The killing fields

While white troops had to overcome a Protestant aversion to violating the Sixth Commandment, the Union Army's black soldiers had no problem justifying wartime killing. As one contemporary African American newspaper explained, slavery itself was a kind of warfare against blacks; therefore, Faust writes, fighting its perpetrators was "by definition an act of self-defense." For black soldiers, "to kill was ironically to claim a human right."

We teach students that the Civil War matters because it ended slavery and shaped the meaning of freedom and equality. Faust makes another point: Civil War death created the modern American state: The expansion of federal power began when the government took on two tasks -- first, identifying and caring for the remains of every dead Union soldier and then paying pensions to their widows. That required not just a massive federal bureaucracy but also a radically new idea about the relationship between the individual and the government in Washington.

Federal policy, however, covered only Union soldiers. Those who had fought to destroy the Union, it was argued, should not be treated as the equals of those who had died to save it. But this exclusion of the Confederate dead from federal cemeteries had unanticipated effects. The task of maintaining Confederate cemeteries was taken up by a grass-roots mobilization of white people in the South, especially women. Their project became a political one of honoring not just the dead but also the cause they died for, which quickly became known as "the Southern way of life." Commemorating the Confederate dead would be a potent political rallying point for white Southerners.

The story ends in 1898. There was a new war -- in Cuba and the Philippines -- and President William McKinley announced that it had officially brought about sectional reconciliation; henceforth the dead, North and South, would be honored together. African Americans may well have resented the change; 15 years earlier, Frederick Douglass had insisted that "I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery."

All history is contemporary history. Faust began writing this book more than 10 years ago, but its publication now, in the midst of another war, gives it a special meaning. Without being explicit about it, the book reminds us what we're doing when we tell war stories centered on heroism and noble sacrifice, when we overlook the fact that wars are, above all, about death. Despite the excessive carnage, the Civil War did have a worthy goal, and a similar purpose is touted by our current leaders: bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. But it seems that all we have brought the Iraqis is a new republic of suffering. *