The New Brenda Wineapple Book

By DAVID S. REYNOLDS

Published: August 9, 2013

So many histories of the Civil War era have been published that one would think writing another would be pretty much a matter of choosing a major political event — the Compromise of 1850, say, with its controversial Fugitive Slave Act — and then pressing cruise control. We drive on a familiar freeway that takes us through a deepening valley: the growing gulf between the North and the South during the 1850s. We view familiar scenery like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Then, suddenly, we encounter a multicar pileup: the Civil War.
ECSTATIC NATION



Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877



By Brenda Wineapple



722 pp. Harper. $35.

.It is indeed tempting to piece together a narrative where everything falls neatly into place or, even if it doesn’t, to imagine a sane resolution to the debate between antislavery and pro-slavery ideologues. A generation of historians known as the revisionists used their supposedly rational perspective to argue that the Civil War was “unnecessary,” caused by issues that could have been solved through reasoned discussion and political compromise. That view, which was vigorously challenged in the later decades of the 20th century, has made something of a comeback in recent years among those who contend that there must have been ways in which a war that killed approximately 750,000 Americans could have been averted. If we had only gone left, not right, on that freeway, we could have avoided the smashup.



In “Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877,” her splendid new history of the Civil War period, Brenda Wineapple takes us on a different ride. Think the Monaco Grand Prix: zigzagging, sometimes precipitous, with hairpin turns that slow you to a crawl followed by straightaways where you reach 200. Lincoln is there, of course, along with all the other major players, but the usual dichotomies are replaced by a kaleidoscope of outsize personalities, conflicting visions and unforeseen events.



In other words, Wineapple gives us history as it feels in real time: full of plans that backfire, schemes foiled by chance, outliers who suddenly change everything and happy endings that turn out to be not too happy after all. And, somehow, the whole untidy situation pushes us toward social progress. “Ecstatic Nation” is not a book with an overt agenda. Its message is delivered through its vivid portrayal of the human side of an era, following the roiling tides of emotions — erratic, shifting and ultimately overpowering.



Lincoln once confessed that he didn’t control events; they controlled him. But if he wasn’t in control, who was? Everyone, Wineapple demonstrates. Everyone in that tumultuous time.



Wineapple’s title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem about “A single Continent” where “One — is the Population— / Numerous enough — / This ecstatic Nation / Seek — it is Yourself.” The image reminds us of the importance of the individual in history. The nation is a motley assortment of individuals, and the individual is a mini-nation of selves. As Walt Whitman, the quintessential poet of American democracy, proclaimed in 1855, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”



All too often, Civil War histories are dominated by accounts of military strategy, party positions, social currents, economic trends and so on. While not ignoring such themes — indeed, her book is a reliable repository of factual information about the Civil War — Wineapple brings alive the vibrant, imperfect people behind the issues: not just the leaders in Washington and on the battlefield but the quixotic adventurers who tried to take over Cuba and Nicaragua, the pro-slavery hotheads, the fervent abolitionists, the poets, the showmen, the shysters and the spirit-­rappers who conversed with the dead. Ecstatic indeed.



With so many individuals bouncing off one another and gravitating to opposite sides of the slavery issue, small wonder that a blood bath resulted. Wineapple finds that, despite all sorts of political deals put on the table, polarized passions became an unstoppable force. By 1860, she writes, “a certain sense of inevitability” had overtaken the nation. “War seemed a foregone conclusion” because there was no “incentive to budge, to question one’s own righteousness, to create the grounds on which a compromise might occur.”



There were many bold efforts to challenge slavery. The Liberty Party in the 1840s tried politics, to no avail. Another method was to reject the government altogether. That was the choice of the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution, which he considered a pro-slavery document, and urged the North to secede from the South. Another strategy was Christian persuasion, the avenue taken by Harriet Beecher Stowe in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which showed the human side of enslaved people. Yet another was individual military action, taken by John Brown, who willingly gave his life in his holy war against slavery.



But all of these efforts, no matter how very different they were, led to slavery becoming ever more deeply entrenched in the reactionary South. One of the strengths of Wineapple’s book is it shows how moderates were inexorably sucked into the vortexes of the sectional passions that led to the war. She tells, for example, of Alexander Stephens, a temperate Georgia representative who in 1859 abandoned politics because he found himself, in his words, caught between two trains, each with a drunken engineer, headed on a collision course. Soon, however, Stephens was right back on the Southern train after being selected as the vice president of the Confederacy, which he extolled as a model society based on the “great physical, philosophical and moral truth” of the inferiority of blacks.



Efforts to ward off war, Wineapple makes clear, were as fruitless in the North as in the South. Lincoln rejected the incendiary tactics of abolitionists and carefully adhered to the principles of the nation’s founders. In 1858 he declared that war was not the solution to slavery, which he said might take as long as a century to disappear. But to his pro-slavery opponents Lincoln was just another devilish radical.



Wineapple relates the war and its aftermath with economy and power. The four-year conflict ended slavery but could not bring a lasting resolution to the race problem. Early in Reconstruction, blacks briefly gained political ascendancy in the South with the help of Northern pressure, but then complacency set in. By 1876, Reconstruction had collapsed, and Jim Crow was beginning to be put in place. In the North, many erstwhile abolitionists abandoned their former radicalism; the few who retained it, like Wendell Phillips, Lydia Maria Child and Frederick Douglass, became lonely prophets of a civil rights movement that would take nearly a century to rouse the nation’s conscience.



Wineapple makes good use of her gift — visible also in her other fine books on Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson — of communicating vast amounts of information in lively, cogent prose. She makes familiar historical figures seem fresh and unfamiliar ones seem vitally important. The result is a masterly, deeply moving record of a crucial period in American history.





David S. Reynolds is a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include “John Brown, Abolitionist” and “Mightier Than the Sword: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and the Battle for America.”