Touched with Fire

THE BLUE AND THE GRAY (2 vols., 1,201 pp.) -- Edited by Henry Steele Commager--Bobbs-Merrill ($12).

When they were unraveling the old myths and weaving their own, the men to whom all cats and causes are grey worked out a version of the American Civil War. Regional economic rivalry, they said, had been heated up by New England abolitionists and dream-wrapped Southern devotees of Sir Walter Scott; the unnecessary struggle that resulted eventually ended, as it had to do, with victory for the side with the most iron foundries; it was rather a pity that the names of two such broad-minded individuals as Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee ever got mixed up in this intolerant and partisan affair.

This and kindred myths (at their height in the 19305) have now begun to fray because they run counter to the American experience o-f the last nine years. Henry Steele Commager's book may help to finish the job, and to put the Civil War back where it belongs--in the center of the American story. With the war left out, the American character is incomprehensible, and dangerously so. In 1861 and in 1950, the American represented himself (and believed himself) as despising politics and loving comfort above all men. Yet the American has always been deeply political, a man with a burning concern as to who may tell whom to do what.

In two world wars, the U.S. bears a measure of guilt in not making this concern clear to those who were to become her enemies. One of the friends of the U.S. understood without being told. Commager, in his introduction, repeats a Winston Churchill story: the day of Pearl Harbor, some Britons doubted that the easygoing U.S. had the will and stamina to fight as it would have to fight. Says Churchill: "But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch ... I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."

"It Wasn't Funny Then." Historian Commager notes that the men who fought the Civil War "knew what they were fighting for, as well as men ever know this." The Blue and the Gray offers strong supporting evidence. For this is not Commager's story, but the war "as told by participants'' in letters, diaries and memoirs, adroitly knit into a coherent narrative.

They were excellent eyewitnesses, the men & women of that generation. Cannoneer Augustus Buell. himself a memorable witness of Gettysburg, pays a tribute to the reportorial ability of his fellow soldiers: "The men in our Army were in the habit of observing things . . . even in matters of military knowledge far beyond their sphere or control."

The soldiers were not the only sharp observers. Mrs. Mary A. Ward of Rome, Ga., telling what it was like to be waiting for the Yankees, gets the anxiety across without theatrics. "Hams would be jerked out of the smokehouse, and holes would be dug and everything thrown in pell mell. Then we would begin to imagine that because we knew where those things were, the first Yankee that appeared would know, too, and often we would go and take them all up from there and dig another hole and put them in that; so that our yards began to look like graveyards. It is very funny to think of now, but it wasn't funny then ..."

Anna Dickinson describes the antidraft riots in New York, and reserves her finest indignation for Governor Seymour, who responded to the rioting by promising to try to have the Federal draft law repealed. Says she: "His allies in newspaper offices attempted to throw the blame upon the loyal press and portion of the community. This was but a repetition of the cry raised by traitors in arms that the government, struggling for life in their deadly hold, was responsible for the war: 'If thou wouldst but consent to be murdered peaceably, there could be no strife.' "

"The Snowy Heights." From the vast material available, Commager could easily have told the war in the words of private citizens and private soldiers. He has, however, turned his back upon the inverse snobbery which minimizes the part of generals and politicians in great struggles. Sherman's letter to the leading citizens of Atlanta, explaining why their city had to be evacuated, is as good an essay on war as was ever written "in haste." The Olympian Lee seems far more human for his letter to Jeff Davis advising what 1950 would call a shrewd propaganda line: Lee urged Davis not to disillusion those Northern members of the peace party who thought they could have both peace and the Union.

Commager's Civil War--the participants' Civil War--is no blind grappling of unwary hosts, but a highly purposive endeavor, enlightened on both sides by respect for principle, or what Commager calls "character." He quotes a veteran of the 20th Massachusetts, the younger Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us."

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