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NEWS & LETTERS, JULY 2003
Black/Red View
'Antietam' still relevant
by John Alan Nearly a century and a half after the U.S. Civil War a
seemingly infinite number of books are still being published on it. It has been
estimated that 100 new books on this topic appear every year. Clearly,
publishers know that there exists an undying interest in the Civil War and that
this nation is still waiting for new information and analysis about the most
devastating and socially transforming war in American history. James M. McPherson’s new book CROSSROADS OF FREEDOM,
ANTIETAM, THE BATTLE THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF THE WAR (Oxford, 2002) is one of
those new books. McPherson has chosen to see the Civil War from the “dimension
of contingency” in the “sense of turning points” in a war, which “might
have gone altogether differently.” Antietam was such a turning point. It led
to the Emancipation Proclamation and stopped England’s and France’s attempts
to recognize the South as an independent state. BLOODY DAY McPherson opens CROSSROADS OF FREEDOM with a chapter
called “Death in September.” According to McPherson the battle at Antietam
on Sept. 17, 1862 “remains the bloodiest single-day in American history.”
More than 12,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or mortally wounded.
Those casualties “were four times greater than the American casualties at the
Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.” And more died that day “than died in combat in all the
other wars fought by this country in the 19th century COMBINED: the War of 1812,
the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, all the Indian Wars"
(p. 3). In other words, in becoming an imperial power the U.S. had fewer
casualties than in a one-day battle at Antietam fought between Americans over
the meaning of African-American freedom 140 years ago. McPherson sees the battle of Antietam as a “historical
tendency,” meaning that although it was an immediate event it would decide the
fate of the Civil War. He seeks to prove the validity of his position by
pointing out that once the Union general George B. McClellan had decisively
defeated the Southern General Robert E. Lee at Antietam, Lincoln announced that
he would emancipate the slaves. MARX’S VIEW Marx was a sharp observer of what was happening during
the Civil War. He thought that the Confederate invasion of Maryland in 1862 was
a sign of the ongoing dissolution in the Confederacy. Marx wrote that the
invasion of this border state by the South “...showed that even in this section [of the country]
the support for the Confederacy is weak. But the whole struggle turns on the
border states. Whoever possesses them dominates the Union.....The emigration of
the slaveowners from Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee to the South, with their
black chattels, is already enormous, and if the war is prolonged for a while, as
it is certain to be, the Southerners will have lost all hold there. The South
began the war for these territories. The war itself was the means of destroying
its power in the border states, where, apart from this, the ties with the South
are weakening daily because a market can no longer be found for slave breeding
and internal slave trade.” (Letter to Engels, Oct. 29, 1862.) Marx clearly saw a number of interlocking contingencies
which were opposing the Southern Confederacy. He saw Antietam in the context of
the economic crises caused by the struggle over the border states limiting
slavery. No one was more careful to follow events empirically than Marx. Yet in
spite of all the contingencies that emerged, the overriding determinant for Marx
was the necessity of the idea of freedom in the slaves themselves. In the same
letter Marx criticized Lincoln for not measuring up to this real “historic
content” of the war. McPherson doesn’t leave Lincoln off the hook. He
reveals that the great emancipator was a politician, without any philosophy of
freedom, under pressure to appease both slave-holding border states and
abolitionists. For Lincoln, the only goal of the war was to preserve
the Union. But the slaves didn’t agree with his limited view of the war.
McPherson writes: “They voted with their feet for freedom by escaping
from their masters to Union military camps in the South. By creating a situation
in which the Union officers would either have to return them to slavery or
acknowledge their freedom, escaping slaves took the first step toward achieving
freedom for themselves and making the war a war for freedom as well as for the
Union.” (p. 62) This quote contains nothing less than a method used by
slaves, 140 years ago, to transform political war into a war for a new concept
of a relationship of person to person and to labor. The real story of why the Civil War continues to need re-examination is not alone unearthing new contingencies, but the persistence of the drive to be free by African Americans. That persistence never stopped and showed itself in the whole 20th century. While McPherson wrote an important book on the Civil War, it still lacks the focus on the massive self-organization of African Americans which was the underlying determinant for the Civil War’s contingencies. |
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