Kevin Levin with his long-running Civil War Memory blog (currently on Substack with the name Grape & Canister) back in 2011 looked at the question of whether we should consider the Civil War tragic:
One way to explore this is to reflect on the very real possibility of the war coming to an end in the early summer of 1862. We know the drill: George McClellan’s massive army defeats Confederate General Joseph Johnston’s army outside of Richmond and within weeks the Confederacy surrenders. [Fill in the details however you choose.] In that event the war would have ended without emancipation. Under these conditions we can place into sharp focus the value that we assign the overall meaning of the war in connection to emancipation with the strong identification among millions of Americans with the preservation of the Union as the war’s greatest achievement.
Perhaps from this perspective the real tragedy is not that it took a war to end slavery, but that could have easily ended without emancipation. But if we are going to assign a tragic quality to the war perhaps we should consider locating it closer to how the Civil War generation viewed its outcome. In other words, we should be more willing to see the tragedy of the war in the failure to preserve the Union through peaceful means rather than a four-year bloody war. William Gienapp once framed this as America’s greatest “failure.” (1)
Tragedy in the classical Greek plays involved a hero pursuing what fate required him to do but destroying himself in the process.
In our understanding off the Civil War today, it would be hard to argue that it was tragic in that sense. The slaveowners could have recognized the demands of decent humanity and the democratic system meant doing away with slavery. Instead, they followed their own ideal of Southern Honor, created the Confederacy, and were destroyed.
But they were pursuing Fate in that undertaking. They were following pig-headedly the greed of the planter class that was willing to wreck they country and shed the blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans to preserve their system of human bondage – and the personal profit they made from it, of course.
There were certainly very many cases of personal tragedy, i.e., death and maiming, that came out of the war.
But we shouldn’t let the slaveowners who perpetrated the war off the hook by pretending they had no options or that there was anything noble in their pursuit of civil war and the destruction of the US government.
Addressing an earlier version of the Civil War as “tragedy,” Phillip Paludan described the problem with that view this way:
The Civil War did produce a brutal slaughter. Union dead of approximately 360,000, Confederate deaths almost equaling that figure; 275,175 Union wounded and perhaps an equal number of rebels wounded — these numbers are overwhelming. Lincoln as usual hit the mark when he said, "What I deal in is too vast for malice." More — the dead were not just numbers — they were fathers, husbands, sons and brothers. They represent the personal anguish of millions of survivors, dreams shattered, security destroyed, lives warped beyond comforting. More — these deaths cost the nation, not just the families — inventions, solutions, creations, alternatives were all ripped from a future which they might have ennobled.
But American Negro slavery, dead also in the war, was brutal on an even larger scale. Approximately four million men, women and children were enslaved as of 1860. And when we speak of slavery it is also not just numbers that are in question. Murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, the destruction of families and marriages took their daily toll, depriving children of love and examples, men and women of comfort and encouragement, all of them of pride and the full development of their humanity. These brutalities had been going on for two hundred years, afflicting six generations of an ever growing enslaved population. There is little reason to believe that slavery would not have gone on for generations to come if Toombs, Davis, and even Crittenden had had their way. The words Dante saw over the gate of Hell might also have been enscribed [sic] over the entrance to slavery, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." (2)
Notes:
(1) Levin, Kevin (2024): Was the Civil War Tragic? Civil War Memory 04/29/2011. <https://cwmemory.com/2011/04/29/was-the-civil-war-tragic/> (Accessed: 2024-13-04).
(2) Paludan, Phillip S. (1974): The American Civil War: Triumph through Tragedy. Civil War History 20:3, 239-250. <https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.1974.0008>
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