It was mid-January, 1862, and a Baltimore dentist was writing grudgingly to his clergyman brother, first to congratulate him on the birth of a son, and then to chide him for his hostility to the administration of Abraham Lincoln. Yes, Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoned civilians without trial. Yes, he had called out federal troops and imposed blockade without Congressional sanction. Yes, he had confiscated Southern slave “property.” But “when Mr. Lincoln came into office,” Dr. Hervey Colburn explained to brother Edward, “he found an empty Treasury … a mere handful of men in the army, & no amount of arms or ammunition. Everything must be commenced anew, and no money to pay with. Commerce, & trade generally, [were] gone.” The Confederates, who had been concocting” secession “for ten years” (and with the connivance of the British government, no less), had arranged to have “the largest quantities of arms & ammunition” shipped from federal arsenals to the South so that “when the rebellion broke out it was found that almost all of the arms … were in the seceded states.” What on earth did Edward expect Lincoln would do? Send a police constable to arrest Jefferson Davis? “Look at the circumstances under which [Lincoln] came into office,” Hervey Colburn pleaded, “and if he were not possessed of much talent, & great decision of character, we should have been completely broken down months ago.” [1]
William Marvel might have done well to consider Dr. Colburn’s letter as he was contemplating the first two volumes in a projected four-volume history of the Civil War, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War and Lincoln’s Darkest Year: The War in 1862. The titles, to begin with, are misleading: Mr. Lincoln Goes to War is a book about 1861, the first year of the Civil War, and Lincoln actually plays a comparatively small role; Lincoln’s Darkest Year devotes the bulk of its attention, not to the war in 1862, but to rising tides of war-weariness and disgruntlement. Neither offers a comprehensive history of the first two years of civil war; neither gives more than token attention to the war in the west. Lincoln Goes to War focuses mostly on North, and is composed of a loosely connected set of disastrous, and somewhat disjointed, Union battle scenarios, from the improvised defense of the District of Columbia in late April, through First Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek, and ending up with Ball’s Bluff. (In fact, fully a third of the book is about Ball’s Bluff and its aftermath, which is curious, given the fact that Ball’s Bluff was little more than a brigade-sized armed reconnaissance across the Potomac.)
Nevertheless, even if Lincoln is not the main character that the titles imply, he is still William Marvel’s culprit-inchief, for it is Marvel’s belief that the entire string of Union failures which he chronicles in these two volumes are to be laid at the doorstep of Lincoln’s bungling. That the war occurred at all is the first proof of Lincoln’s fault. Lincoln chose to handle the crisis over Ft. Sumter “aggressively rather than diplomatically,” and ended up “provoking war to assure the dominance of federal authority.” It was a mistake he compounded by calling on the states for 75,000 state militia to suppress the rebellion, a demand which drove the Union-loving states of the upper South into the arms of the Confederacy. Lincoln might have lost Washington itself, were it not for the labors of old General Winfield Scott and the man who emerged as his chief assistant, Col. Charles P. Stone, both of whom successfully recruited a scratch force to protect the capital until Northern state troops could arrive. When they did arrive, unhappily, most of those troops turned out to be either sky-larkers who had no understanding of what they had enlisted for, or unemployed workingmen who were driven to the recruiting offices by hard economic times. “Patriotism may have played a part in drawing some of the older, unattached men,” while the “youthful” signed up for “travel and adventure,” but the Union forces were predominantly the reserve army of the proletariat. Once they do get a clear view of what the war is like, they can hardly wait to abandon it.
But the indictment doesn’t end with simple incompetence: Lincoln quickly becomes guilty of the far greater crime of subverting the Constitution. Lincoln imposed “severe repression” of basic civil liberties; rushed to invade Virginia on May 24, 1861 with “a medieval disregard for individual rights”; licensed Nathaniel Lyon, an “insubordinate, self-righteous psychopath,” to break up a neutrality the federal department commander; and allowed an incompetent political appointee to march an army of drunken hoodlums down to Bull Run, where the Confederate army handily sent them fleeing in panic and desertion. He bestows an irrational favoritism on Ulysses S. Grant, who “had fallen into every unforgiveable mistake a commander could make” at Shiloh, and probably owed his victories at Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson more to “the gallantry of his men than … his own sound management.” Throughout these two dreary years, Unionists act “hypocritically” as “mobs” bent on “curbing free expression,” the Lincoln administration descends into “tyranny,” and the Confederates appear “less as an army of rebels than as a posse of aggrieved citizens” whose love for the Union was only overmatched by “the spirit of independence that had driven the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.” Not until the Confederacy introduces conscription and compulsory re-enlistment can it be said that Jefferson Davis, fully as much as Abraham Lincoln, “broke faith with soldiers” and betrayed “a culture steeped in the doctrine of personal liberty.”
The most damaging proof of Lincolnian perfidy is the debacle at Ball’s Bluff, or rather the unhappy fate of Charles P. Stone, who commanded the federal division whose units were so roughly handled there on October 21, 1861. Despite Stone’s energetic safe-guarding of Washington that spring, and despite the evidence that the failure at Ball’s Bluff was largely due to the inexperience of the officer in charge, Col. Edward Dickinson Baker, and the confused signals sent by army commander George B. McClellan, Stone was fingered as the man responsible. The fingering came all the more easily since Stone was a Democrat who had aggravated Radical Republicans in Congress by dutifully returning runaway slaves to their masters below the Potomac. The war—at least in 1861— was not about freeing slaves, nor did Stone show much enthusiasm for a war which would. By December, irritated Republican members of Congress were demanding an investigation of Stone, and in February, it led to his arrest and imprisonment—without charges—for more than six months. [2] The order for Stone’s arrest came from McClellan, but for Marvel, it really came from “a government that had dispensed with the rule of law.” [3]
But the perfidy does not stop there. Lincoln creates “fragmented departments largely to satisfy the dignity of influential politicos who never should have worn major generals’ stars in the first place,” and thus opens serve to “prolong” the war. Meanwhile, competent officers deluge “headquarters clerks … processing thick sheaves of resignations” in order to get away from the madness. Options of this sort were unavailable to the enlisted men, however, who could only fill their letters home with pleas to friends and siblings not to follow them into the army. For “thewealthy, military service remained an amusing fantasy”; to the unemployed, it was the lesser of two evils; to the men in the ranks, the army meant high rates of mortality—and impoverishment and starvation for the families they left behind. Through it all, Lincoln relentlessly tramples down every barrier to total control. He federalizes the state militia, permits the secretary of war “unilaterally”to abolish freedom of speech, then tries to shift responsibility for the disappointing course of affairs onto God for having “orchestrated the confrontation that pened the struggle.” The Emancipation Proclamation gets a grand total of five pages, liberally sprinkled with asides which indict Lincoln as “either vacillating or sly for openly reneging on his best-known campaign promise.”
If, by this point, anyone has begun noticing how easy it would be to substitute Iraq for the Confederacy and George W. Bush for Abraham Lincoln, they would not be missing something, since the rage that is palpably spread across the pages of these books seems to have a much closer source than events a century-and-a-half old. Born and bred in New Hampshire, William Marvel served unhappily in Vietnam in 1968-71, and came back to the Granite State to graduate from Keane State College and take up the life of a free-lancewriter. He first turned his hand to Civil War history books in 1985, with a brief history of the 1st New Hampshire Light Artillery, published by a small local press. Three years later, he turned out another, and much larger, history of a New Hampshire infantry regiment for Broadfoot Publishing, a small North Carolina reprinter of Civil War reference works, and in 1989 he co-authored The Horrid Pit, a study of the disastrous Battle of the Crater (July 30, 1864) in another low-budget publication series, H.E. Howard’s Virginia Regimentals. Even so, The Horrid Pit easily stood out as the best-written volume of the series. [4]
Marvel’s door-buster publication was a February, 1991, article for the popular magazine Blue and Gray, in which he meticulously exposed as falsehoods the claims made in the 1950s by a handful of centenarians to be the “last” living veterans of the Civil War. [5] In the same year as the Blue and Gray article, Marvel published Burnside with the University of North Carolina Press, and turned conventional interpretations of the unhappy and unsuccessful Ambrose Burnside on their heads by arguing that the modest and generous general had been made into a scapegoat for the failures of a long string of Union worthies—George McClellan, William Franklin, Henry Halleck, William Farrar Smith, and eventually Ulysses Grant. This was debunking in reverse: Burnside became the symbol for Marvel of a competent and humane officer whose reputation was destroyed by glory-hunters and back-stabbers. “It is now time to set aside the bias,” Marvel told a Civil War Round Table that I attended in October of 1991. And it is a measure of how much Marvel had come to see debunking—and re-bunking—as the personal crusade of an “authentic” veteran that he concluded his presentation that night by assuring us that Burnside “would have done the same for us.”
Marvel’s passion for the exposure of hypocrisy in military places led him to three further books for UNC Press—Andersonville: The Last Depot (1994), A Place Called Appomattox (2000), and Lee’s Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox (2002) —and with each, Marvel drew the circle of what he considered admissible historical evidence ever tighter, even as he expanded the size of his targets. The tall tales of the veteranimposters which he exploded in 1991 imparted an abiding suspicion of the vast outwash of postwar memoirs and recollections that Civil War military history was mostly written from, and led Marvel to confine himself almost exclusively to original letters and diaries of the war years, before illusion, consensus, and controversy had beclouded memory. In Lee’s Last Retreat, Marvel dismissed as hopelessly tainted by post-war romanticism anything but letters, reports, or diaries written immediately after the events of Lee’s desperate flight from Petersburg and the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865. This allowed him to tread heavily on the toes of neo-Confederate worshippers of Lee’s brave but hopeless little band, overwhelmed by Northern numbers and technology rather than actually defeated by Northern soldiers or generalship. To the contrary, Marvel found that Lee’s army began falling into demoralized pieces as soon as it bolted from the Petersburg entrenchments, deserting in droves or surrendering limply along the retreat route as fast as hard-marching Yankees could scoop them up.
But Lee’s Last Retreat also made it clear—clearer even than his plea-bargaining for Ambrose Burnside—that Marvel’s dedication to undressing historical inventions had begun to involve more than disinterested historical detection. In an April 2004 article in the online magazine Intervention, Marvel linked the myths of Appomattox to a larger pattern of right-wing myth-making that characterized all of American history. “The same misrepresentation crops up in all aspects of our history,” Marvel wrote. “Much of the American Revolution, for instance, was undertaken more by self-interested demagogues and the mobs they incited than by altruistic patriots,” while “the Indian wars and the Spanish American War amounted to nothing but thieving expeditions conducted on the excuse of imaginary provocations.” And inevitably Vietnam made its appearance, too: “Our government turned Vietnam’s civil war into our Vietnam War on the strength of a similarly fictional attack in the Tonkin Gulf.”
Not that any of this surprised Marvel. The real problem has been with the American people themselves, who beg for a diet of historical myths about themselves which a conspiratorial cabal are happy to anesthetize them with. “The truly amazing thing about Americans is that they still fall for it every time.” We “believe the phalanx of expensively clad liars who sanitize the theft of a presidential election, or disguise the real motives behind the latest war of the rich against the poor.” [6] In 2003, he drove to Washington to join in one of the early anti-Iraq War demonstrations, and in 2004, he attacked the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for “malicious dishonesty and political motivation,” comparing their campaign ads about John Kerry to the post- Civil War campaign of Jubal Early to denigrate James Longstreet. [7]
Conspiracy theorists come a good dimea- dozen in American culture. But almost all of the theories eventually die a death of public embarrassment, partly because they simply impute too much causal power to the suspected conspiracies, but partly because conspiracy theories eventually escalate to the point where the theorists lose all sense of common proportion, and with it all sense of common believability. And that, to judge by Mr. Lincoln Goes to War, is what has happened to William Marvel, all of which brings me back to the point Dr. Colburn tried to make to his brother during that first bleak winter of the Civil War.
Was Lincoln really conspiring to provoke an unnecessary war so that he could broaden the powers of the federal government, stamp out civil liberties, and achieve a dictatorial sway over the American people? Let us suppose that Lincoln had not called out the militia, not suspended the writ, not arrested the delegates of the Maryland legislature who were agitating for Maryland to join the Confederacy, and not authorized federal officers to use whatever means possible to hold Kentucky and Missouri for the Union. What would have been the result? Marvel believes that if Kentucky and Missouri had been allowed to join the Confederacy, the actual result would have been negligible—which is preposterous. A prospect of a Confederacy which controlled the Mississippi fromtl Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans was not some Lincolnian invention to justify a needless war; it was the nightmare which had haunted American foreign policy ever since the Burr conspiracy. And a Confederacy that also controlled the Ohio and Missouri rivers would put out of federal military reach any access to the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, the great invasion highways eventually used by the Union in 1862. It also goes without saying that if the legislature of Maryland—whose principal city, Baltimore, had been the site of both a plot to assassinate Lincoln and a mob attack on Union troops—had dragged Maryland into the Confederacy, the United States capital would have had to be abandoned.
Or suppose that Lincoln had stood aside numbly and “let the erring sisters depart in peace” (to borrow Horace Greeley’s advice). Given the example of the Latin American republics, there was no guarantee that secession would stop with the Confederacy. In short order, the old Northwest, or the West Coast, might stage their own secessions, and the result would be a balkanized continent of weakened, postage-stamp republics, caught up in minor-league trade wars (and shooting wars) and easily manipulated by the great imperial powers of Europe. Of course, none of those things happened. But that is not the same thing as supposing that theycould not have happened, and in the spring of 1861, Lincoln didn’t have the luxury of waiting to see whether they would.
Not, at least, if Lincoln took his constitutional oath at all seriously. “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government,” he warned the secessionists in his First Inaugural, “while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.” Lincoln understood the oath as imposing on him a “duty … to administer the present government, as it came to his hands, and to transmit it, unimpaired by him, to his successor,” and not, in the midst of a national emergency, to worry how the jurists were going to score him on his sensibilities toward the rights of rebellious states. It seemed to Lincoln absurd that “all the laws” were to be overthrown by the rebels, while “the government itself” should “go to pieces” as it decided whether it could defend itself. [8] When the building is burning, one does not ask how much respect should be shown to company property before putting out the fire. “We have,” said Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in 1917, “a fighting Constitution,” and the least it ought to be allowed is a chance to fight for its own life. [9]
Even so, if Lincoln’s actions were the work of conspiracy, it was a conspiracy which had little in the way of evil to show, since the Lincoln administration turned out to be surprisingly mild in dealing with its dissidents. As Mark Neely showed in 1991, the estimates of military arrests made under the Lincoln administration were wildly exaggerated—in fact, the total arrests probably amounted to no more than 13,535, by Neely’s reckoning—and of those, vanishingly few actually involved political dissenters. By far, the bulk of Lin-coln’s military detentions were of what we today might call “enemy combatants”— British nationals crewing blockade-runners, smugglers, draft rioters, guerrillas—as well as corrupt war contractors, deserters, and bounty-jumpers. If anything, Lincoln once remarked, people were more likely to look back on the Civil War and wonder why he didn’t exercise the presidential war powers with a harder hand: “I think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.”10
But Marvel could not disagree more. If, as Marvel asked in a 2006 article for the New Hampshire Gazette, secession had “Balkanized the United States into half a dozen regional republics … would that necessarily have been bad?” There would have been no jingoistic adventures in Cuba or Hawaii in the 1890s, no American Expeditionary Kaiser (which, for Marvel, means that “the Great War might have ended in a more equitable peace, rather than in the crippling capitulation that impoverished Germany and fostered the rise of the Nazi Party”), and “no American naval base at Pearl Harbor, or American garrisons at Manila, Midway, or Wake Island to worry and antagonize an increasingly jealous Japan.” Thus Marvel, with all the insight ofan earnest freshman radical, really canbelieve two world wars were really the insidious fault of the United States, andthat “the world might be a better place had the United States divided in two in 1861.” Hugo Chavez could scarcely have put it better. [11]
The Civil War was not a question of whether the North American continent could sustain one or two or five republics, but whether the democratic political process embodied in the Constitution is so inherently feeble that any interest group within it can walk off purely on its own, or purely by threat of force destroy that process, whenever the results disappoint them. It was not merely about maintaining the territorial viability of a particular nationstate, but about whether the idea of democracy which that nation-state was built around was, in fact, a tragic mistake in the history of human ideas.
What Marvel forgets is that, in 1861,the United States was virtually the onlysuccessful, large-scale democracy in the world … that ever since the Congress of Vienna, and especially since the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, reactionary aristocracies had been on the upswing, and nothing would have made them happier than to point out to their subjugated nations how much more unstable democracies were … that three expanding empires were already perched on America’s borders, one of which had tried to suborn Texas in the 1840s while another was in the process of overthrowing Benito Juarez’s Mexican republic (the same Mexico which Lincoln had struggled in vain as a Congressman to prevent being invaded by James Knox Polk).
There was a vast difference in Lincoln’s mind—a vast difference, for that matter, in simple dictionary definition—between wars of unilateral foreign intervention, and a war to suppress an unconstitutional slavery-protecting insurrection at home. Much as he admired and supported Louis Kossuth in 1848, Lincoln did not think that “we may legally or warrantably interfere abroad” to promote regime change, even against despotic and tyrannical regimes; rather, “we should at once announce to the world, our determinations to insist upon this mutuality of non intervention, as a sacred principle of the international law.” But he could not ignore armed rebellion against a lawfully elected civil government: “A nation which endures factious domestic division, is exposed to disrespect abroad; and one party, if not both, is sure, sooner or later, to invoke foreign intervention.” [12] Had Lincoln failed to act, and act decisively, the critical example of the American republic would have become an object lesson in the nworkability of all republics. “The central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy,” Lincoln said, and the Civil War would become the living proof of whether or not popular government was inevitably doomed to descend into anarchy or to despotism.” [13] It was not Mr. Lincoln that went to war in 1861, so much as the very idea of democratic government. Why is it that William Marvel seems to think it would have been better had both lost?
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of the Civil War Era Studies program at Gettysburg College.
1. Dr. Hervey Colburn to Rev. Edward Colburn (January 16, 1862), Civil War Collection Ms. 1860, Maryland Historical Society.
2. Just how much Stone’s hostility to the Republicans may have contributed to his downfall is recounted in Stephen Sears’ “The Ordeal of General Stone,” in Controversies and Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
3. To determine whether Lincoln was really “dispensing” with the “rule of law,” Marvel might have consulted the extant Supreme Court decisions on presidential war power in Martin v. Mott (1827) and Luther v. Borden (1849), which affirmed that “the authority to decide” whether a wartime emergency justified the use of “discretionary power” belongs “exclusively to the President.”
4. The full title was The Petersburg Campaign: The Battle of the Crater, “The Horrid Pit,” June 25-August 6, 1864.
5. “The Great Imposters,” Blue and Gray Magazine (February 1991), pp. 12-15.
6. “From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to Vietnam to Iraq, the Propaganda Machine Has Rewritten Reality and Molded Opinion,” at interventionmag.com, April 11, 2004. In March 2009, the interventionmag.com site was no longer accessible; a note said its domain had expired.
7. “Vets March and Teach in Washington” at Veterans Against the Iraq War (vaiw.org, April 2, 2003), and “An Honorable Soldier Became the Target of a Coordinated Campaign by Partisan Veterans to Destroy his Reputation: Before John Kerry It Was James Longstreet” at interventionmag.com, August 14, 2004.
8. Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address—Final Version” (March 4, 1861) and “First Inaugural Address–First Edition and Revisions,” in Collected Works (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953), 4:261, 265, 270, 271; and “Message to Congress in Special Session” (July 4, 1861), in C.W., 4: 426, 429, 430, 438, 440.
9. Clinton Rossiter, The Supreme Court and the Commander in Chief, ed. R.P. Longacker (Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), p. 7.
10. Mark Neely, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 133-137, 167-174; Lincoln, “To Erastus Corning and Others (June 12, 1863), in C.W., 6:265.
11. “Manifest Doom,” New Hampshire Gazette (February 24, 2006).
12. Lincoln, “Resolutions in Behalf of Hungarian Freedom” (January 9, 1852) and “Annual Message to Congress” (December 3, 1861), in C.W., 2:115, 5:36.
13. Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address,” in C.W., 4:256.
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