The Reasons Why

The Union War

by Gary W. Gallagher

Harvard, 256 pp., $27.95

The Confederate War

by Gary W. Gallagher

Harvard, 272 pp., $17.50

In the earlier of these companion books, The Confederate War (1997), Gary Gallagher posted an emphatic disclaimer. Don’t dismiss me as a “neo-Confederate,” he said; his origins were solidly Western: “As a native of Los Angeles who grew up on a farm in southern Colorado, I can claim complete freedom from any . . . special pleading.” Moreover, “not a single ancestor fought in the war.”

This may seem a remarkable protestation from a distinguished University of Virginia historian. But it was prudent, since his examination of recent Civil War writing is iconoclastic in tone, and at times it seems heretical. The heresy lies in this: Gallagher reinforces the understanding of our “American Iliad” that so many of us—especially of a pre-1960s vintage—absorbed in the old school of Civil War history. There, the war was understood not as a sociological experiment but as deadly combat. That this old-school conception is now widely questioned in the academy may be a consequence of the upheavals of the Vietnam era, when the draft disappeared, war was widely vilified, and infant historians became unlikely to come within earshot of a drill sergeant, let alone the whistle of a bullet. Accordingly, much of the Civil War history now written and taught (at least as Gallagher tells the story, with powerful documentation) tends to de-emphasize shot and shell and stresses, instead, the present generation’s moral superiority to the warlike past and its gun-toting actors, especially “Southern oligarchs.”