The American Civil War, Reconstruction, and Iraq: A “Teachable Moment”

Every so often one hits upon a way to make past events “relevant” in the classroom only to discover that in doing so, one begins to reevaluate one’s own views about both historical and current events.  I had such a moment on April 12, 2006, in my course on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.  The class was discussing a group of readings on the “dynamics of Confederate defeat.”  I asked if Confederate defeat was inevitable, a pretty standard question.  A student responded that the question was hard to answer because we already knew the South lost the Civil War, and we could only speculate about other scenarios. Opening the way for the study of Reconstruction that we were scheduled to begin the next week, I asked the student if she was sure the South lost the Civil War.  She and her peers looked at me quizzically.  Was I just playing games with them?   After admitting that I was trying to be provocative, I went to the blackboard (the old-fashioned kind in the front of the room, not the electronic software kind), and I said, “Imagine it is April 12, 1865.  Richmond has fallen, and the Robert E. Lee has surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.  All major military operations have been completed.”  Then I wrote on the board in big letters: “Mission Accomplished.”  I proceeded to ask if the Civil War was really over by April 12, 1865, or whether it was just entering a new phase—one that would turn out differently than the phase of conventional warfare. 

A fascinating discussion ensued, and over the next few weeks the class repeatedly returned to the question of when the Civil War really ended. I began to see more and more parallels between the debates over Reconstruction and debates over American intervention in Iraq—parallels that sometimes made me uncomfortable about my own scholarly and political positions.  Like many other leftists, I opposed American intervention in Iraq from the start. Although no fan of Saddam Hussein, I believed that the U.S. should work through the United Nations rather than take unilateral military action.  I also believed that any attempt to impose Western-style democracy on Iraq from the outside was bound to fail.

Three years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, I felt vindicated.  Clearly events in Iraq had not turned out the way Bush and his advisors had predicted.  The mission of creating a stable, democratic, pro-American Iraq remained unaccomplished.  So should we get out?  The obvious answer was yes if the mission was -- and always had been -- virtually impossible.

But then I began to think about E. L. Godkin, Horace Greeley, and the Liberal Republicans in 1872.  Hadn’t they called for an end to Federal intervention in the South because the terror and turmoil of Radical Reconstruction proved that biracial democracy was virtually impossible and not worth more northern, white sacrifice?  Like many other historians of progressive bent, I wanted to believe that Reconstruction could have succeeded had the Federal government stuck by the freedpeople and maintained a stronger military presence in the postwar South.   But perhaps making biracial democracy work in the South in the 1870s was no more do-able than making multi-religious, multi-ethnic democracy work in present-day Iraq.  Or, alternatively, perhaps Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was right after all: we should stick with the project of democracy-building in Iraq even if it takes many more years and many more lives because the moral and political consequences of writing off the possibility of democracy developing there would be enduring and awful. 

Then again, the parallels between the American Civil War and the war in Iraq are hardly exact.  There are no “lessons” of history that one can derive from nineteenth-century precedents and apply in simple ways to twenty-first century challenges. I still believe that Radical Reconstruction was a worthy cause – a good mission – and that the invasion of Iraq was not.  Yet my “teachable moment” on April 12 has given me pause.  I feel less confident than before about passing judgment on how others have tried to shape the world.  To this extent, historical reflection has proven personally destabilizing but also edifying. What began as my attempt to disrupt the unthinking assumptions of my students has resulted in my questioning of my own accepted truths and in my recommitment to the value of scholarly skepticism.