In his WaPo column yesterday, David Ignatius enlists eminent Princeton Civil War historian James McPherson to teach us all “Lessons for Iraq From Gettysburg.” These “lessons” are far more opaque, contradictory, and confusing than anything I believe Prof. McPherson would sign his name to in print.
Before proceeding, however, let me repeat something I wrote earlier, here, before criticizing a defense of racial preferences by Prof. McPherson.
Let me say first that I have enormous respect for Prof. McPherson, based in part (but only in part) on personal experience. Many years ago, in a former life, as a privileged “Visiting Fellow” at Princeton, I taught precepts (sections) in Prof. McPherson’s course on the Civil War and Reconstruction. He’s a fine scholar and a fine man, and his comments on affirmative action deserve attention, if for no other reason than that they are almost universally shared in the upper reaches of academia and elsewhere. They do not, however, deserve assent.
I would be tempted to repeat (or re-repeat) that last sentence, except that in Mr. Ignatius’s column it is not possible to distinguish Prof. McPherson’s views from those of Mr. Ignatius, although in a moment I will mention one other possible clue to Prof. McPherson’s views on war and reconstruction in Iraq.
Ignatius begins:
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — The most famous battlefield of the American Civil War might seem an unlikely place to look for lessons about Iraq. But as historian James McPherson leads a group of Pentagon officials in a discussion of postwar reconstruction, some startling common themes emerge….
To prepare for the discussion, McPherson guided the Army generals and Pentagon civilians along the rocky slope of Little Round Top to where the 20th Maine volunteers launched the mad bayonet charge that saved the Union army’s flank, and then to the open field where Confederate Gen. George Pickett made his disastrous charge against the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge. After walking the battlefield, McPherson and the group explored what happened when the war ended — and the intriguing parallels between postwar Iraq and the postwar South.
The first of those “startling common themes” and “intriguing parallels” mentioned by Ignatius is one that many historians (I suspect most historians, if they weren’t being asked to draw parallels to Iraq) would challenge:
The Civil War, like the invasion of Iraq, was a war of transformation in which the victors hoped to reshape the political culture of the vanquished.
The “victors,” of course had many hopes, not one, and these hopes were often contradictory and inconsistent. That may seem like a quibble, but the fact is that by far most of the “victors” had no such visionary hope to transform the “political culture” of the South. They hoped to eliminate slavery, to be sure, which they saw as the basic cause of the sectional conflict, but beyond that they agreed on little. (In fact, even that desire was considerably attenuated, inasmuch as Lincoln and others would have been willing to guarantee the continued existence of slavery where it already existed.) There were far more “victors” whose opposition to slavery was rooted in a racist desire to remove the reason for blacks to immigrate to the North than there were radicals like Thaddeus Stevens who wanted to convert the South into an idealized version of New England democracy.
Stevens and his few abolitionist and radical supporters may have wished “to reshape the political culture of the South,” just as their neo-abolitionist sympathizers today, such as Ignatius, wish that they had done so, but they did not. What the “victors” accomplished was precisely what most of them set out to accomplish, which was to prevent the Southern states from leaving the Union, and eradicating the institution that had caused them to try to leave.
The comparison that I’m sure most interested the Pentagon was not to Northern war aims but to Reconstruction, and here the “lessons” become relevant even as their content becomes more confusing:
… as McPherson tells the story, reconstruction posed severe and unexpected tests: The occupying Union army was harassed by an insurgency that fused die-hard remnants of the old plantation power structure with irregular guerrillas. The Union was as unprepared for this struggle as the Coalition Provisional Authority was in Baghdad in 2003. The army of occupation was too small, and its local allies were often corrupt and disorganized.
There was even a false dawn (like today?).
For a time, it still seemed that reconstruction might work. “In 1870 things looked pretty good — if not rosy, at least optimistic,” says McPherson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1988 narrative, “Battle Cry of Freedom.” A black man was serving in the U.S. Senate and Northerners were investing in what they believed would be a new South.
But this apparent progress proved illusory, and short-lived.
But the insurgency was potent and took more than 1,000 lives. Along with the Ku Klux Klan, there were underground groups such as the White Brotherhood and the Knights of the White Camellia, determined to preserve the old regime’s power. White insurgents staged bloody riots in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. The rebels also drew support from the remnants of irregular Confederate units such as Quantrill’s Raiders, which produced the outlaws Frank and Jesse James. “It was a matrix of lawlessness,” says Oregon law professor Garrett Epps, who chronicles the period in a forthcoming book, “Second Founding.”
The poison that destroyed reconstruction was racial hatred. The white elite managed to convince poor whites that newly freed blacks were their enemies, rather than potential allies. There’s an obvious analogy to the Sunni-Shiite divide that has poisoned postwar Iraq. In the South, the die-hard whites began to believe that if they held tough, the North would abandon the campaign to create a new, multiracial South. And it turned out they were right.
By 1877, says McPherson, the North essentially gave up. Demoralized by the economic depression of 1873, Northern investors pulled back from projects in the South and turned their attention to the West. The troops occupying the South were withdrawn. White Southerners, defeated in war, had won the peace. The South slipped into more than 80 years of racism, isolation and economic backwardness.
These comparisons are interesting, even clever, but reading them, and then re-reading them, I kept wanting to ask Ignatius only one question: “And your point is … ?”
Here’s as close as Ignatius comes to an answer:
First, what you do immediately after the end of hostilities is crucial, and mistakes made then may be impossible to undo. Don’t attempt a wholesale transformation of another society unless you have the troops and political will to impose it. Above all, don’t let racial or religious hatred destroy democratic political institutions as in the post-bellum South. Giving up on reconstruction led to a social and economic disaster that lasted nearly a century. That’s a history nobody should want to repeat, least of all the Iraqi insurgents.
But what is he saying here? Since the clear implication is that we have bungled Reconstruction in Iraq, is Ignatius, is McPherson, saying we should not have waged war in Iraq? Since McPherson signed the historians’ petition against President Bush’s pre-war policies discussed here and here, that may well be the “lesson” they would like us to learn. Profs. Joyce Appleby and Ellen DuBois, the organizers of that petition, wrote in Newsday and the Los Angeles Times that a U.S. attack on Iraq “would violate every principle this country has stood for.” That statement, and others like it, were not in the petition itself, but it is unlikely that many signers disagreed with the view it expressed.
But if the “lesson” is that alleged post-war bungling means we should have stayed out of Iraq (and Afghanistan?), doesn’t the “social and economic disaster” that was our Reconstruction then mean that our Civil War was a mistake as well, that those transformation-desiring Union soldiers should have stayed home?
Since I know Prof. McPherson doesn’t believe that, and I doubt that Mr. Ignatius does, the meaning of those “Lessons for Iraq From Gettysburg” is not at all clear.
ADDENDUM
For other Civil War analogies, see here and here (note well the fool referred to therein who in fact did argue that the Union soldiers should have stayed home). On war aims of the Civil War victors, see here.
“But if the “lesson” is that alleged post-war bungling means we should have stayed out of Iraq (and Afghanistan?), doesn’t the “social and economic disaster” that was our Reconstruction then mean that our Civil War was a mistake as well, that those transformation-desiring Union soldiers should have stayed home?
There is the difference that the traitors in the south started the war and were violating northern independence with their fugitive slave laws. Ie. They actually had the evil we were trying to eliminate.
But I don’t see the link saying that because we have bungled we should not have gone in. I think it says that because we have gone in we should not bungle.
The fugitive slave laws were a cause of the war, but not a major cause.
I think the statement “they actually had the evil we were trying to eliminate” refers to WMD, which of course was a cause of the Iraqi war, but again just one of many. As to possessing the “evil we were trying to eliminate”, look at the graves of young children, the abuse of oil for food, the support of terrorist suicides, and ask if this was ever going to end.
The link between allegedly bungling reconstruction and not going in is (to me) very clear in the article, and in the known symppathies of the writers.
I’ll tell you one thing about Ignatius, at least he compares the insurgents with southern racists, unlike many others who compared them to minutemen and patriots, and openly hoped that they would win.
Dom
“As to possessing the “evil we were trying to eliminate”, look at the graves of young children, the abuse of oil for food, the support of terrorist suicides, and ask if this was ever going to end.”
It probably wouldn’t, and that was always a better foundation to the war: spreading liberal democracy and human rights. Too bad it didn’t come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
“I’ll tell you one thing about Ignatius, at least he compares the insurgents with southern racists, unlike many others who compared them to minutemen and patriots, and openly hoped that they would win.”
See I thought the minutemen comparison came from a fear that they would win. From a fear that they would be the minutemen. But it turns out we got some ex-baathists to be minutemen instead and hunt down terrorists, so it ought to work out.
actus:
There is the difference that the traitors in the south started the war and were violating northern independence with their fugitive slave laws. Ie. They actually had the evil we were trying to eliminate.
The Southern states certainly seceded and fired the first shot, and so in those senses “started the war.” In a more meaningful sense, however, whether secession or the opposition to it or whether the existence of slavery or the opposition to it started the war is not a factual question, and good arguments can be (and have been) made on both sides.
The assertion that the Southern states “were violating northern independence with their fugitive slave laws,” however, is so wrong as to be absurd. First, the fugitive slave law was a federal law, not a law of the Southern states, and slavery was (implicitly but really) recognized in the Constitution as it then existed.
Finally, your statement that the South “actually had the evil we were trying to eliminate” is interesting on several levels. First, your “we” remindes me of Tonto’s famous comment to the Lone Ranger when the latter observed that “we” are surrounded. Second, most of those you intend to encompass with your “we” had no overriding desire to eliminate slavery. Lincoln would have guaranteed slavery forever where it already existed. Even the Emancipation Proclamation proclaimed the freedom of slaves only in areas still in rebellion, not in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, etc, i.e., where it was impossible to enforce. I could go on.
But even more interesting, and revealing, is your acknowledgment that Saddam’s regime, unlike the South, was not “actually” evil.
“First, the fugitive slave law was a federal law, not a law of the Southern states, and slavery was (implicitly but really) recognized in the Constitution as it then existed.”
Sure, and the northern states were using constitutional powers and federal laws to upset the southern ones. I don’t understand what is the problem with this.
“Second, most of those you intend to encompass with your “we” had no overriding desire to eliminate slavery.”
Who said the evil was slavery?
Who said the evil was slavery?
My fault. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt.
So, now you’re saying that the South, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, really was evil, but the evil wasn’t slavery….
And just when I think you’ve lost the ability to surprise me….
“So, now you’re saying that the South, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, really was evil, but the evil wasn’t slavery”
I think you misread the evil of WMD’s as being the only evil of iraq.
The South slipped in more than 80 yrs. of racism, isolation and economic backwardness after Reconstruction? Doesn’t this presuppose that such conditions were absent before the war? An economic analysis of slavery in the US might well indicate that it was a loser proposition for both slave and slaveowner, not to mention other workers, society, etc. There is a mindset that slavery was the goose that laid the golden egg; in fact, it probably cost more than it ever created.
actus: John has one of the longest fuses of anyone I know. How ’bout for once stop playing games and just state in plain lingo just what the hell the “evil” in the South was, and how/why Saddam’s regime doesn’t reach that level of evil.
“How ’bout for once stop playing games and just state in plain lingo just what the hell the “evil” in the South was, and how/why Saddam’s regime doesn’t reach that level of evil.”
They’re nowhere near the same levels of evil. Id say the evil we were after in the south was their treason, their lack of subjugation to the northern capital interests, and their insouance in attempting to hold the north to their slave laws. Not to mention having started a war.
Next time just let them go.
“It has nothing to do with the point of my comment, which was the oddity of your suggesting slavery wasn’t the Southern evil to which you referred”
The southern evil that the north was trying to eradicate was not slavery, but treason, divison and war. Thats not too hard to understand.
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“Actus” says, (whatever exactly an “Actus” is…)
“The southern evil that the north was trying to eradicate was not slavery, but treason, divison and war. Thats not too hard to understand.”
Just so. And the revolutionary evil of George Washington that Cornwallis and King George were trying to eradicate was not slavery, but treason, division, and war. That’s not too hard to understand either. Is it?
I just finished a book on Reconstruction.
The reason why the KKK and the other terrorist groups won is because the US Govt refused to declare martial law and mean it. Grant did get power to declare martial law but there was so much opposition to it that he couldn’t really do it. Ordinary legal measures were helpless against terrorist organizations, which simply killed witnesses.
Thus, the terrorists had a free hand.
Thus, when we see the liberals demanding habeas corpus for terrorists, they are making the same mistake that ruined reconstruction in the South.
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
Thank God for GB.
And this guy (actus) actually defends race preferences? If he were in charge, he would have willingly accepted secession and a slave endowed South all to avoid the difficulty that followed the war.
And yes, the final causes of the Civil War were secession and the South’s attempt to enforce slavery in non-slave states (in violation of state sovereignty), but all of these conditions were created by the existence of slavery, not by the North’s decision to not have slavery.
American history shows that the Declaration of Independence, in those fabluous word “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” to have created an awareness in the people that slavery was an unjust and immoral institution. It was the Declaration that spawned Massachusettes, and other states, in a wave, to add anti-slavery clauses to their state Constitutions as early as the 1790s. Slavery was morally inconsistent with the founding pre-cepts of America’s creation – the failure and compromises of the original framers to address slavery set in motion a long-chain of events that necessitated the Civil War. It didn’t start in 1861 – it began on July 4th, 1776. Indeed, slavery as a “racial” institution didn’t even begin until after 1800, when the South “justified” it in terms of racial inferiority. Before then, it was an extension of indentured servitude and conquest, institutions transcending racial subjugation by millenia.