Damn the Pride of Men
February 8th, 2009
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
The history of the Civil War has never really interested me that much compared to the American Revolution. Neither has the Great Man theory of history interested me nearly as much as the study of science and nature.
But just like in life we can’t ultimately escape death or taxes, I can’t seem to get through life as an American or a Southerner without facing the baggage left over from the Civil War — and the man-centric view of history.
I would rather be camping out in the Great Smoky Mountains photographing birds in the wild.
But since Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis has thrust this race for governor upon us a year and a half ahead of time, like a lot of men before him whose ambitions drove the agendas of their state or nation, it is impossible NOT to spend some time thinking about these things.
Proponents of the Great Man theory of history say the best way to explain things is by studying the stories of political and military heroes, influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence and wisdom or “Machiavellianism,” used power in a way that had a decisive historical impact, at least according to this brief sketch of the theory in the online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. (No, this is not my only source. I read more about it than I care to elaborate on during almost a decade as a grad student and teaching journalism at the university level. I link to this basic source here for those who may want to begin exploring the subject further on the Web.)
So for example, to understand the Civil War, a scholar might study the life and role of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee, or even Joshua Chamberlain or William C. Oates.
The Great Man theory is associated most often with 19th-century commentator and historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” reflecting his belief that heroes shape history through both their personal attributes and divine inspiration.
One of the most vitriolic critics of Carlyle’s formulation of the Great Man theory was Herbert Spencer, who believed that attributing historical events to the decisions of individuals was a hopelessly primitive, childish, and unscientific. He said the men Carlyle called “great men” were merely products of their social environments. He once wrote that, “you must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown…. Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”
Of course he is best known for coining the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which he did in Principles of Biology in 1864, during the last year of the Civil War, after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which was published 150 years ago this year. Spencer tried to extend the hard science view of evolution through natural selection into the social sciences of sociology and ethics, and he had some impact, although many of the theories derived from that line of thought have been discredited, most notably “social darwinism.”
I will be writing more about those things later on in the year. For today, however, I find myself thinking about the movie Gods and Generals, which I watched for the first time last night on late night cable.
The first in a trilogy based on the books of Jeff Shaar and funded by Ted Turner of CNN fame, the story is very much a study of the great men of the war, including the Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, played by Robert Duvall, who is from Virginia and claims to be distant kin.
In an interview on CNN, Duvall said the gods in the story are the Southern generals, “because they were pretty much superior to the generals of the North.” The “generals” are the Northern generals. The film was criticized for straying from the book and for being too favorable to the Southern side, with grandiose scenes showing Jackson and others praying for god to bless them before battle and such.
To me a more interesting story, and one dealt with to some extent in the next book and movie, Killer Angels, focuses on the hero of the Battle of Gettysburg, Col. Joshua Chamberlain, whose valiant defense of Little Round Top became the focus of many published stories over the years.
Chamberlain was an interesting and gracious philosophy professor from Maine thrust into the war like many others at the time. His leadership of the 20th Maine’s bayonet charge that routed the 15th Alabama regiment, wearing their famous yellowhammer patch, led by Col. William C. Oates, may have been the key moment in the war that saved the Union on that gray afternoon of July 2, 1863.
“At that crisis, I ordered the bayonet,” Chamberlain wrote later. “The word was enough.”
After the war, Chamberlain went back to teaching in Maine. Oates went into politics and served as governor of Alabama from 1894 to 1896. He resigned from Congress in 1894 and ran for governor in a contest that became infamous for its “double-dealing, dirty politics, and corrupt bargains,” according to histories written of the time.
