Volume 29, Number 2 · February 18, 1982
Looking for Heroes
By Gordon S. Wood
The Vineyard of Liberty Volume One of "The American Experiment"
by James MacGregor Burns
Knopf, 741 pp., $22.95
We Americans, unlike many Europeans, have tended to see our history as the product of conscious intentions and purposeful leadership. We have not usually thought of ourselves as caught up in large impersonal forces sweeping us along to destinies we have not chosen. Which is to say that we generally have not had a tragic vision of our past. But there is in our history one notable exception to this—the Civil War. Of all the great events of American history only the Civil War has been viewed as tragic. Only such a bloody, fratricidal conflict was awesome enough to seem to be beyond traditional American political management. Yet as unaccustomed as we are to being imprisoned by circumstances, it is not surprising that some of us have been unwilling to see even the Civil War as the result of inexorable forces beyond human control. Consequently, that war has become the only major event in our history that has aroused among historians a continual debate over whether it was inevitable or avoidable. The Civil War has become a kind of test of America's ability to govern its fate.
Review, 2915 words
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