How did we get here? Well, we've been here before. That ought to tell us something.
What can we do? Well, our great-great-grandparents faced worse times. Maybe we should learn from what they did—and didn't—do about them.
The great virtue of history in our time is its attention to voices and perspectives neglected by centuries of white-guy scholarship focused on the doings of white guys. But that attention is necessarily focused, more intimate than epic. And yes, there's plenty of good journalism/contemporary history describing the ongoing, deliberate dismantling of our democracy—here's a shout-out to Kurt Andersen's *Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America—*but even these broad surveys can't provide a sense of panoramic chronology.
That's why I'm reading Allan Nevins' Ordeal of the Union. All eight volumes, retelling the United States' descent into civil war, from 1847 to 1865. Nevins is a white guy of his time—a journalist, historian and teacher who lived from 1890 to 1971—and his narrative is not free from prejudices and condescensions. But he also listens to the hubbub and argument, the propaganda and fervent idealisms of mid-19th-century America more attentively and inclusively than any other American historian of that prolonged crisis. Even Eric Foner's great body of work, with its much more inclusive methodology, does not offer a sustained narrative to match Nevins' Ordeal of the Union.
And right now, I need to be reading this story. Nevins provides a day-by-day sense of newspaper editorializing and congressional debate, radicals' hate-mongering and centrists' paralyzing denial. A party increasingly committed to minority rule at all costs. A party afraid to do right. Acts of terror dismissed as acts of madness; acts of resistance deplored as acts of terror. Violence in the Capitol, violence at the polls. The self-frenzied minority's insistence that the power to oppress and own others and to stockpile the means of oppression are states' rights. Their complaint that federal protection of equal rights for all is tyranny. The excruciating wait for leaders willing to tell the nation the truth and take uncompromising action. Desperate waiting, until it's too late and the hate-makers begin their war.
Nevins introduces the fools, the heroes and the uncountable in-between actors in this two-decade drama. A master of character sketches, he is equally superb at the less-glamorous task of exposition, at acquainting us with manufactures, agricultural economies and census statistics. He considers the foreign policy implications of our quarrels with our selves, surveys contemporary literature and popular culture. Ordeal of the Union does as much as any history can to suggest the spirit of a nation and its effect on the world over ominous, agonizing time.
What can we do? I read in hope of inspiration. And this morning, six volumes into Nevins' narrative, at the close of a chapter on Civil War relations with Britain and France, I read of the cotton mill workers of Lancashire, hundreds of thousands of whom were reduced to penury and starvation when the South ceased cotton exports in an attempt to blackmail European powers into recognizing the slaveocracy. I read of hundreds of thousands who refused to be manipulated into siding with slaveholders, who despite their hunger wanted nothing more from the United States than that its government should at last do what was right. Nevins writes of the 6,000 mill workers who sent Lincoln a letter of thanks and praise for the Emancipation Proclamation, and quotes Lincoln's reply:
Through the actions of our disloyal citizens, the workingmen of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial, for the purpose of forcing [support for a nation based on slavery]. Under these circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterance upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is, indeed, an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.
What can we do? Learn. Be inspired by those who stood up for justice at great cost. Believe. Evil will go as far as it can, unless it is stopped. Resolve to support daring ideas and overdue reforms before it is too late. Vote. Not for appeasement of others' fears, not for what has already proven not to work, but for what's right. For the rights—civil, voting, educational, reproductive, healthcare, environmental—that many other nations have long acknowledged, for the empathy and inclusion most of us already want to share. Before it's too late.
William Craig teaches writing at Dartmouth and founded the Meetinghouse Readings in Canaan. The author of Yankee Come Home: On The Road from Guantanamo to San Juan Hill*, he was a longtime writer and editor for the* Valley News and the creator of Upper Valley Image*. His fiction, criticism and journalism have appeared most recently in* Gulf Coast and The Boston Globe*.*