James M. McPherson is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Battle Cry of Freedom and he is recognized as the preeminent Civil War historian. (Colin and I are fortunate to be part of a three-day tour of Gettysburg with Professor McPherson this coming September. This Mighty Scourge is not about battles but is a collection of thought-provoking articles. It is more about issues and choices than events and McPherson discusses historiography over time. For example, when many of us were growing up, we learned that the Civil War was about state’s rights, not about slavery. If you still feel that way, you may find this book to be illuminating – or aggravating. McPherson states: “Of all these interpretations, the state’s-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, state’s rights for what purpose? State’s rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle.” “A more powerful instrument to protect slavery was control of the national government.” “During forty-nine of the seventy-two years from 1789 to 1861, the presidents of the United States were Southerners – all of them slaveholders. The only presidents to be reelected were slaveholders. Two-thirds of the Speakers of the House, chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, and presidents pro tem of the Senate were Southerners. At all times before 1861, a majority of the Supreme Court justices were Southerners.”

“Slaves were the principle form of wealth in the South – indeed in the nation as a whole. The market value of four million slaves in 1860 was close to $3 billion – more than the value of land, of cotton, or of anything else in the slave states, and more than the amount of capital invested in manufacturing and railroads combined for the whole United States.”

When we attempt to evaluate what happened and why at different times in the past, it is necessary to try to understand how people were different and thought differently at the time. One big question about the war which is difficult to answer is why so many went to slaughter. “Confederate armies suffered proportional casualty rates twice as high as Union armies and several times greater than American armies in any other war this country has fought. Yet the Confederacy kept fighting until it almost literally had nothing left to fight with in 1865.”

While Atul Gawande tells in Better how we are keeping so many more soldiers alive in 2007 due to advances in medical care, McPherson shares that: “In all wars before the twentieth century, microbes were more lethal than bullets. Nearly twice as many died from disease as from combat in the Civil War.”

“For at least the past two centuries, nations have usually found it harder to end a war that to start one. Americans relearned that bitter lesson in Vietnam and, having apparently forgotten it, were forced to learn it all over again in Iraq.” This was certainly true of the Civil War. “In his second inaugural address, Lincoln acknowledged that in 1861, ‘neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained’ or ‘a result [so] fundamental and astounding.’ The same can be said of many wars.” “As historians we cannot know – though we can certainly speculate – that the leaders of these nations would have acted differently if they could have foreseen the consequences.”

History is interesting for many of us for a variety of reasons. Good history can certainly make us think and wonder.