The Civil War freed almost four million Americans from the humiliations and oppressions of slavery. It is undoubtedly one of America’s greatest triumphs. As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of this huge event, however, we must also grieve. The Civil War is simultaneously America’s greatest tragedy. No other conflict in the nation’s 237-year history can compare to the anguish and grief it inflicted on the men and women who were engulfed by it.
For almost a century, the accepted figure for the number of soldiers killed in the war was 618,222. Recently, an historian who has restudied the census records of 1870 and 1880 has concluded that the toll was at least 750,000. There is a strong possibility that the correct number is 850,000. The Southern Confederacy’s records vanished with their defeat. Their toll is only an estimate. If we include the wounded men who died prematurely over the next two decades, the toll for both sides may be 1,000,000. This much is certain: more soldiers died in that four-year struggle than the nation lost in all her previous and future wars combined.1
What makes these numbers especially horrendous is the fact that America’s population in 1861 was about 31 million. In 2012, U.S. population is about 313 million. If a similar conflict demanded the same sacrifice from our young men and women today, the number of dead might total over 10 million. Think for a moment about how many stricken parents, wives, fiancés, and children would be struggling to cope with this tidal wave of grief and loss.
The enormity of the Civil War’s tragedy grows even larger when we realize that the United States is the only country in the world that fought such a horrific war to end slavery. Other nations with large slave populations, such as Great Britain, which had 850,000 slaves in its West Indies islands, Cuba, which had almost 1,000,000, and Brazil, which had at least 3,000,000, ended the deplorable institution with relatively little bloodshed. Even Czarist Russia, with its millions of semi-slaves known as serfs, freed them without a war. Why were the Americans, with a government designed to respond to the voice—or voices—of the people, compelled to resort to such awful carnage?2
The question becomes even more perplexing when we consider another startling fact. Only 316,632 Southerners owned slaves—a mere 6 percent of the total white population of 5,582,322. These figures become doubly baffling when a further analysis reveals only 46,214 of these masters owned 50 or more slaves, entitling them to the aristocratic-sounding term, “planter.” Why did the vast majority of the white population unite behind these slaveholders in this fratricidal war? Why did they sacrifice over 300,000 of their sons to preserve an institution in which they apparently had no personal stake?
I have devoted much of my literary life to writing about the American Revolution. My exploration of our founding years convinced me of the originality and importance of the heritage created by the men and women who won an eight-year struggle against the most powerful nation in the world and created the modern era’s first republic. Ironically, this conviction made me even more baffled by the Civil War’s eruption little more than a half century after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their compatriots turned the leadership of the new nation over to the next generation.
I never thought I would do more than muse about the Civil War until my good friend, Byron Hollinshead, director of American Historical Publications and former publisher of two distinguished history magazines, asked me to contribute to a book entitled I Wish I’d Been There. A gallery of well-known historians was asked to insert themselves into famous events of the past and describe them as if they were on the scene. I became a spectator/ actor in John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
I was mesmerized, not only by the chief protagonist, but by the reactions of prominent contemporaries, ranging from Robert E. Lee to Abraham Lincoln to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Especially fascinating was the statement of the president of the United States in 1859, James Buchanan. Brown’s reckless venture was caused, Buchanan said, by “an incurable disease in the public mind.” In his final message to Congress in 1860, as Southern states seceded and Civil War loomed, he repeated the assertion.
Buchanan’s frequently hostile biographers have all dismissed or ignored these words. They caught my attention because in two of my previous books, I have explored how illusions play a role in history. Was the president talking about this sort of distortion?3
Few presidents have lower ratings than Mr. Buchanan in the polls historians take to rank the nation’s chief executives as great, near great, mediocre, or failures. On the other hand, not many presidents had more experience in national politics than “Old Buck.” He spent almost forty years as a congressman and senator, plus terms as secretary of state and ambassador to Great Britain, before winning the White House.
I soon discovered that President Buchanan did not originate the phrase “public mind.” Thomas Jefferson frequently used the term to describe various aspects of the politics of his era. Writing to George Washington in 1792 about the angry disagreements stirred by the new federal government’s financial policy, Jefferson warned, “The public mind is no longer confident and serene.” Abraham Lincoln was another man who frequently invoked the phrase. In 1861 he accused the South of “debauching the public mind” about the right to secede. A century later, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson declared, “Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.”4
The public mind is intimately linked with public opinion, which one early nineteenth-century commentator called “that inexorable judge of men and manners” in a republic. But the public mind suggests something less fluctuating than opinion—and more complex than an illusion, which can be swiftly dispelled by events. The phrase implies fixed beliefs that are fundamental to the way people participate in the world of their time.5 A disease in the public mind would seem to be a twisted interpretation of political or economic or spiritual realities that seizes control of thousands and even millions of minds. Americans first experienced one of these episodes in 1692, when the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony became convinced that witches were threatening their society with evil powers. Over two hundred people were arrested and flung into fetid jails. Twenty-one were hanged, one seventy-one-year-old man was “pressed to death” beneath heavy stones, and at least seven died in prison.
No one has described this public frenzy better than the great New England novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne. “That terrible delusion . . . should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes . . . are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen—the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day, stood in the inner circle roundabout the gallows, loudest to acclaim the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.”6
A similar frenzy seized the nation in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, reaching a climax on January 16, 1919, when Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, banning the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks. Prohibition destroyed the liquor industry, the seventh largest business in the United States. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs. For the next thirteen years, the ban corrupted and tormented Americans from coast to coast.
Rather than discouraging liquor consumption, Prohibition increased it. Taking a drink became a sign of defiance against the arrogant minority who had deprived people of their right to enjoy themselves. The 1920s roared with reckless amorality in all directions, including Wall Street. When everything came crashing down in 1929 and the grey years of the Great Depression began, second thoughts were the order of the day. Large numbers of people pointed to the state of mind inspired by Prohibition as one of the chief reasons for the disaster.
In 1933, a new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment one of his priorities. But the evil effects of the plunge into moral redemption linger to this day, most notably in the influence of organized crime, better known as the Mafia, in many areas of American life. The experience proved that a passionate minority seized by the noble desire to achieve some great moral goal may be abysmally wrong.
Later in the twentieth century, a European disease of the public mind consumed a horrific number of lives. Communism, with its spurious goal of achieving economic equality, killed an estimated 50 million people in Soviet Russia alone and uncounted millions more elsewhere.
In America, an offshoot of this disease, McCarthyism, roiled our politics and morality for most of a decade after World War II. Spawned by Joseph McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin, McCarthyism prompted thousands of Americans to become enraged investigators and persecutors of their fellow Americans, based on the often spurious accusation that they were or once had been Communists or Communist sympathizers. Many saw their legal, literary, film, or other careers ruined. Some people, driven to despair, committed suicide.
A good example was my friend, novelist Howard Fast, who was forced to write under a pseudonym to make a living. I was among several fellow writers who gave him quotes that his publisher used to help sell these secretly written books.
Analyzing these false beliefs gave me additional insights into how a disease in the public mind works its dark will on the world. It is backed by politicians and other prominent leaders, and often by a media apparatus—newspapers, pamphlets, books, magazine articles, and in the twentieth century, television, radio, and film—that reinforces the disease with massive repetition. At least as important are hate-filled verbal denunciations of real or supposed opponents.
On September 11, 2001, the United States awoke from the illusion that an era of peace and reason was dawning after the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989. Muslim fanatics flew two passenger planes into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, and another plane into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, killing themselves and 2,700 Americans. The disease in the public mind that motivated these true believers was a warped version of the Mohammedan faith.
Perhaps President Buchanan’s assertion that a disease in the public mind produced John Brown in 1859 and the ensuing Civil War deserves consideration, at the very least. Let us remember it while we visit a bloodstained Harpers Ferry and begin our journey into the history that inflamed John Brown’s already unbalanced brain—the United States of America’s entanglement with African slavery.