The Romantic Outlook

By BRUCE CATTON

It may be that we would all be better off if we could rid history of some of the romantic haze which keeps blurring the outlines. This (it is only fair to add) is a responsibility of the citizen at large as well as of the historian. The romance is there, all right, and there is no way to avoid seeing it; the trick is to keep that fact from distorting our scale of values.

The romantic outlook does no particular harm if it is confined to the past. The trouble is that it won’t stay there. It gets into the present as well, and then it represents a flight from reality. It embodies an attitude toward life—an attempt to perpetuate an impossible dream-image of bygone times—which makes it impossible to cope with today’s problems. When that happens the future is apt to become rather difficult.

As a case in point, consider the American Civil War.

Whatever values we may see when we look back on that war—and both the romanticist and the cold realist can find plenty to look at—what stays with one the longest is the realization that the whole tragic business represented a national inability to face up to the future. The future was arriving, in the iSGo’s—what we live with now was struggling then to be born—and the need to study it and make the inevitable adjustments was simply too much for everybody. The war was an attempt to escape, with men on both sides imagining that they would preserve (each section in its own way) a cherished version of the past. The romantic outlook could hardly be followed with greater te- nacity, nor could it easily lead to a greater disaster.

The one Civil War figure who, more than any other, draws the attention of the romanticist is that famous leader of Robert E. Lee’s cavalry, Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart. You have to adopt the romantic outlook in looking at Stuart because there is no other way to see him. He wore a gray cape lined with scarlet, he kept a plume in his hat, when he rode off on some perilous expedition he went gaily, with a banjo player twanging a lively tune and the whole staff, as likely as not, joining in song; and he could posture for his own eyes and the eyes of posterity at the same time that he was most efficiently leading a hard-hitting group of fighting horsemen. He is presented now in a good new biography by Burke Davis—Jeb Stuart, the Last Cavalier—which is very much worth reading.

Mr. Davis has the right title. Stuart was the last cavalier. The Civil War was the last war in which he could have operated; indeed—and this is perhaps the point of the whole business—he was just slightly obsolete even for the Civil War, although neither he nor the men who fought against him ever suspected it. He saw war as a matter of gallantry and the heroic gesture, and it had got past that. He comes down to us as a streak of bright color in a darkening landscape, and he was never able to see why things were clouding up so badly because he was out of touch with the realities of his day. The ultimate realities of life and death he knew very well, and they never scared him. When his time came to die he played his part perfectly; carried off the field at Yellow Tavern with a mortal wound (an uncommonly painful one, to boot) he could call out to his troopers to go on back and give the Yankees another round, adding grimly and quite truthfully: “I would rather die than be whipped!” But of the larger reality in which his life was cast Stuart apparently understood very little.

Which is to say that he was pure act; a man of enormous gusto, who was the last cavalier without suspecting that something more than a cavalier was needed. Long before he died his deeds had become legendary. He twice rode completely around McClellan’s army, he deftly screened Lee’s army from prying Yankee cavalry, and when he took his men into battle—which he did with enormous enthusiasm whenever the chance offered—he was usually up in the front line himself, doing his own personal cutting and thrusting. As a soldier he was wholly admirable; the only trouble was that he was fighting in the wrong war.

War had ceased to be a romantic adventure. Traditionally, it was something that a nation might do with its left hand, carrying it on until the other side concluded that everybody might be better off if the fighting stopped, at which point some sort of accommodation would be reached. By the 1860’s war had taken on the two terrible characteristics of modern war; neither participant could afford to stop anywhere short of complete, unconditional victory, and each discovered as it fought that to win a modern war a nation has to use every resource it has, from the farmer’s corncrib or the village machine shop on up to the last full measure of the citizen’s devotion. The converse of this, of course, is that you have to destroy every resource your enemy has, no matter where that leads you. It has led us in these later years considerably beyond our depth; even in the Civil War it led people farther than anyone intended to go, farther than anyone was ready to understand.

Jeb Stuart, the Last Cavalier, by Burke Davis. Rinehart & Co. 480 pp. $6.

It had led them, for instance, beyond the point at which war could be won by cut-and-thrust cavalrymen pounding along in the grand manner. Stuart’s own romantic concept tripped him at Gettysburg, where he saw the glamour of a bold cavalry raid so much more clearly than he saw what he was supposed to do to help Lee. In the end, it is possible to argue that roughhewn Bedford Forrest, who would not have recognized a romantic notion if it had hit him in the eye, had a better understanding of what mounted troops ought to be doing than Stuart had. The Stuart story is colorful and inspirational, but at bottom it is the tragic story of a man who came on the scene in the wrong era. That tragedy he shared with his entire generation.

Sea Raider

By BRUCE CATTON

What was true on the land was also true on the water. The sea raid was like the cavalry raid. It was bold, eye-filling, inspiring, and in the grand tradition, and it could be done (given the right leader) with the materials at hand. But it did not—in the nature of things, it could not—lead to final victory. Undying legends could be erected on the exploits of a Confederate cruiser like Alabama, which flitted across the seven seas like a destroying wraith, a great ship under a. great captain; but to destroy the Northerners’ ability to go on with the war something quite different was needed—something like the makeshift improvisations that produced the ironclads Merrimac and Tennessee, which could hit the Yankees where they really lived.

It was Alabama that got the attention, however; Alabama, and her famous skipper, Raphael Semmes, who was the Confederate Navy’s exact counterpart of Jeb Stuart. Like Stuart, Semmes was brave, competent, and effective, with a flair for that little something extra which the born leader of men has to have. He had every qualification he needed for his job, but the job itself was a fragment from the earlier wars, aimed at the sort of thing that might have brought victory in the old days but that could not possibly do it in the Civil War.

Semmes gets the full treatment in Edward Boykin’s new book, Ghost Ship of the Confederacy, and a fine tale it is. Semmes may have been the most accomplished commerce destroyer who ever lived. Putting to sea in 1861 in a rickety teakettle of a converted merchantman hastily fitted out as a cruiser and given the name Sumter, he took eighteen prizes, drove the Federal Navy almost frantic, and wound up at last at Gibraltar, with his ship almost ready to fall apart. Leaving it there, he went to England, took over the British-built and British-manned Alabama, and went off on one of the great sea raids of all time. In 22 months he roamed the Atlantic and Indian oceans and took 69 prizes. The American flag was all but driven from the sea, and American ship owners, hit squarely in the pocketbook, cried in anguish that this Semmes was a pirate who wanted hanging. All in all, Captain Semmes did his foes a good deal of harm.

But if Yankee commerce was extremely vulnerable to a daring sea raider, the Yankee nation itself was not. The war had taken on a new dimension, and it could never be won by commerce raiding any more than it could be won by heroic cavalry raids. It could be won, finally, only when one contestant or the other had been made utterly incapable of going on with the fight, and in the grim totality of that kind of war the commerce destroyer did not pack enough weight. Semmes cost the American shipping community enormous sums, but the American economy as a whole kept growing stronger. Semmes did perfectly what he was supposed to do; it was the job itself that failed to measure up.

Ghost Ship of the Confederacy, by Edward Boykin. Funk & Wagnalls. 404 pp. $4.95.

Like Stuart, Semmes played his part with an air, right to the end. Late in the spring of 1864, U.S.S. Kearsarge caught up with him while he was at anchor in Cherbourg Harbor. Semmes served formal notice on Captain Winslow, of Kearsarge, that he would go outside and fight just as soon as he finished a few shore-side arrangements, and Winslow quietly accepted the challenge. (The whole business reminds one of two lace-cuffed duelists arranging for a meeting under the trees at tomorrow’s dawn.) Presently the two warships left the harbor, almost in company, steamed carefully out past the limit of French territorial waters, and then squared off and began to fight.

The fight went quickly wrong, for Semmes. His fuses and powder were defective, and Winslow’s gun crews were much better marksmen than his. In little more than an hour Alabama was a sinking wreck. She went down, Kearsarge picked up some of the crew, Semmes and others were rescued by a British yacht—which promptly took them off to England, out of the reach of vengeful Yankees—and the great story was over.

So it was a great story—and nothing more. Like Stuart, Semmes was on a dead-end street. Glamorous cavalry and glamorous sea raider alike came out of the romantic idea of war; that is, they were born of a national viewpoint by which the present had to resemble the past. They could do magnificent things, leaving a bright streak of color on the land and the sea—and, in the end, the war would go on about as it would have done if these things had not been.

Realist’s War

By BRUCE CATTON

Perhaps General William Tecumseh Sherman had caught the idea. It might be going too far to say that he had thought the thing through, but something in him seemed to respond instinctively to the changed condition. He fitted in, where Stuart and Semmes did not. He was no man for the knightly gesture or the grand flourish that both of these men understood so well, but he knew precisely what to do when he came across the enemy’s corncribs and machine shops and he did it without a qualm. What he did finally won the war, but it was not very pretty.

For a firsthand glimpse of it you might read When the World Ended, which is the diary of a seventeenyear-old girl who lived in Columbia, South Carolina, edited by Earl Schenck Miers and brought forward here as an illustration of the unhappy fact that war in the modern world embodies things which the romantic outlook overlooks.

Emma LeConte lived in Columbia just when Sherman’s destroying army came marching into the place and turned the greater part of the city into rubble. Her diary tells what she saw, felt, and experienced. It is hysterical, unbalanced, bitterly biased—and true; which is to say that she tells us, from an extremely partisan viewpoint, what the people of South Carolina felt when the destroying horde finally descended upon them.

The fact that there is in this book a strong touch of that departure from reality which was experienced by so many ardent Confederates (to say nothing of a great many ardent Northerners as well) simply gives it added point. The war which began as an inspiring and romantic thing got very grim, finally, and there is little of romantic inspiration in the story of Sherman’s march across the Carolinas. Whatever of final gain for all the nation there may have been in the Civil War was not readily visible to a teen-ager in Columbia in the early weeks of 1865, and you cannot expect to find a recognition of it in this diary.

When the World Ended; the Diary of Emma LeConte, edited by Earl Schcnck Miers. Oxford University Press. 124 pp. $4.

What you do find is the undeniable fact that Sherman’s men did a great deal to earn the hatred which the people of South Carolina felt for them. They went across the state like (and it was an expression the men themselves fancied) the wrath of God. They had an animus, and they felt justified in expressing it. They were imperfectly disciplined, and among them there were a good many out-and-out rowdies, and they looted and burned without giving the matter a second thought. They rationalized it, later (whenever it occurred to them that rationalization might be needed), by remarking that the war had to be won and that anyhow South Carolina had started it, but it does no one any harm to see how the whole business looked to a girl who was on the receiving end of it.

The war had to be won: perhaps that is the sentence that does the damage. In the old days there were limits; there were things you did not have to endure and things you did not have to do, and when the pinch came you could simply stop fighting and work out some sort of settlement. War has got beyond that now because the stakes are always immeasurable. Neither the North nor the South imagined that the war they began at Fort Sumter was going to be like that. Their belief that it was going to be of the old, limited kind was basically a romantic belief. The present was going to be like the past. Unfortunately, it was not in the least like it, and the blackened ruins of burned Columbia lay on the sky line in testimony of it.

Young Innocents

By BRUCE CATTON

Bear in mind that this romantic viewpoint was by no means confined to the South. It was all but universal, and you can see it in the North as well as in Dixie. It is eminently visible in the history of any of the hundreds of volunteer regiments which wore the Federal blue; very strikingly so, at this moment, in an excellent new book, The Twentieth Maine, by John J. Pullen, which tells how a typical regiment was organized, what it did, and how its members reacted to the whole affair.

The Twentieth Maine was formed in 1862, mostly from small towns and backwoods areas in the state of Maine, and its recruits came to camp with the quaintest notions of what they were getting into. Discipline, in the beginning, was entirely nonexistent. The regiment’s first colonel was a starchy West Pointer named Adelbert Ames, and what he saw when he got to camp horrified him beyond measure. Instead of saluting, lanky privates leaning against trees would casually remark, “How d’ye do, Colonel?” when he came along. At guard mount, the officer of the day might show up in a cutaway coat and a silk hat—formal enough, if not exactly military—and when orders were issued the men would hold impromptu town meetings to discuss them and determine whether they ought to be obeyed. After his first inspection, Colonel Ames exploded wrathfully: “This is a hell of a regiment!” Then he set to work to put it into shape.

He succeeded admirably, and the Twentieth Maine became one of the most solid of Union combat outfits. It learned to salute and to obey orders and to appear on parade in proper uniform, and in the end it did a horrifying amount of very hard fighting—it was one of several Union regiments which claimed to have saved the day at Gettysburg, which was an occasion where the day needed saving repeatedly—and it served to the end of the war, counting among its veterans, finally, three winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

All in all, this regiment was typical; typical chiefly in that its members went off to war (like the nation that bore them) without the faintest conception of what was going to happen. They thought of war in the beginning as a sort of joint venture carried on by youthful heroes, who would picturesquely do fine things with great daring for flag and country; on their own level, they had the Jeb Stuart idea. They were caught up in something they did not understand, and what they would actually do was not at all like what they had bargained for when they enlisted.

They were, in short, a collection of young innocents, in which they precisely resembled most of their fellow countrymen, North and South alike. But what innocent people can do when they wage modern war can be rather terrifying, and in a small way Miss Emma LeConte has some testimony on the matter.

Sherman’s army which wrecked Columbia was made up of regiments exactly like this one. Somewhere along the way its men were taught that they would win the war by wrecking the Southern economy, which meant by destroying all of the means that kept the economy functioning. Do this with a poorly disciplined, inadequately indoctrinated army and you are apt to loose horror on the land. Between burning a farmer’s barn and killing his livestock (necessary, if total war is to be won) and destroying a city that has already been captured, there is a dividing line which is all too easily crossed if the men who come up to it are disillusioned romantics who have learned that anything goes.

The Twentieth Maine, by John J. Pullen. The J. B. Lippincott Company. 352 pp. $5.

This is not simply a matter for solemn head-shaking by one reading the story of the Civil War in the quiet of his study. The problem is still with us, raised by now to quadruple strength. Modern war, just dawning in the i86o’s, has come to its high noon—and we still have not thought our way through it. Subconsciously, we still approach the idea of war with the feeling that war can be limited and kept within some sort of restraints, which does not seem to be the case. Our ability to make war has developed much faster than our thinking about war. We still have the Jeb Stuart viewpoint, but in actions we tend to follow the pattern set by Sherman’s bummers.

The historian Carl L. Becker once remarked that America is a society which needs to re-examine its theory of itself. Somehow we have let that re-examination lag. A good place to begin might be with a study of the gap between theory and reality in the Civil War.