I. Introduction

A. The Civil War and its sequel, Reconstruction--a period I will call, for the sake of brevity, the Union Crisis--resulted in tremendous political and social change. It altered the relationship of the states to the central government. It destroyed slavery and created a system of free labor in the South. It changed the South from a region which boasted the nation's highest per capita income in 1860 to one which, for nearly a century afterward, had one of the nation's lowest.⁽¹⁾ In 1869 the Harvard historian George Ticknor described these changes as "a great gulf between what happened before [the Civil War] and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born."⁽²⁾ Common conception. See James M. McPherson's Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution.

B. Some of this change was expected and desired when the war broke out; a great deal of it was unforeseen and not necessarily desired at anyone.

1. The Federal armies played a major role in bringing about this changes, but not simply because for four years they carried the fortunes of the Union upon their bayonets. They also played a significant role in shaping and implementing these changes as weell, through their conduct in three areas:

a. wartime policy toward Southern civilians and property in the context of extinguishing the rebellion;

b. the events leading up to emancipation, the decision for emancipation itself, and the genesis of free labor in the South;

c. the restoration of loyal civilian government in the rebellious states, both during the war and afterward.

C. In each of these areas one sees the constant interplay between war and politics--a feature that is clearly emerging as a major theme in the military historiography of the period.

II. Conceptual Framework

A. In order to organize the material for better study and understanding, I am going to use four complementary lenses:

1. first, Clausewitz's observations about the relationship between war and politics, especially his "trinity of war;"

2. second, intrawar escalation

3. third, the concept of people's war;

4. fourth, the concept of peacekeeping.

B. First Lens: The Trinity of War

1. "As a total phenomenon [Clausewitz wrote] its dominant tendencies always make war a remarkable trinity--composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.

The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his army; the third the government. The passions that are to be kindled in war must already be inherent in the people; the scope which the play of courage and talent will enjoy in the realm of probability and chance depends on the particular character of the commander and the army; but the political aims are the business of government alone.

These three tendencies are like three different codes of law, deep-rooted in their object and yet variable in their relationship to one another. A theory that ignores any one of them or seeks to fix an arbitrary relationship between them would conflict with reality to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally useless."⁽³⁾

2. Clausewitz's qualifier at the end is well-taken, for to separate arbitrarily the strands of people, army and government would be, in the case of the Civil War, to misunderstand the basic nature of the conflict. The three were deeply and inextricably blended together.

a. The people, in an important sense, were both army and government in a fashion that even the liberal-minded Clausewitz could not have anticipated. The Federal army was not professionalized; the bulk of its officers and enlisted men were citizens, temporarily placed into uniform and so numerous as to overwhelm the standards of corporate behavior prevalent in a professional army.

b. The soldiers did not lose contact in any important sense with the communities that spawned them; they retained many of the values of civilians, maintained close contact with the folks at home, and continued to participate in the political life of the nation.⁽⁴⁾

c. A professional officer corps divorced from civilian partisan politics did not exist. Both volunteer and regular army officers maintained contact with public officials and party cronies; commanders in a position to do so frequently sought to advance the aims of their own political factions.

3. The Grasp of War. --My title derives from the formulation offered in a famous speech by Richard Henry Dana in June 1865. "We stand upon the ground of war, and we exercise the powers of war. Now, my fellow citizens, what are those powers and rights? What is a WAR? War is not an attempt to kill, to destroy; but it is coercion for a purpose. . . . When one nation has conquered another, in a war, the victorious nation does not retreat from the country and give up possession of it, because the fighting has ceased. No, it holds the conquered people in the grasp of war until it has secured whatever it has a right to acquire. I put that proposition fearlessly--The conquering party may hold the other in the grasp of war until it has secured whatever it has a right to require."⁽⁵⁾

4. It was, of course, the Army that held Southern civilians in the grasp of war--a grasp that it maintained, in certain regions, as late as 1877. But to what end? What did the conquering party wish to require? And did the instrument that placed Southern civilians in the grasp of war also shape what could be secured and how it could be secured?

C. Second Lens: intrawar escalation

1. War can be seen as a process of negotiation, but also as having an inherent upward dynamic. Saliencies. Federal wartime policy toward civilians can be seen as an effort to communicate Union intentions, resolve.

D. Third Lens: People's War

1. In a people's war, resistance is carried out "in every field: military, economic, political and cultural," not only against the enemy but with the goal of fostering and exploiting a broad base of popular support.⁽⁶⁾ Although the phrase has come into vogue relatively recently--one associates it primarily with the post-1945 "wars of national liberation"--the concept goes back at least as far as the eighteenth century and arguably much further. The American Revolution was an example of such a war, as were the French Revolution and the Spanish revolt against Napoleon. Lincoln called the Civil War "a people's contest," and viewed it, at bottom, as a struggle for the hearts and minds of Southern civilians.⁽⁷⁾ The desire to recover their alienated allegiance formed the basis of the conciliatory policy that informed the North's war effort during the first fifteen months of the conflict.⁽⁸⁾ It also lay, for a much longer period, at the heart of Lincoln's moderate wartime reconstruction policies.

2. It is most clearly useful in understanding the Reconstruction period, when conservative Southerners tried to regain control by any means necessary--sometimes by the ballot, sometimes by the bullet.

E. Fourth Lens: Peacekeeping

1. Contemporary buzz phrase, but also helpful, particularly in the later Reconstruction phase. As we'll see, overt use of federal authority was regarded with increasing distaste as Reconstruction wore on, esp. after states readmitted to Union (last one readmitted 1870). Did not accord with American republican values. Military role was, in practice, to try to mediate between warring parties in South--conservative Democrats, Republicans. UN soldiers stationed in Bosnia-Herzogovina would have understood predicament of the officer in the 1874 Arkansas shootout.

III. Conclusion

A. Informality of lectures--not matured conclusions, for the most part, but a sharing of preliminary explorations.

B. Nexus bet. 1st and 2nd books.

1. My figure must be based on whites only. "In 1860 the South's share of national wealth was 30 percent; in 1870 it was only 12 percent. In 1860 the average per capita income of southerners, including slaves, was two-thirds of the northern average; after the war the southern average dropped to less than two-fifths of the northern, and did not rise above that level for the rest of the nineteenth century." McP, 2dAmRev, 12.

2. Quoted in McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, ix-x.

3. Ibid., 89.

4. Reid Mitchell has explored some of these linkages in "The Northern Soldier and His Community," in Maris A. Vinovskis (ed.), Toward a Social History of the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78-92.

5. Quoted in Michael Les Benedict, The Fruits of Victory: Alternatives in Restoring the Union, 1865-1877, 98.

6. The quoted phrase is from Truong Chinh, Primer for Revolt (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), 109. See also Vo Nguyen Giap, People's War, People's Army (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), 97; and idem., "Big Victory, Great Task" (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 52.

7. Roy P. Basler (ed.), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1948), vol. 5, p. 49.

8. Mark Grimsley, "Conciliation and Its Failure, 1861-1862," unpub. paper presented at the Duquesne History Forum, October 29, 1991; and Joseph L. Harsh, "Lincoln's Tarnished Brass: Conservative Strategies and the Attempt to Fight the Early Civil War as a Limited War," in Roman J. Heleniak and Lawrence L. Hewitt, eds., The Confederate High Command & Related Topics: Themes in Honor of T. Harry Williams (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing, 1988), 124-141.

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