Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War

By Edmund Wilson

Featuring critical and biographical portraits of notable figures of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore remains one of Edmund Wilson's greatest achievements. Considered one of the 100 Best Nonfiction books by The Modern Library.

Figures discussed include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among many others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781466899636

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded. His more than twenty books include Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE PERIOD of the American Civil War was not one in which belles lettres flourished, but it did produce a remarkable literature which mostly consists of speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journalistic reports. Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–65 in which so many people were so articulate? The elaborate orations of Charles Sumner, modelled on Demosthenes and Cicero; Lincoln’s unique addresses, at once directives and elegies; John Brown’s letters from prison and his final speech to the court; Grant’s hard and pellucid memoirs and John Mosby’s almost picaresque ones, together with the chronicles and apologetics of innumerable other officers of both the armies; the brilliant journal of Mary Chesnut, so much more imaginative and revealing than most of the fiction inspired by the war; the autobiographies of the Adams brothers, that cool but attentive commentary by members of the fourth generation of an historically self-conscious family — such documents dramatize the war as the poet or the writer of fiction has never been able to do. The drama has already been staged by characters who have written their own parts; and the peculiar fascination of this literature which leads one to go on and on reading if is rather like that of Browning’s The Ring and the Book, in which the same story is told from the points of view of nine different persons. We read in Mrs. Chesnut’s diary of General Hood’s unhappy passion for the beautiful girl Buck Preston; then we meet him in Sherman’s memoirs protesting, at the taking of Atlanta, against the Northern invaders’ harsh measures and engaging in polemics with him; then we discover that Hood has written his own memoirs. Charlotte Forten, the Negro school teacher from Philadelphia and the Boston Brahmin Thomas Wentworth Higginson turn out both to have left detailed records of the days that they spent together on the South Carolina Sea Islands. How very different Lincoln looks when he is seen by William Herndon, his law partner, by the Americanized Frenchman the Marquis de Chambrun, by Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, and by young Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes! How very different Grant appears to Henry and to Charles Francis Adams! And, as seems to have been natural in the nineteenth century so much more than it is in our own, everybody speaks in character in such a way that one can often almost hear their voices. It is as amusing to find McClellan writing home from the front to his wife, after a visit from Henry W. Halleck, who had displaced him as General-in-Chief, "He’s a bien mauvais sujet — he is not a gentleman, as to remember General Forrest’s reply, when asked how he had scored his success at Murfreesboro, that he had taken a short cut and got there fustes’ with the mostes’."

This book describes some thirty men and women who lived through the Civil War, either playing some special role in connection with it or experiencing its impact in some interesting way, and who have left their personal records of some angle or aspect of it. In dealing with them, I have mainly presented them in terms of their immediate human relations and of the values of their time and place, and I have tried to avoid generalizations and to allow the career and the character to suggest its own moral. I am, however, under some obligation to explain to the reader in advance the general point of view which gives shape to my picture of the war.

Having myself lived through a couple of world wars and having read a certain amount of history, I am no longer disposed to take very seriously the professions of war aims that nations make. I think that it is a serious deficiency on the part of historians and political writers that they so rarely interest themselves in biological and zoological phenomena. In a recent Walt Disney film showing life at the bottom of the sea, a primitive organism called a sea slug is seen gobbling up smaller organisms through a large orifice at one end of its body; confronted with another sea slug of an only slightly lesser size, it ingurgitates that, too. Now, the wars fought by human beings are stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of the sea slug. It is true that among the animals other than man it is hard to find organized aggression of the kind that has been developed by humanity. There are perhaps only the army ants which have mastered a comparable technique. But baboons travel in gangs; small birds will gang up on an owl; bees will defend a hive. The anthropoid gorilla, it seems, is now one of the least pugnacious of mammals: he lives in a family tree and does not molest the homes of others; but there is evidence that primitive man had to fight to defend his home. In any case, all animals must prey on some form of life that they can capture, and all will eat as much as they can. The difference in this respect between man and the other forms of life is that man has succeeded in cultivating enough of what he calls morality and reason to justify what he is doing in terms of what he calls virtue and civilization. Hence the self-assertive sounds which he utters when he is fighting and swallowing others: the songs about glory and God, the speeches about national ideals, the demonstrations of logical ideologies. These assertions rarely have any meaning — that is, they will soon lose any meaning they have had — once a war has been got under way. The Germans have represented in our century the simplest kind of aggressive expansion. In the war of 1914, they invaded France and Belgium on the pretext that they needed Lebensraum and had a mission to spread Kultur; and when the disabling penalties of the Treaty of Versailles sent them out again rampaging through Europe, they called themselves the master race, which had a mission to regiment humanity. In the case, however, of a people which has just had a successful revolution, the situation is a little more complicated. The slogans that such a people shouts may at first express a real exaltation on the part of some social group or country which has succeeded in escaping from the clutches of some other group or country that has been eating it, as well as enthusiastic hopes for the freer and happier society which it hopes to construct in the future. It may at first fight a civil war, and then when the once dominant power has been routed and dispossessed, still find itself under the necessity of defending the new society set up by the revolution against the return of the former regime, now supported perhaps by other still stable regimes which have made common cause with the power expelled. But once the insurgent party has succeeded in imposing its own authority, if it feels itself strong enough to go further, it will devour as much as it can, and its slogans will lose all meaning. The defense by the French of their revolution turned into Napoleon’s conquests; the defense by the Russians of theirs into the appetite for expansion which has spurred them — while indignantly denouncing imperialism — to swallow up the Balkan and the Baltic countries and those of Central Europe, just as the Tsar’s Russia, by methods sometimes peaceful and sometimes not, had swallowed up the innumerable peoples who made up the old Russian Empire. The Napoleonic French were boasting about la gloire as well as about their revolutionary ideals, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and they made the Marseillaise do for both; the Russians have been pretending to be the instruments of a relentless historical process which has chosen them to carry out the mission of saving the rest of the world by converting it into people’s democracies. And now we Americans of the United States, we too the self-congratulatory grandchildren of a successful revolution but driven, also, by the appetite for aggrandizement, have been adding such terms as the American dream, the American way of life and the defense of the Free World to these other forms of warlike cant.

It is, however, of course, very difficult for us to recognize that we, too, are devourers and that we, too, are talking cant. If we would truly understand at the present time the kind of role that our own country is playing, we must go back and try to see objectively what our tendencies and our practice have been in the past.

Like modern France and the Soviet Union, we inaugurated our national existence with the expulsion of the agents of a monarchic power; and as soon as that had been accomplished, the process of expansion began. This, except for our struggles with the Indians, to which I shall later return, was for some time peaceful enough. We bought Louisiana from the French and Florida from the Spanish. In the case of Texas, we colonized it when it was still a part of a Mexican province and under the rule of Spain, and we made offers to buy it from Mexico, but the Mexicans would not sell. The colonists from the United States eventually drove the Mexicans out and set up an independent republic, which later became part of the United States. With the British we made a settlement to take over the Oregon Territory; but with the relatively incompetent Mexicans we continually became more high-handed. We demanded of Mexico the payment of a very large compensation for property belonging to Americans which had been lost in her revolutions and for Americans who had been shot in Mexico. We offered to cancel this debt if the Mexicans would cede to us that part of their territory which lay north of the Rio Grande and which we claimed as a part of Texas; and we tried to buy California, which was also a part of Mexico but which was already being settled, in the northern part, by pioneers from the United States. The Mexicans refused both these offers, and President Polk retorted by sending troops to occupy the territory north of the Rio Grande. The Mexicans defended it. The United States declared war, invaded Mexico and captured the capital city, and took over, by force of arms, New Mexico, California and all the rest of the unsettled West. This amounted to more than half the territory originally owned by Mexico. The government of Mexico was compelled to sign a treaty with us, by which it was agreed that, in compensation for the land that had been taken from it we should pay them fifteen million dollars and let them off from responsibility for the claims that the United States had pressed. The sentiment that justified the Mexican War may be illustrated by an extract from a letter written in 1847 by William Gilmore Simms, the South Carolinian novelist and publicist, to the South Carolinian senator James H. Hammond: You must not dilate against military glory. War is the greatest element of modern civilization, and our destiny is conquest. Indeed the moment a nation ceases to extend its sway it falls a prey to an inferior but more energetic neighbour. The Mexicans are in the condition of those whom God seeks to destroy having first made mad. They are doing their best to compel us to conquer them. It is now impossible that it should be otherwise. Mark my words — our people will never surrender an inch of soil they have won. They are too certainly of the Anglo Norman breed for that. We will pay for it, perhaps, but only out of the assessed expense and damage of the conquest to us.

The next step was the repression of the Southern states when they attempted to secede from the Union and set up a republic of their own — in the course of which, it may be mentioned, the Canadians became so alarmed at the increasing aggressiveness of the Washington government that they for the first time began to take steps to consolidate their diverse provinces in a single federal system. The slave-owning Southern states and the rapidly industrializing North had by this time become so distinct from one another that they were virtually two different nations; they were as much two contending power units — each of which was trying to expand at the other’s expense — as any two European countries. The action of the Washington government in preventing the South from seceding was not prompted by the motives that have been often assumed. The myth that it was fighting to free the slaves is everywhere except in the South firmly fixed in the American popular mind; and it is true, of course, that slavery in the Southern states was embarrassing to many people — in the South as well as the North; but many other people thoroughly approved of it — in the North as well as the South. Abolitionists like Whittier and Garrison were not in such mortal danger as they would have been in South Carolina, but both were mobbed in New England and the former, in Philadelphia, had the office of his paper burned down. These fanatics were handled rather gingerly by the anti-South Republicans, and exploitation of the wickedness of the planters became later a form of propaganda like the alleged German atrocities in Belgium at the beginning of the first World War. The institution of slavery, which the Northern states had by this time got rid of, thus supplied the militant Union North with the rabble-rousing moral issue which is necessary in every modern war to make the conflict appear as a melodrama. As for the wickedness of secession, New England itself had debated seceding when, at the time of the War of 1812, its trade with Great Britain was interrupted. But these pseudo-moral issues which aroused such furious hatred were never fundamental for the North; and it was possible for the Washington government to coerce and to crush the South not by reason of the righteousness of its cause but on account of the superior equipment which it was able to mobilize and its superior capacity for organization.

The North’s determination to preserve the Union was simply the form that the power drive now took. The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century; it has continued to be strong in this; and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time, we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with the other leaders who have been engaged in similar tasks. The chief of these leaders have been Bismarck and Lenin. They with Lincoln have presided over the unifications of the three great new modern powers. If one happens to belong to a class or to live in a part of the world which has reason to honor the memory of one of these statesmen but has been injured by the policies of another, one may find this grouping unexpected. Bismarck was detested by the French whom he defeated and humiliated; Lenin is widely detested by old regime Russians, by political heretics who have been outlawed by the Soviet government and by everyone who has been frightened by Communism as the enemy of old-fashioned laissez-faire (which can hardly be said now to exist in any of the so-called capitalist countries); Lincoln is detested by the American Southerners against whom he waged a four years’ war and whom he reduced to unconditional surrender. But each became a hero for the people who gave their allegiance to the state he established. (I remember how shocked I was when, on a visit in my childhood to Virginia cousins, I heard them refer to Lincoln as a bloody tyrant.) And they all had certain qualities in common. Lincoln and Bismarck and Lenin were all men of unusual intellect and formidable tenacity of character, of historical imagination combined with powerful will. They were all, in their several ways, idealists, who put their ideals before everything else. All three were solitary men, who lived with their concentration of purpose. None liked to deal in demagogy and none cared for official pomp: even Bismarck complained that he could not be a courtier and assured Grant and others — as he must have believed quite sincerely — that he was not really a monarchist but a republican. Each established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples. Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia; Lenin — though contemptuous of bureaucracy, since he could not himself imagine that, once the old order was abolished, any decent person could want to be a bureaucrat — began the work of binding Russia, with its innumerable ethnic groups scattered through immense spaces, in a tight bureaucratic net. Each of these statesmen risked everything for his object and each paid a heavy price. Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer at the end of hardly more than four years in office; Lenin did not last much longer — hardly more than seven years: he was shot by a political opponent, then suffered a series of strokes, which, in his last two years as head of the government, incapacitated him almost completely; Bismarck was not assassinated, but two attacks by social revolutionaries were made upon the life of his Emperor; and all of these acts of violence were gauges of the weight of repression which their objects had been imposing or were assumed to be responsible for imposing. Each of these statesmen was confident that he was acting out the purpose of a force infinitely greater than himself. Bismarck believed in God and thought that his successful strokes were guided by revelatory moments in which he could see where God was going; Lenin believed in History, which had become, in the Marxist philosophy, a kind of substitute for the Protestant Providence; Lincoln talked sometimes, like Lenin, of History, sometimes, like Bismarck, of God, and he was always aware, like Lenin, of his destiny to play a decisive role in the drama of human development, although, unlike Lenin, he regarded himself as a simple human being, whereas Lenin identified himself with the antithesis of the dialectical process and, having dropped his real name in the underground, seems never to have thought of himself afterwards as a Russian named Vladimir Ulyánov.

Each of these men, through the pressure of the power which he found himself exercising, became an uncompromising dictator, and each was succeeded by agencies which continued to exercise this power and to manipulate the peoples he had been unifying in a stupid, despotic and unscrupulous fashion, so that all the bad potentialities of the policies he had initiated were realized, after his removal, in the most undesirable way. The generous program of Lincoln for readmitting the South to the Union was discarded by the Radical Republicans, who added every form of insult and injury to the bitterness of the Confederate failure. Bismarck was succeeded by a monarch who presided over a German defeat and debacle and then fled, by request, to another country, leaving his own in a situation which led inevitably to an even worse government, an even more outrageous aggression and an even more disastrous defeat; Lenin well before his death had been superseded by Stalin, who exterminated the old Bolshevik idealists, tormented the Russians with a reign of terror that made the French Revolution look moderate and let them in for a foreign invasion which laid waste the whole western part of their country and cost it seven million lives in addition to the several million that Stalin had already extinguished. We Americans have not yet had to suffer from the worst of the calamities that have followed on the dictatorships in Germany and Russia, but we have been going for a long time now quite steadily in the same direction. In what way, for example, was the fate of Hungary, at the time of its recent rebellion, any worse than the fate of the South at the end of the Civil War? The Russians put down this rebellion with brutality and tried to reduce the Hungarians to subjection just as we did with the Southerners, and they could protest the same justification: that the group they were forced to suppress was a retarded feudal society whose economy had become unworkable and was founded on social injustice.

These great modern federations that always speak with such horror of imperialism — for we do this as well as the Soviet Union — are continually put under a strain by the recalcitrance of the groups they have subjugated, and their revolts are likely to be stifled by their bureaucratic central governments as quickly as and often more quietly than they were by the old kings and emperors. In my account of the expansion of the United States, I did not dwell on our expulsion of the Indians from the lands that we had agreed they should occupy. In general, having ousted and cheated and murdered and demoralized this interesting people, we made haste to forget about them; and yet, so far as we know, there are now in North America about the same number of Indians that were here when Columbus arrived. These first natives still do not regard themselves as belonging to the United States; they have refused to accept American citizenship. They are resisting the efforts to deprive them of their lands in the interests of the truckroads and power projects which, in this centralizing age, in the United States and elsewhere, are usually given precedence over all individual or local interests; they are invoking their old treaties with our government — which are, after all, as recent as the end of the eighteenth century — treaties which we dare disregard for no more honorable reason than that we know that, in any given case, a few hundred or a few thousand Indians are helpless in a contest with our courts, our police and, if necessary, our armed forces. The Iroquois Indians of New York State and Canada have now organized a nationalist movement, and a general conference of Indians from all over the United States has, as I write, just been held in Chicago. This conference has drawn up a declaration demanding more assistance from the federal government for housing, education and health and a transference of the authority of the Indian Bureau, which they complain does not know much or care much about them, to reservation superintendents, who would be aware of their needs and make it possible for them to have access to Washington. All this has been going on at a time when we were priding ourselves on our loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek, a discarded Chinese nationalist whom we are keeping in comfort on Formosa, and lavishing millions of dollars on Laos and other distant countries, in which, for ridiculous reasons and with lavish ineptitude, we are supposed to be resisting Communism in the interest of the freedom of people who are often as primitive as those Indians whom we are constantly harassing at home.

This revival of resistance on the part of the Indians has hitherto seemed so feeble that we have not felt we needed to notice it; but the recent resistance of the South over the issue of school integration has been so violent and has continued for so long that we have been forced to take cognizance of it. In this case, there are two situations involved which work against one another in a way that makes it unrealistic for Northerners to talk, as they often do, in terms of a simple right and wrong. The Negroes are rebelling against the whites, who are afraid of them, as they have always been, and do not want them to better themselves because they do not want to have to compete with them; but the white Southerners themselves are rebelling against the federal government, which they have never forgiven for laying waste their country, for reducing them to abject defeat and for the needling and meddling of the Reconstruction. They have never entirely recognized the authority of the Washington government. It is possible to sympathize with both Negroes and whites, though not with the hoodlum and criminal methods employed by the latter against desegregation, which have left the Negro leaders, with their non-violent methods, in a position of moral superiority. Again, an analogy is useful. The relentlessness, it is said, of the color ban which is being imposed in South Africa by the white people of Dutch extraction is partly the result of their defeat by the British in the imperialistic Boer War. They take out their own humiliation on the blacks who are at their mercy, and the whites of the frustrated Confederacy take out theirs on the Negroes among whom they live. When the federal government sends troops to escort Negro children to white schools and to avert the mob action of whites, the Southerners remember the burning of Atlanta, the wrecking by Northern troops of Southern homes, the disfranchisement of the governing classes and the premature enfranchisement of the Negroes. The truth is that the South since the Civil War, in relation to the Washington government, has been in a state of mind that has fluctuated between that of Hungary and that of the Ukraine in relation to the government of Moscow. It was Lincoln who — though not without hesitation — decided to oppose secession and who reduced the South to total surrender; but he had disapproved of the Mexican War and had refused to endorse it in Congress, and he does not seem to have thought much about further expansion. Others, however, did, and we find in one of Stephen A. Douglas’s speeches, in the course of his debates with Lincoln, a flight of prophecy which is a good illustration of this. Douglas had been the leader of the Young America movement in the Democratic Party, which had favored, if opportunity offered, the annexation of Mexico, Cuba and the countries of Central America.

Let each State stand firmly, cries Douglas, by that great constitutional right, let each State mind its own business and let its neighbors alone, and there will be no trouble on this question. If we will stand by that principle, then Mr. Lincoln will find that this republic can exist forever divided into free and slave States, as our fathers made it and the people of each State have decided. Stand by that great principle and we can go on as we have done, increasing in wealth, in population, in power, and in all the elements of greatness, until we shall be the admiration and terror of the world. We can go on and enlarge as our population increases, and we require more room, until we make this continent one ocean-bound republic. Under that principle the United States can perform that great mission, that destiny which Providence has marked out for us. Under that principle we can receive with entire safety that stream of intelligence which is constantly flowing from the Old World to the New, filling up our prairies, clearing our wildernesses and building cities, towns, railroads and other internal improvements, and thus make this the asylum of the oppressed of the whole earth. We have this great mission to perform, and it can only be performed by adhering faithfully to that principle of self-government on which our institutions were all established. Observe that the enlargement of the United States is supposed to be benevolent and beneficent, that our aim is to provide asylum for the oppressed of the rest of the world. To utter these altruistic professions has become our official policy. Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country, it is always to liberate somebody.

Let us follow our further expansion. Having occupied a broad strip of the continent, we purchased Alaska from Russia and began to reach out for the islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. We acquired the Midway Islands and, in fear of having Hawaii and Samoa occupied by rival powers, we established naval bases on them. We had always had a yearning for Cuba, and in 1898, in spite of the fact that the Spanish were apparently ready to negotiate, we sent them an ultimatum demanding their withdrawal from the island. The immediate provocation for this was the sinking of the battleship Maine — though there was never any reason for believing that this had been done by the Spanish, and there is some reason for believing that it was engineered by William Randolph Hearst in order to set off a war. But before we invaded Cuba, we had sent Admiral Dewey to the Philippines, which also belonged to Spain, to destroy the Spanish warships in Manila Bay — a move that was apparently directed, with no official justification, by the expansionist Theodore Roosevelt, who was then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. We later sent troops to the Philippines and captured the city of Manila. The exploit had no relevance whatever to our quarrel with the Spaniards over Cuba, which was supposed to have been provoked by the struggle of the Cubans to get rid of them. This struggle had been going on since 1868 and had culminated in the ruthless suppression of a recent Cuban revolt. We dislodged the Spanish from the island at the cost of only three hundred of our own soldiers killed in battle but of three thousand who died from disease. We also took Puerto Rico, Guam and the Hawaiian Islands. But with the Philippines we had more trouble. The Filipino rebels against Spanish rule, who had assumed that our intervention was disinterested, turned their resistance against us when they discovered that we wanted to take over their islands. It took us more than two years to subdue them and cost us three and a half thousand lives among the seventy thousand soldiers we sent there. We established concentration camps of the kind which had aroused our indignation when the Spanish had resorted to them in Cuba, and the casualties of the Filipinos, mostly among civilians, were fifteen or twenty times ours. We paid Spain twenty million dollars. Later on, when Theodore Roosevelt was President, he arranged a revolution in Panama in order to break it off from Colombia, which was refusing to meet our terms for a lease on the Panama canal zone. We then leased the canal zone from Panama, which was given the half-subject status of a protectorate of the United States, as Cuba had already been and Haiti and the Dominican Republic were very soon to be. Colombia, resenting this, retorted by adopting a policy of making it difficult for American business men to obtain concessions there, so we eventually — not till 1921 — paid her twenty-five million dollars.

When the Germany that Bismarck had unified and turned into a great European power began to invade her neighbors in 1914, her chief rival, England, accepted the challenge and went to war with her on the Continent. Both England and Germany interfered with what the United States regarded as our neutral rights, the British by blockading our trade, by impounding American ships and by blacklisting American firms suspected of doing business with Germany, and the Germans by their submarine warfare, which, in spite of German warnings to Americans not to travel on the ships of Germany’s enemies, resulted in the loss of American lives, and which later, when unrestricted, was directed within certain zones against all kinds of merchant shipping. Bombarded by British propaganda and horrified by what we heard of the brutality of the Germans, with whom, nevertheless, we had a great deal in common and for whom throughout the nineteenth century we had expressed the highest admiration, we went in on the side of England and made her struggle for supremacy our struggle, when we might well by abstaining have shortened the war and left Europe less shattered and more stable. This cost us fifty thousand lives, about a sixth of the price of the war and a persecution of everything German in a country with an immense German population which had always been thought one of our more valuable elements, together with a hissing and hounding of every kind of opposition sentiment that far outdid the repressions of Lincoln. President Wilson had made a great effort to keep us out of the war, and when finally he took us in, he announced that we had no quarrel with the German people but only with the warlords who were inciting them to mischief; but, once involved with his European allies, he was dragged into subjecting the enemy to an unnecessary unconditional surrender and imposing on them such heavy penalties that a second war with Germany was inevitable. When this second war occurred — with, as George F. Kennan has said, a real Beast of Berlin directing it instead of the fatuous Kaiser, whom we had unfairly cast in this role — we were gradually and furtively brought into it by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been making secret agreements with the British but pretending, in his public statements, that he had not committed himself. Roosevelt of course disliked Hitler just as Lincoln disliked slavery; but it was not the mass murders of Hitler that drove us into going to war, any more than it had been the wrongs of slavery that made us go to war with the South. The American Jews had the motive of wanting to save their own people: they had even stronger reasons for fighting him than had their ancestors for resisting the Greeks and the Romans, they were glad to have us go in against him. But the extermination of six million Jews was already very far advanced by the time the United States took action; and when the United States did take action, the occasion for intervention was supplied by the Japanese, whose depredations in China had been threatening our commercial interests there and who had become a new power unit expanding across the Pacific and making us uneasy about the Philippines. It is true that we were also fearful lest Germany might threaten us across the Atlantic if she succeeded in defeating England and managed, by way of Africa, to establish herself strongly in South America. In any case, we first declared war on Japan.

The attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor has become, in our popular history, an act of moral turpitude more heinous than the firing of the Confederates on Fort Sumter; but it has been argued, to me quite convincingly, by Charles A. Beard, Mr. Harry Elmer Barnes and others that this act was foreseen by our government and — in order to make our antagonists strike the first blow — deliberately not forestalled at a time when a Japanese delegation was attempting to negotiate peace. As soon as we declared war on Japan, the Germans declared war on us. We sent our troops again to Europe and again into the Pacific, and in this even larger-scale conflict three hundred and seventy-five thousand Americans were killed. Unconditional surrender again, and the unnecessary bombing of German cities. We used many of the most horrible weapons of modern war and made a climax by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — though a Committee on the Social and Political Implications of using the atomic bomb, made up of physicists, chemists and biologists, had recommended a harmless demonstration, as a warning to the Japanese, in the presence of representatives of the new United Nations. It may be very difficult to persuade the world, said the report of this official committee, that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a new weapon, as indiscriminate as the rocket bomb and a thousand times more destructive, is to be trusted later in any proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement…. It is not at all certain that American public opinion, if it could be enlightened as to the effect of atomic explosives, would approve of our own country being the first to introduce such an indiscriminate method of wholesale destruction of civilian life…. Thus … the military advantages and the saving of American lives achieved by the sudden use of atomic bombs against Japan may be outweighed by the ensuing loss of confidence and by a wave of horror and revulsion sweeping over the rest of the world.

After the war, the troops and agents of the U.S.A. moved in all over Europe and Asia, from West Germany to South Korea, and we found ourselves confronted by the Soviet Union, which was also moving in. Neither the Soviet Russians nor we were very much beloved by the peoples in upon whom they had moved. The rivalry of power units had now reached an even more gigantic scale than that of the British and German Empires. The Russians and we produced nuclear weapons to flourish at one another and played the game of calling bad names when there had been nothing at issue between us that need have prevented our living in the same world and when we were actually, for better or worse, becoming more and more alike — the Russians emulating America in their frantic industrializing and we imitating them in our persecution of non-conformist political opinion, while both, to achieve their ends, were building up huge government bureaucracies in the hands of which the people have seemed helpless. We Americans, whose public officials kept telling us we were living in the Free World, discovered that we were expected to pay staggering taxes of which it has been estimated that 70 per cent has been going not only for nuclear weapons capable of depopulating whole countries but also for bacteriological and biological ones which made it possible for us to poison the enemy with every abominable disease from pneumonia and encephalitis to anthrax, cholera, diphtheria and typhoid, as well as with such new devices as the chemical agent called GB, which imitates the natural weapons of the Australian stone fish and the black widow spider in paralyzing the nerves of its victims so that a drop of it no larger than a dot can kill a man in fifteen minutes. We discovered that if we should refuse to contribute to these researches, we could be fined and clapped into jail — that we could even be clapped into jail if we protested against any of this by taking part in public demonstrations. We are, furthermore, like the Russians, being spied upon by an extensive secret police, whose salaries we are required to pay, as we are required to pay, also, the salaries of another corps of secret agents who are infiltrating foreign countries. And while all this expenditure is going for the purpose of sustaining the United States as a more and more unpopular world power, as few funds as possible are being supplied to educate and civilize the Americans themselves, and generations of young people are growing up who at worst live a life of gang warfare, the highest objectives of which are brawling and killing and robbing, in the buried crowded slum streets of cities outside of which they can imagine no other world, and at best find little spur to ambition when they emerge from four years in college to face two years in the armed services in preparation for further large-scale wars at the prospect of taking part in which they rarely feel the slightest enthusiasm.

I have said that the Americans discovered all this, but many of us have never discovered it. (Our research into bacteriological and biological weapons — which we are trying to make antibiotic proof — has, to be sure, been kept as secret as possible, though the men who have been conducting it, uncomfortable about what they were doing, at one time, in 1959, held an international conference in an effort to lift this secrecy and to curb the production of such weapons, and an issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists [June, 1960] was recently devoted to the subject.) We do not want to know about it, we do not like to talk about it. We talk instead about the big bad Russia, of which we as a rule know nothing except the moral indignation of politicians and the name-calling of the popular press. We cannot imagine the figure that is presented to the rest of the world by the United States of Hiroshima, which first used the atomic bomb and which is promising plague and annihilation if anybody treads on the tail of its coat — that inflated and centralized United States which, after rescuing Cuba, as we boasted, from the cruelties of Spanish tyranny, took quite calmly the regime of Batista with its tortures and executions, and which, when Fidel Castro overthrew it as it deserved to be overthrown, obstructed in every way possible his socialist revolution, misrepresented his aims and forced him to seek support from the Communists, whose influence we were supposed to be fighting. We wonder in a naïve way whether the Germans really knew about the gas chambers and the other mass killings of the Nazis, and if they did, how they could ever have stood for them. We have only to examine our own state of mind in regard to what the United States government is getting ready to do to a possible enemy — and the Nazis considered the Jews enemies — only a few years after Dachau and Belsen were emptied. We have tried to make up for our atomic bombs by treating and petting the Japanese women whom we disfigured or incapacitated. We like to read about this in the papers; but we do not like to realize, let alone resist, the exactions that our government is making of us in order to equip us for a warfare which would not merely blight but exterminate, or to confess the extent to which our own bristling attitude has brought this situation about.

I know very well, of course, all the arguments from expediency for our policies in the past and for our so-called preventive measures at present. The reluctance of the Washington government to allow the South to secede was partly due to the same sort of fear of the possible intervention of other powers — with which a seceded Confederacy might have decided to make its own arrangements — as was involved in our seizure of the Pacific islands, our uneasiness about the French in Mexico and our even more serious uneasiness about the Nazis in South America; but this kind of jockeying for position is itself an aspect of the power contest and inseparable from — since, unchecked, it must lead to — the competition for power for its own sake. I am not here making a moral criticism of the course of our foreign policy: I am trying to disregard the pretensions to moral superiority with which we have attempted to clothe it; I am trying — as in the book that follows — to remove the whole subject from the plane of morality and to give an objective account of the expansion of the United States. I want to suggest that — headed as we seem to have been, for a blind collision with the Soviet Union — we ought to stop talking in terms of defending and liberating the victims of oppressors and criminals, our old patter of right and wrong and punishing the guilty party. We have forgotten the Mexican War — only historians ever think of it. We have tried to forget the Civil War, but we have had the defeated enemy on the premises, and he will not allow us to forget it. We continue, nevertheless, to make him as much the villain as we dare to. Everything, past, present and future, takes its place in the legend of American idealism. Mr. Robert Penn Warren, in his little book The Legacy of the Civil War, the most intelligent comment, so far as I know, that has yet been brought forth by this absurd centennial — a day of mourning would be more appropriate — has shown how two fraudulent traditions, in the South and in the North respectively, have been stimulated by the Civil War. In the South, it is, he says, the Great Alibi, which enables the Southerners to put the blame for everything that is lazy, provincial, barbarous and degraded in the South on the damage that they suffered in the war; for the North, it is the Treasury of Virtue, which has enabled us to carry along into all our subsequent wars — in which so far we have always won or enlisted on the winning side — the insufferable moral attitudes that appeared to us first to be justified by our victory over the Confederacy in 1865. This prevents us from recognizing today, in our relation to our cold-war opponent, that our panicky pugnacity as we challenge him is not virtue but at bottom the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism, of a sea slug of vigorous voracity in the presence of another such sea slug.

This is the time to think what we are doing because, as soon as a war gets started, few people do any more thinking about anything except demolishing the enemy. It will be seen in the pages that follow how automatically, on both sides of the contest, as soon as it had come to war, a Southerner like Lee who had opposed secession and who did not approve of slavery was ready to fight to the death for both, and how a Northerner like Sherman who knew the South, who had always got on well with the Southerners and who did not much object to slavery, became more and more ferocious to devour the South. We have seen, in our most recent wars, how a divided and arguing public opinion may be converted overnight into a national near-unanimity, an obedient flood of energy which will carry the young to destruction and overpower any effort to stem it. The unanimity of men at war is like that of a school of fish, which will swerve, simultaneously and apparently without leadership, when the shadow of an enemy appears, or like a sky-darkening flight of grasshoppers, which, also all compelled by one impulse, will descend to consume the crops.

November, 1961

I

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

LET US BEGIN WITH Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

This novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the greatest successes of American publishing history as well as one of the most influential books — immediately influential, at any rate — that have ever appeared in the United States. A year after its publication on March 20, 1852, it had sold 305,000 copies in America and something like two million and a half copies in English and in translation all over the world. As for its influence, it is enough to remember the greeting of Lincoln to Mrs. Stowe when she was taken to call on him at the White House: So this is the little lady who made this big war. Yet, in the period after the war, the novel’s popularity steadily declined. Mrs. Stowe’s royalty statements for the second half of 1887 showed a sale of only 12,225, and eventually Uncle Tom went out of print Up to the time when it was reprinted, in 1948, in the Modern Library Series, it was actually unavailable except at secondhand.

What were the reasons for this eclipse? It is often assumed in the United States that Uncle Tom was a mere propaganda novel which disappeared when it had accomplished its purpose and did not, on its merits, deserve to live. Yet it continued to be read in Europe, and, up to the great Revolution, at any rate, it was a popular book in Russia. If we come to Uncle Tom for the first time today, we are likely to be surprised at not finding it what we imagined it and to conclude that the post-war neglect of it has been due to the strained situation between the North and the South. The Northerners, embarrassed by the memory of the war and not without feelings of guilt, did not care to be reminded of the issue which had given rise to so much bitterness. In the South, where before the war any public discussion of slavery had by general tacit agreement been banned, nothing afterwards was wanted less than Northern criticism of pre-war conditions. It was still possible at the beginning of this century for a South Carolina teacher to make his pupils hold up their right hands and swear that they would never read Uncle Tom. Both sides, after the terrible years of the war, were glad to disregard the famous novel. The characters did still remain bywords, but they were mostly kept alive by the dramatizations, in which Mrs. Stowe had had no hand and which had exploited its more obviously comic and its more melodramatic elements. These versions for the stage kept at first relatively close to the novel, but in the course of half a century they grotesquely departed from it. By the late seventies, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was half a minstrel show and half a circus. The live bloodhounds that were supposed to pursue Eliza as she was crossing the ice with her baby — which did not occur in the novel — began to figure in 1879, and were typical of this phase of the play. The original characters were now sometimes doubled: you had two Topsys, two Lawyer Markses, two Uncle Toms. Topsy sang comic songs, and Uncle Tom was given minstrel interludes, in which he would do a shuffle and breakdown. In the meantime, on account of sectional feeling, the book could not be read in schools as the New England classics were, and it even disappeared from the home. It may be said that by the early nineteen-hundreds few young people had any at all clear idea of what Uncle Tom’s Cabin contained. One could in fact grow up in the United States without ever having seen a copy.

To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom may therefore prove a startling experience. It is a much more impressive work than one has ever been allowed to suspect. The first thing that strikes one about it is a certain eruptive force. This is partly explained by the author in a preface to a late edition, in which she tells of the oppressive silence that hung over the whole question of slavery before she published her book. It was a general saying, she explains, among conservative and sagacious people that this subject was a dangerous one to investigate, and that nobody could begin to read and think upon it without becoming practically insane; moreover, that it was a subject of such delicacy that no discussion of it could be held in the free states without impinging upon the sensibilities of the slave states, to whom alone the management of the matter belonged. The story came so suddenly to Mrs. Stowe and seemed so irresistibly to write itself that she felt as if some power beyond her had laid hold of her to deliver its message, and she said sometimes that the book had been written by God. This is actually a little the impression that the novel makes on the reader. Out of a background of undistinguished narrative, inelegantly and carelessly written, the characters leap into being with a vitality that is all the more striking for the ineptitude of the prose that presents them. These characters — like those of Dickens, at least in his early phase — express themselves a good deal better than the author expresses herself. The Shelbys and George Harris and Eliza and Aunt Chloe and Uncle Tom project themselves out of the void. They come before us arguing and struggling, like real people who cannot be quiet. We feel that the dams of discretion of which Mrs. Stowe has spoken have been burst by a passionate force that, compressed, has been mounting behind them, and which, liberated, has taken the form of a flock of lamenting and ranting, prattling and preaching characters, in a drama that demands to be played to the end.

Not, however, that it is merely a question of a troubled imagination and an inhibited emotional impulse finding vent in a waking fantasy. What is most unexpected is that, the farther one reads in Uncle Tom, the more one becomes aware that a critical mind is at work, which has the complex situation in a very firm grip and which, no matter how vehement the characters become, is controlling and coordinating their interrelations. Though there is much that is exciting in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is never the crude melodrama of the decadent phase of the play; and though we find some old-fashioned moralizing and a couple of Dickensian deathbeds, there is a good deal less sentimentality than we may have been prepared for by our memories of the once celebrated stage apotheosis — if we are old enough to have seen it: Little Eva in the Realms of Gold. We may even be surprised to discover that the novel is by no means an indictment drawn up by New England against the South. Mrs. Stowe has, on the contrary, been careful to contrive her story in such a way that the Southern states and New England shall be shown as involved to an equal degree in the kidnapping into slavery of the Negroes and the subsequent maltreatment of them, and that the emphasis shall all be laid on the impracticability of slavery as a permanent institution. The author, if anything, leans over backwards in trying to make it plain that the New Englanders are as much to blame as the South and to exhibit the Southerners in a favorable light; for St. Clare and Miss Ophelia, intended as typical products of, respectively, Louisiana and Vermont, are, after all, first cousins; they are the children of two New England brothers, both of whom are described as upright, energetic, noble-minded, with an iron will, but one of whom had settled down in New England, to rule over rocks and stones, and to force an existence out of Nature, while the other had "settled in Louisiana, to rule over men and women, and force existence out of them." The difference between the two cousins is, then, chiefly a difference of habitat: the result of the diverse effects of a society in which you have to do things for yourself and of a society in which everything is done for you. And as for Simon Legree — a plantation owner, not an overseer, as many people imagine him to be (due, no doubt, to some telescoping of episodes, in the later productions of the play, which would have made him an employee of St. Clare’s) — Simon Legree is not a Southerner: he is a Yankee, and his harsh inhumanity as well as his morbid solitude are evidently regarded by Mrs. Stowe as characteristic of his native New England. Nor are these regional characterizations — though later, by the public, turned into clichés — of an easy or obvious kind. The contrasted types of the book, through their conflicts, precipitate real tragedy, and even, in some episodes, high comedy — the Sisyphean efforts, for example, of the visitor from Vermont, Miss Ophelia, to bring system into the St. Clare household, and her bafflement by the Negro-run kitchen, a place of confusion and mystery, out of which she is unable to understand how the magnificent meals are produced. There is, in fact, in Uncle Tom, as well as in its successor Dred, a whole drama of manners and morals and intellectual points of view which corresponds somewhat to the kind of thing that was then being done by Dickens, and was soon to be continued by Zola, for the relations of the social classes, and which anticipates such later studies of two sharply contrasting peoples uncomfortably involved with one another as the John Bull’s Other Island of Bernard Shaw or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

But such a writer as Forster or Shaw is a well-balanced man of letters contriving a fable at his leisure. Mrs. Stowe’s objectivity is taut, intent. She has nothing of the partisan mentality that was to become so inflamed in the fifties; and Lord Palmerston, who had read the book three times, was evidently quite sincere in complimenting her on the statesmanship of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She is national, never regional, but her consciousness that the national ideal is in danger gave her book a desperate candor that shook South and North alike, and a dramatic reverberation that, perpetuated by the run of the play, has outlasted the analysis of the novel. In what terms this ideal of the United States was conceived by Harriet Beecher Stowe appears very clearly from a passage in her autobiographical notes: "There was one of my fathers books that proved a mine of wealth to me. It was a happy hour when he brought home and set up in his bookcase Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, in a new edition of two volumes. What wonderful stories those! Stories, too, about my own country. Stories that made me feel the very ground I trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God’s providence. And she tells of her emotions, in her childhood, on hearing the Declaration of Independence read: I had never heard it before, wrote Mrs. Stowe, and even now had but a vague idea of what was meant by some parts of it. Still I gathered enough from the recital of the abuses and injuries that had driven my nation to this course to feel myself swelling with indignation, and ready with all my little mind and strength to applaud the concluding passage, which Colonel Talmadge rendered with resounding majesty. I was as ready as any of them to pledge my life, fortune, and sacred honor for such a cause. The heroic element was strong in me, having come down by ordinary generation from a long line of Puritan ancestry, and just now it made me long to do something, I knew not what: to fight for my country, or to make some declaration on my own account." Her assumption, in writing Uncle Tom, is that every worthy person in the United States must desire to preserve the integrity of our unprecedented republic; and she tries to show how Negro slavery must disrupt and degrade this common ideal by tempting the North to the moral indifference, the half-deliberate ignorance, which encourages inhuman practices, and by weakening the character of the South through the luxury and the irresponsibility that the institution of slavery breeds. For Harriet Beecher Stowe, besides, the American Union had been founded under the auspices of the Christian God, and she could not accept institutions that did such violence to Christian teaching. One of the strongest things in the novel is the role played by Uncle Tom — another value that was debased in the play. The Quakers who shelter Eliza are, of course, presented as Christians; but not one of the other white groups that figure in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is living in accordance with the principles of the religion they all profess. It is only the black