The Reunion. - Review - book review

April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik (HarperCollins, 461 pp., $32.50)

The most enduring image of the Civil War is probably the burning of Atlanta-as carried out not by General Sherman, but by David O. Selznick in Gone with the Wind. Jay Winik, in his new book about the war's endgame, stages the fall of Richmond with an equally impressive visual power. The author matches his wide-angle descriptions of the explosions and fires with some finely rendered close-ups: Jefferson Davis straightening out his desk, prior to abandoning it, lest the approaching Federals "think him sloppy"; a slavetrader trying to board 50 pieces of chained human property at the pandemoniac train depot, then getting the message of a new world from a bayonet-wielding Confederate who orders the slaves set free.

Nothing, however, tops a scene from the war's denouement, weeks after Appomattox. Richmond's leading Episcopal church, St. Paul's, faces a social convulsion when a black man decides to approach the Communion rail at what has always been the moment reserved for whites. An exhausted-looking white man ends the tension by kneeling down beside him: "Watching Robert E. Lee, the other communicants slowly followed in his path, going forward to the altar, and, with a mixture of reluctance and fear, hope and awkward expectation, into the future."

Winik's subtitle pronounces April 1865-whose wildly fast-forwarding events included the fall of Richmond, Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln's assassination, and Jefferson Davis's flight-to be "the month that saved America." For all the ruin and carnage to be toted up at war's end-and Winik spares the reader nothing in terms of gore and privation-April 1865 is more than anything else concerned with American luck. The author shows, notwithstanding Lincoln's murder, how much worse things could have turned out. Any number of developments might have violently prolonged the inevitable-if it even was that. Lee's forces might have escaped Grant and linked up with General Johnston further south, and the long-debated infusion of slaves into the Confederate army might have kept the South alive for a long and bloody while. Had Jefferson Davis had his way, the conflict would have continued, beyond Appomattox, on a guerrilla basis that might have afforded the South some distinct advantages: The Union army would have been, in Winik's words, "forced to undertake the onerous task of occupying the entire Confederacy," the supposedly reunited country coming "to resemble a Swiss cheese, with Union cities here, pockets of Confederate resistance lurking there, ambiguous areas of no-man's-land in between." Instead, the Northern generals' generosity and their Southern counterparts' good sense allowed the war to come to a relatively abrupt halt.

Winik is wise not to leave all these might-have-beens to "alternative history" novelists, and readers of April 1865 will get a fresh perspective on the oft-told events the book comprises. This is the work of a practitioner, not a lifelong professor. Winik's former career as a military-affairs adviser inside Congress and the Pentagon forced him, he says, "to witness up close a number of civil wars around the globe," from Central America to the Balkans to Cambodia. The experience gave him a vision of American exceptionalism, or more particularly, exemption from the "cruel edicts of history."

According to Winik, post-civil-war reconciliations have as bad a track record as republics themselves. Like the Roman Republic, the United Netherlands, and the French Republics I-IV, reunited nations frequently fall apart all over again. It was the good fortune of Americans that they needed not so much to reconcile a nation as to create one that had never really existed in the first place.

The Union, before Lincoln's mystical vision of it prevailed, had always been a tentative and experimental arrangement. (As Winik points out, the Gettysburg Address makes bold to use the word "nation," which the Declaration of Independence had eschewed.) The "secessionist tradition" of the country's first decades was hardly confined to the South; various elements in New England and even New York City had thought about pulling out. The author's great symbol of national incompleteness-and competition for control-is Jefferson's self-built home: "By 1860, Monticello lay abandoned and largely in ruins, and . . . by April 1865, it had two owners, one a New Yorker, the other a Virginian, and was cared for by neither." The new sense of nationality that Winik describes at his book's end still had plenty of gaps, and required many bitter decades to knit itself fully together. But in the years after the war, the noun "United States" began to take a singular verb instead of a plural. On the whole, one feels inclined to say what Winik did about the autumn of 1989 in his previous book, On the Brink, about the Reagan administration's successful offensive to end the Cold War: "Amazing how it all came together."

Winik's style is lively to the point of exuberance. He writes of battle-as in this description of Sayler's Creek-with a curious mixture of horror and relish:

Grabbing one another with dirt-sodden fingers, callused, sweaty hands, and sharp fingernails, they rolled on the ground like wild beasts, biting one another's throats and ears and noses. . . . Blood oozed freely. So did tempers. Even officers lost their cool and dispensed with their guns, fighting with swords and, when they no longer worked, with fists.

Here and elsewhere, Winik might have put up stronger resistance against the florid and the purple ("Like the stars high above, dangling in the overarching vault of history . . . "), but this is a deeply felt book, patriotic in the most informed and fundamental way. As such, it is not so much sentimental as revisionist; academic American history, which is most of what gets written, seeks to smother any hint of triumphalism in a sackcloth of apologetic jargon. From his current position at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs, Winik has managed to produce a book that is unashamed of the history it describes.

Above all, it is a book that springs from-and transcends-the era of Bill Clinton. Winik understands that character always counts, for better or worse, and that in April 1865 it counted for better. If this volume has a preeminent hero, it is unquestionably Lee, who ends up being Lincoln's ironic heir. Resisting Davis's call for continued guerrilla warfare, late in April he gives an interview to the New York Herald, not just condemning the president's assassination but rejoicing in the abolition of slavery. In the end, Lee would almost literally embrace the blood and bones of the Union dead, when the land his wife had owned in Arlington, Virginia, became their cemetery.

With so much to do, Winik inevitably rushes things here and there. We see Sherman being so weirdly gentle in the peace terms he offers Joe Johnston (after burning his way through the South) that he finds himself excoriated in the northern press, the New Haven Journal even insinuating (in Winik's paraphrase), "that [he] was an accomplice in the plot to assassinate Lincoln and had helped facilitate Davis's escape." A month later Sherman is taking the cheers of the crowd during the grand review of the armies held in Washington, "his popularity now greater than ever." A little more explanation for the turnaround, something beyond the intoxication of victory, seems required. Even so, Winik's fast, vivid portrait of this general-along with brisk animations of Lincoln ("a shrewd master of indirection"), Grant (more nervous than Lee on the morning of the surrender), and a half-dozen lesser figures-indicates a considerable talent for biography.

But Winik's decision to use a single month in American history to explore much wider themes works sufficiently well that I'll presume to offer a subject for his next book: a comparative study of two other significant months in American history, the frantic weeks surrounding the elections of 1876 and 2000-both of which resolved themselves, however imperfectly, in a legal civility bought by the screams and suffering at places like Sayler's Creek.

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