ED: So, Aaron does a great job of evoking for us the central idea of home—
PETER: Yeah.
ED: And the motivations of Confederate soldiers and their understanding that is what they are sacrificing their lives for. And you might ask, what did this look like from the perspective of those for whom they were sacrificing their lives. What was it like for the women who lived in those homes that the Confederate soldiers were defending? No one has thought about this more thoroughly than Catherine Clinton who has written about women in the war before and after for a long time, and she told me that when you look really closely at the lives of women in the Civil War era, Northern and Southern, white and black, a lot of the easy stereotypes and generalizations begin to fall away.
CATHERINE CLINTON: Men were coming home maimed. Men were coming home scarred. Men were coming home psychologically damaged and then, again, men weren’t coming home. There were small towns in Wisconsin where marriageable-age men were simply wiped out, an entire generation and the young women became skilled at the rituals of mourning. And I think this really deeply affected their outlook on life. It scarred an entire generation of young women.
ED: So, it sounds like you would emphasize in some ways the commonalities perhaps that we’ve overlooked between Northern and Southern white women.
CATHERINE CLINTON: Right, and also the way in which war and men marching into war can create a commonality between women, black and white, in the South. When we look at matters of war unleashing violence against women, war unleashing men’s restraints during war time, I was struck by the fact that Jefferson Davis was someone who spoke about rape as a fate infinitely worse than death, so we look at the way in which gender and sexual politics during the war affected very dramatically how women lived the war and that a woman alone, black or white, might be in fear of soldiers marching through. Maybe they were supposed to be liberators, maybe they were our own boys, but in both cases, war can unleash terrors and cause a gender divide that was quite dramatic.
ED: So, the more we look at the Civil War, as Catherine Clinton shows us, the more you see that the humanity of the people at the time stretched over four years, dying in incomprehensible numbers, in incomprehensible ways, for causes that had been unimaginable, it’s going to require every skill the historian has to try to make sense of this thing.
PETER: Right. And I think, Ed, Catherine tells us something important, reminds us of something that is omnipresent in the experience of people in war and that is here we are fighting on behalf of civilization, however we define it, yet just beneath the surface of civility and law is the reality of violence and as Catherine quite rightly points out and this is what Southern soldiers feared, as Aaron told us, when the forces of war are unleashed on your home, then the laws of war are hanging in suspense and that is the whole notion of laws of war which is the whole basis of modern international law, that you can somehow create conventions and standards of how you fight. Well, actually killing people blurs the distinction between barbarism and civilization and it’s that dissent into barbarism that is the threat of all wars.
BRIAN: Yeah, and Peter, with that phrase, “the threat of all wars,” we really must confront this question of ultimately how different—
PETER: Yeah, yeah.
BRIAN: Is the Civil War from all wars. Now, I who know the least about this so I’ll listen to your answers, but for me, it remains very distinctive, primarily because we did this to ourselves. We fought this—
PETER: Yeah.
BRIAN: On our own homeland, so to speak, and that certainly makes it distinctive, but listening to you guys, especially about the number of young men who signed up without being coerced and their sense of patriotism, either to the Union or to their home state and the larger Confederacy, really underscores this notion of doing this to ourselves—
PETER: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.
BRIAN: And that remains distinctive to me, but I’d be curious to hear where you and Ed come down on this question.
PETER: Well, Ed—
ED: You know, I think it was an exceptional moment in American history but I guess I’d argue that this is our version of something that all nations seem to go through at some time, right? They’re fighting over who are we really.
PETER: Right.
ED: And unlike other countries where they might be fighting over a religious difference or a longstanding who owns that piece of turf, here this was all about a future. There was not anything immediately at stake because the North didn’t think that it could abolish slavery in the Constitution, but Americans projecting themselves across space and across time were fighting in many ways over what the future of America would be.
PETER: Yeah, and I do think, I mean, you’re exactly right. There’ve been so many civil wars. There’s been so much slaughter in world history. We’re not special in that regard, but what makes this special for us is that the United States was founded on the notion of a vision of peace, that is, that republican government would end conflicts within nations, that this was a model for the world, that the Union was a way to transcend the problem of war that had scarred the European continent for centuries, that the Americas had the hubris, the pride, to think that they had discovered the formula for progress and perpetual peace and prosperity and that is republican government and that’s why there’s so much pathos in Lincoln’s Civil War rhetoric about the meaning of the war, about the meaning of republican government, because what the war was really demonstrating was the failure of that dream.