On May 23
and 24, 1865, Washington, D.C., witnessed a pageant the likes of which it neither had
seen before nor has seen since: marching 60 abreast, 150,000 victorious Union
troops paraded up Pennsylvania
Avenue, a throng
stretching 25 miles.
Writes Melinda
Lawson, visiting assistant professor of history, in her new book, Patriot
Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (University Press of Kansas): “The
symbolism was unmistakable: a far cry from the ragtag collection of local boys
who had presented themselves to their states for service in 1861, this
disciplined, orderly army, now marching in synchrony down the streets of the
country's capital represented the new American nation.”
Yet, she notes, not a single black regiment was included in this vast parade.
“The
marching white troops were occasionally accompanied by captured slaves or by
black pick-and-shovel brigades, but the nearly 180,000 black troops who saw
action in the war — men who might claim as much credit for the Union's victory
as the white soldiers present — were nowhere to be seen.”
In Lawson's
view, that absence was prophetic. The Civil War gave birth to a new nation —
but it did not produce the new birth of freedom envisioned in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Her book
explores the two distinct, even contrary, forces that joined together to
produce this new nation.
One
force was what Lawson calls “transcendent patriotism.” Resembling the European
variety that Alexis de Tocqueville had earlier found lacking in America, this was a highly emotional, even mystical, patriotism rooted
in tradition and history.
The other was a force that grew stronger over the course of the war but
ultimately proved much more fragile than transcendent patriotism. With
abolitionists its most prominent advocates, this was the force of ideas and
principles — freedom, equality, justice for all.
“American
nationalism is said to be rooted in an idea,” she writes. “The Civil War
exposed the fragility of the American idea as a basis of national unity. Thus,
agents of Civil War nation-building brought more European-style tools to their
task, depicting the nation in more traditional, historical, and cultural terms.”
Who were
these agents of Civil War nation-building? Lawson focuses principally on these:
— The
ladies who organized Sanitary Fairs in cities and town all across the country
to raise money for the Union's sick and wounded. The fairs were “a celebration of
nation unlike anything 19th-century Americans had ever seen.”
—
Financier Jay Cooke, whose agents blanketed the country selling war bonds —
and selling as well the notion of Washington as the people's banker, “a source of economic well-being.”
— The
Republican Party, which to a considerable extent succeeded in “conflat[ing]
Republicanism with loyalty and Democracy with treason.”
—
Metropolitan Union Leagues, the gentlemen's clubs in big Eastern cities that “brought
an embattled intellectual and professional elite together with powerful
business interests … to rally support for the Union and strengthen the
national state.”
—
Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale, whose 1863 short story “The Man without
a Country” became an instant best seller with its message that life without
allegiance to a nation is empty and meaningless.
Contributing
to the new sense of nationhood as well were the abolitionists, but their
approach to patriotism and national allegiance was of a different stripe. As
Lawson puts it, “For the abolitionists, the United States was not a nation
worth saving — or even a nation at all — until it lived up to the ideals it
had set forth in the Declaration of Independence.”
As the
war progressed, Lincoln came to view the struggle more and more in such terms. “Lincoln set out to restore the notion of American identity as
rooted in an idea,” Lawson writes. “Yet one of his most lasting contributions
lay in his death,” which in the post-war decades, she makes clear, carried an
emotional power far exceeding national dedication to the idea that all men are
created equal.
Still,
fragile though ideas and principles proved to be in that era, they remain an
element in American wars to the present, Lawson believes.
“The
kind of transcendent patriotism that the Civil War created gives our leaders
considerable leeway in their conduct of wars,” she says. “But, as we
learned in Vietnam, that doesn't amount to a blank check. In World War II,
sacrifice was sustained not only because of people's patriotism but because the
war was widely seen as furthering our national ideals. In Vietnam that proved not to be the case.”
Such
issues could arise in the war against terrorism, she adds, if the going gets
more difficult than it proved to be in Afghanistan.
Early in
Patriot Fires, Prof. Lawson
quotes an admonition of Judge Mellon of Pittsburgh to his newly enlisted son: “It is only greenhorns who
enlist. You can learn nothing in the army … In time you will come to
understand and believe that a man may be a patriot without risking his own life
or sacrificing his health.”
Comments
Lawson: “What an amazing statement at the outset of the bloodiest war in our
national history! What was it that made possible the tremendous sacrifice the
war came to entail? In large part it was the construction of transcendent
patriotism through the Sanitary Fairs, the Union Leagues, 'The Man without a
Country.' But in large part, too, it was the ideas promoted by the
abolitionists and their increasing importance to Lincoln. Although the new birth of freedom he envisioned was not
realized, that idea was embodied in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which
ultimately served as touchstones for egalitarian movements.
“Ideas
are fragile as a basis for nationhood,” she concludes. “But that doesn't mean
they don't count.”