War, after the smoke clears

THE making of the Constitution and the Civil War are the most consequential events in America’s history.

In “This Mighty Scourge” -- a riveting collection of 16 masterfully written essays -- James M. McPherson again demonstrates that he is our greatest historian of the war. Now 71 and an emeritus professor of history at Princeton, McPherson is author or editor of more than two dozen books on the Civil War, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Battle Cry of Freedom,” which is the best and most eloquent single-volume account of the conflict.

Earlier versions of all but three of these essays have appeared elsewhere, but the author’s reworking of them for this book has freshened, deepened and sharpened them to such a degree that they seem almost entirely new. Moreover, read in sequence, they stand as a remarkably elegant and clarifying narrative exploration of the most basic questions concerning the Civil War, issues over which scholars and activists still contend.

McPherson’s title is drawn from what is perhaps the most memorable passage from Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’ ”

The appropriation of the phrase is more than rhetorically convenient. As a historian, McPherson always has argued forcefully and persuasively that slavery and the question of race were the Civil War’s cause and central to the conduct of fighting in which 620,000 Americans died. Despite the incontrovertible evidence McPherson has marshaled in support of his views, they have brought him into frequent conflict through the years with adherents to what those revisionist Southern historians who began constructing “the myth of the Lost Cause” almost immediately after the war’s end. It’s no accident, therefore, that the author begins his preface to this volume by quoting John Morley, the British viscount and pacifist, who in the midst of World War I wrote that the American Civil War had been “the only war in modern times as to which we can be sure, first, that no skill or patience of diplomacy would have avoided it; and second, that preservation of the American Union and abolition of negro slavery were two vast triumphs of good by which even the inferno of war was justified.”

In the essay “No Peace Without Victory, 1861-1865,” McPherson points out that “the American Civil War could not end with a negotiated peace because the issues over which it was fought -- Union vs. Disunion, Freedom vs. Slavery -- proved to be nonnegotiable. This was a new experience for Americans.”

Whatever their descendants and later sympathizers have argued, the Southerners who started and prosecuted the Civil War understood that slavery and the ideology of white supremacy were its causes. As Alexander H. Stephens, the new Confederacy’s vice president, argued in a speech in Savannah, Ga., in 1861, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence had erred in its assertion that “all men are created equal.” The Confederacy, Stephens told his listeners, is “founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

It also was founded in defense of an economic fact: “Slaves were the principal form of wealth in the South -- indeed in the nation as a whole,” McPherson points out. “The market value of the 4 million slaves in 1860 was close to $3 billion -- more than the amount of capital invested in manufacturing and railroads combined of the whole United States.”

Cotton cultivated and processed by slave labor accounted for more than half of all American exports, “but slavery was more than an economic system. It was a means of maintaining racial control and white supremacy.” Devotion to the latter principle helps explain why a majority of the private soldiers who fought so ferociously and at such great personal cost for the South did not own slaves.

One of the great strengths of McPherson’s work always has been his refusal to accept a narrative account that pictures African Americans as bystanders to their liberation. Thus he cites in this volume the practical account of emancipation that Lincoln gave to a pair of fellow Midwestern Republicans late in the war: “ ‘No human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done,’ he insisted. Lincoln pointed out that 100,000 or more black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union. ‘If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive -- even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.’ ” To do otherwise, Lincoln said, would wreck the Union war effort, since “all colored men in our service would instantly desert us. And rightfully, too. Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them? ... I should be damned in time and eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.”

This collection is equally rich in insights concerning military strategy and tactics. For example, had the South surrendered in June 1861, its institutions -- including slavery -- and physical infrastructure almost surely would have remained intact. However, that month, with the Confederacy’s fortunes at a low ebb, Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia. His subsequent victories not only prolonged the war but also opened the way to the promotion of Grant and Sherman to top Union commands. “Here was the irony of Robert E. Lee,” McPherson writes. “His success produced the destruction of everything he fought for.”

The two essays in the book’s final section deal with the compelling figure of Lincoln. McPherson has been a public opponent of the current war in Iraq and in “As Commander-in-Chief I Have a Right to Take Any Measure Which May Best Subdue the Enemy,” he analyzes Lincoln’s abrogation of civil liberties during the war, including his suspension of habeas corpus, which was held illegal by then U.S. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney -- author of the notorious Dred Scott decision. The legal issue, by the way, was never whether the “Great Writ” could, in fact be suspended, since Article I of the Constitution provides for such a step “when in cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The argument was over whether Congress or the president had the power to do so.

McPherson quotes contemporary legal scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen’s approval of Lincoln’s initiative as a defense of the Constitution itself: “A part cannot control the whole, to the destruction of the whole.” Lincoln, one of his era’s great trial lawyers, preferred a homespun analogy to surgery: “Life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through preservation of the nation.”

Both critics and supporters of the Bush administration’s sweeping assertion of presidential powers will find much to chew on in this essay. “This Mighty Scourge,” in fact, is an exemplary exercise in the contribution a great historian and eloquent writer can make to a people’s understanding of themselves.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com