1861 (4 page)

I realized I already knew from my own experience that this isn’t the way history works. On
September 11, 2001, I had observed how everyone I knew responded to the terrorist attacks in his or her own way. The responses didn’t derive simply from whether someone was liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. They also depended on a whole complicated set of personal convictions, fears, character traits,
religious beliefs. They depended on where people came from, where they lived, and where they had traveled. On how and where people had experienced the day of the attacks itself. And all these complications influenced not just ordinary people but also those I knew who worked in the media and in government. Presumably they influenced the nation’s leaders, as well.

In fact, the startling events in New York and Washington hadn’t simply changed the course of future history, they had shaken up old categories and assumptions. In a way, they had changed the past just as much as the future; rewritten not only our expectation of what was to come but also our sense of what had gone before. For a brief moment, in a most terrifying and thrilling way, anything seemed possible. The only certainty was the one expressed by a family
member of mine phoning an hour or so after the first plane hit, one that no doubt occurred to countless others: “The world is never going to be the same again.”

When, seven years later, I came across that bundle of old letters, I realized that this very sense was what was missing from my understanding of the Civil War. I wanted to learn more about how Americans—both ordinary citizens and national leaders—experienced and responded to a moment of sudden crisis and change as it unfolded. I especially wanted to understand how that moment ended up giving birth to a new and better nation. I wanted to know about the
people who responded to that moment not just with anger and panic but with hope and determination, people who, amid the ruins of the country they had grown up in, saw an opportunity to change history. Perhaps what I learned would even teach me things about our own time, too.

L
IKE SO MUCH ELSE
about the beginning of the Civil War, Major Anderson’s move from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter is largely forgotten today. At the time, however, the little garrison’s mile-long journey was seen not just as a masterstroke of military cunning but as the opening scene of a great and terrible national drama. “War has begun,” one correspondent telegraphed from South Carolina. “Major Robert
Anderson,” thundered the
Charleston Courier,
“has achieved the unenviable distinction of opening civil war between American citizens by a gross breach of faith.”
³⁵
Northerners, meanwhile, held enormous public banquets in Anderson’s honor; cannons fired salutes in New York, Chicago, Boston, and dozens of other cities and towns.
³⁶

And considered in retrospect, Anderson’s move seems freighted with
even more symbolism. He lowered his flag on an old fortress, hallowed by the past, yet half ruined—and then raised it upon a new one, still unfinished, yet stronger, bedded in New England granite. That folded banner’s crossing of Charleston Harbor foreshadowed another defiant journey ahead, far longer and more perilous: from the old America to a new one.

Twenty years after the war, when officials at the War Department began preparing the
Official History of the War of the Rebellion,
a massive compilation of documents that would eventually grow to more than two hundred thousand pages,
³⁷
the first of all the uncountable documents that they included was Anderson’s brisk telegram announcing his
arrival at Sumter. Nineteenth-century historians knew that without this event, the war might not have happened. A remarkable thing about Anderson’s move, too, is that it was no calculated act of heroism or symbolism—much less the intentional commencement of a revolution. It was, indeed, motivated by the major’s deep conservatism, by his desire to preserve his honor and his garrison. And yet its results were revolutionary; it ended up touching off a series of
events whose repercussions would be incalculable.

When the saga of the Civil War is recounted now, it usually begins four months later, when the Confederate batteries at Charleston finally opened fire. That’s the version that I, and probably most people, grew up with, and it’s a good story, too. Yet it’s also one that turns the Union side into simply the passive target of the Confederacy’s aggression. It glorifies the “lost cause” at the expense of the one that would win. It
elevates a moment when war was already a fait accompli, with Americans on both sides simply awaiting the opening guns.

The Civil War story told in this book begins with the raising of a Union flag, not the firing of a Confederate shot. The war described here was not just a Southern rebellion but a nationwide revolution—fought even from within the seceding states—for freedom. And while the South’s rebellion failed, with the Confederacy fated to become a historical dead end, this revolution—our second as a people—reinvented America, and a century and a
half later still defines much of our national character. It was a revolution that engaged both the nation’s progressive impulses and, at the same time, some of its profoundly conservative tendencies: many Americans saw it as a struggle to create new freedoms, many others as an effort to preserve a cherished legacy.
³⁸
But in the end, the outcome would be the same.
Swept away forever would be the older America, a nation stranded halfway between its love of freedom and its accommodation of slavery, mired for decades in policies of appeasement and compromise.

W
ALT
W
HITMAN FAMOUSLY WROTE
that the “real war,” by which he meant the squalor of hospitals and blood-drenched battlefields, would never make it into the history books. It was the heroism of the Union cause, he assumed, that would ring down through the generations.

Yet, if anything, the war’s squalor is remembered today while its heroism, in the truest and most complicated sense of the term, has been gradually erased. Books and documentaries dwell on the blood and filth, the bloating bodies on the fields of Antietam, the sons and brothers lost. If heroism is to be measured by human suffering, surely both Northerners and Southerners were heroes in equal measure—indeed, by that measure, the South was probably more
heroic. It is also intellectually fashionable to deprecate the Union cause, at least so far as it relates to slavery and
race: to point out the casual
racism of everyone from lowly infantrymen up to President Lincoln himself; to say that the Emancipation Proclamation was simply a convenient military stratagem; to repeat the truism that the Civil War began not as a war to abolish slavery but as a war to save the
Union. It is also common for historians to say that soldiers went to war in the spring of 1861 “more or less on a lark,” to quote one I recently spoke with. But people do not often go to war—much less against their own countrymen—on a lark.

Men and women at the time, on both sides of the conflict, did understand it as a war against slavery, even before it began. This is clear from what they said and wrote.

An important distinction must be drawn here: a war against slavery did not necessarily mean a war for abolition, at least not in 1861, or not for everybody. It did mean, though, that many white Northerners and even some white Southerners were ready to say
Enough.
Enough compromise of principles; enough betrayal of people and ideals; enough cruelty; enough gradual surrender of what had been won in 1776. The war represented the overdue effort to sort out the
double legacy of America’s founders: the uneasy marriage of the Declaration’s inspired ideals with the Constitution’s ingenious expedients.

Just as impressive, or more so, was the heroism of black men, women, and even children who were ready not just to be free but also to become Americans. They were partners, and sometimes leaders, in the project to reinvent their country—a project that was still incomplete at the end of the Civil War, but which had been even less complete at the close of the Revolution. The fact that these former slaves and children of slaves were ready to make it
their
project, to make it
their
country—almost from the moment that hostilities began—was perhaps the most strange and wonderful thing to come out of the war.

Americans today find it fairly easy to fathom the idea that there was a right side and a wrong side in
World War II, a side that stood for freedom and a side that stood against it. It is possible to accept this even while acknowledging that both sides committed atrocities; that most Axis soldiers did not go to war in order to exterminate other races, nor most Allied soldiers to save them; and that in 1941, casual
anti-Semitism was probably taken for granted among many GIs, as it also was in the clubby Anglo-Saxon milieu of Roosevelt and Churchill.

We find it harder, though—much harder than most people did in the 1860s—to accept that there was a right side and a wrong side in our own Civil War. It is difficult to fathom that millions of Americans could have fought as enemies of America. It is even harder to accept this when we come to realize that in some senses the Civil War really was, as some defiant Southerners still call it, a “War of Northern Aggression.”

Most accounts of the months leading up to war focus tightly on the parallel dramas in Charleston and Washington, as the clocks ticked away the last opportunities for peace. This is indeed an important, even essential, part of the story. But to get the full story of that moment in American history, it is necessary to go much farther afield: to the slums of Manhattan and the drawing rooms of Boston, to Ohio villages and Virginia slave cabins, and even to the shores of the
Pacific. It is also necessary to consider people and ideas that were migrating from the Old World to the New. It is only then that this defining national event can truly be understood as a revolution, and one whose heroes were not only the soldiers and politicians.

That revolution began years before the first guns opened, as a gradual change in the hearts and minds of men and women, until suddenly, in the months before the attack on Sumter, this transformation attained irresistible momentum. One person at a time, millions of Americans decided in 1861—as their grandparents had in 1776—that it was worth risking everything, their lives and fortunes, on their country. Not just on its present reality, either, not on
something so solid; but on a vision of what its future could be and what its past had meant.

Eighteen sixty-one, like 1776, was—and still is—not just a year, but an idea.

W
ALT
W
HITMAN UNDERSTOOD THIS,
probably even before the actual year 1861 began. Sometime in mid-1860, when the war clouds were gathering, still distant, on the horizon, he sat down to write a singularly prophetic poem.

“Song of the Banner at Day-Break” is a mystical, surreal vision, an American version of Ezekiel’s wheel turning in the sky. Instead of a fiery wheel, though, floating in Whitman’s sky is the American flag. What does it stand for? asks the poet. Is it simply a piece of fabric? Is it an emblem of America’s prosperity, of the banks and merchant houses that make the nation “envied by all the earth”? Is it a banner of war?
Then the truth is revealed as the poet looks up to see the flag become an apparition of things soon to come:

Though the poem is little read today, the poet himself cherished it almost from the moment he wrote it. Whitman originally intended to publish a book early in 1861 titled
The Banner at Day-Break,
with this strange prophecy leading off the volume. His publishers unexpectedly went bankrupt and the book never appeared. But Whitman, as was his custom, continued writing and rewriting the poem, at least until the country’s centennial year of 1876.

Another flag raising, that at Sumter on a chill December morning, also embodies the second American Revolution. Before that day, the flag had served mostly as a military ensign or a convenient marking
of American territory, flown from forts, embassies, and ships, and displayed on special occasions like the Fourth of July. But in the weeks after Major Anderson’s surprising stand, it became something different. Suddenly the Stars and Stripes
flew—as it does today, and especially as it did after
September 11—from houses, from storefronts, from churches; above village greens and college quads. For the first time, American flags were mass-produced rather than individually stitched, and even so, manufacturers could not keep up with demand.
³⁹

As the long winter of 1861 turned into spring, that old flag meant something new. The abstraction of the
Union cause was transfigured into a physical thing: strips of cloth that millions of people would fight for, and many thousands die for.
⁴⁰

This book, like Whitman’s poem, tells a story foreshadowing things to come. It is not a
Civil War saga of hallowed battlefields drenched in blood, much less of which general’s cavalry came charging over which hill. It is a story, rather, of a moment in our country’s history when almost everything hung in the balance.

It is a story of how some people clung to the past, while others sought the future; how a new generation of Americans arose to throw aside the cautious ways of its parents and embrace the revolutionary ideals of its grandparents. The battleground of that struggle was not one orchard or wheat field, but the quickly growing country itself.