A Disease in the Public Mind: A
New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War. By Thomas Fleming. Da
Capo. $26.99.
If there is one bit of
history that Americans, who are notoriously ahistorical people, believe they
truly know and understand, it is the Civil War. It was freedom vs. slavery,
union vs. division, federal rights vs. states’ rights. Correct? Yet although it
was all of those things, it was also a great deal more – and a great deal more
complicated than most people know or are ever taught in school.
Thomas Fleming has done a
genuine service in writing A Disease in
the Public Mind, even though the book is unlikely to be widely enough read
or widely enough adopted by academics to have a significant impact on
widespread misperceptions about the Civil War or, as it is still called in much
of the South, the War Between the States. Entrenched beliefs about the
conflict, the bloodiest in American history because all its casualties were, at
least retrospectively, American (rather than deemed Union and Confederate and
kept separate), are too deeply held to be amenable to change, even by a book as
thoroughly researched and well-written as this one. And the unlikelihood of
changing attitudes actually makes sense in its own peculiar way, since by the
time of the Civil War, beliefs of Northerners about Southerners, and vice versa,
were already so deeply held that conflict was well-nigh inevitable.
Take, for example, the
seemingly innocent point of pride of the state of Virginia, which calls itself
the “mother of presidents.” Eight U.S. chief executives were born in the state,
but with the exception of Woodrow Wilson, all were president before the Civil
War: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William
Henry Harrison, John Tyler and Zachary Taylor. Far from being the rather
innocuous distinction that it is today, this preponderance of Virginian presidents
in the first half of the 19th century was a significant contributor
to the bad blood between North and South, with New Englanders believing that
their Puritan approach to government had been hijacked by Southerners hostile
to their entire way of life.
Conflicts like this one, perceptions
like this one, became so deeply embedded in government and civic dialogue in
the 19th century that they had become insuperable barriers to mutual
understanding by the time of the Civil War itself. This is the sort of
exploration and analysis that Fleming does so very well in A Disease in the Public Mind. He also does a superb job of putting
figures, well-known and less-known, in proper context, turning them into fuller
human beings than the cardboard characters that they, even when their names are
known to all, generally become in history books. Thus, Fleming points out that
the slave Dred Scott, whose case led to the infamous Dred Scott decision by the
Supreme Court (the ruling said Scott, as a slave, was not a citizen and could
not bring a case in federal court), was freed by his owners – together with his
entire family – three months after the decision. Newspaper editor Horace
Greeley, often identified as a major source calling for war in his virulently
anti-slavery New York Tribune, was in
fact horrified at the prospect of war but was outmaneuvered by his firebrand
managing editor, Charles Dana. Southern fears of a murderous slave revolt,
dismissed as nonsense by Northerners, were not only real but also justified in
light of events in Santo Domingo (Haiti) and the 1831 Nat Turner uprising that
was overtly based on events there. Former President John Tyler tried hard to
help avoid civil war by attempting to arrange a peace conference in 1861 – but
when President Lincoln said no, Tyler called for Virginia’s secession.
A Disease in the Public Mind is filled with information like this,
in small matters and large, and is consistently fascinating in the new
dimensions it brings to historical figures whom readers may think they know but
in fact understand only imperfectly. The discussion of the Louisiana Purchase,
with its insights into the motivations of both Napoleon and President
Jefferson, is all by itself an extraordinary exploration by Fleming, especially
in connection with his discussion of Jefferson’s supposed favoritism toward
France in the early-19th-century conflicts between France and
England – events that led to an embargo that in turn caused tremendous hardship
in New England and further convinced residents of the area that Southerners did
not have the North’s best interests in mind. And this was 50-plus years before
Fort Sumter.
One of the most remarkable
effects of Fleming’s book, although it is scarcely the book’s primary intent,
is to show that the North-South conflicts, great and small, that persist to
this day, are not caused by a small band of recidivists wishing vainly for a
return to a glorious Southern past that was in fact built on a culture of abuse
and brutality. Fleming, indeed, exposes the venality and serious shortcomings
of many abolitionists – problems of which Lincoln himself was well aware. The
Civil War was a climactic event in a multigenerational saga of conflict,
misunderstanding and outright hatred between different parts of the country, areas
settled by very different people under very different circumstances. The war actually
exacerbated many underlying issues rather than settling them; and while it did
lead to the end of slavery through the 13th Amendment, it did not do
so through the Emancipation Proclamation, which applied only to slaves within
the Confederacy – where Lincoln at the time had no power and his proclamation
no legal authority. Americans who read A
Disease in the Public Mind will see their country and what was, for many,
its defining conflict, in a very different way from the typical one, and will
understand that the book’s title refers to an illness that neither the Civil
War, nor the peace afterwards, nor the intervening century and a half, has completely
cured.
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