Why the Terrible Destruction of the Civil War? (sic)

The early publicity I saw on David Goldfield's new book, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, certainly made it seem like something a revisionist history buff like me would want to read. The review in the New York Times, for example, which ran on Sunday, March 27, quotes Goldfield's description of himself as "antiwar, particularly the Civil War," and goes on to say that "what is distinctive about Goldfield's book is that he believes the 600,000 deaths and countless mutilations [caused by the war] could have been avoided." As Goldfield himself puts it, "after the Revolutionary War, the Civil War is the defining event of American history." And it "was not inevitable." Rather, it was "America's greatest failure."

Surely, Goldfield writes,

the failure is evident in the deaths of over 620,000 young men, the misery of their families and friends left to mourn their loss, the destruction of homes and personal property, the uprooting of households, and the scenes of war haunting those who managed to live through it.

And how much wealth was seized and squandered in order to accomplish this orgy of destruction of lives and property? "All told," Goldfield writes,

the war's direct costs amounted to $6.7 billion. If upon Lincoln's inauguration, the government had purchased the freedom of four million slaves and granted a forty-acre farm to each slave family, the total cost would have been $3.1 billion, leaving $3.6 billion for reparations to make up for a century of lost wages. And not a single life would have been lost.

Of course, this passage, admirable though it is in many respects, is predicated on the assumption that the Civil War was fought over slavery — that slavery was the issue that brought the war on, made it happen. This has always been rather an awkward position for its many, many adherents to defend, due to the fact that such luminaries as the majority of the US Senate in 1861, the president of the United States during the years of the war, and the supreme commander of the Union Army during that time all disagreed with it. The US Senate declared in a resolution in support of the war adopted on July 26, 1861, that