America's Tragedy
by
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NOT only is Mr. James Truslow Adams an accomplished historian, with an apprenticeship in research techniques, but for the general reader he has the high merit of a sparkling, attractive style. Many of the thousands who harkened to The Epic of America will be attracted to America’s Tragedy, for it is marked with the same flavor of fetching phrase and the same effort to give unity and coherence to the diverse and disordered stream of American events.
Few modern American historians will disagree with his statement that ‘slavery and all that has flowed from it has been an unmitigated curse. The misunderstanding of the sections, war, hatred, a black South, arrested development and other ills made our national tragedy.’ He lays the groundwork for his thesis in the story of the black man’s coming to America in slavers stinking holds; he pictures the diverging Northern and Southern social patterns, gives heed to the forming of a puissant West, and then posits the arguments of 1832’s Nullification crisis. After that, he says, ‘the rest of the fateful decades was compulsion, emotion, and Fate.’ This readiness to look to ’the steady footfalls of Fate’ for explanation of why things happened may arouse dissent, because any special study of the emotional dynamics of the forties and the fifties makes very clear the part chance played in precipitating the Civil War.
If at any one of the several junctures in the twenty years before Sumter the realistic statesmen who sought an intellectual rather than emotional solution had been advantaged by the breaks of the game, the ultras of the two sections would not have precipitated the crisis of 1860, and it might well have been that a slow and peaceable readjustment would have taken the place of a brothers’ war. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bleeding Kansas, ‘Bully’ Brooks’s attack on Sumner, Taney’s inept phrase in the Dred Scott case, John Brown at Harpers Ferry, James Buchanan’s hatred of Stephen A. Douglas—had almost any one of these been left out of the balance, probably the scales would have been tipped for peace. Slavery, with its fruit of Civil War, is all the more America’s tragedy because it was so importantly the fruit of chance.
One may find room to differ with Mr. Adams in his reading of the causes of the conflict. But one can find naught but praise when he draws the picture of the consequences. Franklin once well said that no war was good and no peace bad. Certainly America has reason to know that this was true of the Civil War. For the victorious North it brought a concentration into four years of economic changes which should have been spread over as many decades. The result was a bulbous, mispropOrtioned structure, the evil effect of which has been intensified with the passing years. The political marriage of High Tariff and Bloody Shirt, by which this misbegotten control was maintained, perpetuated a sectional estrangement which to this day weakens and distorts our nationality. On the South’s part, the war required a fearful destruction of the tools of life and exhaustion of the men and women who peopled its desolation.
When to this was superadded the stupid violence of Reconstruction, the South suffered wounds which have never yet completely healed. All these dire consequences Mr. Adams pictures with force and penetration. It is a powerful and moving statement that he has given. While it seems drawn chiefly from secondary sources, and as to causes seems occasionally lacking in penetration, it presents a graphic record of the tragedy and the evils that still flow from it. The author has lost neither his style, his intuitive grasp of verities, nor his vigor as a social philosopher.
GEORGE FORT MILTON