Megan Kate Nelson. Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2012.
Nelson defines a ruin as "a material whole that has violently broken into parts; enough of these parts must remain in situ, however, that the observer can recognize what they used to be." (2) She argues that her book is "the first book to consider the evocative power of wartime ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change." (9) This book is intended as a cultural history of war drawing from a variety of disciplines and interpretive tracks.
Each of the four chapters considers a different type of "ruin"--cities; individual family homes; forests and trees; and wounded soldiers who suffered the loss of one or more limb, often to battlefield surgeons. The first two were the sort of "ruins" one normally thinks of, while the latter two were living things and therefore it's an interesting conceptual assertion by Nelson. In all four cases, however, she notes a commonality--the particular American experience of ruination would prove ephemeral, as Americans preferred rebuilding to preserving when possible--cities and houses were rebuilt, forests regrew, and disable veterans would eventually die.
The messages that ruins presented, and the narratives created to give them meaning, varied by example as well as time and place, but in general Nelson tries to argue that the very concept of ruination created a physical, visible landscape which Americans grappled with, assigning narrative meaning to lone chimneys (represented destroyed houses) and empty sleeves (representing war amputees) as well as to efforts to repair damage and restore or recreate this new world.
It's not entirely clear from her text that "ruination" is a concept which would have made sense at the time, not in the over-arching sense she gives it. Nor does her book lead from the four different topics to a more cohesive vision at the end. All the same, this is an interesting way of trying to recreate the way in which the war was experienced at the time--a messier reality than the pristine lawns of modern Civil War battlefield sites would suggest.
Saturday, October 22, 2016
This Republic of Suffering
Drew Gilpin Faust. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008.
The American Civil War did a lot of things. One of the most profound outcomes of the war was the sheer number of lives it claimed. War, at its most basic level, is about killing people. For Americans who lived through the Civil War, the experience of death on an industrial scale challenged antebellum notions of mortality and humanity. Aside from the political and moral issues at stake, the Civil War unleashed a quantitative and qualitative overload of carnage both corporal and psychological on American society.
Faust organizes her book thematically, moving from "Dying" through "Killing", "Burying", "Naming" and so on. She notes in the beginning that Americans of the mid-nineteenth century were more accustomed to the first-hand experience of death than most contemporary Americans are--most people died in their homes then, and the antebellum notion of the "good death" predominated. A "good death" meant that the person dying was prepared for his or her demise, at peace with their fate and ready for a (Christian) afterlife. Also, their death was in the home, witnessed by family who were there for comfort--a comfort for both the dying and the bereaved, whom needed confirmation that their loved one had met his or her end in a manner befitting both gender norms and religious strictures.
The experience of sending thousands of young men off to die in strange places far from the people who knew them and loved them was a massive shock, then, and one which forced society to alter old expectations to accommodate new realities. Patriotism was often substituted for faith as the guiding principle at work, because while there was no way to confirm that a dying soldier had been ready to meet his maker, the death of a soldier could, by default, be said to have been sanctified by service to country.
The ways in which the scale and industrial savagery of the war challenged older assumptions and mores was matched by the ways in which it created entirely new problems and relations. The question of what to do with the dead, how to memorialize them, and how to compensate the families they left behind had massive consequences, ranging from an expanded role for the national state (particularly regarding pensions for Union veterans), to the landscaping of national cemeteries.
It is often said that the Civil War was the first modern war, a break from those that came before and a precursor to those which would follow. Faust has found a new way in which to make that old argument.
The American Civil War did a lot of things. One of the most profound outcomes of the war was the sheer number of lives it claimed. War, at its most basic level, is about killing people. For Americans who lived through the Civil War, the experience of death on an industrial scale challenged antebellum notions of mortality and humanity. Aside from the political and moral issues at stake, the Civil War unleashed a quantitative and qualitative overload of carnage both corporal and psychological on American society.
Faust organizes her book thematically, moving from "Dying" through "Killing", "Burying", "Naming" and so on. She notes in the beginning that Americans of the mid-nineteenth century were more accustomed to the first-hand experience of death than most contemporary Americans are--most people died in their homes then, and the antebellum notion of the "good death" predominated. A "good death" meant that the person dying was prepared for his or her demise, at peace with their fate and ready for a (Christian) afterlife. Also, their death was in the home, witnessed by family who were there for comfort--a comfort for both the dying and the bereaved, whom needed confirmation that their loved one had met his or her end in a manner befitting both gender norms and religious strictures.
The experience of sending thousands of young men off to die in strange places far from the people who knew them and loved them was a massive shock, then, and one which forced society to alter old expectations to accommodate new realities. Patriotism was often substituted for faith as the guiding principle at work, because while there was no way to confirm that a dying soldier had been ready to meet his maker, the death of a soldier could, by default, be said to have been sanctified by service to country.
The ways in which the scale and industrial savagery of the war challenged older assumptions and mores was matched by the ways in which it created entirely new problems and relations. The question of what to do with the dead, how to memorialize them, and how to compensate the families they left behind had massive consequences, ranging from an expanded role for the national state (particularly regarding pensions for Union veterans), to the landscaping of national cemeteries.
It is often said that the Civil War was the first modern war, a break from those that came before and a precursor to those which would follow. Faust has found a new way in which to make that old argument.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Disunion!
Elizabeth R. Varon. Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Elizabeth Veron argues "that 'disunion' was once the most provocative and potent word in the political vocabulary of Americans." (1) She goes to great pains to distinguish between 'disunion' and 'secession'; while the latter is a political, if not constitutional, process, the former was a broader and somewhat more abstract concept as well as a rhetorical device. It contained a wide spectrum of meanings and purposes: prophecy, threat, accusation, process, and program. From the founding of the Republic through the final secession crisis which led to the Civil War, the notion of 'disunion' haunted the polity and served as both warning and weapon for actors on all sides of the most fundamental conflicts of the early Republic.
'Disunion' was such a potent rhetorical trope because it spoke to existential anxieties about the fundamental nature of the Republic and the Constitutional order--"it suggested that the beloved Union might be contingent". (5) The Constitution itself instituionalized hard-won, carefully calculated compromises on several foundational issues, most notably that of slavery--an issue so delicate the document declined to name it.
Therefore, threats of disunion could cow opponents, even as accusations of the same could paint the target as a threat to stability and, of course, union. Early discourse on disunion centered on issues of sectional conflict or partisan discord; early examples include the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in response to the perceived threat of Federalist dominance, as well as the Hartford Convention. However, it was slavery which most often provoked charges and accusations of disunion. Both Southern Fire-Eaters and Northern Abolitionists (particularly Garrisonian immediatists) resorted to the language of disunion, as both sides sought to portray the Union as being fundamentally unsound.
However, it was slavery which most often evoked the language of disunion, and as sectional tensions rose the language of disunion became a fixed feature of the associated discord. Varon quotes Edward Ayres regarding the dichotomy between those "fundamentalists" who believed slavery was the "cause" of the Civil War, and those "revisionists" who believed that slavery was an aspect of antebellum society intertwined with other issues, and that the war was the product of an avoidable political crisis. Ayres wanted to find a way out of this bind, and Varon proposes her book as an answer to his plea.
The degree to which she succeeds is a mixed bag. She is at her best when arguing most strenuously that 'disunion' was a perennial and deeply coded facet of American political culture for decades. Yet, despite her (correct, in my reading) insistence that disunion and secession are separate issues, as the Civil War approaches much of the book ends up as yet another recounting of the secession crisis. Perhaps this is unavoidable, and in fairness the narrative ends with a provocative argument that the language of disunion fed into the secession crisis because it spoke to so many aspects of white Southern anxiety--not just the constitutional issues of slavery but also racial anxieties, "class and gender disorder, foreign intervention, moral decline, and economic decay." (338) At it's strongest, Varon's book adds complexity, nuance, and historical continuity to the otherwise sometime jarring accounts of the success of secession in 1860 and the war which followed.
Elizabeth Veron argues "that 'disunion' was once the most provocative and potent word in the political vocabulary of Americans." (1) She goes to great pains to distinguish between 'disunion' and 'secession'; while the latter is a political, if not constitutional, process, the former was a broader and somewhat more abstract concept as well as a rhetorical device. It contained a wide spectrum of meanings and purposes: prophecy, threat, accusation, process, and program. From the founding of the Republic through the final secession crisis which led to the Civil War, the notion of 'disunion' haunted the polity and served as both warning and weapon for actors on all sides of the most fundamental conflicts of the early Republic.
'Disunion' was such a potent rhetorical trope because it spoke to existential anxieties about the fundamental nature of the Republic and the Constitutional order--"it suggested that the beloved Union might be contingent". (5) The Constitution itself instituionalized hard-won, carefully calculated compromises on several foundational issues, most notably that of slavery--an issue so delicate the document declined to name it.
Therefore, threats of disunion could cow opponents, even as accusations of the same could paint the target as a threat to stability and, of course, union. Early discourse on disunion centered on issues of sectional conflict or partisan discord; early examples include the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in response to the perceived threat of Federalist dominance, as well as the Hartford Convention. However, it was slavery which most often provoked charges and accusations of disunion. Both Southern Fire-Eaters and Northern Abolitionists (particularly Garrisonian immediatists) resorted to the language of disunion, as both sides sought to portray the Union as being fundamentally unsound.
However, it was slavery which most often evoked the language of disunion, and as sectional tensions rose the language of disunion became a fixed feature of the associated discord. Varon quotes Edward Ayres regarding the dichotomy between those "fundamentalists" who believed slavery was the "cause" of the Civil War, and those "revisionists" who believed that slavery was an aspect of antebellum society intertwined with other issues, and that the war was the product of an avoidable political crisis. Ayres wanted to find a way out of this bind, and Varon proposes her book as an answer to his plea.
The degree to which she succeeds is a mixed bag. She is at her best when arguing most strenuously that 'disunion' was a perennial and deeply coded facet of American political culture for decades. Yet, despite her (correct, in my reading) insistence that disunion and secession are separate issues, as the Civil War approaches much of the book ends up as yet another recounting of the secession crisis. Perhaps this is unavoidable, and in fairness the narrative ends with a provocative argument that the language of disunion fed into the secession crisis because it spoke to so many aspects of white Southern anxiety--not just the constitutional issues of slavery but also racial anxieties, "class and gender disorder, foreign intervention, moral decline, and economic decay." (338) At it's strongest, Varon's book adds complexity, nuance, and historical continuity to the otherwise sometime jarring accounts of the success of secession in 1860 and the war which followed.
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