(light music) - [Announcer] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents "The Civic Discourse Project, Civics, Patriotism, and America's Prospects."

This week- - For in every way in which we can say that the Civil War ended badly, it did succeed in this one significant thing.

It made democracy believable to the world again.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

And now, a conversation with Dr. Allen Guelzo, the Thomas W. Smith distinguished research scholar at Princeton University, on What was the American Civil War really about?

- I'm very pleased to be able to be here and to speak about this question, what was the American Civil War really about?

It's the kind of question where a lot of the time we think we know the answer almost automatically, but it's also one of those moments when you examine it, even with the slightest bit of care, suddenly turns out to be a lot more complicated than it seemed.

The American Civil War did not end well, which is not surprising given the civil wars rarely have good endings.

"More than any other form of conflict," writes David Armitage, "it is not war between states, not terrorism, but civil war, which has been the graveyard of nations.

Civil War," Armitage says, "is the most widespread, the most destructive, and the most characteristic form of organized human violence."

And we could add, the one which has proven the most difficult to forget.

Civil War is the hatchet that will not bury.

Whether it's Ireland in the 1970s, Spain in the 1930s, or the Balkans in the 1990s, whether it's the Roman Republic or Democratic Greece, civil war has no permanent peace conference, and often no peace conference at all.

As T.S.

Elliot remarked writing about John Milton and the English Civil War of the 17th century, "I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.

No matter how long in the past, societies scarred by civil war are," Elliot said, "so convulsed and divided that the effects are still felt centuries later."

Well, the American Civil War is no exception to that.

Our Civil War has lived on and made us limp through a botched reconstruction, a haphazard racial landscape, a protracted sectionalism, riots over statues and remembrance, and in its least toxic form, battlefield reenactments.

Entire academic history programs have been made out of the American Civil War.

As late as 2012, over 200 nonfiction titles were focused on our Civil War and were released that year.

Some of them from publishers who specialize in nothing but Civil War books.

Even now, any discussion of what caused the Civil War will trigger dreary, drag out, cat-fighting arguments over slavery, abolition, state rights, generals, campaigns, motivations, what-ifs, and the Constitution.

You simply want to ask, will this war never be done?

One reason for the massive imprint of the Civil War on our national consciousness is the unhallowed excitement it gives us.

That is compared with almost everything else in the American 19th century.

I mean, let's be candid, without the Civil War, 19th century American history would be boring.

It would be a tale of economic growth, of useful inventions, some polite literature, some genteel art, some settler expansion, occasional labor eruptions, and Stephen Foster.

(audience laughs) But it would be Canada raised to continental heights, but lacking Sir John Franklin.

Without the Civil War, 19th century political leadership would be known principally for its bland honors dullness.

Imagine, an American presidency between 1808 and 1898, whose high moments would consist of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Chester Allen Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison, interrupted only by a sociopath, Andrew Jackson.

So surely one reason why the Civil War bulks so large in our memories is that we need it to keep from falling asleep.

But another and larger reason for our long memory of the war is the harshness, with which the Civil War disrupted so much of the experience of ordinary Americans.

By the time the war began in 1861, the United States had experienced three wars in its brief life since independence: the Revolutionary War, the war of 1812, and the Mexican War.

But only the revolution saw anything which approached a mass mobilization of the American people.

And even then, the concept of mass has to be sharply qualified.

George Washington's continental army was fixed by the continental Congress in 1780 at 21,000 infantry plus 2,000 artillerymen and 1,000 cavalry, which is minuscule by the standards of only 80 years later.

Even then, Washington had trouble maintaining just that strength.

The states may have mustered another 145,000 militia, but calling out the militia to assist the Continentals was usually an on-again-off-again affair.

And Washington dismissed the militia angrily with the complaint that no militia will ever acquire the habits necessary to resist a regular force.

In the revolution, little more than half a percent of the population of the United States wore a continental uniform, which is also approximately the same percentage as served in the war of 1812, and only a third of that served in the Mexican war.

By contrast, in the Civil War, the Union armies mustered 2.1 million men with the Confederacy enrolling over 800,000, which means that over half of all northern men of military age were drawn into the Civil War, while in the South, due to the Confederate government's draconian conscription policies just under four fifths of military aged white males served.

When we add to that estimates of the war's death toll, which now approach something like 750,000 by the most recent reckonings, we realized that almost 2.5% of the entire American population died in the Civil War.

While in the South, the white military aged male population was literally decimated.

Translated into modern terms, the Civil War's death toll would produce eight and a quarter million war deaths.

World War II, by comparison, produced slightly over 407,000 deaths.

If that comparison shocks us, imagine what it did to the consciousness of American society in 1865.

Before the Civil War, only about 7% of American manufacturing was organized in corporations.

By 1900, corporations accounted for 69% of all American manufacturing.

And between 1897 and 1905 alone, 5,300 small scale firms were consolidated and reorganized into just 318 corporations and 26 super corporations known as trusts, which controlled 80% of major American industrial output.

Moreover, many lessons in corporate organization were also learned in the Civil War, as both Union and Confederate agents became responsible for purchasing, distributing, and manufacturing a billion rounds of small arms ammunition, moving thousands of soldiers by rail and by steamboat, ordering a million and a half barrels of pork and a hundred million pounds of coffee and financing it all by mountainous schemes of public borrowing.

Modern American business and government were shaped directly and indirectly by a military model of administration During the war, writes Mark R. Wilson in "The Business of Civil War."

In the management of corporate enterprise, memories of the Civil War mobilization played an important part.

Perhaps even more surprising, the Civil War has frequently been marked as the moment when American government began transforming itself away from federalism, state rights, and the small scale maintenance state envisioned by the founders to the large scale regulatory state that was already becoming the model in 19th century European empires as bureaucracy, and corporatization moved forward hand in hand.

This transformation is sometimes measured by vocabulary, as in the oft-cited example that Americans began to speak of themselves after the war as a single nation rather than a union, as though northern victory in the Civil War was a parallel to Otto Von Bismarck's creation of a German empire out of his wars with Austria and France from 1866 to 1871.

"Abraham Lincoln," concludes the libertarian writer David Gordon, "like his Prussian contemporary, Otto von Bismarck sought a powerful centralizing state."

The Civil War thus becomes the hinge moment, in which the United States ceases to be the simple constitutional union of 1787 and moves toward being a complex center-driven bureaucratic state.

But perhaps the biggest loser of all in the Civil War was American religion.

The brutality of the Civil War took a terrible toll on religious confidence, especially among Southerners who had convinced themselves that God was their protector and the justifier of the slave system.

"My faith in Revelations and my faith in the institution of slavery had been woven together," wrote one Southern woman, "But when slavery was done away with, my faith in God's holy book was terribly shaken.

For a time I doubted God."

For northern soldiers, likewise, the unpredictable trauma of combat also undermined religious certainty.

"It is hard, very hard for one to retain his religious sentiments and feelings in this soldier life," admitted one New Jersey officer in 1862, "Everything seems to tend in a different direction.

There seems to be no thought of God, of their souls, et cetera among the soldiers."

And as much as Abraham Lincoln welcomed the support of northern churches for the war effort, he delicately shunted aside the volumes of advice they bestowed on him.

When the National Reform Association tried to persuade Lincoln to endorse amending the Constitution to insert an explicit recognition of Christianity, Lincoln politely let the matter die on the drawing board.

Meanwhile, those elements in American life, which did not change, all seemed to have stood still for the worse.

"Slavery," wrote W.E.B.

Du Bois in 1935, "withdrew the name of humanity, until this battle called the Civil War changed it all.

In its wake," said Du Bois, "the slave went free only to move back again towards slavery, as the whole weight of America was thrown to color cast and they a new slavery arose."

We would not be exaggerating if we began to wonder in the spirit of Du Bois, whether the Civil War had been mostly, if not entirely, a ghastly blunder from which we have never recovered.

By this reckoning, the Civil War brought the United States into the modern world.

What we have to do is decide whether that was a good idea or a regrettable one.

For in every way in which we can say that the Civil War ended badly, it did succeed in this one significant thing.

It made democracy believable to the world again.

After the failures of the reign of terror, of the Bolivarian dictatorships and the revolutions of 1848, democracy seemed to have caught a second wind from the American Civil War.

Lincoln cast this new birth of freedom in its most eloquent form at Gettysburg, when he asked Americans to acknowledge that the fundamental goal of this great Civil War was making permanent a government of the people by the people and for the people.

In fact, he asked that we do more than just acknowledge it.

He asked that we dedicate ourselves to it.

This is why the Civil War should remain so central to our imagination, not because we enjoy replaying its violent scenes, like the endless loop of an action adventure movie, but because we sense however mutely, that it really was fought to save a democracy, and therefore we feel urgently the necessity of being part of it.

The Civil War created unprecedented problems.

It did not solve all of them or all of the ones that existed before it began, especially concerning race.

But it did save the idea of democracy at the moment in the 19th century when if that idea had been lost in North America, it might well be said to have been lost everywhere and for good.

Instead, the victory of the Union led the Friends of liberal democracy in England to rejoice in 1864, that "An English liberal comes here not only to watch the unfolding of your destiny, but to read his own.

Your regeneration, when it is achieved, will set forth the regeneration of the European nations."

It led still other friends in France to insist that if liberal institutions come out victorious from a tempest where many hope to see them perish, will this be nothing?

"The answer to this question does not alone include the future of America.

It also contains our own."

And it even led slaves laboring in the sugar fields of Spanish Cuba in January of 1862 to mingle within their songs the significant refrain, "Avanza, Lincoln, Avanza, Tu eres nuestra Esperanza!"

Onward, Lincoln, onward.

You are our hope.

On those terms, we may actually need to embrace the importance of the American Civil War now more than at any previous moment, if only because democracy has once more come onto such hard times.

30 years ago with the collapse of democracy's most serious totalitarian rival, democracy seemed to stand as the only viable form of government in the modern world, as the end of history.

But since then, democracy has sagged.

A former Soviet intelligence operative shrewdly twisted post-Soviet elections into a nationalist authoritarianism.

The fastest growing and most aggressive economy in the world belongs to a repressive dictatorship.

According to the annual surveys published by Freedom House, the number of people living in genuinely democratic states has fallen by more than half since 2003.

We need to know and to understand the Civil War for what it failed to do, yes, but also for the one surpassingly great thing it saved and why it was worth the last full measure of devotion.

We should not need to romanticize the Civil War or any war and its outcomes, but sometimes we need to acknowledge that war has saved endangered things from becoming infinitely more endangered.

Winston Churchill, who had experience of many wars that should never have happened, and one whose happening was thrust upon him, once wrote that the American Civil War "must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record."

He was not wrong, and we will not be wrong if we let the memory of the Civil War and of Lincoln bring us back to the first principles of our democracy.

Thank you very much.

(audience applauds) (light music) - Would you not say that this battle for this liberal democracy and concept is something that it's not generational when we have to read, meet and fight in every generation, for example, this was part of Wilson's unsuccessful vision at the end of World War I, World War II with the United Nations and the concept and perhaps with what we're going on right now and the current political situation without getting political, seems to us to be a challenge again for the Democratic concept.

- Let me tell you why in the most fundamental way.

Lincoln said at Gettysburg that this was a nation dedicated to a proposition that all men are created equal.

I want you to reflect for a moment on how utterly novel that idea was, even in Lincoln's day.

The idea that you could create a nation dedicated to "tracks of ink on paper," that was how one European reactionary scoffed at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

European reactionary like Joseph de Maistre sneered at the American Experiment, the idea that you could build a nation around propositions, sentences, reason.

"No," said de Maistre, nations are built historically.

They are built upon race and tribe and clan and ethnicity and language and religion and soil.

That's what makes a nation."

They thought it was ridiculous that Americans thought they could confect a nation out of ascent to propositions.

You mean any Tom, Dick and Harry that gets off the boat and reads the Constitution and the Declaration and says yes, can be part of the American experiment?

To which the American experiment replies, "Yeah.

Yeah."

It takes 1,500 years to make a Frenchman.

You've got a lot of wine that has to be consumed, you know.

It takes 1,500 years to make a Frenchman, but you can become an American in 20 minutes.

- Did Lincoln ever give any speeches or write privately about how the declaration of Independence's right to revolution did not apply to the Confederate states and that what they were doing was against what the founders believed?

- Oh, oh, oh, he does.

He does.

He lays this out principally in two places.

One is in his first inaugural, and secondly in the speech he gives to the special session of Congress that convenes on July 4th, 1861.

And there, what he's dealing with is the fundamental Confederate contention that what they are doing is executing a secession.

Not a revolution.

A secession.

Now Lincoln made the concession that people being the sovereigns have the revolutionary right to reframe, change, overthrow the government that they have if it's not serving their interest and create another one.

That is a revolutionary right.

But what the Confederates are doing is not a revolution.

They keep insisting, "What we're doing is a secession."

Now you might think, "Well, what's the difference?"

Ah, yes.

Now we're going to hear from Lincoln the lawyer.

What is a secession?

A secession is about continuity.

It's about a peaceful departure, not a disagreement of principle, but a peaceful departure.

The kind of peaceful departure that separated Belgium from the Netherlands in 1830.

Same kind of peaceful separation that separates Norway and Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century.

No argument.

Just simply, we speak different languages, we have different culture, let's go our different ways.

And that, Lincoln says, that is a secession.

The difficulty is the Constitution makes no provision for it.

The Constitution says nothing about how to secede from the Union.

If that was as important as the Confederates insisted it was, you would expect there'd be something about it in the Constitution, but there isn't.

There's no provision for how to conduct a secession.

There's no provision...

There's no reversion clause in the Constitution that tells you what to do with the property that would be involved if the Confederate states are seceding from the Union.

I mean, some determination has to be made about that property, the federal government property there.

There's no discussion about in the Constitution.

Why?

Because the Constitution understood from the get go, there wasn't going to be any secessions.

What they were forming was a more perfect union, not a less perfect union.

So there is no provision for secession in the Constitution and the thing you're calling a secession really isn't a secession at all.

But you notice the confederates didn't want to call it a revolution, and Lincoln knew that they didn't want to call it a revolution and for a very good reason.

A revolution, unlike secession, a revolution is about discontinuity, is about breaking all the bonds and all the ties and all the habits and all the procedures.

That's what we did in our revolution.

That's why we call it the American Revo... We didn't secede from the British Empire.

We had a revolution.

We got rid of George III.

Now, not only George III, we got rid of a whole lot of dukes and earls and whatnot.

We got rid of the whole structure of monarchical society.

We got rid of British law, we got rid of British this, British that, and British the other.

We even dumped tea in Boston Harbor.

No, what we did was a revolution.

But the Confederacy doesn't wanna call what it's doing a revolution.

It doesn't want to invoke discontinuity.

Why?

Because that would destabilize every law on their books about slavery.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

They have to insist that what they're doing is continuity to preserve the integrity of those laws and the integrity of those law books.

And Lincoln says, "You can call it as long as you like secession, but there is no provision for secession.

Sorry, folks.

You're gonna have to call it a revolution."

But they don't want to do that.

What is this really Lincoln say?

This is an insurrection.

This is a rebellion.

Call it for what it really is.

Alright, well I see Will is on his feet and he is about to invoke cloture, as they say.

So I yield to him.

- Indeed.

Thank you very much, Allen, for an outstanding talk.

(audience applauds) - [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

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