What John Kelly got right — and wrong — on the Civil War.
Cosh, A8
As someone who is relishing the United State s’ s out burst of Civil War revisionism, I am a little confused by the controversy over a remark by the White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly. Kelly is being assailed for saying in a Fox News interview that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the ( American) Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”
This was part of a familiarsounding encomium to Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s warlord. It is the kind of thing, until recently an accepted part of the American civil religion, that is being instantly challenged in our tempestuous moral climate. And I think this is, on the whole, terrific. About time, and then some.
But I would have thought that the objectionable part of Kelly’s comment was the stuff about “men and women of good faith” — as if Southern whites had not made war for the purpose of preserving a caste’s economic advantage and its political dominance within the federation. Did “good faith” always characterize the Confederacy’s collective behaviour before and during the war? One thinks of Andersonville, or Fort Pillow, or Bleeding Kansas, or — to throw in a Canadian angle — the Confederacy’s use of British North America as a base for conspiracies and violence. We may even recall Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner nearly to death in the United States Senate in 1856, and being lionized throughout the South for it.
“Good faith,” eh? This reflects the toxic part of the schoolhouse account of history given to Americans: faced with the problem of being bound together in a Union as a victorious nation and a vanquished one, the United States made a collective choice to let the South have a mythology in place of independence. An account of the war as a fateful collision between “ways of life” was allowed to stand — perhaps in the absence of acceptable alternatives — and the South was permitted to commemorate and celebrate war heroes without inviting odium or reprisal. Those heroes ultimately remained part of the ruling class in the South.
It is easy to recognize talk of “good faith” ( or “ways of life”) as the thinking of somebody still under the cultural spell of Gone With the Wind. The puzzle is that it does not seem to be the “good faith” part of Kelly’s comment that is inviting the strongest objections. He is being vilified by the “lack of an ability to compromise” part.
Which is ... factually true in the simplest possible sense, isn’t it? Kelly has not used the value- laden word “failure”: he is just saying that the conditions for a compromise did not exist. I am not sure you could find a good textbook on the Civil War that says any different.
If you point out that two sides of an issue were unable to reach a compromise, you are not thereby making a moral judgment between them. The North could have avoided war by tacitly surrendering the authority of the Union, allowing slavery to be enforced on free soil, and permitting slavery to expand to new American territories. It could, at any time, simply have stopped fighting the war and recognized the Confederacy.
What we appreciate about Lincoln is precisely that he did, in fact, refuse to compromise, past a certain point. But how can you know so little about Lincoln that you ignore his electoral position in 1860 — to wit, the preservation of the original American compromise on slavery? He insisted that the federal government had no power to eliminate slavery where it existed, and promised — loudly, before any group of people or livestock he could find — that he had no intention of eliminating it. He merely insisted on circumscribing it and putting it back on the Founders’ poorly designed path to “ultimate extinction.” The South wouldn’t take the deal, and there was war.
I fear that Civil War revisionists are, not for the first time, in the awkward position of arguing against Lincoln. Moreover, has it occurred to anyone that slavery ended pretty much everywhere else in the Western hemisphere through what can only be called compromise? No one else, at any rate, needed to kill a million people doing it. Slaveholders were bought off in the British, Dutch, and French empires and in most of the republics of South America. Brazil, the New World’s other nest of mega- slavery, abolished the institution in steps, freeing children of slaves in 1871, slaves aged 60 or above in 1885, and all slavery only in 1888.
Our instinctive reaction to this is to imagine the sadness of remaining enslaved while one is waiting for such compromises to be completed. And Brazil had the U.S. example before it. But the revisionists never bother to argue that other countries went about abolishing slavery mistakenly, or wickedly. The brute certainty that the U.S. Civil War was a Good Thing, or even the best possible thing, only reflects popular American tunnel vision about history. It is somehow beneath American dignity to ever compare the U.S. to anything else: even learning too much about another country is suspicious.