A “UNION ALWAYS SWARMING WITH BLATHERERS”
By the fall of 1863, the Civil War had taken on new and unexpected shapes for all Americans. The political goals of the war had expanded for both Northerners and Southerners, from simple reunion to emancipation in the Northern case, and from simple secession to the forging of a new Confederate nation in the South. The added turmoil of moving millions of people out of their homes and out of the accustomed tracks of their lives, and the relentlessly-lengthening casualty lists threatened to break up and disorganize an entire generation of American lives. After two years of dislocation, shock, and carnage, Americans were groping in exhaustion for the meaning and purpose of the war that would give them some idea of why the war was being fought. For those answers they turned to the philosophers, moralists, and clergymen who constituted the intellectual elite of the American republic and made it what Walt Whitman cheerfully described as a “Union always swarming with blatherers.”65
America was the off spring of movements of the mind, and the South was not the only place in American life where the Enlightenment was enmeshed in the challenge of the Romantics. The most formidable reply to the burden of Enlightenment reason came from Immanuel Kant, and it is from Kant’s formulations of a “transcendent” realm of knowledge that Northern Romantics formulated a critique of Enlightenment politics. Kant’s foremost American admirer was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian clergyman who had abandoned the ministry to take up a life of writing and lecturing across the country. Around Emerson clustered the crown jewels of Boston’s Romantic intellect—Henry Hedge, George Putnam, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Bronson Alcott—whom Emerson styled as Transcendentalists, “from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke.” The Transcendentalists found the “buzz and din” of democratic politics distasteful. They withdrew from an engagement with democratic political culture and celebrated a radical individualism built upon “self-reliance” and “self-culture.” That, in turn, gave them little to admire and still less to understand about a civil war in a democracy. Emerson wanted “to insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world as his, and man shall treat man with as a sovereign state with a sovereign state,” and he held himself aloof from even the most pressing reform movements.66
Few of the Transcendentalists bothered their heads with abolition; Emerson, in particular, had been notoriously slow to embrace the anti-slavery cause, not so much from indifference to the moral question at stake as from his reluctance to imbrue his hands in politics. “Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him.” Slavery he opposed, but largely out of the Kantian conviction that slavery was a denial of human authenticity (or free will). With the firing on Fort Sumter, Emerson was surprised almost in spite of himself with how “a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church” and was sweeping up even the most detached and self-reliant minds up in a “whirlwind of patriotism.” Still, few New England intellectuals stayed for long within that whirlwind. Rather than seeing the war as the test of liberalism’s virtues, the Romantic historian Francis Parkman thought that the war had exposed “the fallacies of ultra democracy,” and though he supported the war, it was more for the opportunities it gave young New England blue bloods to demonstrate the individual virtues of heroism, fortitude, and manliness.67 The death of Robert Gould Shaw at Battery Wagner, for instance, was seen less as a blow for racial justice and more as proof that Boston’s wealthy mercantile elite had not grown stagnant and effeminate.
Here is her witness: this, her perfect son,
This delicate and proud New England soul
Who leads despisèd men, with just-unshackled feet,
Up the large ways where death and glory meet,
To show all peoples that our shame is done,
That once more we are clean and spirit-whole.68
Some Romantic intellectuals even hoped that the Civil War would burst the bubble of Americans’ overweened confidence in democracy and lead to the replacement of democratic turbulence with a more orderly and organic notion of society—with themselves as the acknowledged elite. In New York, George Templeton Strong condemned Americans’ preoccupation with “democracy and equality and various other phantasms” and hoped that they “will be dispersed and dissipated and will disappear forever” in the face of civil war. America required the discipline of a strong government, and Charles Stillé, a lawyer and later provost of the University of Pennsylvania, blamed much of the North’s inability to bring the war to a swift conclusion on the discord of democratic politics, “which seems to be the sad but invariable attendant upon all political discussions in a free government, corrupting the very sources of public life. …”69
Romanticism, however, was not the only optic of Northern intellectuals, and no one looked less like a Romantic than Abraham Lincoln. Although he was a politician rather than a philosopher, Lincoln was nevertheless very directly the child of the Enlightenment, of the Declaration and the Constitution. Lincoln argued down slavery by an appeal to the “sacred principles of the laws of nature,” and hailed “the constitution and the laws” as “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.” For Lincoln, the war was a test of the practical worth of liberalism—of whether ordinary people of any race were entitled by nature to govern themselves and create their own governments, and whether that government could be content with allowing those people to pursue their own self-interest and self-improvement. The great offense of slavery was that it forbade self-interest and self-improvement—the interests of the slave counted for nothing, and the improvement of one segment of society would throw the others (starting with the slaveholders) dangerously out of kilter; the great offense of secession was that it was, in reality, nothing but a malevolent attempt to disrupt a constitutional order that encouraged all people, irrespective of race, to pursue that interest and that improvement. “On the side of the Union,” Lincoln said,
it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.70
The fall of 1863 gave Lincoln a perfect opportunity to articulate that understanding of the war when the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, following the battle at Gettysburg, arranged for the reburial of Gettysburg dead in a new cemetery at the center of the battlefield. Lincoln was invited by the organizers to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” at the dedication ceremonies in Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. He was not the featured speaker—that honor went to the former president of Harvard, Edward Everett, who launched into an oration two and a half hours long—and he needed to do no more in his remarks than is done when a bottle of champagne is cracked over a ship’s bow at its launch. He was respectful enough of the scope of that assignment to limit himself to only 272 words. In those words, Lincoln nevertheless managed to justify the ways of democracy more eloquently than anyone, then or now.71
Lincoln reached in his first sentence to the Declaration of Independence for authority: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” By “equal” he meant not a predetermined result but rather an equal starting point in the eyes of law and government, a common point from which any man could make himself. The idea that a nation could be founded on a proposition was ludicrous to the Romantic reactionaries of nineteenth-century Europe, and they were not reluctant to point to the Civil War as proof that attempting to build a government around something as bloodless and logical as a proposition was futile. Lincoln accepted that challenge: the war indeed would be the t
est of whether “that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure,” or whether democracies, wobbling around on the stilts of a proposition about equality, were doomed to self-destruction the moment a sizable minority decided it had no desire to abide by the will of a majority’s decision. The sacrifices of Gettysburg, Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chancellorsville, and a hundred other places demonstrated otherwise, that men would die rather than lose hold of that proposition. Reflecting on that dedication, the living should themselves experience a new birth of freedom, a determination—and he drove his point home with a deliberate evocation of the great Whig orator Daniel Webster—“that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”72
The Republican newspapers heartily applauded it: the address was a “brief but immortal speech,” editorialized John W. Forney’s Philadelphia Press. The Democratic papers, predictably, spurned it as “mere trash” and “unworthy of comment.”73
Southern intellectuals had a very different task: to demonstrate that the South really was a cultural world unto itself. Offering up the proof of a unique Southern cultural identity would make it easier to justify a separate Southern political regime, and that would build consensus behind the battle lines and shore up popular support for the Confederate government, even when that government undertook policy initiatives, from military conscription to economic nationalization, which seemed to contradict the immediate reasons the Southern states had seceded from the Union in the first place. By discovering and revealing the outlines of a distinctively Southern culture, Confederate intellectuals would create the rock around which the changing tides of war would splash in vain.
They certainly had the appetite for this task. Although the South had fewer resources to support them and fewer magazines and quarterlies for platforms, an intellectual network based on James Henry Hammond and William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, Henry Hughes of Mississippi, Josiah Clark Nott of Alabama, and the Virginians Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, Thomas Roderick Dew, George Fitzhugh, and George Frederick Holmes provided the backbone of Southern intellectual life. It also embraced the novelists Augusta Jane Evans, Caroline Gilman, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (the uncle of Confederate general James Longstreet), and John Pendleton Kennedy, the poets Edgar Allan Poe and Paul Hamilton Hayne. Their writing crowded into the four principal Southern journals, the Southern Quarterly Review, DeBow’s Review, the Southern Literary Messenger, and the Southern Review.74
Southern intellectuals tapped the energy of a long-festering resentment at the condescension shown them in the prewar decades by Northern publishers and editors. “The true gentleman was educated at a Northern college, wore clothing made at the North or imported by the North, employed a Northern teacher, male or female, listened to a Yankee parson, and read Northern books, magazines and newspapers,” complained DeBow’s Review in the heady summer of 1861. “We have been in a state of pupilage, and never learned to walk alone.” If only Southerners would shake off this Yankee-induced “pupilage,” they would realize that they actually possessed a distinct and self-defining culture of their own. This culture was built upon the fundamental (and Romantic) realization that nations are made not by adherence to propositions but by the cultivation of an ineluctable but palpable national character.75
The great error of the Enlightenment was that (as Thomas Dew explained in 1853) in their enthusiasm for reason, “the philosophers and encyclopaedists published their theories and principles without daring to apply them. … Their investigations, consequently, became eminently Utopian. Every principle was pushed out to its greatest extent,—the speculation of the philosopher was not hampered at each step by the difficulty of practical application. These abstract speculations were like theoretic mechanics, who sit in their closets and contemplate diagrams and figures, representing levers, pulleys, &c, with all the accuracy of mathematic precision.” The result, of course, was that when “the French revolution came, and the evils of government were at last to be corrected, unfortunately for France, there was nothing but this Utopian philosophy to shed light on the path of the revolution,” and the result was not government of, by or for the people, but the Reign of Terror.76
Rather than worship reason, Southerners “accept as true the faith of our fathers, believe in the authority of the Bible, attested by the voice of the civilized world for almost two thousand years; heed and respect the lessons of history, ancient and profane, and pursue no Utopias that promise to change man’s nature, his social habitudes, and his inequalities of condition, because we believe in nature and in nature’s God.” Societies could never be built from the sort of grasping, advantage-calculating individuals who populated the North. “The world has seen many instances of governments devised on theoretical principles, mainly with a view to the security of equal rights,” wrote Nathaniel Beverly Tucker of the College of William & Mary, but “how these have succeeded, history and the present abject condition of those countries which were the subjects of those experiments, show but too plainly.” The true basis of society was the community, not the individual and the individual’s rights. “One of the principal ends of the establishment of government is to provide, in the collective responsibility of the whole, a substitute for the responsibility of the individual. …”77
Still, Southern intellectuals stalled on the same fundamental issue that had dogged Southern society from the start: slavery. Was slavery of the essence of the South, woven into the warp and woof of its cultural fabric so completely that any description of the South must also be a description of the slave system? Or was slavery merely an economic accident, a superficial aspect of a more profound, underlying organism of Southern culture? The intellectuals’ answer, surprisingly, was the latter. “The differences between the Northern and Southern portions of the former American Union never involved a moral question,” declared DeBow’s Review in that same midsummer issue of 1861; “these and all former issues are now dead.” James Henley Thornwell, the prince among Southern Presbyterian theologians, stood among slavery’s most ardent defenders right up to the point of secession, but in 1861, he began to express doubts about slavery that he would never have permitted to see daylight in earlier times. Thornwell told his friend and biographer, Benjamin Palmer, that “he had made up his mind to move… for the gradual emancipation of the negro, as the only measure that would give peace to the country.”78
If slavery was not the South’s cultural trademark, what was? Was there really such a thing as Southernness? Oddly, no one seemed more convinced that there was than the soldiers of the Union armies. Much as they had enlisted to preserve a common America, the deeper they marched into the South, the more it really did seem to resemble a foreign country. “It is vain to deny that the slave system of labor is giving shape to the government of the society where it exists, and that that government is not republican either in form or spirit,” exclaimed the abolitionist general John W. Phelps. “It was through this system that the leading conspirators sought to fasten upon the people an aristocracy or a despotism; and it is not sufficient that they should be merely defeated in their object and the country be rid of their rebellion.” The rank and file felt much the same way. “The papers used to talk a great deal about Union people in Virginia, and their love for their country,” wrote one soldier in the 5th Maine, but “it never happened to be our fortune to see any of those exceptions to Southern character. … Possibly this may seem a hard statement, but it is not so hard as was the reality.” So at just the moment when Southerners wanted to claim culture rather than slavery as the basis of Confederate identity, Northerners were moving in precisely the opposite direction and holding Southerners to their prewar word that the protection of slavery was its guiding star.79
In pursuit of a Southern national culture, Confederates invented new national emblems (the Confederate great seal featured an image of George Washington’s statue in Richmond and the pious motto Deo vindice, “God will vindicate”), a new grammar (through def
iantly Confederate school textbooks such as the Confederate Primer [1861], the First and Second Confederate Speller [1861], Boys and Girls Stories of the War [1863], and the Dixie Primer for the Little Folks [1863]), new popular music (“God Save the South,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” “The Southrons’ Chaunt of Defiance,” “Stonewall Jackson’s Way,” “General Lee’s Grand March”), art (William D. Washington’s The Burial of Latané), anthologies of poetry (William Shepperson’s War Songs of the South), histories (Edward Pollard’s The First Year of the War and its successive “years” through 1864), and novels (Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice).80
This represents a remarkable volume of effort, even if Southerners themselves were dubious of its quality. “In this Titanic struggle which is going on, the genial pursuit of letters is at an end, and for nearly three years little has appeared which is worthy either of the genius or attainments of our people,” J. D. B. DeBow sighed. “The glorious struggle has scarcely inspired one song which will live beyond the generation that now burns with martial ardor and rushes to the deadly field.” But as in the failure of Confederate political nationhood, it was the war that proved the principal block to Confederate cultural nationhood. The grinding demands of the war and the blockade, Northern occupation of the Southern heartland, and the disruptions in supplies of paper, ink, type, pens, and books had all hampered the exercise of a Confederate imagination, and the looming shadow of defeat meant that any hope of delineating a Southern national character in its literature or culture would need to rely on time and experimentation.81
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