There is little ground in American historical writing better trod than the history of the Civil War. We all think we know the story – whatever version of it we grew up – and yet we continue to think about it, read about it, and yes, write about it. We know the cast of characters and their entrances and exits, the script, the scenery they perform in front of, and even the props. With respect to what actually happened, there is precious little new to say. If we continue to watch this drama over and over again, it is because of what the story means for us in the present, and as the present changes, so does how we read the pivotal moments of the past.
The funny thing about history is that whatever energy it expends describing the past, it is ever so often really about the here and now. Monuments to statesmen and Confederate generals don’t matter to us because we can alter outcomes in the past, but because of how we use them to interpret our own world as we now find it. The doctoral candidate who stands athwart historiography crying “presentism!” at the suggestion that history is important because it informs out understanding of the present nonetheless concerns himself (herself?) with how the past lends itself to the methods and preoccupations of our own moment. It’s hardly revolutionary to suggest that historians have their own perspectives rooted in the present that inform their view of the past, but we ought to remember that the present, as often as not, puts restraints on the questions we let ourselves ask of the past.
As trivial as the question might seem, we would do well to ask a question that ought to be easiest of all: who won? The answer to this question, superficially, is trivially easy: the Union won the Civil War in the spring of 1865 when the Confederate armies surrendered to their victorious opponents. That much is indisputable at any level beyond the academic. But who accomplished their objectives, and, more abstractly, whose memory endures at the heart of American nationalism? The answers to these questions are more complicated.
If we want to say that “the Union” won the war, what do we really mean when we say that? Whose “Union” are we actually talking about? Those who possess a grasp of the conflict beyond the elementary level will know that the preservation of the Union stood out as the Union’s chief war goal, with the abolition of slavery attaining great importance only later. On paper, they accomplished their objective: the 11 states that constituted the entity calling itself the Confederate States of America were brought back into the United States of America at the point of a bayonet. Whether we believe this counts as “preserving the Union” depends on what we mean by Union, whose Union it was, and how it would be preserved.
The Union as it existed in May of 1865 was not the same one that existed in December of 1860. It had been torn apart by years of vicious warfare. Hundreds of thousands were dead, with countless others wounded, many of them permanently so. Slavery, the peculiar institution of the South, was no longer recognized under federal law, banned under the newly-amended Constitution. In a bitter historical irony, many of those most ardently in favor of Union before the war had been proven wrong by it. Long had ardent Unionists believed that a Union half slave and half free could endure, that a house divided against itself could indeed stand. They genuinely believed, or thought they believed, that a Union could continue organizing its politics on the grounds of anything but slavery. To these Unionists, slavery was either a southern institution that needed to be preserved, or a polite embarrassment best left unspoken of in polite company. This Union, the Union whose partisans inherited it from the sons and grandsons of the Founders, died the moment Confederate forces fired on Ft. Sumter.
If the prewar Union died at Ft. Sumter, the 13th Amendment buried it. The 13th Amendment closed the book on the great debate about legal chattel slavery in the United States. It permanently wrote into law that which many a conservative Unionist had to deny: that there was no dealing with the question of a united American independent of the question of slavery. They tried, oh how they tried. The US government endeavored not to tamper with slavery in the earliest months of the war, not just to avoid antagonizing the opinions of southern civilians, but to avoid agitating northerners who did not want to wage a war on the grounds of ending slavery. As the Contraband Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation demonstrated, however, this settlement was not long for this world. In waging war against slavery, the Lincoln administration was going to war not just against the Confederacy, but against the Union itself as it had been understood by prior generations. That Union was forever dead.
The trauma could run deeper still for southern Unionists. Lincoln seemed to have proven correct the fanatical fire-eaters who warned that an ascendant “Black Republican” Party would wage war against the white South, attacking slavery, and putting weapons into the hands of black men. The Union as they understood it was gone too, and for those white southerners who did not enlist in the Confederate cause – and especially for those who actively aided the Union – the story grew more complicated still. Being a good Union man and a good southerner wasn’t impossible, but it also wasn’t easy. Even if veterans of the Confederate army had lost the war, memories of their exploits would live on in southern legend, while those who aided Reconstruction became derided as scalawags. The memory of the Civil War South would forever be that of the Confederate, not of those who chose to stay out. The Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy keep that memory alive today, while the stories of Jones County, Mississippi and the Red Strings of North Carolina remain at the margins. Not only was the Union as these men understood it gone, but their story had no clear place in the one either their country or their community told.
One can argue in different directions about the precise ways the Civil War changed the United States, how much life changed for freedmen at war’s end, and what Reconstruction did or did not accomplish. The reality is that the Civil War represents a highly traumatic breaking point in American history. The Civil War did not preserve the Union. It built a new one out of leftover rags from the end of the war. We might think that Union has things to recommend it over the old – ending slavery is pretty neat – but it is a mistake to think of the Civil War as an exercise in preservation. Even if secessionists lost the war, and even if abolitionists never accomplished the transformation of the South as they envisioned it, they each won the argument in their own way: the status of slavery had to be central to how the nation understood itself at that moment. It’s bitterly ironic then that those most committed to the Union’s goals at the war’s beginning won victory on the battlefield, but lost the argument about how the nation would define itself.
In this sense, the Civil War was a break even more radical than we sometimes acknowledge, or even permit ourselves to imagine. It would seem, even, that secessionists, in undertaking the radical creation of a republic explicitly based on slavery, understood the implications of the struggle better than many of their northern rivals. It was the North and the border states, after all, that sought to maintain the status quo, and there are few impulses more deeply conservative than that. The Union won the war, ultimately, not by standing by their initial aims, but by breaking dramatically in a different direction. The North won the war, but only by radically redefining what they sought to do. If any conflict in American history is worthy of being called a Second American Revolution, then surely it is this one.