Subscribe now and receive weekly newsletters with educational materials, new courses, interesting posts, popular books, and much more!
Articles
English-Speaking Peoples (11): Lincoln, Lee, and the Civil War
History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume 4, Book 11
On Fridays starting September 30th, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and radio host Hugh Hewitt discussed Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the Hillsdale Dialogues segment of the Hugh Hewitt Show. For their discussion of the American Civil War, please click on the audio icon above.
Following each discussion, the Churchill Project offered companion pieces highlighting important episodes and themes in the book covered. Readers will note that our writers may focus on aspects of the books which the discussants may not. Such is the depth of Churchill’s History. Every reader may take what they prize most from this vast mine of political wisdom and understanding. Page references (parentheses) are to Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 4, The Great Democracies (New York: Dodd Mead, 1958).
“Not in vain these deeds were done”
Silly people, and there were many, not only in enemy countries, might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips…. Now we should see the weakness of this numerous but remote, wealthy, and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. —Churchill on Pearl Harbor, 19501
* * *
An earthly palimpsest of tragedy!… “Here is the Angle,” says our guide. “Here is where the dead lay thickest. Yes! in this trench they were piled in heaps, both sides together, blue and grey…. See that little gully there? It was pouring with rain, and all the water running along it was red. You know,” he adds, “a little blood goes a long way.” A small boy comes up with a basketful of bullets and regimental badges from the forgotten gleanings of a fearful harvest. We take some of these poor relics—all there is to show! Ah! No! Great causes have been settled. Destiny pivoting here has stamped the ground with a ruthless heel; the path of the world takes a different turn henceforward. Not in vain these deeds were done. —Churchill on Spotsylvania, 19292
“The noblest and least avoidable mass-conflict”
Churchill devotes one-third of The Great Democracies to the War between the States. Significantly, The American Civil War (1961) was one of only two complete excerpts from A History of the English-Speaking Peoples published as a separate work. (The other was Joan of Arc.)
It is largely a military account, with sentiments that that surprise some. Dr. Harry Jaffa, a great scholar of Lincoln and Churchill, called it “a concise history of the Civil War from the Southern point of view.”3
Churchill’s experience as he wrote may have led him to ponder the nobler aspects of the Confederate side. He had toured Civil War battlefields with Douglas Southall Freeman, the great biographer of Robert E. Lee. He compares Washington and Richmond (“the rebel capital”) with the 20th and the 19th centuries, the present and the past:
We march with Lee and Jackson, with Stuart, with Longstreet, and with Early through autumn woodlands…. Virginia, the proud Founder State of the American Union, the birthplace and home of its most renowned citizens, from Washington to Wilson, beaten down, trampled upon, disinherited, impoverished, riven asunder and flung aside while Northern wealth and power and progress strode on to Empire! And yet it had to be. Hardly even would the adherents of the lost cause wish it otherwise.4
His last sentences confirm that Churchill was not pro-Confederacy. His instincts were with human liberty. Indeed his boyhood interest in the American Civil War was first stirred by a cartoon in Punch. He recalled it in his autobiography: “a fierce young woman” beating a slave. “Not being yet myself removed out of the zone of such possibilities,” he wrote, “I regarded [this] as undoubtedly severe. I was all for the slave.”5
Churchill on Lincoln
Churchill admires but does not do full justice to Abraham Lincoln. He passes quickly over Lincoln’s philosophy and wisdom. He neither quotes nor references Lincoln’s three greatest addresses: Cooper Union, Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural. Yet he quotes at length Daniel Webster’s “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” Young Abe, he notes, “was moved by this speech” (140-41).6
Churchill holds Lincoln’s speeches “magnificent, calm, massive, and magnanimous” (163). And he does briefly quote Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, calling it a plea for “patience and conciliation”:
He disclaimed all intention of invading the South [and] announced that he would not interfere with slavery in the Southern states. He revived the common memories of the North and South, which, like “mystic cords, stretch from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart…over this broad land.”
“In your hands,” he exclaimed, “my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is this momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without yourselves being the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve and defend it” (167-68).
To this theme Lincoln adhered—for a time. Churchill quotes his letter to Horace Greeley: “My paramount object is to save the Union. [What I do,] I do because it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” Yet even then, in late 1862, the President was “meditating” on the likelihood that the Union could survive only with liberty for all.
“The only protector of the prostrate South”
The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 applied only to the rebel states. Lincoln believed he lacked broader authority, though this was perhaps a technical point: the 13th Amendment declared Emancipation nationwide. The President’s hesitancy, Churchill writes, troubled Britain. Fortunately, however, Palmerston withheld recognition of the Confederacy (217).
Northern Democrats disliked the Proclamation, and Lincoln’s Republicans lost ground in the 1862 midterms (216). The failed General McClellan opposed Lincoln in the 1864 election. In the end, however, there is no doubt about Churchill’s approval of the President:
When the toll of war rose steeply and plans went wrong he appealed for strength in his inmost thoughts to a power higher than man’s. Strength was certainly given him. It is sometimes necessary at the summit of authority to bear with the intrigues of disloyal colleagues, to remain calm when others panic, and to withstand misguided popular outcries. All this Lincoln did (215).
Lincoln “saved the Union with steel and flame,” Churchill adds, and might have saved it from the bitter aftermath. With “his great qualities of spirit and wisdom.” he proved himself indispensable:
On April 11th he proclaimed the need of a broad and generous temper and urged the conciliation of the vanquished. At Cabinet on the 14th he spoke of Lee and other Confederate leaders with kindness, and pointed to the paths of forgiveness and goodwill. But that very night as he sat in his box at Ford’s Theater a fanatical actor, one of a murder gang, stole in from behind and shot him through the head…. Lincoln died next day, without regaining consciousness, and with him vanished the only protector of the prostrate South” (262-63).
Churchill on Lee
Churchill regarded Robert E. Lee as the South’s preeminent figure. Indeed in 1930 he went so far as to imagine a fantasy in which Lee, by “a deathless feat of arms, broke the Union front at Gettysburg and laid open a fair future to the world.” Lee supplants Jefferson Davis as unchallenged leader of the independent South—and then frees the slaves! Next Churchill imagines that Britain and the two American republics combine in 1914 to prevent the First World War. He asks us to consider what horrors might have occurred “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.”7
The real Lee also comes in for praise. Churchill does not dwell on Lee’s fateful error: placing loyalty to Virginia above loyalty to his country. Instead he highlights Lee’s struggle with his conscience:
His noble presence and gentle, kindly manner were sustained by religious faith and an exalted character…. He was opposed to slavery and thought that “secession would do no good,” but he had been taught from childhood that his first allegiance was to the state of Virginia…. [When] Virginia seceded he resigned his commission, bade farewell for ever to his home at Arlington, and in the deepest sorrow boarded the train for Richmond….
Some of those who saw him in these tragic weeks, when sometimes his eyes filled with tears, emotion which he never showed after the gain or loss of great battles, have written about his inward struggle. But there was no struggle; he never hesitated. The choice was for the state of Virginia. He deplored the choice; he foresaw its consequences with bitter grief; but for himself he had no doubts at the time, nor ever after regret or remorse (169-70).
Gettysburg
In 1863, Churchill writes, Lee “resolved to carry out his long-planned invasion of Pennsylvania” (233). The climax came at Gettysburg. As the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a “damn’d close-run thing.”
Fifty thousand men collided on July 1st. Initially Lee had some success, “and [Union General George] Meade was committed to a field he thought ill-chosen” (236). Lee wished to press his gains July 2nd, but absent cavalry, General James Longstreet argued for a flanking movement. On July 3rd Lee ordered a direct assault on the Union line by General George Pickett. But Meade correctly anticipated the point of Lee’s attack:
Longstreet, unable to rally himself to a plan he deemed disastrous, left it to the artillery commander, Alexander, to give the signal to Pickett…. “Come quick,” Alexander said to Pickett, “or my ammunition will not support you properly.” “General,” said Pickett to Longstreet, who stood sombre and mute, “shall I advance?” By an intense effort Longstreet bowed his head in assent. Pickett saluted and set 42 regiments against the Union centre (239).
It was a slaughter. The dead lay where they fell, the survivors limped back. “Lee met them on his horse Traveller with the only explanation, which they would not accept: ‘It is all my fault.’” Lee offered to fight again the next day, “but no one knew better that it was decisive.” By the 14th, after successive marches, Lee was south of the Potomac: “He carried with him his wounded and his prisoners. He had lost only two guns, and the war” (240–41).
Appomattox
After Gettysburg, Churchill rapidly concludes “the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass-conflicts of which till then there was record” (266). The North, with “overwhelming strength,” captures Vicksburg, lays waste to Georgia and besieges Petersburg and Richmond. Reelected, Lincoln is emboldened. Though peace delegations meet, he will not compromise on “liberty and union.” This Jefferson Davis cannot accept. As the federal army closes on Richmond, Grant appeals to Lee to abjure further bloodshed. Churchill beautifully recounts the end:
Lee rode on Traveller to Appomattox Court House to learn what terms would be offered. Grant wrote them out in a few sentences. They were generous: Lee’s officers and soldiers must surrender their arms and return on parole to their homes, not to be molested while they observed the laws of the United States. Grant added, “Your men must keep their horses. They will need them for the spring ploughing.” This was the greatest day in the career of General Grant, and stands high in the story of the United States (261-62).
Churchill has now only to recount the death of Lincoln, and the aftermath: The South was ruined, the North in deep debt. Some 620,000 Americans had fallen, more than in both World Wars combined: “The material advance of the United States was cast back for a spell. The genius of America was impoverished by the alienation of many of the parent elements in the life and history of the Republic” (266).
A magnanimous conclusion
What does Churchill wish us to take from the American Civil War? It is likely what Lincoln offered: malice towards none and charity for all. A later American president echoed those sentiments. In 1938 at Gettysburg battlefield, “piously preserved by North and South” (233), Franklin Roosevelt declared: “Lincoln spoke in solace for all who fought upon this field…. Men who wore the blue, and men who wore the grey, are here together, in fragments spared by time. All of them we honor, not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together, under one flag now.”
***
“Who knows but it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning roll call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again hastily to don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the Long Roll summons us to battle.
“Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise. All will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well. And there will be talking and laughter and cheers. And all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?” —Berry Benson (1843-1923), Company H, 1st South Carolina Regiment, Hill’s Division, Army of Northern Virginia
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1950), 540.
2 WSC, “Old Battlefields of Virginia,” Daily Telegraph, 16 December 1929, reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Library of Imperial History, 4 vols, 1975, IV, 47-48. WSC is describing the bloodiest venue of the Battle of Spotsvylania Courthouse, May 1864.
3 Larry P. Arnn to Hugh Hewitt, Hillsdale Dialogues podcast, 5 November 2022.
4 WSC, “Old Battlefields of Virginia,” 45.
5 WSC, “Cartoons and Cartoonists,” Strand Magazine, June 1931, reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures (1932; London: Leo Cooper, 1990), 13.
6 This and all following parenthetic page references are from WSC, The Great Democracies (New York: Dodd Mead, 1958).
7 WSC, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” Scribners Magazine, December 1930, reprinted in the Collected Essays, IV: 73-84.
The author
Richard M. Langworth CBE is Senior Fellow of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.