The Cholesterol Will Rise Again

I figured the Civil War would get dragged into the Chick-fil-A controversy eventually.

War And African-American Equality

In a new book, historian David Goldfield asks whether the sin of slavery in the U.S. could have been erased by some means short of the savagery of the Civil War. Reviewer and Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco thinks not, though he does see a correlation between U.S. Grant's bloody times and today's take-no-prisoners, unconditional- surrender politics:

Throughout Goldfield’s book, one sees the present peeping through the past. In his allergy to the infusion of religion into politics, and his regret over the failure of government to achieve compromise, he sometimes seems to be writing as much about our own time as about time past. Yet even looking through his eyes, one finds it hard to imagine that the post-Civil War constitutional amendments by which black citizenship rights were advanced could ever have been ratified if the slave states had remained in the Union. The “secession war,” as Walt Whitman called it, would seem to have been a necessary prelude to the process of securing black equality — a process still unfinished ­today.

No-Spin War Zone

As we prepare for the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, E. J. Dionne cautions readers not to fall for the canard, successfully promoted by the Confederacy's president and vice president, that the cataclysm was about state's rights instead of southerns' desire to preserve slavery at all costs:

After the war, in one of the great efforts of spin control in our history, both [Jefferson] Davis and [Alexander] Stephens, despite their own words, insisted that the war was not about slavery after all but about state sovereignty. By then, of course, slavery was "a dead and discredited institution," [historian James] McPherson wrote, and to "concede that the Confederacy had broken up the United States and launched a war that killed 620,000 Americans in a vain attempt to keep 4 million people in slavery would not confer honor on their lost cause."

"A Splendid Tale Of Victory"

With the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War looming (the Battle of Fort Sumter was April 12-13), Glenn W. LaFantasie of Western Kentucky University says the late Bruce Catton's A Stillness At Appomattox is the best Civil War book ever written:

This book leaves sharp images lingering in the reader's mind, largely because Catton expertly sets scenes, describes people in human terms, and refuses to disguise the ugly, malevolent and heartless aspects of war. Yet, in the end, the book is surprisingly uplifting, a splendid tale of victory, no doubt because Catton so adeptly uses irony and compassion to tell the Army of the Potomac's story.

State And Church

Library of Congress

Hat tip to Tom Tierney for this amazing on-line catalog of Civil War-era photographs, most from the Library of Congress. According to its caption, this one shows the "old Trinity Church" and U.S. Capitol dome, which was constructed between 1855-66, as it nears completion. So far, I can't discern which Trinity Church.

Glad He Was Mad

In The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester tells the story of W. C. Minor (left), a military physician who seems to have been severely traumatized by the Battle of the Wilderness during the Civil War and was sent to an English mental institution after killing a man in London after the war -- only to become a principal contributor to the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary. James Murray, its editor, built a network of volunteer readers by distributing fliers via booksellers. One of these found its way to Dr. Minor, who became a vital cog in Murray's apparatus long before the editor realized that his most brilliant and dependable volunteer was confined to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

Winchester speculates that Minor suffered from schizophrenia, which, today, would be substantially relieved by drugs and other therapies. Since like many troubled geniuses, Minor was obsessive about his creative work, we're left to wonder about the extent to which the advance of civilization -- not just the creation of great dictionaries -- depends on untreated or rampant pathologies:

One must feel a sense of strange gratitude, then, that [Minor's] treatment was never good enough to divert him from his work. The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.