George M. Fredrickson (1934–2008)

Did the Civil War change everything, or almost everything? The war seems so momentous in American history that scholars have often seemed to debate its influence in more or less these terms. This intellectual history, first published in 1965, argues instead for a measure of continuity behind the crisis. Fredrickson argues that the war, and intellectuals' response to the war, undermined radical individualism in favor of bureaucracy, corporatism, and conservatism, spurring the postwar growth show more of formal institutions in social and cultural life. But rather than creating something entirely new, the war accelerated trends that were already under way.

The book focuses on the New England intelligentsia, a class that had occupied a relatively marginal role in antebellum society. With the coming of war, this class transformed itself “from a demoralized gentry without a clearly defined social role into a self-confident modernizing elite.” Fredrickson’s three-part study follows this development from the antebellum decades through the war itself and into the early years of the twentieth century.

The Civil War generation grew up under the sway of the Jacksonian era (1828-1836), which had bequeathed the United States an innate suspicion of institutions and intellectualism. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s individualist creed of “self-culture” suited the ideological climate of the times. Similarly, William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionism, although not a mainstream movement, urged Americans to fulfill their personal integrity by ridding themselves of the most corrupt of all institutions. Most radical of all was the democratic idealism typified by George Bancroft and Walt Whitman, for whom the popular will, when not corrupted by political institutions such as the Democratic Party, was an infallible guide to divine truth.

America had its conservative intellectuals as well, nostalgic for a more deferential, less humanitarian past, and distrustful of the undisciplined masses. These conservatives, such as Orestes A. Brownson, were thoroughly out of step with antebellum society. Unexpectedly, the crisis of impending civil war united radical democrats and conservatives behind the Union cause, albeit for different reasons and with different expectations.

The eight chapters at the heart of the book discuss intellectual responses to secession and rebellion, the outburst of popular patriotism, growing wartime suffering, the sacrifice of young members of the elite class, voluntarism, the emancipation of slaves, the question of loyalty to government, and, finally, a new form of anti-intellectualism among a rising generation of battle-scarred scholars. Except for Whitman and, notably, Abraham Lincoln, whose public rhetoric described the war as a struggle to save democracy, most northern intellectuals tempered their enthusiasm for democracy and the individual, rallied around the flag, and discovered a new appreciation for patriotism and unswerving loyalty.

Conservatives welcomed the war as an opportunity to assault what Charles Eliot Norton called the “feeble sentimentalities” of an excessively democratic era, marshaling Darwinist ideas to justify the war’s wastage of human life for “great and durable results.”

Other conservatives formed the influential United States Sanitary Commission to impose “practical good sense” on the public’s spontaneous impulse to relieve suffering. Far from being a beacon of benevolence, the USSC was, in Fredrickson's view, an ideological organization devoted to training Americans to submit to order and discipline. Providing aid to soldiers through paid agents rather than volunteers, which the USSC did quite effectively, was mostly a means to this higher end.

Moral reform also gave way to wartime pragmatism as abolitionists, including Garrison himself, united with conservatives in casting the emancipation of slaves as primarily a means to victory. Even the death in battle of Col. Robert Gould Shaw, a symbol to many of the war as an anti-slavery crusade, was also of use to conservatives. Shaw’s cousin Francis Parkman used the elite Bostonian’s death to help establish the political myth of a worthy American aristocracy entitled to rule over the majority.

Fredrickson’s concluding section traces the war’s legacy in the changed intellectual climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, characterized by nationalism, imperialism, the growth of elite-controlled institutions, and esteem for the “strenuous life” of warlike adventurism over the life of the mind.

This 1965 work has held up remarkably well, justifying a 1993 reprint with no changes other than a new preface. Fredrickson, best known today as a leading scholar of the history and consequences of racism, pursued this study (his first book) under the guidance of Perry Miller, the influential intellectual historian of New England Puritanism. The book is influenced as well by Stanley Elkins’ unfortunate claim that the transcendentalist followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson comprised the only noteworthy intellectual community in the antebellum United States. Therefore The Inner Civil War focuses tightly on Massachusetts, describing the concerns and conflicts of Concord transcendentalists, Boston Brahmins, and a few other individuals with Bay State connections, none of whom resided further west than New York City.

In the preface to the 1993 edition, Fredrickson admits to being “slightly embarrassed” by his book’s elitist concern with those whom he called in 1965 “the few who have a genuine concern for ideas.” He also admits that his choice of individuals to study was somewhat arbitrary. In his favor, the book is remarkable for its time in that it takes note of women who were not named Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as several male intellectuals not usually listed among the “great men” of the period.

Of particular interest to Fredrickson is Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist who maintained his ideological commitment to racial equality in the face of open hostility, even as other erstwhile idealists succumbed to the lure of Social Darwinist thought or simply professed to be bored with the plight of the southern Negro. Some frustrated abolitionists were lost to the political fringe, but Phillips does not appear to be one of these. Fredrickson’s account of Phillips’ career maintains critical distance, yet also suggests the possibility of a different postbellum consensus in the North, had a critical mass of northern opinion opted, as Phillips consistently did, for racial justice over white supremacy. show less

When one reads about the writings and thoughts of these men (nearly all men save toward the end) one is pleased at the healthiness of range of intellectual discourse reflecting on a healthy democratic society. However, it may have been helpful to contrast this refined learned discussion with that of the broader public that was deteriorating into a raw, raucous, puffing shouting match to adversaries and so much patriotic gore (I'm burrowing a phrase) to one's own that led to the very show more undemocratic process of war. For me it makes the successful running, it subjugated the South militarily, of the War by the Union government all the more amazing. A very insightful picture is presented by Frederickson that is loaded with many quotable moments. After this reading you can not with confidence say what led to the War and what it was all about. Ah, all those dead for what?

Quotes: (pages 39-40) “Following the lead of Thoreau who had first made transcendentalism the basis for defying the law in his doctrine of civil disobedience, Emerson passed from a theoretical anti-institutionalism to something approaching staight-out anarchism.
Emerson's new view of radical egoism came out forcefully in his 1856 address to a Kansas relief meeting in Cambridge. After advocating direct aid from the Massachusetts state government to the embattled free-state settlers, Emerson went on to dismiss the argument that such aid would be illegal: 'We stick at the technical difficulties. I think there never was a people so choked and stultified by forms...I own have little esteem for governments. I esteem them only good in the moment they are established. I set the private man first. He only who is able to stand alone is qualified to be a citizen.' In reviewing events in Kansas, Emerson welcomed the fact of anarchy as confirmation of his belief that men could live without institutions. 'I am glad,' he said, 'to see that the terror of disunion and anarchy are disappearing.'
John Brown's raid raised even more extravagant hopes for the triumph of transcendental anarchism. '...John Brown was an idealist. He believed in his ideas to that extent that he existed to put them all into action....' said Emerson at a John Brown meeting, and he confided to his journal that courage like that of Brown 'charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.' The example of Brown was just what the country needed: 'what a contagion belongs to it. It finds its own with magic affinity all over the land...Everything feels the new breadth, excepting the dead old doting politicians, whom the trumpet of resurrection can not waken.'”

(page 170) “Just such an affirmation of America by duty and not by inclination came out in one of Holmes' letters of 1862, '...I'm an out and outer of a democrat in theory,' he wrote, 'but for contact, except at the polls, I loathe the thick-fingered clowns we call the people---especially as the beasts are represented at political centres---vulgar, selfish & base...' to men with such opinions, public service in peace time, like military duty in time of war, was a matter of stern self-discipline, an ability to stand unpleasantness, pain, and frustration.
With his distrust of home-front ideology and his sense of himself as a professional soldier rather than a citizen volunteer, Holmes diverged increasingly from his correspondents in Boston. The elder Holmes, who, like most members of the older generation of intellectuals, expected national salvation from the war, was dismayed by unenthusiastic tones of his soldier son, whom he accused of losing faith in the Northern cause.” show less

This work really focuses on 18th & 19th Century histories of institutional racism, injustice, and slavery in South Africa and the United States. The author context switches between these continental differences often at the paragraph frequency, which strikes me as too frequent for this comparative study. The telling in detail ends abruptly before the 20th Century with the run-up to WW I in the last few pages. There is no Sun City or Mandela Nelson here, though I get the feeling while it is show more not overtly stated that South Africa's longer if less bloody trek through Apartheid is what would have happened in the U.S. had it not been for the messy catharsis of the Civil War. show less

5295. Great Lives Observed William Lloyd Garrison, Edited by George M. Fredrickson (read 21 Jul 2015) This book consists of parts of Garrison's writings, mostly drawn from his paper, The Liberator, which he started in 1831 and continued till 1866--when what he sought, the end of slavery in the US, had been accomplished. and then excerpts from his contemporaries' comments about him, and finally parts from what historians have had to say about him. The book presents a good picture and one must show more conclude that while some of his positions in regard to how to assail slavery were questionable, his aim was so admirable that we should admire the man. I found my admiration for him was highest as I read what Southerners who were his contemporaries had to say about him. It is clear that some of them would have killed him if they had had a chance. . show less