Rebirth of a Nation

Jackson Lears

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061940965
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

An illuminating and authoritative history of America in the years between the Civil War and World War I, Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

"Fascinating.... A major work by a leading historian at the top of his game—at once engaging and tightly argued." — The New York Times Book Review

"Dazzling cultural history: smart, provocative, and gripping. It is also a book for our times, historically grounded, hopeful, and filled with humane, just, and peaceful possibilities." — The Washington Post

In the half-century between the Civil War and World War I, widespread yearning for a new beginning permeated American public life. Dreams of spiritual, moral, and physical rebirth formed the foundation for the modern United States, inspiring its leaders with imperial ambition. Theodore Roosevelt's desire to recapture frontier vigor led him to promote U.S. interests throughout Latin America. Woodrow Wilson's vision of a reborn international order drew him into a war to end war. Andrew Carnegie's embrace of philanthropy coincided with his creation of the world's first billion-dollar corporation, United States Steel. Presidents and entrepreneurs helped usher the nation into the modern era, but sometimes the consequences of their actions failed to match the grandeur of their hopes.

Award-winning historian Jackson Lears richly chronicles this momentous period when America reunited and began to form the world power of the twentieth century. Lears vividly captures imperialists, Gilded Age mavericks, and vaudeville entertainers, and illuminates the roles played by a variety of seekers, male and female, from populist farmers to avant-garde artists and writers to progressive reformers. Some were motivated by their own visions of Christianity; all were swept up in longings for revitalization.

In these years marked by wrenching social conflict and vigorous political debate, a modern America emerged and came to dominance on a world stage. Illuminating and authoritative, Rebirth of a Nation brilliantly weaves the remarkable story of this crucial epoch into a masterful work of history.

CHAPTER ONE

The Long Shadow of Appomattox

Wars have a way of staying in the mind. Scenes of unimaginable carnage cannot be casually shrugged off; visceral fears and rages cannot be easily forgotten. So it was in the United States after the Civil War ended at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in 1865. For the victors as well as the vanquished, the fight left many wounds festering. Sectional bitterness flourished for years after grass covered the corpses. Widespread popular weariness failed to dry up the wells of resentment, in the North as in the South.

There were good reasons for this. The Civil War was not only the most destructive war in U.S. history but the most morally and emotionally charged, as well—a total war in every sense. As hostilities intensified, both armies soon abandoned the West Point Code, which was rooted in just war tradition. The code’s key principle was proportionality: commanders were expected to keep their own and their enemy’s casualties to a minimum consistent with limited battlefield objectives, and to avoid inflicting any damage on the civilian population.

The principle of proportionality was an early casualty of the war. Within a year after the firing on Fort Sumter, both sides had targeted civilians and sustained losses in the field that would previously have been unimaginable. Yet popular opinion, North and South, submitted to the slaughter. Both armies were cheered on by ideologues who were convinced of the sanctity of their cause and the impossibility of compromise. Only a handful of observers—most prominently, Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address—saw the tragic complexity of the conflict. Most commentators preferred the simplicities of nationalist melodrama. Romantic notions of nationhood flourished in pulpits and the press. Preachers and editors invoked visions of blood sacrifice, endowing mass death with an aura of the sacred. For many Christians, the wartime atmosphere became charged with millennial expectancy, with the hope that the creation of a righteous nation would somehow coincide with the coming of Christ’s Kingdom. Such extravagant visions sustained strategies of total war. Gradually it became apparent that the North was far better equipped than the South to pile up corpses without counting the cost, and to reduce an entire region to a wasteland.

Northern nationalism triumphed, and with it the dream of a messianic destiny for America, a nation bound to play a redemptive role in the sacred drama of world history. Southerners, having drunk deeply of millennial nationalism themselves, eventually embraced the Northern version as their own. But this would happen only after Radical Republicans had failed to implement their sweeping version of Reconstruction, after Northern politicians had decisively abandoned the freed slaves, and the meaning of the war—at least for white people—had been transformed from Emancipation to Reunion. The key to that transformation was a revived ethic of martial valor, an ethic rooted in Civil War memories and entangled with a developing discourse of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. By the 1890s, Anglo-Saxon militarism would solidify the reconnection of the white North and the white South, to the exclusion of black Americans. This could not happen overnight. The memory of the war—not as moral crusade or lost cause but as actual experience—was too fresh. Farmers in Virginia were still turning up skulls in their cornfields.

AS EARLY AS April 1862 Americans had a sense of what happened when massive assaults provoked massive counterassaults. Near Shiloh Church in Tennessee, Generals Beauregard and Grant threw armies at each other for thirty-six hours. As reports of the battle filtered back to the home front, the staggering losses mounted, eventually up to 24,500 killed, wounded, or missing on both sides. The numbers were numbing; in any case there was little popular protest, North or South. A few Democratic newspaper editors in the North, never too keen on the war in the first place, deplored the losses and demanded Grant’s scalp. No one knew that they had seen the future. Shiloh was only the first of many bloodbaths—the first of many indications that the most successful Union commanders would be the ones most willing to sacrifice unprecedented numbers of men. The West Point Code was on the way out.

Neither side sought to avoid bloodbaths; both seemed addicted to frontal assaults (preferably uphill) on entrenched fortifications. The casualties were fearful, in the mass and in detail. The failed assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863 by the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, the black regiment under the command of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, left an eyewitness aghast: “The ditch was literally choked up with dead bodies and it was possible to walk upon them for fifty yards without touching ground.” Those who survived often faced their own protracted horrors, as Walt Whitman reported from a Washington hospital: a Union soldier shot through the bladder, marinating in his own piss; a Confederate soldier the top of whose head had been blown off and whose brains were suppurating in the sun, surviving for three days while he dug a hole in the ground with his heel. These scenes were repeated by the hundreds of thousands. And there were many witnesses.

Looking back on the war in Specimen Days, Whitman strained to capture the enormity of the evil unleashed by raw rage. After describing John Mosby’s Confederate guerrillas gunning down the Union wounded they had captured near Upperville, Virginia, Whitman then recalled the Union cavalry’s counterattack, capture, and summary execution of seventeen guerrillas in the Upperville town square, where they left the bodies to rot. “Multiply [this scene] by scores, aye hundreds,” Whitman wrote, “light it with every lurid passion, the wolf’s, the lion’s lapping thirst for blood—the passionate volcanoes of human revenge for comrades, brothers slain—with the light of burning farms, and heaps of smutting, smouldering black embers—and in the human heart everywhere black, worse embers—and you have an inkling of this war.”

Whitman’s recollection of “the light of burning farms” underlined the other major feature of total war: the treatment of civilians as belligerents. Early in the war, Confederates fantasized about bombarding Northern cities, and Stonewall Jackson was always champing at the bit to bring the war to the Northern people. But despite Jackson’s murderous ferocity, the Confederates did not have the resources to sustain an aggressive war. Apart from the two abortive invasions that ended at Antietam and Gettysburg, the main damage done by the Confederate Army to the Yankee population was the tactically pointless burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1864. The chief Southern war on civilians was conducted in Missouri, by guerrillas and other irregulars who resisted the Union army of occupation and terrorized its civilian sympathizers, torching their property and gunning them down at random. William Quantrell and his guerrilla band in Missouri, along with John Mosby and his raiders in Virginia, led what might today be characterized as the terrorist wing of the Confederate insurgency.

While Confederate guerrillas practiced insurgent terrorism, the Union Army gradually embraced a policy that can accurately be characterized as state terrorism. By 1865, fifty thousand Southern civilians had been killed as a direct result of Northern combat operations. The policy was embodied in Lincoln’s General Order #100, authored by Francis Lieber, a German émigré, romantic nationalist, and erstwhile professor at the University of South Carolina. The first part of the order aimed to restrict “savage” behavior, such as the bombardment of civilian areas in cities or the pillage of farms; the second part eviscerated those restrictions by stating that any of them could be ignored in the event of “military necessity.” In a counterinsurgency campaign, the phrase justified shelling cities and torching farms. Like other insurgencies, the secessionist movement depended for its support on the local population. The recognition of that fact was behind Grant’s famous order to Philip Sheridan: “turn the Shenandoah into a barren waste so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their own provender.” Other rationales for treating civilians as belligerents foreshadowed contemporary excuses for “collateral damage.” Sherman bombarded Atlanta neighborhoods, he said, because the Confederates were using civilians as human shields. The mass of the Southern population was neither armed nor dangerous. But they were in the war, whether they wanted to be or not. Total war swept all before it.

Conventional accounts of Appomattox and its aftermath have everyone rolling up his sleeves and getting ready to pitch into an expansive economy. But given the ravages of total war, North and South, one could just as easily describe a postwar landscape littered with lost souls. Consider, for example, how the war shaped the lives of two James boys: Garth Wilkinson James and Jesse James.

Wilky James was the younger brother of William and Henry James, one of the two less favored sons in a talented, ambitious family. Plump, good-natured, and fervently antislavery, Wilky enlisted in the Forty-fourth Massachusetts regiment in September 1862. Both his older brothers managed to avoid the army, with their father’s approval and connivance. Henry James Sr. showed no such solicitude for his younger boys. But war would be Wilky’s one chance to step out of his brothers’ shadow. Transferred to Shaw’s Fifty-fourth, Wilky became one of the white officers who led the black regiment’s doomed charge on Fort Wagner. He was seriously wounded, hit by a shell in the side and a canister ball in the foot. After months of convalescence he returned to the Fifty-fourth, but he never really recovered from his wounds. He survived for eighteen years after Appomattox, in nearly constant pain from rheumatism in his wounded foot. He bumped from one bad business venture to another, beginning with the failure of his idealistic plan to provide recently freed black families an economic foothold by employing them on his farm in Florida. Having run through many thousands of his father’s dollars, he was finally disinherited and died in poverty in Milwaukee, where he and his family had been scraping by after several failed business ventures. For Wilky the war brought not regeneration but ruin. He was one of many men whose physical and emotional wounds never healed.

Jesse James, in contrast, was not physically wounded but psychologically brutalized by the war. Coming of age amid the white-hot hatreds of wartime Missouri, he grew up in a world where casual murder was a manly sport and a rite of passage, the only conclusive proof that you had become (and remained) a man. He proved himself many times during the war, when he rode with Quantrell’s raiders. After Appomattox new opportunities presented themselves. In Missouri, ten years of blood feuds had bred widespread longings for retribution. Many returning veterans could not give up the habit of violence and helped to swell a postwar crime wave. Gunslinging became a way of life.

Much of the violence was rooted in Reconstruction politics. Bushwhackers wanted revenge against Radical Republicans and money from the companies the Republicans financed. That was enough, among embittered Confederates, to make the James gang seem more than mere bandits and killers. But that is what they were. For fifteen years, they took money at gunpoint from banks and later from express companies, whose monies were being transported on the expanding network of railroads. They also killed a lot of innocent people. Throughout his short life, Jesse remained irresistibly attracted to arbitrary violence.

Garth Wilkinson James and Jesse James were both permanently scarred by the war, though in profoundly different ways. Wilky limped through the postwar period, failing at everything he tried, knowing that nothing he did would ever match the heroism of storming Fort Wagner. Jesse was filled with partisan rage and vicious notions of manhood that transformed him into a driven killer. The war ravaged lives in unpredictable ways and left a wounded nation.

Lincoln grappled with the magnitude of the destruction in his second inaugural address. He believed the war was not a melodrama but a tragedy, not a struggle of good versus evil but a bloody expiation visited on North and South alike for the national sin of slavery. And as the historian C. Vann Woodward once argued, Southerners like Robert E. Lee also derived a tragic sense of life from the experience of defeat. But what is remarkable is how unusual Lee and Lincoln were, how thoroughly their contemporaries on both sides evaded the tragic significance of the war. Public moralists, North and South, wanted to turn it into a melodrama—and they succeeded.

THE CHATTERING CLASS played a crucial role in charging the conflict with moral and religious fervor. As casualties mounted, Americans felt an increasingly desperate need for a coherent narrative to justify the horror. Preachers, politicians, and journalists on both sides deployed narratives of triumphant nationhood to meet that need. Still, nationalism by itself was an abstraction; what mattered was how it entered the viscera of the people, how it became part of a narrative that made sense of mass killing.

The Confederates’ nationalism was more ambivalent than the Yankees’. As the war dragged on, Southern Honor and eventually the Lost Cause itself acquired the numinous quality at first ascribed to the Confederate nation—the capacity to command blood sacrifice. In the early years, editors still entertained hopes of a successful revolution. The Richmond Enquirer predicted that the Confederates, like the French revolutionaries, would “pass to the promised land through a sea of red blood.” Soldiers and civilians alike attributed redemptive powers to the conflict. Especially civilians. Virginia governor Henry Wise (who hanged John Brown) was not atypical. “I rejoice in this war,” Wise said soon after it began. “It is a war of purification. You want war, fire, blood, to purify you; and the Lord of hosts has demanded that you shall walk through fire and blood—You are called to the fiery baptism and I call you to come up to the altar…. Take a lesson from John Brown.” Many Southerners were willing to take that lesson, but they lacked sufficient resources to implement a successful war of purification.

The success of the Northern strategy depended on redemptive purpose combined with superior force. Narratives of personal and national regeneration intertwined with the determination to realize them on the battlefield. Individual and collective identities merged in a mass ritual of blood sacrifice.

The Unionist narrative became the core of the civil religion that justified the emerging American empire in the decades following the Civil War. Unionist ideology dissolved republican and democratic ingredients in a romantic nationalist stew that was in many ways neither republican nor democratic. The sheer scale of this creed’s grandiosity was breathtaking. “A National Fast Day Hymn,” which appeared in an evangelical newspaper in 1861, revealed a vision with imperial implications. After praying to God the Father to “smite the rebel bands, until / Of traitors there are none,” the hymn then asked to be led by His Son “o’er earth’s bloodless fields / Till all the world is won.” This was the absolutist habit of mind that bred doctrines of unconditional surrender and dreams of exterminating traitors. And if the nation was to be universal, it was also to be eternal. On Thanksgiving Day, 1864, the Rev. Alexander Vinton spoke what he called “both a prayer and a prophecy”: “My country, be thou as perpetual as the ages.” Since many millennial nationalists were Protestant preachers, with a penchant for Old Testament texts, the language of righteous vengeance came easily to their lips. The devastation of Atlanta and the Shenandoah Valley were fiery retribution for rebellion, said the Rev. O. T. Lanphear of New Haven, Connecticut: “Let it be shown that when a state insults the law of the land, by deliberate secession, it is like a withered branch cast forth from the national tree, to be gathered, cast into the fire, and burned.”

The organic imagery embodied in “the national tree” reflected a new strain of romantic nationalism, which melded the individual with the collective by likening the nation to a natural organism. According to Edward Everett Hale’s popular didactic tale, The Man Without a Country (1863), one’s personal identity—indeed one’s very life—was dependent on immersion in a larger national identity. While Lincoln used the language of “the people” to elevate democracy as well as nationhood, more typical orators deployed the same idiom in the service of organic nationalism, wrapping the government and the citizenry in the sacred garment of the nation.

The sanctity of the nation justified its demands for blood. Redefining unspeakable losses as religious sacrifice, Northerners forged a powerful link between war and regeneration. In some formulations, personal rebirth seemed to arise simply from the decision to risk combat—to plunge into action as an end in itself, heedless of the consequences. (This would be the version that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would eventually celebrate, as he recalled his own war experience, and that Theodore Roosevelt would unwittingly parody.) More commonly, the revitalization was explicitly moral. For generations, republican moralists had been haunted by visions of a citizenry grown soft through indulgence in luxury and other vices of commerce. The many forms of sacrifice demanded by the war provided a perfect opportunity for Americans to redeem themselves from commercial corruption, to transcend private gain in pursuit of a larger public good. So moralists said.

Sacrifice was most appealing when imagined from a distance. As usual in such cases, the loudest yelps for blood often came from those farthest from the battlefield. Charles Eliot Norton, a well-connected young Brahmin intellectual, waxed eloquent over “the Advantages of Defeat” after the Union Army was routed at the first battle of Manassas. The humiliation might have the salutary effect of sobering us, soldiers and civilians—of reminding us that this “religious war” would require a mass blood sacrifice. “But there must be no shrinking from the prospect of the death of our soldiers,” the young man warned. “Better than that we should fail that a million men should die on the battlefield.” Victory would eventually come; and meanwhile Northern character—so long sunk in selfishness and softness—would be purified by protracted struggle. Years later, Norton would repudiate these youthful fatuities and become an outspoken anti-imperialist. But during the Civil War, his breathtaking arrogance was commonplace. Men routinely praised the cleansing power of war from a comfortable distance.

Some turned in therapeutic directions. The Albany Argus predicted that “A vigorous war would tone up the public mind, and impart to it qualities that would last after the calamities of war had passed.” And the historian Benson Lossing wrote to Sue Wallace (the wife of General Lew Wallace) in 1862: “I have felt profoundly impressed with the conviction that out of all this tribulation would come health, and strength, and purification for the nation.” From the perspective of the people who actually fought it, or were swept up in it, one could attribute few more bizarre effects to the war than “health, strength, and purification.” Here as elsewhere, one can glimpse the connections between millennial dreams of collective rebirth and the sort of organic nationalism that could eventually mutate into fascism.

The political meaning of regeneration remained contested long after the guns fell silent. Certainly the freed slaves embraced a version of regeneration far more rooted in lived experience than the vaporous version of press and pulpit. For them, emancipation was a genuine rebirth. Free blacks in the North, too, had reason to exult. The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from bondage himself, remembered the crowds of ecstatic black people celebrating the news in Boston. “My old friend Rue, a colored preacher, a man of wonderful vocal power, expressed the heartfelt emotion of the hour,” Douglass later wrote, “when he led all voices in the anthem, ‘Sound the loud timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea, Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free.’” The black vision of freedom was the most powerfully justified version of rebirth to come out of the war—and the most cruelly disappointed.

The freed people and their Radical allies hoped that if the fruits of emancipation could be secured, then the regenerative possibilities of the war might actually be realized. Longings for racial equality animated the ambitious agenda of Radical Reconstruction, which included a thorough redistribution of property and power in the former Confederate states. Yet despite the decisive transformation wrought by ending slavery, the political meaning of Northern victory came to focus exclusively on reunion; the importance of emancipation slipped to the margins and event...