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And the War Came
- Abstract
One hundred fifty years ago, on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, the Union garrison just off the coast of Charleston, and the Civil War began. To mark the anniversary, the Library of America has issued The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It. The volume actually covers the period from November 1860 to January 1862 and includes writings by Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—as well as an assortment of newspaper editorials, magazine articles, diary entries, letters, political orations, and sermons by lesser known or even quite unknown figures. The book represents the Library of America at its best, and one hopes that this and subsequent volumes (the Library plans three more) will help a large readership better understand why the war was fought, what it cost, and why the end was worth the terrible price exacted.
Certain intellectual sophisticates of the left, led by Charles A. Beard in the 1920s, have preferred to emphasize as a cause of war the increasingly industrialized North’s economic oppression of the agricultural South: Yankee capitalism with its unjust tariffs and unsavory favors to railroad interests was as morally culpable for the war’s outbreak as Southern racist feudalism. More recent historians unwilling to grant any Americans but themselves credit for basic humanity argue instead that the North fought strictly for the sake of preserving the Union.
About the Author
Algis Valiunas, a frequent contributor, last wrote for us about Michel de Montaigne in the April issue.
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