John Keegan's "The American Civil War"

I really enjoyed this book. It is an excellent history of the Civil War. I've read many books on the Civil War and this is one of the best because it includes viewpoints other books didn't include. Most just focus on the politics and the battles (e.g. Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, and James McPherson). This book includes topics that are normally ignored in writing about the Civil War, and the author's British/European perspective usefully adds commentary on the conflict not normally related in writing this history. It comments in broader terms on the history of the US by including sociological and economic themes. Funny, it takes an Englishman to write a good US history book.

There are a number of things in this book that gave me pause. Here are a few:

Keegan looks at more than battles and politics. Here he looks at a socio-historical reason for the war:

Virginia was socially the most distinct of the colonies and later of the states, because it was deliberately set up in imitation of the English landed counties by its mid-seventeenth-century governor, Sir William Berkeley. Berkeley recruited the younger and therefore landless sons of English landowning families, wich bequeathed all to the eldest, with the promise that in the New World they would be able to set up as landed gentelmen themselves. He succeeded perhaps better than he hope. As early as 1660 every seat on the ruling Council of Virginia was held by members of five interrelated families, and as late as 1775 every council member was descended from one of the 1660 councillors. As Berkeley had endowed many of the settlers he attracted with large grants of land, the families were not only politically powerful but rich. They remained so and their names were to become celebrated in American history, the Madisons, the Washingtons, the Lees. They supplied the young United States with many of its Founding Fathers and the Confederacy also with many of its leaders.

Keegan remarks on America's ability to compromise over slavery for 50+ years, but in the short run-up to the outbreak of the war that ability to compromise failed spectacularly:

The political leaders of the South correctly recognized that the tide of opinion in a country in which they represented a minority was running against them. They might have moderated their position and sought common ground. It would have been difficult to find. Not only was the South indeed different from the North, with the difference founded on an institution that could not be disguised or easily altered; as the dispute with the North dragged on, Southerners had begun to make a virtue of the difference, by inventing a creed of Southern nationalism which eventually committed them to confrontation. Mid-century Southerners proclaimed themselves to be a superior breed to Northerners, preserving the agrarian way of life on which the republic had been founded at the Revolution and led by a breed of cultivated gentlemen who better resembled the Founding Fathers than the money-grubbing capitalists who dominated public life in the North. The South's poorer classes, too, sons of the soil and outdoorsmen, were held to be superior to their equivalents in the North, whose lives were confined by factory walls and who were often not native-born but immigrants, sometimes not English-speaking, and Catholic rather than Protestant. Southern nationalism had impressive ideologues as its own founding fathers, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay, and it even had its own lyceum, the University of the South, founded at Sewanee, Tennessee, to train Southern scholars who could debate on equal terms with men from Harvard. The North took it seriously enough to destroy its buildings, down to the foundation stone, soon after the Civil War began.

Sadly most wars happen because people fail to recognize just how costly war will be. For Americans this is was demonstrated to a degree that is hard to conceive. The war devastated the South for a century. A very heavy price to pay for the inability to recognize the "winds of change".

Keegan points out the numbers in terms of just casualties. There were a million casualties out of a population of 31 million. For the North 1 out of 65 soldiers was killed in action and 1 out of 13 died of disease and 1 out of 10 was wounded. These are horrible numbers:

The war inflicted more than a million total casualties, of whom 200,000 had been killed in battle. The total exceeeds that of the American fatalities of the Second World War and bears comparison only with the European losses of the Great War and Russia's in the Second World War. In many respects the Civil War was and remains America's Great War, in the way it is commemorated nationally in so many towns and battlefield cemeteries and subjectively and collectively in the American consciouslness.

Unlike most books about battles, this one unflinchingly looks at the horrors of war:

After the second Battle of Bull Run, 3,000 wounded still lay where they had fallen three days after the fighting ceased; 600 were found still alive five days after the battle. It was a week before the last survivors were got to hospital in Washington. It was often preferable to remain in a barn or private house, as many did, than to be taken to hospital, which frequently stinks of infection, dirty, untidy, and overrun with parasites. Most soldiers were infected with lice but, while fit, were able to make some effort to rid themselves of the creepy-crawlies. In hospital they were dependent on others to delouse them, a duty not often undertaken. Many soldiers were brought in with their wounds crawling with maggots, stinking, and all too often gangrenous. Because of the prevalence of gangrene, amputation was the preferred surgical procedure.

Keegan talks of the role Blacks played in the fighting. Initially they were refused participation. But in the end between 180,000 and 200,000 served in the Union armies. And even the South decided to try and use slaves to fight and defend slavery:

By March 1965, The Confederate Congress officially called on slave owners to make up to a quarter of the slaves in any one state available for military service. Eventually only two companies of black soldiers were enrolled, and they had taken no part in fighting before the Union army arrived in Richmond to impose surrender.

Treatment of Blacks by the North improved until the war ended, but:

Twenty-three solidiers of U.S> Colored Troops won the Congressional Medal of Honor before Appomattox. Thereafter the U.S. Army reverted to unequal treatment of its black soldiers, a policy not to be reversed until the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower after the Second World War.

The above attribution of desegregation to Eisenhower is false. It was Harry Truman who started desegregating the military in 1948.

This comment in the closing chapter of the book was insightful:

Antebellum America was a country, not a state. Political America impinged too little upon its citizens to confer a sense of common purpose or of belonging. As is often remarked, the only contact with the state experienced by most antebellum Americans was a visit to the post office. The Civil War changed that. There was no more graphic means of apprehending the power of the state than to stand in the line of battle, a voluntary act with unintended consequences. Men who performed the act and ssurvived the consequences were transformed as citizens. Their understanding of "duty" and "sacrifice" were thereby revolutionised. Men who had stood shoulder to shoulder to brave the volleys of the enemy could not thenceforth be tepid or passive citizens.

The book may have a few flaws, but it is an excellent read with a unique perspective on the Civil War that makes it well worth reading.