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.

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America Just Elected Its First Black President

Are the people of Alabama ready for an African-American governor?

by Glynn Wilson

ATLANTA, Ga. — Some historians say the final battle of the Civil War was fought at Sayler’s Creek, southwest of Petersburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1865. Try bringing that up in a political bar like Manuel’s Tavern in downtown Atlanta, however, and see how fast you can start an argument.

While everyone knows that Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the war, many an expert would argue that the old, lingering causes of the war survived in people’s attitudes long after the fighting on the bloody battle fields came to a gentlemanly end.

Ask the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, those who had to fight those battles all over again in the 1950s and ’60s.

Then there are thinkers and writers who will tell you, if you give them half a chance over a few shots of whiskey or a few pints of dark beer, that the election of George W. Bush in 2000 effectively erased the Union’s victory in the war and was finally, at long last, a victory for the old Confederacy. Putting aside the issue of election theft and the Supreme Court, ponder the idea that Bush came into office in large measure by the hands of mostly white voters from the old Confederate states of the Deep South, with some help from middle America and parts of the West.

Since Obama’s election even the TV pundits will tell you the only base left for the national Republican Party lies in the old states of the Confederacy, thanks in part to the scorched earth strategies of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, whose marches to Washington and Baghdad with Bush scarred the national character almost as much as General William Tecumseh Sherman’s fiery “March to the Sea.”

Then consider that while Bush’s campaign coffers may not have been filled by the profits from cotton, hand-picked on plantations worked by slaves, the mega corporations that mostly supported his candidacy were interested in keeping wages low and gutting the rights of juries in courtrooms to punish corporate crimes against working people, humanity and the earth. Bush got most of his money to run in 2000 from oil and other energy companies, including Exxon Mobile and Southern Company, as well as insurance companies and the pharmaceutical giants. He came into office — in the world prior to 9/11 — with the prime objective to pass national “tort reform,” the watchword for stopping juries from rendering multi-million dollar judgments against multi-national corporations.

Rove had already accomplished that feat in Alabama — once known as the top state in the country for large jury awards against corporate malfeasance — by helping the Republican Party orchestrate a political takeover of the state Supreme Court.

If you ask just about any academic expert who studies the demographic numbers from public opinion polls and election results, you could say Americans finally fought the final battle of the Civil War on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008. Symbolically, it took another Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, to put together enough of a national coalition to defeat Confederate attitudes once and for all.

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