|
 Every
once in awhile, a Civil War book makes it to the bestseller lists, appealing
to a broader audience than history fans. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the
Wind was one such book, in its day; so was Shelby Foote's magnificent trilogy,
The Civil War. And so, too, is Jay Winik's April 1865: The Month That Saved
America (HarperCollins 2001). Winik's book was on The New York Times
bestseller list for quite awhile, and President Bush was seen with it tucked
under his arm not long after 9-11.
However, I come not to praise
Winik, but to bury him. April 1865 just isn't a very good book. The author has
neither the writing skills nor the commitment to historical accuracy,
unfortunately, to craft a good book about that momentous month.
Winik, a college professor
and former congressional and Pentagon staffer, describes the last month of the
Civil War as "the thirty most pivotal days in the life of the United
States." He writes, "April 1865 is a month that could have unraveled
the American nation. Instead, it saved it. It is a month as dramatic and as
devastating as any ever faced in American history - and it proved to be
perhaps the most moving and decisive month not simply of the Civil War, but
indeed, quite likely, in the life of the United States." Winik retells
all the familiar stories of the last days of the war, arguing that the
decisions made by President Abraham Lincoln, Generals Robert E. Lee and
Ulysses S. Grant, and John Wilkes Booth, had a tremendous impact on the
immediate postwar era and in all the years since.
From Lincoln's policy of
"letting 'em up easy" and not imposing harsh Reconstruction terms on
the states of the defeated Confederacy, to Grant's pursuing that policy at
Appomattox, to Lee's decision not to wage guerilla warfare despite the urging
of many around him, to Booth's decision to murder Lincoln when the Confederate
cause otherwise seemed all but lost, the decisions of these men shaped the
country in which we now live. Winik notes how easily things could have gone
differently, and how much worse the aftermath of the Civil War might have
been, with endless guerilla warfare, reprisals, persecution and civil strife
fatally wounding the young republic. He'll get no argument from me there,
although it's hardly an original hypothesis.
Unfortunately, Winik is a
poor writer, with an often-hyperbolic and overwrought style. He makes every
point with a sledgehammer. Twice in two pages he tells us that Lincoln was the
"first ever" assassinated president. He writes that the war
"climaxed to a close," that the U.S. Constitution was "quite
unique," that Lincoln was "rather unique," and that the Framers
were (take a deep breath, now) "boldly obliged to repudiate a political
axiom that had behind it the domineering authority" of Montesquieu. Whew.
Everything about which Winik writes seems to be the biggest, most important,
most earth-shattering, most significant…whatever. Sometimes it seems that
every other sentence should end with an exclamation point. Winik also has
several irritating writing tics, such as using "Unionists" and
"Union troops" synonymously.
The author also commits
serious errors of historical judgment and emphasis. He's overly critical of
Sherman and his policy of total war, making Sherman and his men seem little
better than Visigoths and (other than in his endnotes) overlooking much recent
scholarship on how carefully-calibrated and measured Sherman's waging of war
actually was. Sherman's men did not, for instance, "massacre able-bodied
males" in Atlanta or send "the city library and archives…up in
flames, for the sheer naked joy of it." Winik is also far too sympathetic
to the Southern view of secession and its consequences. Did secessionism have
earlier antecedents in New England than in the South? Certainly. Would an
objective historian find that the U.S. Constitution "appeared to be
largely on [the South's] side," and that Confederate secession was
"but one more thread of a very long, even honorable rope in American…
history"? Hardly. Winik consistently downplays the significance of
slavery as a root cause of the war, and grossly overstates the Confederate
leadership's willingness to free and arm slaves.
He also makes factual errors,
both large and small. The Jamestown settlers' ship in 1607 was the Susan
Constant, not the Sarah Constant. John Brown was not "summarily
executed," as Winik writes, but was convicted after a trial (whose
outcome was, to be sure, almost preordained). Simon Cameron was Lincoln's
first secretary of war, not of the treasury. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had
not been awarded the Medal of Honor by the time of the surrender at
Appomattox, and he was not a brigadier general then, but a brevet major
general. Benjamin Wade was a U.S. senator and not a congressman throughout the
Civil War. Salmon P. Chase, as chief justice, was not a member of Lincoln's
Cabinet. Winik misspells the names of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Secretary
of State William Seward and Confederate Sen. Robert Toombs. In his
acknowledgements the author thanks five people, by name, for proofreading his
manuscript, but errors like these make me wonder what else he got wrong that I
didn't even notice. Did Lincoln drop in on Gen. George Pickett's astonished
wife and infant while visiting Richmond? Did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton
actually tender his resignation to Lincoln in the last days of the war? Winik
says they did, but I've never read these things anywhere else, and I have
little confidence in the author's ability to get such details right.
In his celebration of
Southern heroes like Jefferson Davis, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and
Lee, Winik ignores those southerners like David Farragut, George Thomas, Sam
Houston and Andrew Johnson who remained loyal to the Union. He quotes
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and Lincoln to good effect,
however. During the Feb. 3, 1865 Hampton Roads conference aboard the steamer
River Queen, Stephens said, "Mr. President, if I understand you
correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that
we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights, and are
proper subjects for the hangman." To which Lincoln replied, "Yes…
that is about the size of it." Fortunately, the better angels of
Lincoln's nature led him away from any bloodthirsty retribution. The author
draws on his personal familiarity with the aftermath of far too many Third
World civil wars to show just how lucky we were that our own ended as well as
it did.
To give him his due, Winik
writes interesting, concise and largely accurate portraits of the major
figures of the war, and has a thoughtful chapter on those innovative figures
of postwar American society - Sam Clemens, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and
others - whose lives might have been cut short, or wastefully diverted, had
the war descended into a fratricidal guerilla war. He explores the evolution
of the law on presidential succession, correctly noting that Lincoln's
assassination and Andrew Johnson's assumption of power had the potential,
under the circumstances of the times, to lead to a debilitating constitutional
crisis. Winik writes in true Dickensian style, "April 1865 was marked by
tumult and bloodshed, heroism and desperation, freedom and defeat, military
prowess and diplomatic magnanimity, jubilation and sorrow, and, finally, by
individual and national agony and joy."
This is some of his best
writing, and his essential point is sound: April 1865 was a key month in
American history, when the national die was cast for many years to come. For a
far better exploration of the subject, however, I recommend Noah Andre
Trudeau's Out of the Storm (Little Brown 1994).
April 1865: The Month That Saved America
by Jay Winik
|
|
