James McPherson's "Tried by War"

I enjoyed McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. And I enjoyed this book, his accounting of Lincoln's struggle with his generals to prod them into winning the US's Civil War.

The story is an epic struggle... with the generals. It was eye-opening to see the politics behind the scene. McClellan was a Democrat and not eager to "win" the war. His sympathies, and the Northern Democrats, with the South and its "peculiar" institution led him to drag his feet and fight a positional war, not a war of conquest. This book points out that Lincoln struggled not only with incompetent generals, political generals, but also politically tainted Democrat generals. I had never appreciated the many fronts on which Lincoln struggled.

This book is a fast read. It isn't ponderous. It hits the key points and gives just enough background and blow-by-blow details to get you to appreciate the struggles that Lincoln faced. It is an excellent history for the general reader. Nothing academic or ponderous about this book.

I was also interested in the bits about Confederate intransigence with respect to black Union soldiers. McPherson not only covers the Southern policy of re-enslaving these soldiers, but he points out that Southern armies carried out several cold-blooded masscres of black Union soldiers who had surrendered. I remember reading with horror how the German Army, under the influence of the NAZIs, carried out cold-bloodied killing of surrendered American soldiers in WWII. But I wasn't aware of this blot on US history. And I wasn't aware that Lincoln issued an order for revenge killings:

Another subject that Lincoln and Douglass discussed was the Confederate threat to reenslave captured black soldiers or even to excute them and their white officers. After Lincoln had announced in the Emanipation Proclamation that black recruits would be accepted as soldiers, Jefferson Davis had retaliated with an order that caputred officers would be turned over to state governments for punishment as 'criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection' The punishment for that crime in slave states was death. ... individual Southern officers and enlisted men did sometimes shoot captured black soldiers or their officers in the field even before the infamous Fort Pillow and Poison Spings massacres in 1864. On July 30, 1863, Lincoln issued an order that 'for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works."

I found this astounding because I was raised with the idea that revenge killings of civilians by the German army was a war crime. But here was the United States under Lincoln with an order to carry out revenge killings. This certainly wasn't in the school books when I was a kid.

The fact is, life is always uglier than what we remember or want to present to ourselves that it is. We hardly ever live up to our ideals. It is a sad fact. It is the failure to recognize this that lets many justify their own cruelty because they fail to truly know themselves. This is one reason why I remain highly distrustful of nationalism and pumped-up patriotism. It unleashes blind forces supposedly for a "higher cause" but because of ignorance, these forces are usually harnessed to bad ends.