. Radical Reconstruction, once the object of almost universal opprobrium, is now pictured as a noble experiment unwisely abandoned. Andrew Johnson was formerly pitied as the victim of a malign and cynical Radical conspiracy; now he is blamed as a doctrinaire obstructionist afflicted with both political and moral obtuseness. Lincoln has been transformed from a lily-white Republican and reluctant emancipator into a prophet of the equalitarian millenium. Abolitionists are no longer destructive, emotionally unstable, and sometimes racist fanatics, but have become angels of light. Such reinterpretation, as always, is a function of the times. To the 1930's generation the Civil War seemed needless, and the moral issues confused, because that was the way World War I seemed. To the succeeding generation, thinking in terms of the struggle against Hitler, and then against communism, the Civil War appears to have been inevitable and to have involved clear-cut moral issues. And, of course, Radical Reconstruction is being reexamined in the midst of the present equalitarian crusade—as a deferred dating from the 1870's, a commitment which the Radicals gallantly attempted to meet, albeit with much fumbling and many mistakes. While it is to be expected that changes in the ideological climate would alter interpretations of the causes and aftermath of the war, it is somewhat surprising that such a politically neutral subject as militar)' science should also have been affected, but such seems to be the case. The reason is perhaps less obscure than might be supposed. In the afterglow of the Second World War, seen as inevitable, moral in purpose, and constructive in outcome, the generals who achieved an unconditional victory in 1865 are more apt to be admired than they were a generation ago, when war seemed neither inevitable nor righteous nor constructive. The overthrow of Hitler gave men a new faith in war as an instrument—sometimes the only instrument—of progress. Looking at the

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