In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets “grows in our consciousness,” arousing complex emotions and leaving “a gallery of great human images for our contemplation.”
Good writing is always in style As the centennial of the Civil War approached Life magazine asked Robert Penn Warren to write an essay on the impact the war had on America. Warren, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and numerous other prizes accepted. This small book is the essay he wrote in 1961. While Warren never considered himself a historian, he had a lifelong love of history and published a biography on John Brown. His grandfather, who fought for the South while believing in Union, told him about the Civil War and instilled in him a love of history.
This essay is as fresh and new today as it was in 1961. Warren's thoughts on the war, what he calls "The Great Alibi" and the "Treasury of Virtue" are still accurate. This is one of the great essays on the American Civil War, the impact on American history and how it affects us today. The style of writing is interesting, intelligent and very easy to read. You will quickly be caught up in the logic even as you identify current positions and come to understand their historic importance.
Civil War Established America as a Country. Robert Penn Warren, a noted Southern writer, is certain that our Civil War shaped modern America, the social institutions which had to take care of the freed slaves, domestic policies, and foreign interests. "The Civil War is our only 'felt' history -- history lived in the national imagination and not just on paper. This is not to say that the War is always, and by all men, felt in the same way. Quite the contrary. But this fact is an index to the very complexity, depth, and fundamental significance of the event. It is an overwhelming and vital image of human, and national, experience."
It taking place so long ago and ended so disastrously with the death of Abraham Lincoln, I really don't believe it caused our failing economy, philosophy, and psychology. Far too many wars, most on foreign lands, have taken place since then to put all the blame on the ressurection of the slaves. "There is no facet of our lives today that does not owe its present character in some measure to the Civil War."
The Confederate Commander in East Tennessee was General James Longstreet. The siege of Knoxville and Battle of Fort Sanders was disastrous for this area. Bridge burners to stop the railroad took place across East Tennessee. The campaign at Strawberry Plains was led by Colonel William P. Sanders, for whom the Fort on the UT campus was named. Bulls Gap, birthplace of Archie Campbell (HeeHaw fame) was pivotal for the northeast, as was Lick Creek Bridge and Blue Springs.
In Middle Tennessee, commandered by Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood, Nathan Bedford Forrest reigned in Columbia, having been born a short distance away in Chapel Hill; Columbia is the birthplace of a U. S. President, James Polk, Thompson's Station and Fort Donelson on either end of Nashville had important confrontations. In Pulaski, Sam Davis was hanged as a Confederate spy; there is a statue on the Square and on Capitol Hill in Nashville. His home at Smyrna is near Murfreesboro.
West Tennessee was under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom Sherman called, "that devil Forrest." There is a statue of him in Forrest Square on Union Avenue in Memphis. He started his campaign in Clifton on the Tennessee River where the federal ironclad held sway, near Jackson, TN. At Shiloh, one of the nations's oldest and most pristine battlefield parks, General Albert Sidney Johnston led the Southern side and died (buried there 25 miles Northeast of Corinth, Mississippi, near Savannah, Tennessee. The Sons of Confederate Veterans have established a memorial at Salem Cemetery near Jackson and a small park at Davis Bridge, near Bolivar.
Robert Penn Warren was a Phodes Scholar at Oxford University in London and taught at Yale University, as did Richard Marius. He wrote JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, THE CAVE, WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME, BAND OF ANGELS (made into a movie), ALL THE KINGS'S MEN which won the Pulitzer prize and made into an Academy award winning movie about Huey Long. He also wrote PROMISES (poetry, which won the Edna St. Vincent Millay Award of Poetry Society of America), SELECTED ESSAYS, TEXTBOOKS: UNDERSTANDING POETRY and UNDERSTANDING FICTION. He was truly as much a part of history as the Civil War of which he writes his meditation on the Centennial in this book.
Outstanding Interesting little book, this. Costs next-to nothing and takes almost no time to read. But there's more here than most of the other spurious profundity published these days.
Warren, a Kentuckian whose grandfather fought for the Confederacy during that war, looks at the effects of the war on both North and South. Warren is harsh on the hypocrisy of the North and its "Treasury of Virtue" as he calls it. But he is no Lost Causer; he is equally harsh with the South, with its "Great Alibi." And Warren is scathing with those racists who believed(and still believe)themselves to be the legatees of Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee. An essential book.
A miniature classic of historical interpretation The noted poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote several brilliant book-length essays on various subjects, including JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK (which originally appeared in THE NEW YORKER) and INTEGRATION, but none better than this miniature classic of historical interpretation. In 1961, when LIFE magazine asked him for his thoughts on the centennial of the Civil War, he wrote this superb, thoughtful essay (originally subtitled "A Meditation on the Centennial"). In an extraordinarily compressed discussion, Warren notes a dizzying variety of effects that the war and the policies it brought in its wake had on American society. His two most important observations have to do with the ways that the North and the South used the war as alibis. For the victorious North, the war was a "treasury of virtue" that excused generations of corruption, short-sighted public policy, and neglect of national interests; after all, we won the war and freed the slaves. For the defeated South, the war was "the great alibi" that excused every failure to grapple with a region's pressing social and economic problems. Warren never wrote better than in these eloquent pages; this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the Civil War in particular or American history in general. Its reappearance, with a fine introduction by Howard Jones (author of MUTINY ON THE AMISTAD and other excellent histories of the Civil War era), is cause for celebration. -- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School, and Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College/CUNY (1997-1998)
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