Shelby Foote begins his 3000 page history with Davis and Lincoln thinking about their relative positions at the start of things. Bruce Catton begins this trilogy of history written and published around the same time as Foote’s with the dueling conventions leading up to the 1860 presidential race. I like this approach because it more squarely deal with the question of what context do we need to understand where we’re going. For us, we need to know the politics of the 1850s, at least in some detail, to know what matters of consequence we’re happening. It also helps to place certain choices within the context of choices. For a lot of histories, we begin with the idea: The Civil War happened! And then we go from there. Here we’re shown some of the politics surrounding it.
For one, there’s a certain kind of anti-democratic spirit that infested a lot of Southern politics in the 1850s. Yes, the South had been appeased left and right for the previous 70 years, but there the beginning of the sense of the end of things regarding slavery with the expansion of territories, the unpopularity of slavery in various new places, and other pending situations. Catton demonstrates this anti-democratic sprit by showing the various ways the South decided that voting would not be the avenue on which these questions would be answered. The constant push toward one acceptable outcome, regardless of the means permeates the early part of the war.
The second weird anti-democratic situation we find ourselves in in Catton’s history is how institutions are understood. The South decided that the Constitution allowed for secession, so they seceded. This creates the paradox that they are claiming sovereign status, but also demanding the laws of the US apply to how they are handled. It’s like the Civil War begins: The South declares war. The North fights a war. The South: Pikachu shocked meme. The North for their part have the opposite situation. This is NOT a sovereign nation and therefore the laws do apply. So what then? It’s interesting to see how much of the legality of the war and the things done in name of war were made on the fly (still the same way today).
The history is magnifying in a lot of good ways. There’s a very heavy focus on the leadup, and we actually only just end this first of three volumes with the first Bull Run. That’s 600 pages for two years, and presumably two more volumes at the same length remaining for each of the two year periods. Foote’s books are huge, but he’s not focusing so heavily on historical questions as narrating a giant story.
