AMERICA REVISITED
431
to specialists in the history and literature of the period, but not to the
general reader. So various are they that they qualify Mr. Wilson's own
historical argument-which is another matter-and in their totality
give about as complex and various a picture of what the Civil War meant
to the generation that lived through it as has ever been put between
the covers of one book. The second great merit is the psychological
understanding of the author, who, while allowing his "characters" to
speak for themselves in great part, has arranged and highlighted their
words with such skill and provided such lucid and luminous connecting
passages, expositions, and comments that they all corne alive as do
few of the characters of even Mrs. Stowe and De Forest. The char–
acterization of Sherman, for example, is one of great tact, and in him
and his family is embodied the modem psychological equivalent to the
Biblical injunction that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons.
Somehow there is made a telling connection between Sherman's march
through Georgia wherein he exalted the lust to dominate and gloried
in the beauty of war, and the awful fate of his son, a Catholic priest who
finally went insane but who before being actually put away gave un–
mistakable signs of imagining himself as a commanding officer.
As for the other aspect of the book, history-protest-dirge: the
history is the history of the Civil War; the protest is against modern
centralization; and the dirge is for the lost aristocratic-republican tra–
ditions of Ameriea, namely the Old South, Virginia and New England.
The historical argument breaks down into two parts: the introduction
and the book as a whole. The introduction, which is probably by now
notorious-at least it's already been attacked by the editors of
Life–
is completely deterministic and sees all wars as equal, be it the North
defeating the South or the Allies defeating Hitler, and man himself
as a sea-slug who voraciously devours anything that comes his way.
There are all kinds of things to argue with in the Introduction. I
will confine myself to making some remarks on the idea that the Civil
War was but another instance of American "imperialism." To at least
one acute contemporary English observer, Lord Acton, it seemed that
the North did not follow the age-old imperialistic pattern. Acton was a
close and astute student of American history and institutions and,
especially, of the Civil War. He shared the enthusiasm of the English
aristocracy for the cause of the South, not for snobbish reasons, but
because he was a confirmed states-rights man who thought that by
the federal system the United States had solved the problem of power
and that the Civil War threatened this system.
As
for slavery, he thought
