66 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
Radical Republicans have been recast as moral heroes in America’s near-demise.
BOOKS
UNCIVIL WARS
How much did Lincoln really matter?BYADAM GOPNIK
ILLUSTRATION BY MATTEO BERTON
W
hat are the most misleading, if
plausible-seeming, metaphors
that afflict our understanding of the
world? Some come from incorrectly
scaled expectations. There is the idea
that the economics of a nation are like
those of a household—that debt will
strangle you sooner rather than later,
and that the national checkbook must
be balanced. There’s the notion that,
because our little lives are ruled by in-
tentions, evolution’s larger cycles must
reflect them as well: the giraffe has a
long neck in order to reach the highest
branch. A hundred-plus years after
Darwin, it remains hard for us to in-
ternalize the truth that longer necks
arrived through adaptive accident. The
most powerful of these seemingly
self-evident yet specious metaphors
may arise from the leakage of our phys-
ical organization into our conceptual
categories. Because we have ten fingers,
we give far more significance to de-
cades—the fifties were one way; the
sixties another—than they ever de-
serve. (The “sixties” as a continuous
cultural period began in 1964, with the
Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,”
and ended, perhaps, in 1989, with the
fall of the Berlin Wall to the sound of
rock and roll. Centipedes might see
such truths more quickly.) And be-
cause we have brains at the top of ourbodies we are susceptible to the image
of a “body politic,” where the head’s in
charge, and the arms and legs and liver
do as they’re told.
This idea of power simply emanat-
ing downward still animates apologet-
ics for authoritarianism, but it also
leads to excitement about top-down
health-care programs that everyone
knows will never be enacted by exec-
utive fiat. It inspires, too, the belief that
there are “diseases” in the body poli-
tic, in need of a cure, rather than a
multitude of interests and a plurality
of means, always to be kept in balance.
If we were jellyfish, blobs of water and
nerves, we might realize that political
units aren’t really like human bodies;
they’re more like coral reefs, with lots
of different kinds of life existing at
once, competing and coöperating in
complex, multilevel emergent systems.
We might realize that we would often
be better off worrying about what the
appendages in legislatures and locali-
ties are doing than about what some
ultimate head is thinking, or might be
made to think.
All these varieties of metaphor,
and the confusions they engender, turn
out to matter as one reads Fergus M.
Bordewich’s new book, “Congress at
War” (Knopf )—but it is the last that
is the most striking. Although the sub-
ject of the book is specific, its implica-
tions are universal. It is essentially a
history of the Civil War, from the
Northern side, told by the feet and the
arms. Lincoln gets pushed into the
background as a largely confused and
feeble figure, and the Radical Repub-
licans in Congress take the foreground
as the managers of the war and the ar-
chitects of abolition. Bordewich’s book
has an aptly pugnacious subtitle: “How
Republican Reformers Fought the Civil
War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery,
and Remade America.”
This is popular history of a high
order—Bordewich has a terrific eye
and ear for the details of his chosen
time—and it thoroughly reflects the
larger revisionism of our day. As re-
cently as the nineties, Ken Burns’s Civil
War series told the story of America’s
near-demise as a tragic conflict of com-
peting values between brothers. Home
and hearth and tradition on one side;
union and industry and modernity on