By John Daniel Davidson
Thursday, November 02, 2017
White House chief of staff John Kelly’s interview Monday
night with Laura Ingraham, in which he expressed the mundane and historically
straightforward view that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the
Civil War,” has produced a spasm of simple-minded and myopic commentary. Our
intellectual class, unable to think about the war between North and South in
anything but the most reductive terms, has decided not only that Kelly suffers
from “nostalgia” about the Confederacy, but that Ken Burns and Shelby Foote
should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Specifically, Kelly has been excoriated for daring to
call Robert E. Lee an “honorable man” and expressing the same view of the Civil
War put forward in Burns’ enormously popular 1990 Civil War documentary. Up
until this week, Burns’ series had been a celebrated work—a restored version of
the series aired on PBS just two years ago. But now, at least according to
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine,
Burns’ masterpiece is a “disaster,” mostly because it relied heavily on
interviews with Foote.
Foote is, of course, the author of his own celebrated
Civil War masterpiece, a three-volume narrative history of the war, each about
a thousand pages long, that stands as a triumph of American history and
literature. The trilogy, which began as a contract with Random House to write a
short one-volume history to mark the war’s approaching centennial, took Foote
20 years to write.
The volumes, published between 1958 and 1974, were almost
immediately hailed as a seminal contribution to American letters. Writing in The New Republic, literary scholar and
critic Louis D. Rubin Jr. said Foote’s trilogy “is a model of what military
history can be.” The New York Times Book
Review called it “a remarkable achievement, prodigiously researched,
vigorous, detailed, absorbing.” (Presumably by today’s standards these
reviewers would be upbraided for praising Foote.)
So no wonder that Foote, who died in 2005, figures
prominently in Burns’ documentary (all told, he’s featured in about an hour of
the 11-hour series). His deep southern drawl and magnetic on-camera presence
make him captivating figure for the screen, but Foote is compelling above all
because he’s an abiding authority on the Civil War.
For the Left, Compromise
Was a Crime
But because we live in an ignorant age, Foote’s
reputation is getting dragged through the mud. In an article noting that White
House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Kelly’s comments by
citing the Burns documentary, Chait writes that Burns relies heavily on Foote,
and “Foote presented Lee and other Confederate fighters as largely driven by
motives other than preserving human property, and bemoaned the failure of the
North and South to compromise (a compromise that would inevitably have
preserved slavery).”
This should be dismissed as a simple case of historical
ignorance, especially since it’s been repeated so often by a Wikipedia-reliant
press corps over the past few days. Even someone with a cursory knowledge of
the Civil War should know that the war came about, as all wars do, because of a
failure to compromise.
In our case, the entire history of the United States
prior to outbreak of war in 1861 was full of compromises on the question of
slavery. It began with the Three-Fifths Compromise written into the U.S.
Constitution and was followed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which
prohibited slavery north of the 36°30’ parallel, excluding Missouri), the
Compromise of 1850, then the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the
Missouri Compromise and eventually led to the election of Abraham Lincoln and
the subsequent secession of the southern states. Through all this, we inched
toward emancipation, albeit slowly.
In other words, the breakdown of all those decades of
compromise did indeed lead to the Civil War. This is a point that Foote and
other historians have made many times and that Kelly tried his best to
paraphrase. Compromising on slavery had been part of how America stayed
together, and staved off war, from the beginning. No historian disputes this.
But for writers like Chait and The
Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, compromise was a bad thing because it
preserved slavery. That such compromises limited slavery’s spread and put it on
the path to extinction carries no weight with them.
In a widely shared thread on Twitter, Coates joined in
lambasting Kelly’s remark about compromise, but managed to turn the question on
its head. For Coates, each compromise that preserved the Union and prevented
war prior to the Civil War was morally bankrupt. He also rails against the
compromises struck after the war to restore the Union, as well as the
compromises Lincoln offered during the war to bring rebellious southern states back
into the fold.
Coates’ initial line of criticism—that Kelly should know
about all these compromises because the relevant history is “easily accessible,
not tucked away in archives somewhere”—gets to something deeper. For Coates and
his ilk, the entire idea of America is indefensible. Our original sin of
slavery can never be extirpated—not by the Civil War, not by the civil rights
movement, not even by the remarkable fact that a black man became president of
the United States, even as he has become one of the most celebrated and
influential writers in America. Coates’ entire project is fundamentally
anti-American. To speak of compromises that could have prevented or delayed the
war is to speak of a great crime—slavery—for which there is no suitable punishment,
except maybe extinction.
In Coates’ reading of history, even Lincoln is culpable.
“Lincoln’s own platform was a compromise,” he writes. “Lincoln was not an
abolitionist. He proposed to limit slavery’s expansion, not end it.” Of course,
Coates is wrong in a larger sense about Lincoln’s view of the matter. In his
famous 1858 House Divided speech, Lincoln said the United States “cannot
endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be
dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease
to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
Here, Lincoln was echoing the sentiments of the drafters
of the Declaration of Independence, who conceived of that document as a kind of
poison pill for slavery: if all men are created equal, then eventually slavery
must be abolished. Perhaps it might even be abolished without war. This was
Lincoln’s hope, right up until the Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter.
Coates doesn’t believe any of that. He believes the
Declaration is a cynical document, just as he believes the entire American
constitutional order is a massive fraud designed to preserve white supremacy.
There’s no use arguing with such a man about history, because it’s all an
immense crime, a racist conspiracy from the outset. His complaint with Kelly,
much like Chait’s complaint with Foote and Burns, isn’t with a particular
interpretation of the causes of the Civil War but with the belief that America
as such is worth fighting a war to preserve.
To Whom Should We
Turn to Understand the Civil War?
Alas, Coates is said to be one of the brightest lights of
our time. A generation ago, we looked to men like Foote for insight on the
Civil War, and their knowledge and compassion revealed to us something about
ourselves beyond the nihilism of Coates and Chait. Foote spoke often about
compromise in the context of the war because he understood that after such an
unfathomable bloodletting—620,000 dead—there would be no way to reunify the
country without compromise.
Part of that compromise was allowing the South to honor
their war dead, which soon led to the construction of Confederate memorials
across the south. (Later, of course, monuments would be erected for different
reasons, not in mourning but in defiance of the civil rights movement.) Today,
we’re engaged in great debate about what to do with those reminders of our
past. But it’s not an entirely new question.
In the early 1990s, the Confederate flag and statue
controversies that have now engulfed us were just emerging. In Memphis, where
Foote lived most of his life, there was a push to remove the statue and remains
of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest in the city’s Forrest Park, a
push that’s recently been revived. In a 1991 interview, Foote said: “I think to
remove Forrest from Forrest Park would be as if the women of France were
indignant over the way Napoleon treated the ladies and wanted to remove his
body from Les Invalides. I really don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I think
this is just as serious, and I hope they’ll never be able to do it.”
For Foote, preserving history and, if not honoring then
at least trying to understand our forebears, is how we move forward as a people
and a nation. In 1994, when objections to the display of the Confederate symbol
were gaining momentum, he told another interviewer that banishing such symbols
was a mistake.
Quite the opposite of the case of
the Jews in the Holocaust, the blacks seem not to want to be reminded of
history… In this Disney project that was announced—‘we will show you what it
was like to be a slave’—what a great outcry went up. ‘We don’t want to see that
kind of thing.’ Almost the opposite of the Jews having Holocaust museums. I
regret that. I think they ought to celebrate their past the same way the Jews
did about bondage in Egypt. They’re not ashamed of it, they say, ‘We came out
of it, we conquered it.’ I wish there were more of that… I wish my black
friends could do the same thing.
But if you’re Coates, celebrating the emancipation of
southern slaves or the end of Jim Crow is impossible, because in his telling,
black Americans never really came out of their bondage. The great white
supremacist project of the United States persists to this day, as evidenced by
the election of Donald Trump. There are still grievances to settle, reparations
to be paid. No wonder you want to tear down statues, and not just of
Confederates.
In that 1991 interview, Foote spoke of the war as a great
trauma that has stayed with us, in one form or another, and continues to
fascinate and disturb us:
I think the Civil War in our
history corresponds to a horrendous event that happened in your adolescence.
You may even forget it, but anything that comes up to bring it to mind, it’s
there. So people, even though they don’t know a thing about the Civil War, it’s
in their blood somehow. And anything seriously and well-done about it will
immediately call up all this unconscious memory. It’s sort of a Jungian thing.
This unconscious memory of ours has been coming up a lot
lately. To grapple with it, we can listen to the likes of Coates or we can turn
to Foote, whose deep understanding of the war we need deeply. The novelist
Walker Percy was a lifelong friend of Foote. In 1974, after reading the proofs
of Foote’s epic Civil War history, Percy wrote to his friend that the work was
“as good as you think… I’ve no doubt it will survive; might even be read in the
ruins.”
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