The U.S. wins a long, costly, bloody war to establish democracy where it had not existed. Troops are left in place to combat terrorists who seek to undo the results of the war. The terrorists' nefarious efforts are stymied for a time, but eventually the American economy collapses, the public grows weary of the effort, and the troops are prematurely withdrawn. The terrorists overthrow the new democratic order.
The dates: 1861-1877. The place: the American South.
Two new volumes tell this story well: Allen C. Guelzo's Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction and Steven E. Woodworth's This Great Struggle: America's Civil War.
Both authors are eminent authorities on the period. Guelzo, the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College, has published several important studies of Lincoln, including Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (2003); Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004); and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America (2008). This spring, Knopf will publish his new history of the Gettysburg campaign. Woodworth, professor of history at Texas Christian University, has written or edited over two dozen books on the war, among them Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865(2005) and Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (2010).
Both books scrupulously chronicle the tumultuous events of 1861-1865, and each contains a brief account of the postwar Reconstruction era. Fateful Lightning, which is twice as long as This Great Struggle, covers political, economic, diplomatic, social, and intellectual developments extensively, while Woodworth's volume focuses closely on battles and leaders. Both are written with verve and demonstrate a masterful command of the vast literature on the subject. (Guelzo's footnotes and bibliography offer an excellent guide to that literature.) Because Guelzo paints on a larger canvas, he offers a more detailed picture of the coming of the war, devoting roughly a quarter of his pages to that complex story, whereas only a tenth of Woodworth's book deals with the antebellum years.
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The Civil War pitted a modernizing society (the North) against a traditional one (the South). During the generation before the war, reform mania gripped the North, sparking innovations in agriculture, social relations, gender relations, education, manufacturing, transportation, penology, medicine, science, and religion. Among the many strands of Northern reform, one emerged dominant: the antislavery crusade.
White Southerners recoiled in horror at the upsurge of reform sentiment, especially the attack on slavery. They revolted when Lincoln's party, championing modernization and antislavery, won the election of 1860. Rather than accept the results of that contest, they seceded from the Union. Guelzo argues that their action was not irrational. Taking issue with the so-called Revisionist school of Civil War historiography, which blamed the war on a blundering generation of political incompetents, he asserts that "[i]f there is anything that is genuinely appalling in the political context of the Civil War, it is the dominance of the most glittering and hard-edged political rationality. It was the hard edge of that rationality that, in the end, made a final compromise impossible."
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