What Really Drives History?
As we ride an historical roller coaster in Iraq, it might be a good time to ponder a hot new word in the history game: contingency. It means that more and more historians are admitting that Marxism or Progress or some other abstraction is not the driving force of history. It is events -- often unexpected events or decisions made by prime ministers and presidents and generals.
That could lead to a bad case of the jitters. Perhaps the best antidote is a look at some of the close calls of the past. Let's timetravel to one of the best (or worst) of these: the incredible turnaround in Abraham Lincoln's political fortunes as he sought reelection in the summer of 1864.
Just about everyone in the North considered Lincoln and his war an utter failure. General William Tecumseh Sherman's army was mired in a siege before Atlanta. General Ulysses S. Grant was piling up bodies against Robert E. Lee's dogged defense of Richmond. More than five hundred thousand men had been killed on both sides out of a population of 34 million -- the equivalent of 5 million dead today.
The discouraged Republican Party faced seemingly certain defeat at the polls. Running on the Democratic ticket was General George McClellan, the man Lincoln had appointed to head the Union Army in 1861 -- and fired for failing to produce a military victory. "Little Mac" had been enormously popular with the Union troops. Now he was denouncing Lincoln as a liar and a blunderer and calling for a negotiated peace that would recognize Southern independence.
Some Republicans were trying to muster support for an alternative candidate who was more radical on the abolition of slavery than Lincoln. The president himself was so convinced he was going to lose, he wrote a letter, outlining the dolorous tasks that would confront his replacement. Desertion in the Union Army was approaching epidemic proportions. Behind the lines in Indiana, bands of runaways regularly fought it out with Union pursuers. The governor of Indiana, faced with a Democratic majority in the legislature after the 1862 elections, had barred the state's representatives from meeting in their constitutionally designated sessions and was ruling by executive fiat, with money surreptitiously shipped to him from Washington.
In Kentucky, in a desperate attempt to stop Confederate guerillas, the local Union general had decreed that for every Union soldier killed, four Confederate captives would be taken from local prisons and summarily shot. In that divided state, no less than seventeen Democratic newspapers had been smashed and burned by mobs, many of them supervised or joined by men in army uniforms. Almost as many papers had been wrecked in Indiana. A Democratic resistance group, The Sons of Liberty, had responded to the government's tactics by organizing a secret army of 100,000 men. Their plan was to revolutionize the states of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, where disgust with the war and anger at the Lincoln government's ruthless tactics was at high tide. Their plan was to create a Northwest Confederacy which would issue a call for an immediate cease fire.
On Sept, 1, 1864, a telegram arrived in Washington that changed everything. General Sherman declared: "ATLANTA IS OURS AND FAIRLY WON." Almost overnight, the Republicans who were drafting a radical opponent to contest Lincoln's renomination vanished. General McClellan repudiated the Democratic Party's platform, which called for an immediate armistice. "The Union must be preserved at all hazards," he suddenly intoned. Meanwhile, Union secret agents infiltrated the Sons of Liberty and arrested key leaders in Kentucky and Indiana days before they were to launch their uprising. Lincoln won a second term, 55 percent to 45 percent.
Fast forward to the spring of 1918. The German Army, having defeated the Russians, had numerical and tactical superiority on the Western Front. In two massive offenses, they had wiped out an entire British army and captured over 100,000 prisoners. In May they turned their attention to the French. A hurricane of steel and poison gas descended on the French army on the Chemin des Dames, the ridge line that was considered the outer rampart of Paris. The surviving poilus surrendered or ran.
Another French army, fed into the maelstrom piecemeal, also vanished. Its general burst into tears of despair. In a few days the Germans were on the Marne, only 40 miles from Paris. A million people fled the capital. The frantic Allied commander in chief, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, sent for the Americans. Heretofore he had treated them and their commander, General John J. Pershing, with thinly veiled disdain. Pershing had repeatedly refused to let the French (and British) amalgamate his troops into their faltering armies.
Virtually untried in serious combat, the Americans went into an improvised line along the Marne, while French troops streamed past them, shouting: "La guerre fini!" If the newcomers did not hold, the future was catastrophic: the Germans dictating peace in Paris, with the remnants of the American army hostage, and the British army frantically fleeing back to England. The Americans held. A disheartened German general said the history of the world had been changed in three days. Five months later, Berlin asked for an armistice.
Close calls. History is full of them. Does this tell us what will happen in Iraq? No. But it does enable us to think seriously about what is decisive in history: Force. Ideals are important too -- but without the force to sustain them ideals are so many words, blowing in history's winds.
This article was first published in the New York Sun and is reprinted with permission of the author.