The civil war and American destiny

National Review, Nov 6, 1987 by Thomas (American writer) Fleming

THE CIVIL WAR AND AMERICAN DESTINY

JEFFERSON DAVIS once speculated that if the South lost the Civil War, its history would be written by Northerners. And Northern historians like George Bancroft did in fact do their best to establish an authoritative version of American history as the triumph of the Puritan ethic. Even more to the point were the sermons and patriotic speeches supplied by abolitionists who found themselves temporarily without a cause. In a centennial address given on July 4, 1876, Henry Ward Beecher declared that the Revolutionary generation had built a great nation but that his generation was building a greater. Beecher was in a position to know: a successful Boston minister, he was a leading supporter of progressive causes, including women's rights--although the purity of his feminism was somewhat tarnished when he was named a co-respondent in a famous divorce trial.

While a great many Unionists had been tepid abolitionists at best and would have despised all of Beecher's causes, the North's victory seemed to set a divine seal of approval upon the whole radical program of reform. Even cautious old soldiers were infected with the glorious vision:

The war begot a spirit of independence and enterprise. The feeling now is that a youth must cut loose from his old surroundings to enable him to get up in the world. There is now such a commingling of the people that particular idioms and pronunciation are no longer localized. . . . I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be a great harmony between the federal and the confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness of the correctness of this prophecy; but I feel within me that it is to be so.

This prophet of American destiny is Ulysses S. Grant, writing in the conclusion of his memoirs. More, perhaps, than anyone else, Grant was qualified to speak for the United States that was reborn from the national suicide. As commanding general, he had won the war; as President, he had set the tone for an entire generation of politicians; and in retirement he became one of many victims of the boisterous economic system he believed in.

Henry Adams described Grant as a typical American type: "inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money.' From the first, Adams had seen the weaknesses of Grant's Administration as a symptom of something seriously wrong with the commonwealth. Adams blamed the postwar "speculative mania'--and the corruption that went with it--on the war itself, and viewed the final decades of the nineteenth century as a spectacle of greed, vulgarity, and decadence. "Grant's Administration,' he wrote in his own memoirs, "wrecked men by thousands, but profited few. . . . One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the 25 years 1870 to 1895, and find little but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in results.'

Adams had good reason to be bitter. His people, the old Yankee stock, had created the United States--albeit with the help of a few Virginians and Carolinians. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been Presidents, and his father had played a distinguished part in foreign affairs. What is more, his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, had done more than any other man to make abolitionism a respectable cause, thereby inflaming the sectional hostilities that brought on the war.

But the war that should have swept the Adamses and their connections into power and ushered in a Yankee golden age had, instead, installed a new regime of speculators, stockjobbers, and robber barons--the people Owen Wister (a Philadelphia patrician) later described as "the yellow rich.' Every revolution brings new men into power, and old John Adams had been horrified by the vulgar and unprincipled Yankees who had got rich during the Revolution. But while John was willing to dirty himself in the political arena, his great-grandsons were men of a different stamp. With one exception, they kept out of the fray and devoted themselves to higher things. To exception was Charles Francis Adams Jr., a hardworking businessman who was president of the Union Pacific Railroad until he got skinned by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.

Like most of the best men of his time, Charles Francis was a nationalist. The war and its aftermath, he believed, had given the arrogant Southerns what they deserved, but it was time for a wider vision, for Grant's "great harmony.' Even Charles Francis's career in the railroads was more than an opportunistic venture, since he saw the new lines as "the most developing force' in the country and as a powerful instrument for uniting the sections.

SECTIONAL UNITY was a major theme in many postwar novels that featured beautiful rebel girls falling in love with Yankee officers. A generation later, the racial supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr. was plowing these old fields in novels like The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman. In The Clansman (the inspiration for D. W. Griffith's masterpiece, Birth of a Nation) Dixon even found good things to say about Lincoln.