New---Clash of Democracy's Zealots, Full of Irony and Hypocrisy

Clash of the Zealots, Michael Kazin, New York Times, March 23, 2008, a review of the new book Throes of Democracy:The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, Walter A. McDougall, illustrated, indexed, 787 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95.

For historians of the United States, the middle years of the 19th century present an exceptional challenge. How does one capture the meaning of a half-century in which Americans elected first Andrew Jackson and, later, Abraham Lincoln president; fought the Mexican War and the Civil War; flocked to millennarian creeds; joined or clashed with movements for the rights of black people and women and workers of all races; endured the shift from a decentralized agrarian society to a united, industrial powerhouse; and lived in a country that more than doubled in territory and quadrupled in population?

The titles of major works attempt to convey the outsize significance of the times. “The Rise of American Democracy” and “The Market Revolution” produced “The Second American Revolution.” “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution” followed “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” The number of rich, absorbing narratives about this period easily outstrips the quantity of those devoted to any other slice of the nation’s past.

Walter A. McDougall is not impressed. He begins Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, his own fat survey, with a fire in 1835 that destroyed much of Lower Manhattan and concludes it with an admiring portrait of the prolific writer and editor Orestes Brownson, who abandoned his youthful radicalism for a steadfast conviction that the United States was doomed unless its citizens embraced the eternal truths of the Roman Catholic Church. While McDougall, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, covers all the major events and social forces of the era with great energy and wit, his tone is relentlessly ironic. All the sound and fury signify little to him besides Americans’ extraordinary talent for wrapping their bloodletting and money-making in thick layers of moralistic pretense.

McDougall keeps smiling at the foolishness of those mortals who spout and stumble across his pages. Daniel Webster, the great Whig orator, was “a man of strong Yankee principles, ... never religious except insofar as he worshiped himself.” The abolitionists, much honored by posterity, were actually “the most feeble reform movement” of the era, in part because their eccentric ideas and behavior alienated “ordinary Americans, just as the behavior of hippies damaged their peace movement in the 1960s.” And the unruly, plebeian throng that flocked to Jackson and made the Democrats the party to beat in the decades before the Civil War? “Americans of many sorts were in one bad mood or another between 1819 and 1850,” McDougall comments. “They were against many things and sensed that Jackson was, too.” Their discontent, he explains, was “an inevitable consequence of free markets in power, wealth and pursuits of happiness.”

Such judgments, like his regard for Brownson, reveal the author’s particular conservative worldview, an old-fashioned one closer to that of Edmund Burke than of Ronald Reagan (who was fond of quoting Thomas Paine’s line “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”). McDougall does not deny that the persistence of racial bigotry and urban poverty betrayed the ideals trumpeted ad nauseam by politicians and evangelical preachers. But all the mighty efforts to forge a more equal, more humane order strike him as overblown and oversold. The result is the most unromantic narrative of 19th-century America I have ever read.


McDougall is a Vietnam veteran, which may help explain why he is most sober when writing about war, both the war with Mexico and the bigger one between North and South. He goes beyond the now standard argument that the earlier conflict was an act of raw conquest justified by the messianic promise of Manifest Destiny. In McDougall’s mordant rendering, it was “the climactic achievement of the republic founded in 1776” because it exposed the notion of a peaceful democracy sharing its gifts with the world to be “a pretentious fraud.” The army that claimed the inglorious victory was a sorry lot as well. Large numbers of recruits “mutinied, deserted, malingered, rebelled and died.” And seven times more soldiers died away from the battlefield, mostly of disease, than in combat.

McDougall’s similar attitude toward the Civil War and its aftermath may elicit several gigabytes worth of academic controversy. He has no patience for the view that the fight to preserve the Union was justified because it led to the emancipation of four million African-Americans. In his view, zealots on both sides stoked an inferno of mistrust, as “each section’s rational measures of self-defense looked to the other like mad provocations.” The messy, incomplete Reconstruction that followed a war in which more than 600,000 died only increased the hatred white Southerners felt toward their former slaves. McDougall scoffs at those who praise Reconstruction as “a simple morality play” between crusaders for racial equality and their enemies. Instead, he compares it to the American invasion of Iraq, an adventure that began with high ideals and may end as an embarrassing failure.

The analogy is flawed: former Confederates had far more in common with Unionists than Iraqi insurgents do with American occupiers. But by proposing it, McDougall affirms his fundamental distaste for any attempt to remake one’s society, or any other. Like Mark Twain, a rare 19th-century figure whom he admires, McDougall mocks “in suitably palatable fashion” the myth that Americans were a decent people eager to share the blessings of democracy. Because he writes exceedingly well, this makes for a history that is bracing to read, even if one questions its premises and conclusions.

Yet the conception of the work is a good deal less satisfying than its parts. “Throes of Democracy” is the second installment in a projected multivolume history of America from its colonial birth pangs to the present. McDougall began the first volume, “Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828,” with the arresting statement that the United States was “the central historical event of the past 400 years.” It is, he declared, “the mightiest, richest, most creative civilization on earth — a civilization that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing. Not only was the United States born of revolution; it is one.” But to interpret the Civil War era as a history of self-deception on a grand scale ends up making that civilization look rather small.

It’s useful to have a rebuttal of the progressive views most contemporary historians hold, and McDougall does so with verve, if not always cogently. However, one can find mendacious and deluded souls aplenty in any land, during any era. The critical events that took place at the heart of the 19th century did much to transform the United States into the power for good and ill it subsequently became. Depicting most of the people responsible for these radical changes as hypocrites and fools undermines McDougall’s own argument. To debunk what Americans thought they were doing does not help us understand the meaning of what they did accomplish. McDougall may view the United States as a revolutionary success, but his image of those pivotal years looks more like failure.

Michael Kazin’s most recent book is A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. He teaches history at Georgetown University.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Kazin-t.html?em&ex=1206331200&en=4b5437d21c751ebd&ei=5087%0A

CWL--True Crime In Postbellum NYC

A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, W. W. Norton Publishing, notes, illustrations, appendices, 2006, $35.00.

A remarkable document was created by George Appo, a career criminal in 19th century New York City. His autobiography, in a typewritten manuscript form, was stored in Box 32 of Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, in New York City. In an exemplary effort of historical research, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, history professor at Loyola University in Chicago has extensively annotated portions Appo’s autobiography.

Remarkably, the author has chosen not to include the entire 98 page autobiography as an appendix. Portions of the document appear at the beginning of A Pickpocket’s Tale and are cited in the chapters. Gilfoyle’s curious approach is successful in telling two stories: a life story of Appo and the story of the New York City and state criminal justice system and the environment it tried to control. The subtitle of the book is The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York. George Appo is representative of a world beneath the financial and high culture world of NYC. Punished as a juvenile, he was committed to a reform school ship that sailed to Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. He went to Ossinging (Sing Sing) and Clinton prisons four times; he spent a year on Blackwell’s Island and had six incarcerations in the Tombs, both located in NYC. He spent a year in Pennsylvania’s Eastern Penitentiary. Murderer? Mob enforcer? Rapist? No, Appo was a pickpocket who was unaligned with any politician, policeman or gang. An allegiance with any of these three forces would have kept him out of prison.

In the course of the book, Gilfoyle explains the conditions and contexts in which Appo lived his life of crime and was punished for it. As an independent pickpocket and a team player in a ‘green goods’ (selling allegedly counterfeit money and hen switching it with it for blank paper) racket, he was shot and cut. Appo suffered from an addiction to opium. Gilfoyle skillfully provides a history of opium, how it is smoked and where, a history of counterfeiting and how it tapped into Americans ‘get something for nothing’ attitudes. Gilfoyle explains why pickpocketing was prevalent and easy. In a world of no checking accounts and the publics partial reliance on both hard currency and cool cash, citizens would normally carry nothing but cash in clothing that had three to six outside pockets.

Other Voices---Ghost Dancing and (Color) Line Dancing After The War: The Veterans Return Home

Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton, eds., The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader, New York: New York University Press, 2007. ix + 457 pp. Notes, index. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8147-5203-9; $26.00 (paper), ISBN 0-8147-5204-7.

Reviewed for H-CivWar by Carol Taylor, Northeast Texas History and Genealogy Center

The Difficult Road to Peace

When the guns fell silent at Appomattox and other sites of Confederate surrender to the Union Army, the Civil War was technically over. The Confederates were paroled and headed home, penniless and hungry in their threadbare clothing. The Union Army was hastily marched to Washington, D.C., to parade in the Grand Review. But the vast majority of those men were broke, some not having been paid for more than one year. The Union Army had a plan to muster out its soldiers; the Confederates did not even have a government, much less a plan to return surviving soldiers to peaceful civilian life. It is at that point that Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton pick up the fate of the Civil War veterans.

The editors have collected a wide range of essays from various disciplines
to allow the reader to understand the "rich variety of attitudes,
circumstances, and behaviors that historians and other scholars have found
among the Civil War veterans” (p. 2). As Logue and Barton explain, "the
veterans shared a profoundly important event, but the rest of their lives
followed courses determined by a host of circumstances" (p. 5). It is the
host of circumstances that _The Civil War Veteran_ explores. The book is
divided into five parts, each focusing on a particular stage in the
readjustment to civilian life. Many of the essays could be placed in more
than one part, but the arrangement that Logue and Barton chose works well
and creates a flow into the next stage of veterans' experiences.

The first section, "Transition to Peace," reviews the means and methods used
by returning soldiers. The systematic method used by the Union Army is well presented in Dixon Wecter's "By Rail and Boat." Barton in "Did the Confederacy Change Southern Soldiers?" and Gaines M. Foster's "Ghost Dance" trace the dangers and psychological fears of Confederates on the trek home and the months following the war. Foster focuses on the fear that the "Confederate dead were more powerful and awesome than the survivors of the war" (p. 51). Both Barton and Foster emphasize the psychological aspects of the losing side, a problem that received little or no attention at the time. Only William B. Holberton in his "Confederate Demobilization" seems to miss the point. His essay would have contributed a much more valid portrayal of the event if he had used more diaries and contemporary newspaper sources.

The second section, "Problems of Readjustment," presents some excellent
research into the physical, social, and psychological problems returning
veterans experienced. The scourge of drug addiction, alcoholism, mental
instability, criminal activities, and posttraumatic stress are seen through
the eyes of the prevailing means of treatment in the context of the late
nineteenth century. Additional problems faced the United States Colored
Troops (USCT) when they applied for assistance; problems that reflect the
dehumanization of slavery, such as name changes, lack of documentation,
racism, and opposition or apathy on the part of white Union and Confederate
veterans.

The next section, "Governments Provide Aid," looks more to the North than
the South, reflecting the movement in the North to provide a safety net for
veterans. While native born white veterans in the North received more aid
with fewer hurdles, the section also looks at the problems facing immigrants
and African Americans. Racist and nativist politics played an important
role in determining the relative ease with which Union veterans received
social, financial, and occupational aid. In the South, honor was considered
more important than charity, a guise used by the Democratic Party in the
South to avoid expending large sums of money to aid veterans.

The fourth section, "Veterans Fight Their Own Battles," is the most interesting part of the book. Union veterans were not long in realizing that organizing as a united front was to their advantage in finding jobs, receiving needed medical treatment, and dealing with other aspects of their return to civilian life. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) provided that political leverage for countless veterans, even for those Southerners who had fled behind the Union lines to join the United States Army. Yet, the GAR was class oriented and local groups were formed on the basis of social standing. Racism entered into the picture as the USCT tried to join the GAR. Once again, specters of class and racism raised their ugly heads. In the South, the United Confederate Veterans were late in organizing but quickly made up for lost time. David H. Donald adequately covers the so-called Southern trauma created by the experience of defeat and the ending of slavery leading to Jim Crow laws that by 1890 had pervaded not only the South but had crept into the North. His summary of white supremacy and its
negative connotations should be required reading for all students studying
the history of the late nineteenth century.

The fourth section blends well into the last part, "Veterans Shape the
Collective Memory," an interesting account of the beginning of many patriotic customs so venerated by the conservative right movement of the early twenty-first century. These essays focus on the memory that white Union, USCT, and Confederate veterans wanted to leave for their descendents. Each group insisted that their memory of the events at mid-century be correctly recorded, even though the three sides were never in agreement. It was the Union movement that encouraged avid patriotism and memorials for white soldiers, regardless of rant. It was the Confederates that insisted on an educational curriculum that recorded the legitimacy of secession and
negated the emancipation of slavery. And it was the African Americans who
faced the most adversaries and hurdles to their memory. W. Fitzhugh Brundage sums up the importance of memory when he writes that "the fleeting character of memory demands the continuous creation and re-creation of a sense of the past; no enduring social memory can be entirely static" (p.436).

The book lacks in few areas. One is a more thorough examination of
Reconstruction-era violence that occurred in the South ushering in Radical
Reconstruction by Congress. It was this violent period that predicated the
Southern trauma that Donald so capably describes. Another area that seems
to always be forgotten concerns the Unionists of the South during the war
and the fate they met after the war. Large numbers of Union sympathizers
were scattered from Virginia to Texas and fled to areas where they could
join the Union Army. It was the unparalleled violent treatment and abuse
that they received even after the war that needs to be told.

The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader presents the origin of many
longstanding problems in the United States today. In addressing the issues
of class, racism, and nativism in the context of the late nineteenth century
and Civil War veterans, the authors and editors have shown that many of the
problems following the war remain unresolved. As the title suggests, this
is a very readable choice for the lay person as well as the undergraduate
student.

The preceding is from H-NET BOOK REVIEW and published by H-CivWar@h-net.msu.edu (October 2007)Copyright (c) 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved.

CWL: I will be requesting this book through inter-library loan and will be reading several of the essays. Readers of this weblog will see a discussion of of the essays in late December. Historical memory and the rise of the Lost Cause worldview are my interests. I am curious as to whether there is an essay that addresses post-traumatic stress. Shook Over Hell by Eric Dean is a favorite of mine and is an assigned book for those students who are psych majors in my U.S. survey sections.