This idea of power simply emanating downward still animates apologetics for authoritarianism, but it also leads to excitement about top-down health-care programs that everyone knows will never be enacted by executive fiat. It inspires, too, the belief that there are “diseases” in the body politic, in need of a cure, rather than a multitude of interests and a plurality of means, always to be kept in balance. If we were jellyfish, blobs of water and nerves, we might realize that political units aren’t really like human bodies; they’re more like coral reefs, with lots of different kinds of life existing at once, competing and coöperating in complex, multilevel emergent systems. We might realize that we would often be better off worrying about what the appendages in legislatures and localities are doing than about what some ultimate head is thinking, or might be made to think.
All these varieties of metaphor, and the confusions they engender, turn out to matter as one reads Fergus M. Bordewich’s new book, “Congress at War” (Knopf)—but it is the last that is the most striking. Although the subject of the book is specific, its implications are universal. It is essentially a history of the Civil War, from the Northern side, told by the feet and the arms. Lincoln gets pushed into the background as a largely confused and feeble figure, and the Radical Republicans in Congress take the foreground as the managers of the war and the architects of abolition. Bordewich’s book has an aptly pugnacious subtitle: “How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America.”
This is popular history of a high order—Bordewich has a terrific eye and ear for the details of his chosen time—and it thoroughly reflects the larger revisionism of our day. As recently as the nineties, Ken Burns’s Civil War series told the story of America’s near-demise as a tragic conflict of competing values between brothers. Home and hearth and tradition on one side; union and industry and modernity on the other. Now we see that one set of brothers was fighting to keep still another set in a permanent state of property, to be bought and sold and worked as wanted. The Republicans in Congress, long classed as unreasonable radicals, finally seem like moral heroes.