This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War

By James M. McPherson
Notes, index, 260 pp., 2007. Oxford University Press Inc., 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016. $28 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr.
Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. After serving in command and staff positions as an AH-64 Apache pilot from 1992-1999, he taught military history at the U.S. Military Academy and attended graduate school at North Carolina State. Major Bowery Jr., is a U. S. Army Aviator stationed in Iraq with the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade.

Review:
"Why did the war come? What were the war aims of each side? What strategies did they employ to achieve these aims? How do we evaluate the leadership of both sides? Did the war's outcome justify the immense sacrifice of lives? What impact did the experience have on the people who lived through it? How did later generations remember and commemorate that experience?"

These questions frame the most-debated episode in American history, the Civil War, and this edited collection of 16 essays by James M. McPherson seeks to outline and comment on those debates.

Currently the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, McPherson is best known as the author of two seminal books that would be on most short lists of essential works of Civil War history: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize for 1998.

The former is recognized as the best single-volume narrative history of the war, and the latter is a landmark work in the study of soldier motivation.

Professor McPherson is a frequent commentator on Civil War history in the national popular media as well, making him something of a lightning rod for discussion and criticism from various quarters.

This slim volume represents McPherson's study and rumination on Civil War questions large and small over a career spanning 40 years.

This Mighty Scourge is organized thematically, dealing with five broad categories. Part One concerns slavery and the war's origins, while Parts Two and Three focus on Confederate and Union leadership respectively, both military and political. Part Four features three essays on soldier life and the home front, while Part Five is dedicated solely to Abraham Lincoln.

Seven of the essays were originally review essays in the New York Review of Books, but the author has revised them for this project, incorporating material on the latest scholarship. Six other essays originally appeared in magazines, academic journals or edited essay collections.

Three essays are published for the first time, having originated as lectures for the Chambersburg Civil War Seminar, Vicksburg National Military Park and Princeton University. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the author's breadth and depth of research and analysis.

In the book's opening essay, "And the War Came," McPherson applies a sure hand to the most contentious of Civil War debates, that concerning the war's causes. The author lands firmly in the camp that identifies slavery, and more particularly the expansion of slavery, as opposed to state rights, as the driving factor leading to war.

This essay originally appeared in North and South magazine, a publication aimed at an informed popular audience, and is a model of concision. McPherson shows that the concept of state rights was a postwar tenet of Southern advocates of the "Lost Cause."

"Long-Legged Yankee Lies: The Lost Cause Textbook Crusade" continues this theme, elaborating on the ways that the postwar South shaped sectional memory of the conflict to de-emphasize slavery.

I found myself underlining and marking essays three and four, which deal with Confederate grand strategy and hit on another favorite question: did the Confederacy lose (the "internal factors" explanation) or did the Union win ("external factors")?

In a later essay on Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign, McPherson makes his own judgment clear, noting "the principal reasons why the North eventually won the war: Lincoln's faith in Grant through thick and thin, and Grant's vindication of that faith in the Vicksburg campaign."

Again, these essays are as valuable for their recap of various scholarly arguments as for their insight into the development of McPherson's opinions over the years.

The essays of Part Three, "Architects of Victory," showcase McPherson at his myth-busting best. A review essay on Grant and Sherman deals with two of the most tenacious Grant myths, those that assign him the mantle of alcoholic and "butcher" of his own men.

Brooks D. Simpson has done the most complete job of dismantling the former myth and, as McPherson points out, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia sustained a higher casualty rate in the course of the war than did the armies that Grant commanded in the East and West.

Some prominent American historians, Reconstruction specialist Eric Foner among them, have recently used history in an effort to engage in commentary on current events. McPherson does not go that far in This Mighty Scourge, but three pieces resonate especially strongly as our nation fights controversial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Brahmins at War" details the wartime service and sacrifices of the elites of Boston society, many of whom were Harvard graduates and scions of America's first families. These men viewed military service and leadership in a time of war as an obligation of their privileged status, a concept that certainly bears reflection as we struggle to fill our all-volunteer armed forces for wartime service.

McPherson and the authors that he showcases have found that these men were superb leaders precisely because of this elevated status, not in spite of it.

A second essay discusses the effect of newspapers on army morale, a timely topic given our current debates over the role of the news media in shaping our national discussion of the war in Iraq.

The book's final selection outlines Abraham Lincoln's marked expansion of presidential war powers, another hot-button topic in the midst of President George W. Bush's prosecution of the Global War on Terrorism. A comparison of the Lincoln and Bush administrations will offer evidence both for supporters and critics of these measures, but, again, the value of this collection lies in McPherson's ability to frame the debate in a stimulating and non-judgmental way.

This Mighty Scourge has something for everyone, from the dedicated reader of McPherson's works to those encountering him for the first time. The review essays will be useful for students seeking grounding in the relevant literature on various topics.

Many of the essays offer interesting directions for future scholarship as well. Combining penetrating analysis, mastery of primary and secondary sources, and a lucid, brisk writing style is a tall order, but James McPherson does that and more in this volume.

Only one essay is longer than 20 pages, but the reader finishes each with a solid understanding of the salient points of debate and discussion. Highly recommended.