Historian has new take on Civil War:
'Was this necessary?'
UNCC professor's new book 'America Aflame,' calls war an avoidable political failure.
War was not inevitable. But the prevailing political culture made it difficult to solve issues peaceably. The failure is evident in the deaths of over 620,000 young men, the misery of their families and friends left to mourn their loss, the destruction of homes and personal property, the uprooting of households, and the scenes of war haunting those who managed to live through it. Without gainsaying the individual heroism of those who fought and died, it would have been a greater tribute to our nation had they lived.
More info: www.davidgoldfield.us.
In his last book on the Civil War, David Goldfield caught flak from certain Southerners because he criticized those who mythologized the conflict as a courageous lost cause. Now the UNC Charlotte historian takes aim at the other side - the evangelical Christians of the North's Republican Party.
In his new book, "America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation" (Bloomsbury; $35), Goldfield describes the war not as a triumph of freedom but as America's biggest failure - a conflict that cost 620,000 American lives, the equivalent in today's population of 10 million people.
"The question I want readers to ask is, 'Was this necessary?'" Goldfield says.
Though many countries have abolished slavery, America, he says, was the only one to do it with a Civil War. "Was it all worth it?" he asks.
Certainly not in terms of money. For the $6.2 billion that the war cost, the nation could have freed the South's 4 million slaves, paid off their owners and given every former slave reparation wages and 40 acres of land.
"You could have done all this," he says, "without killing people."
As the Civil War's 150th anniversary approaches - Confederates fired on Charleston's Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 - publishers are releasing dozens of war-related works. In this crowded field, early reviews point to Goldfield's book as a standout.
Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal have all given starred reviews to the 640-page history, praising his writing, research and fresh perspective.
The book, which was published on Tuesday, will likely generate controversy, says Goldfield, who has written 16 books, most on Southern history.
"We've grown up thinking the war saved the Union and liberated 4 million human beings and it was good. I'm saying the results weren't as clear cut and there may have been a better way to achieve those results."
Publishers Weekly says that Goldfield "courts controversy by shifting more responsibility for the conflict to the activist North and away from intransigent slaveholders." Still, the review says, "he presents a superb, stylishly written historical synthesis that insightfully foregrounds ideology, faith and public mood."
Why did America resort to war? Goldfield points to the polarized political system.
Governments work best, he says, when they employ moderation and compromise. But the evangelical Christian wing of the Republican Party drove a wedge between Americans, he says.
Many evangelicals, including abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, saw slavery as a threat to democracy. They also saw Catholics as an equal or greater threat, a subversive group loyal to the pope, not America. They wanted to restrict immigration, toughen citizenship requirements and bar Catholics from holding office. (Abraham Lincoln condemned the anti-Catholic wing of his party.)
Evangelical Christianity's influence, Goldfield writes, "was everywhere in the political arena, in discussions about the West, about Roman Catholics, and especially about slavery. What was troubling about this religious immersion was the blindness of its self-righteousness, its certitude, and its lack of humility to understand that those who disagree are not mortal sinners and those who subscribe to your views are not saints."
That self-righteousness poisoned the political process, making compromise impossible, Goldfield says. "If you believe your opponent is not only wrong, but sinful, how can you compromise?"
Some readers may find modern-day parallels in Goldfield's work, as he discusses the problems of political polarization, mixing religion and politics and pursuing wars of choice rather than necessity. That wasn't his goal. "I had no personal contemporary ax to grind," he says. "But it turns out this book I wrote definitely speaks to what we're going through today in terms of the difficulty of finding a center."
Goldfield isn't arguing that the Civil War's death and destruction outweighed the good of abolition, "but there may have been other means to achieve that noble end."
Still, he says he has long found it annoying that the South is always "depicted as the evil empire, and the North was the republic of virtue."
In fact, he says, many Northerners had great reservations about abolishing slavery.
"My book is neither pro-southern nor pro-northern," Goldfield writes. "It is anti-war, particularly the Civil War."
pkelley@charlotteobserver.com.
