Volume 6, Number 10 · June 9, 1966
Goodbye to All That
By Eric L. McKitrick
The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union
by George Fredrickson
Harper & Row, 277 pp., $6.95
The book that Edmund Wilson published a few years ago on the literature of the Civil War, Patriotic Gore, threatened to say the last word on that subject. It was rich, ample, and diverse, full of good portraits and good narrative; it teemed with intuitions and insights. Still, I have always thought the book gave less than it promised. There is no way of extracting from it a usable theory of the Civil War's consequences, of just what changes the war worked upon the American imagination, sensibility, and intellect. George Fredrickson's The Inner Civil War—far shorter, more modest, less diffuse, more programmatic, and in many ways imaginatively less free—is nevertheless a highly successful effort to do just that. Wilson's individual studies are often flashingly suggestive; some—those on Grant and Holmes—are so fine on any grounds that the question of a comprehensive pattern may on those points become impertinent. But his long covering essay—the scandalous 'sea slug' piece, which was intended in some way to unify all his perceptions and show how little dignity the war had as a collective experience—is more effective in paralyzing our thought than in liberating it. Fredrickson's occasional individual portraits are somewhat lacking in contour. Yet his analysis of what the war did to the minds of those individuals, and to the intellectual setting of their generation, is brilliant; it opens a range of possibilities for understanding the remainder of the nineteenth century. There are grave questions as to where, beyond Wilson, one is to go; upon Fredrickson's perceptions, one may build.
Review, 2552 words
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