This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War - Hardcover

McPherson, James M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195313666 ISBN 13: 9780195313666

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom and the New York Times bestsellers Crossroads of Freedom and Tried by War, among many other award-winning books, James M. McPherson is America's preeminent Civil War historian. In this collection of provocative and illuminating essays, McPherson offers fresh insight into many of the enduring questions about one of the defining moments in our nation's history.

McPherson sheds light on topics large and small, from the average soldier's avid love of newspapers to the postwar creation of the mystique of a Lost Cause in the South. Readers will find insightful pieces on such intriguing figures as Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Jesse James, and William Tecumseh Sherman, and on such vital issues as Confederate military strategy, the failure of peace negotiations to end the war, and the realities and myths of the Confederacy. This Mighty Scourge includes several never-before-published essays--pieces on General Robert E. Lee's goals in the Gettysburg campaign, on Lincoln and Grant in the Vicksburg campaign, and on Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief. All of the essays have been updated and revised to give the volume greater thematic coherence and continuity, so that it can be read in sequence as an interpretive history of the war and its meaning for America and the world.

Combining the finest scholarship with luminous prose, and packed with new information and fresh ideas, this book brings together the most recent thinking by the nation's leading authority on the Civil War.

About this title

About the Author

James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He has published numerous volumes on the Civil War, including 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.

Reviews

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

One of the many reasons why James M. McPherson is the pre-eminent contemporary historian of the Civil War -- perhaps the pre-eminent historian of that war, period -- is that he knows historical truth is slippery and arguments over it are eternal. The "scholarly pendulum has a way of swinging from one side to the other," he writes. "The field of Civil War history," he adds, "has produced more interpretive disputes than most other historical subjects. Next to debates about the causes of the war, arguments about how or why the North won, or the Confederacy lost (the difference in phraseology is significant), have generated some of the most heated but also most enlightening scholarship since the centennial commemorations of the war."

That phrase -- "most heated but also most enlightening" -- suggests another reason why McPherson, a professor emeritus at Princeton, stands above all others: Not only does he read everything, but he is always open to judgments that differ from his own and facts that demand new interpretations. This is a rarer quality than the casual reader might think. Historians, like others who labor in intellectual vineyards, are given to firm opinions that in time can calcify into rigid ones. Once a historian has staked out a position, he or she often clings to it long after new or neglected evidence commands a revised reading. McPherson, to the best of my knowledge, has never been guilty of this.

Thus one of the virtues of This Mighty Scourge, a collection of fugitive pieces -- some of them previously published, some of them not, all of them revised for book publication -- is that it gives us McPherson as a reader and critic of other historians' work. Many of the pieces here were originally written for the New York Review of Books, for which McPherson serves as de facto Civil War gatekeeper, and they touch -- lightly but confidently -- upon much recent Civil War scholarship. This has been an uncommonly fruitful period for such work, not least because it has moved from Great Man to Common Man (and Woman) history, and McPherson presides over it like a benign deity, issuing occasional thunderbolts of disagreement but generally cheering on his fellow historians as they pursue ever elusive Truth.

It's a tricky business. These people all know each other. Some are mentors, others protégés. Some are friends, others rivals. Reviewing books about the Civil War is a bit like reviewing books about China or the Middle East: With the rarest of exceptions, the only people to pass competent judgment are all in the same boat, and the possibility that judgment may be compromised by extraneous considerations can never be ruled out. McPherson wades into this quagmire with what seems to me a reasonable, judicious approach. Whether he agrees or disagrees with a fellow historian, he is always generous -- he is quick to acknowledge excellent scholarship even when it seems to him to lead the writer into misinterpretations -- and he is quick to admit it when someone else causes him to revise his own opinions. He is candid, but he is fair.

At times, I am inclined to think, he bends too far backward. His evaluation of David Herbert Donald's Lincoln (1995) is far more positive than my own, which is neither here nor there, but it seems to me that he cops out by (a) calling it "majestic," (b) taking Donald to task for insisting on (the words are Donald's) "a basic trait of character evident throughout Lincoln's life: the essential passivity of his nature," and then (c) lamely retreating from this criticism by claiming, "Recognizing that the facts mostly do not fit the passivity thesis, Donald wisely allows it to fade away as the book proceeds." McPherson himself insists correctly that Lincoln's public life was one of "mastery rather than passivity," so he does no service to the reader when he pats Donald on the back after calling him to account. Book reviews are (or should be) written for readers, not fellow authors, and in his appealing inclination to be kind to his colleagues, McPherson sometimes loses sight of this.

That, though, is a relatively small complaint about what is on the whole an excellent book. For readers unfamiliar with McPherson's work, it provides a useful introduction -- one that, it is to be hoped, will lead them to his masterwork, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) -- and for those who know that work, it provides numerous interesting footnotes. He begins by quoting Lincoln, who said in 1865, "Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came." McPherson writes: "Why did the war come? What were the war aims of each side? What strategies did they employ to achieve these aims? How do we evaluate the leadership of both sides? Did the war's outcome justify the immense sacrifice of lives? What impact did the experience of war have on the people who lived through it? How did later generations remember and commemorate that experience?"

These are the questions that McPherson addresses in the 16 essays collected herein. He offers suggestions about how most of them can be resolved, in some cases firm suggestions, but he doesn't pretend to have final answers. He is impatient, though, with people who approach the Civil War clad in blinders, who interpret it to fit their convenience rather than the evidence. This means most particularly that he comes down hard on devotees of the Lost Cause, whose Margaret Mitchell-ized view of Ol' Dixie long ago was thoroughly discredited yet who continue to thrive in precincts of the South and in Northern outposts as well. He takes -- and convincingly argues for -- a revisionist view of William Tecumseh Sherman ("Despite Sherman's reputation in the South as a ferocious ogre of vengeance and spoliation, he was actually sparing of the lives of his own soldiers, of the enemy's soldiers, and of civilians"), and he takes an admiringly but decidedly unsentimental view of Robert E. Lee: "For the war as a whole, Lee's army had a higher casualty rate than the armies commanded by Grant. The romantic glorification of the Army of Northern Virginia by generations of Lost Cause writers has obscured this truth."

Another judgment cherished by Lost Cause fanatics is that states' rights, not slavery, caused the Civil War. McPherson meticulously demolishes this, yet without rewriting history in order to suit present-day sensibilities. "It was not the existence of slavery that polarized the nation to the breaking point," he writes, "but rather the issue of the expansion of slave territory." Not until well into the war did Lincoln identify extirpating slavery as well as preserving the union as a central war aim, but as a cause it was there from the beginning. Slavery "was so deeply rooted in American society that it required the huge violence of the Civil War to root it out." To pretend otherwise, as sentimentalists of the Confederacy have done for nearly a century and a half, is simply to deny historical truth.

Over and over again, McPherson seeks to separate myth and fantasy from fact -- to the extent, obviously, that fact can be known with certainty in an area so unclear as this one. His brief review of a biography of Jesse James decisively dismisses "what both contemporaries and later commentators have chosen to see in Jesse James -- Robin Hood, social bandit, scourge of capitalism" -- and reveals him for the murderous ex-Confederate that he was. He meticulously analyzes William Herndon's research into the early life of his close friend and colleague Lincoln and makes a strong case for its essential reliability. He shows how the "Brahmin elite" of Boston provided invaluable leadership for the Union forces, acting with "an ethic of sacrifice, the noblesse-oblige conviction that the privileged classes had a greater obligation to defend the country precisely because of the privileged status they enjoyed." Tell that to today's privileged ones who evade military service and then, in high office, send the less privileged to die in a foolish, unnecessary, mismanaged war.

Indeed, much in these pages can be read as a rebuke and a corrective to contemporary American leadership -- regardless of political party. Unlike some of his colleagues, McPherson doesn't use history to preach political sermons, but what he has to say about Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and others leaves no doubt as to how impoverished the country's leadership has become.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

James M. McPherson has written and edited nearly 30 books, including the Pulitzer Prize?winning Battle Cry of Freedom. Turf battles aren't uncommon in Civil War studies, and McPherson has a wide reputation as a thoughtful, fair, and readable historian whose insight brings fresh perspective to some often-scrutinized topics. Although McPherson intended some of the essays for an academic audience, each is accessible and worthwhile, and "displays an admirable transparency, showing the historian at work" (Baltimore Sun). All pieces have been updated and revised, and each bears the stamp of McPherson's keen intellect applied to topics that continue to generate discussion among Civil War historians and buffs.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Prolific and much-honored historian McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom, etc.) weighs in on the Civil War in this compilation of 16 essays, most of which have appeared in print before—seven of them in The New York Review of Books. Revised and edited for this collection, the essays read like chapters in a smooth narrative that addresses some of the biggest questions of the Civil War: why did it start? why did the South lose? what motivated the men who fought on both sides? how do we evaluate the top leaders—including Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses G. Grant? McPherson goes about answering these and other questions in his usual graceful style, underscored by a thorough grasp of myriad primary and secondary sources on virtually every aspect of the conflict. He forthrightly expresses his opinions while backing them up with well-reasoned arguments, whether challenging the "Lost Cause" argument about why the South lost, or supporting the proposition that it was slavery—and not states' rights—that was the main cause of the war. This strong addition to the massive Civil War canon will appeal to all readers. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

McPherson is one of the most prolific and esteemed of contemporary Civil War historians. In this collection of essays, he examines a broad array of topics; many of them continue to bedevil those who study our nation's seminal conflict. In his opening essay, McPherson takes on revisionist historians who discount slavery as the fundamental cause of the war. McPherson's consideration of the career and "martyrdom" of John Brown is both fascinating and incisive, as he illustrates how imagery can be used to portray a man as a crazed murderer or a secular saint. Other topics of note include Lee's goals during the Gettysburg campaign, Grant's reputation as a "butcher" who lacked strategic insight, and Lincoln's use (or abuse) of executive wartime power. As always, McPherson writes with a sharp, succinct style and displays a willingness to challenge current orthodoxies. This work will be an outstanding addition to every library's Civil War holdings. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195313666
• ISBN 13: 9780195313666
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260