Fateful Lightning

If the United States were a person, it would be suffering from schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, and this book explains why.

Allen Guelzo covers the history leading up to the American Civil War in considerable detail, placing the war in the context of evolving political, social and economic differences between the North and the South, and in particular the internal contradictions of Southern society that made it unable to live with the North, or even itself.

The national vision of the United States has been haunted by the horrendous visions of black slavery from the very beginning, and Guelzo argues that the uniquely racist slave society of the pseudo-aristocratic South was ultimately incompatible with the growing push toward a liberal, market-centric, democratic, industrial, “free-labor” republic in the North.

The war itself was, like all wars, not necessary to achieve anyone's goals. It was merely the worst of all possible solutions to the problems facing Americans in the mid-1800's, the one least likely to achieve its stated ends, and the most inefficient means available for the one single end it actually did achieve: the preservation of the United States as a single country. But for a nation that has always been led by men who hear the voice of God telling them to do terrible things, war was the easy option.

Guelzo does a good job of placing Emancipation in context, and emphasizes that most anti-slavery agitators were at best weakly supportive of civil and political rights for freedmen. His account of the war itself includes a nicely interwoven texture of social history along with the battles, and a lucid account of the political and personal gyrations that saw the numerically and financially superior North fight ineffectively and incoherently for the first several years of the conflict.

His account of Reconstruction is relatively short, as it practically must be. It is to all intents and purposes an event that is still going on as Americans continue to struggle with the trauma that layered itself on top of their national schizophrenia. Something close to one in ten young men died by violence and disease and malnutrition and neglect–those factors collectively known as “glory”–in the war years and after, and the larger social questions of racism, civil rights and political participation for all Americans are still not resolved, as modern political parties continue to gerrymander and pass “voter ID” laws that the manipulative operators who filled the void left by Lincoln's death would recognize as variations on their own theme.

Because when you hear the voice of God in your head telling you to do terrible things, the one thing you will never admit is that you were wrong to do them, or back down from your relentless pursuit of the goals they have directed you toward, regardless of the human cost.