2020-02-10 The New Yorker

THE NEWYORKER, FEBRUARY 10, 2020 69

crusade against slavery that it became,
he would likely have had a much harder
time recruiting the soldiers in West
Virginia and Maryland whom he
needed for that crusade. Stevens could
be single-minded because he had a sin-
gle constituency to answer to; Lincoln
had to be Argus-eyed because he had
so many. Lincoln did not want to win
purity awards from abolitionist news-
papers. He wanted to win power and
to use that power to do what was right.

W

hat would have happened if
someone more overtly radical
than Lincoln had become President?
Would the war, and its aftermath, have
gone differently? Counterfactuals usu-
ally belong, in fact, on counters—on
lunch counters, where people can de-
bate at meaningless leisure. Still, if
a Radical Republican like Salmon
Chase, or even a Democrat like Edwin
Stanton, had been President, McClel-
lan might well have been fired sooner,
the Proclamation issued more deci-
sively, and Stevens’s advice on the course
of the war taken up more readily. On
the other hand, the war really was a
near-run thing—right up to the 1864
election, in which McClellan cam-
paigned as the Democratic nominee.
It wasn’t just bad Union leadership that
made the South fight so well. A more
divisive figure in the White House
could have lost Kentucky first and the
rest of the North later.
Indeed, though we don’t know what
would have happened without Lincoln
during the war, we know what hap-
pened to the Republican coalition im-
mediately after the war, when he van-
ished with tragic abruptness. It was not
good. In this case, the head—Andrew
Johnson—was racist and reactionary,
while the rump remained radical. As
the Unionist political order fragmented,
the cause suffered with it. Coalitions
that depend on a charismatic figure at
their center are easy to mock, and hard
to reassemble when they fragment.
Revisionism has its discontents. The
conventional wisdom in baseball is that
it is much harder to steal second base
against a left-hander than against a
right-hander, because the left-hander is
looking directly at you as you take a lead
at first base. The great base stealer Joe
Morgan once said, superciliously, that,

actually, stealing against a left-hander

is easier. Really, what he meant, and

what the stats show, is that it is not as

hard as you would think. Revisionism

is often Morganic in its approach: when

people say that slavery was central to

capitalism, they don’t really mean it, or,

if they do, they don’t have very convinc-

ing evidence that it was—capitalism

flourished elsewhere without it. What

they do mean, credibly, is that we over-

look just how significant slavery was.

It’s right to say that the Civil War was

much less a product of Lincoln’s lead-

ership than you might be led to think

by the usual accounts—by the Spielberg

image of a solitary Lincoln moving alone

among wastrel generals and uncompre-

hending firebrands. It’s wrong to say

that Lincoln wasn’t central.

One of the most significant conse-

quences of the war is one that we often

look right past: we can treat the cause

of preserving the Union as quaint, or

as an alibi for the struggle against slav-

ery, because the North in the end won

so decisively that the question of se-

cession has never been seriously raised

again. There is no particular national

logic to the American arrangement.

Local pressures for sovereignty, as

in Britain and Canada, might have

weighed more heavily in a different

history. It is possible to imagine an

America in which regional rivalry blos-

somed into secession and then back

into war. California would function

just fine as a separate country; so might

New York City, on a Venetian or Sin-

gaporean model. That few propose this

is a sign of how deep a furrow history

can dig in a country’s consciousness.

We are all still the children of Shiloh.

So, all praise to the lawmakers who

brought in the rules, paid for the war,

built the railroads, and created the col-

leges. May the names of Wade and Ste-

vens rise from the condescension of pos-

terity to a place of greater fame. Stevens

stated the central moral question of slav-

ery and equality sooner than Lincoln

did, and Wade saw that the question

was meaningless without the means to

make the good cause happen. The body

politic, after all, may not be the worst

metaphor. A good government does

need a head to see the way forward. It

also needs a heart to make it feel, and

a spine to keep it upright.

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