A MASTER HISTORIAN REVISITS AMERICA'S BLOODIEST WAR
This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. James M. McPherson. Oxford University Press. 260 pages; notes; index; $28.
Reviewed by Col. Cole C. Kingseed, U.S. Army retired

Long recognized as America’s preeminent Civil War historian, James McPherson has won numerous awards for literary excellence. Currently the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, McPherson has published numerous volumes on the Civil War, including Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution; Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War; and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, which won the prestigious Lincoln Prize in 1998.

In This Mighty Scourge, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom attempts to answer questions that he has confronted for 40 years: Why did the war come? What were the aims of each combatant? What strategies were employed to achieve these aims? Did the war’s outcome justify the horrific toll in casualties? The result is a superb collection of 16 essays which, McPherson states, “reaffirm some of my old interpretations, but also offer several new ones.”

McPherson divides his anthology into five sections, each addressing one of the fundamental aspects of America’s bloodiest conflict. The preliminary section examines the causes of war. Led by predominantly Southern-born historians in the 20th century, the “Progressive school” viewed the Confederacy as fighting for the constitutional principle of states’ rights and self-government and for the preservation of a stable, agrarian civilization. Dismissing these interpretations that sought to attribute the advent of the war to a clash between interest groups and classes, McPherson posits that in the 1860s, few people in either the North or the South would have dissented from President Abraham Lincoln’s insistence that slavery “was somehow, the cause of the war.”

In revisiting the evolution of the mythology surrounding the “lost cause,” McPherson analyzes why the South lost and why the North won the war. In his farewell address, Gen. Robert E. Lee attributed the loss to the South’s being forced to yield “to overwhelming numbers and resources.” McPherson, on the other hand, joins historian Gary Gallagher in believing that the Confederate story “cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story.” Each time the Confederacy appeared on the verge of triumph, Northern victories blunted the Southern momentum. In the autumn of 1862, for example, the Confederacy launched simultaneous invasions in both Maryland and Kentucky. The Union’s victory was thus not a foregone conclusion and it certainly was anything but inevitable. McPherson views the battle of Sharpsburg/Antietam as the war’s true turning point, for had Lee triumphed, foreign recognition most surely would have followed.

Though McPherson obviously admires Lee as a strategist, he reserves his greatest admiration for the command team of Union Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Only when Grant and Sherman forged a winning strategy that combined the relentless hammering to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia with the march through the Deep South by Sherman’s army group to wreck the Southern infrastructure was Northern victory assured. McPherson states without reservation that neither part of this strategy alone would have won the war, but in combination they led to victory.

To his credit, McPherson also addresses one of the most neglected aspects of Civil War historiography by analyzing how the war was waged on the home front. Two essays merit special mention: the influence of the press on Army morale and the fact that there could be no peace without military victory. Like most Americans in the military today, Civil War soldiers enjoyed a kind of “love-hate relationship with the media.” Both the Northern and Southern press greatly exaggerated battlefield victories and diminished the severity of tactical defeats. The triple disasters to Confederate arms at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga in 1863 adversely affected morale and led numerous Southern newspapers to demand a negotiated settlement to terminate the slaughter. In the North, peace advocates, led primarily by the Copperheads, fueled Union soldiers rebelling against “domestic traitors.” This backlash against the Copperheads’ antiwar rhetoric actually forged a bond of unity among Union soldiers that improved morale.

McPherson reinforces the age-old tenet that in the quest for battlefield victory, nations have usually found it more difficult to end a war than to start one. McPherson makes a strong case that both sides feared that a political regime change would result in losing the war. Nor could the American Civil War end with a negotiated peace because the issues over which it was fought were irreconcilable and mutually exclusive. There could be no Confederate independence without the dissolution of the Union. Nor could the South reconcile the continuation of slavery with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

McPherson saves the most provocative essay for his final chapter. In assessing Lincoln’s role as commander in chief, he suggests that Lincoln invented the concept of presidential war powers that are again at the center of controversy today. Lincoln’s assertion that “as commander in chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy” strongly resonates with the current chief executive who has repeatedly informed Congress and the American public that he is “the decider.”

Although McPherson leaves any comparisons between Lincoln and President George W. Bush to the reader, Lincoln “vastly expanded presidential war powers and established precedents invoked by many of his successors in subsequent wars.”

What is lacking in This Mighty Scourge is a concluding essay that summarizes McPherson’s observations. Still, this anthology is one of McPherson’s finest works and will be warmly received by any Civil War reader. Perhaps McPherson is correct when he states that it is his hope that his conclusions suggest additional questions that readers will ponder, “perhaps arriving at judgments different” from his own. Only through additional disagreement and dialogue, McPherson concludes, will scholarship and understanding advance.