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Just another book review...
It's been a while so I thought I'd share another Civil War book review.
I just finished reading Thomas Fleming's "Disease of the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War." It was a very enjoyable, and quick, read about the causes of the Civil War in Fleming's interpretation. His main thesis is that extremists on both sides tore the nation apart by politicizing everything for political gain (sound familiar?) even at the expense of national unity and unionism.
Fleming has no use at all for the abolitionists who he continually runs into the ground as extremists and crackpots who were consumed with hatred at southerners more than an actual desire to see the end of slavery. Fleming traces the hatred of southerners by abolitionists back to the post-Revolutionary era and the rise of Jeffersonian Republicanism which stripped political power from New England and left them a minority within the political structure of America. Once the south, and the new western states, formed political alliances over issues like the War of 1812, it only solidified the anti-southern feelings of many in New England who threatened to secede from the Union (see the Hartford Convention). Radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison were burning copies of the constitution and declaring that no peace could exist in a union with slavery. These men were extremists on the edge of society with very small followings. But as the sectional crisis grew over the expansion of America and the future of slavery within Federal territories, the abolitionist extremists grew in number and helped enflame passions which captured the minds of even more gullible people like the infamous John Brown. Brown, who Fleming argues is nothing more than a psychopath, is goaded on by extremists to commit acts of terrorism against the south. Once Brown fails, and his co-conspirators are discovered, they promptly flee the country. President Buchanan laments that Brown's reckless venture was caused, by "an incurable disease in the public mind." Fleming goes on to examine how men like Lincoln were forced to balance the real and popular desire to save the Union while also trying to keep the abolitionists on the sidelines and to prevent their vindictiveness from affecting national reconciliation. Fleming states that "A disease in the public mind would seem to be a twisted interpretation of political or economic or spiritual realities that seizes control of thousands of even millions of minds." Fleming argues effectively that the extremists in the north latched onto anti-slavery as a way to bring about the fall of the south for political and economic reasons more so than for the actual abolition of an enslaved race. For the extremists, nothing short of total victory and the subjugation of the south would do. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Supreme Court Justice and Union veteran, wrote after the war that "Communists show in the most extreme form what I came to loathe in the abolitionists - the conviction that anyone who did not agree with them was either a knave or a fool."
For the south, their form of extremism was born out of a fear that a race war, an insurrection, or an abolitionist invasion, would lead to the extermination of the white race in the south (or worse, the mixing of the races). This fear dated back as long as slavery had been in America and was visibly demonstrated in the slave insurrection in Haiti in its violence and savagery. The south never stopped worrying that a similar event was possible in their own states and went to great lengths to suppress any and all slave uprisings and/or influences from outside the south to encourage them. The abolition of slavery seemed possible, and maybe even likely, at one point during and just after the American Revolution. Men like Washington and Jefferson both spoke out against slavery and hoped to see it end. But Jefferson lived long enough to realize the complications that emancipation would hold as he could not contemplate how the two races could ever live together in peace. What to do with millions of freed slaves that nobody wanted or could control any longer? Various ideas, such as colonization or dispersement (favored by Madison who believed that if slavery expanded that the number of slaves in the various states would shrink due to being scattered across the continent - thus making it easier to live with slavery and/or easier to eventually emancipate them without causing mass hysteria). As the national debate on slavery's expansion increased, so to did the radicalism in the south by men like Calhoun who were willing to defy Federal laws and elections in order to protect their institution and their ability to carry slavery into the new territories. Events like Nat Turner's rebellion and especially John Brown's act solidified the southern mindset that the north was not to be trusted and was being run by radicals who wanted their destruction. Those moderates who sought some sort of compromise, like Lincoln, Douglas, or Breckinridge, found no footing as radicalism had convinced everyone that the only possible solution to all problems was secession and then Civil War. For the Republicans, slavery had to be contained, for the south, that meant the end of slavery. The views were not compatible.
Fleming's book walks a narrow line in trying to chart how a more moderate approach may have avoided a Civil War had extremism on both sides been less vehement. But the narrative is driven forward by a growing sense of the inevitable as moderates and proposals to avoid a war were pushed aside as events escalated quickly and the rhetoric and violence grew more heated both in Washington and across the nation. The flames of war were simply fanned by the media, publishers, and extremists in both sections which could not tolerate a union with the other side who they believed were committed to their subjugation. For some historians, and modern students, the idea that people fought to end, or protect, slavery is paramount and pounded into our heads as an overly simplistic view of the war which is easily swallowable. But the reality is far more complex. The vast majority of soldiers, north and south, fought for reasons that had little to do with what the extremists were saying on the edges of society. But the influence of the extremists (I think Fleming used the term bloodthirsty to describe them) is largely what drove the nation to war.
If you are looking for a 300-page quick read about the causes of the war which tries to take a nuanced look at everything, give this a shot.
What's next on my list?
I am not sure for the Civil War. At present I am reading a biography on Doc Holliday.
_________________ Gen. Blake Strickler
Confederate General-in-Chief
El Presidente 2010 - 2012
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