Buchan on the American Civil War

From John Buchan’s posthumously-published memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, Chapter IX, “My America,” which is a collection of his Tocqueville-esque observations of American culture:

Then, while I was at Oxford, I read Colonel Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson and became a student of the American Civil War. I cannot say what especially attracted me to that campaign: partly, no doubt, the romance of it, the chivalry and the supreme heroism; partly its extraordinary technical interest, both military and political; but chiefly, I think, because I fell in love with the protagonists. I had found the kind of man that I could whole-heartedly admire. Since those days my study of the Civil War has continued, I have visited most of its battlefields, I have followed the trail of its great marches, I have read widely in its literature; indeed, my memory has become so stored with its details that I have often found myself able to tell the descendants of its leaders facts about their forebears of which they had never heard.

What Buchan describes has—until pretty recently, anyway—probably been the case for many of us who first came to a love of history through the Civil War. Courage, cowardice, tragedy, glory, horror, and sentimentality; equipment, logistics, industrial outputs, orders of battle, and casualty figures; and a huge cast of colorful and shocking characters with ever-shifting soap opera-like relationships (think of the unease between Grant and his superior Halleck and the irony of Grant’s eventual promotion over Halleck, or all the bickering among the generals of Bragg’s army)—whether you study history for the drama, the ordinary people, or the numbers there for the crunching, there’s not just something for everyone in the Civil War, there’s a lot of it.

And for those of us who stuck with the Civil War or returned to it more seriously later, it furnishes a lot of ready imaginative and intellectual material for contemplation and comparison. Here’s Buchan himself from earlier in his memoir, on the early years of the First World War and General Douglas Haig specifically:

This was the attitude of all the principal commanders, British, French and German, at the beginning of the War. The campaign produced in the high command no military genius of the first order, no Napoleon, Marlborough or Lee, scarcely even a Wellington, a Stonewall Jackson or a Sherman. Its type was Grant. Hence changes of method had to come by the sheer pressure of events after much tragic trial and error.

This is the power of deep reading and study and the well-chosen allusion—one knows exactly what Buchan means by this, and it illuminates rather than obscures the situation he describes.

Buchan, who spent a stretch of the 1920s mentally recuperating from the First World War by writing biographies of men he admired—Montrose, Augustus, Cromwell—at one point planned to write a biography of Robert E Lee. He abandoned the project when he learned that a friend from Virginia was already working on one, a promising multi-volume work. The friend was Douglas Southall Freeman and the book was RE Lee.

But what I wouldn’t give to have Buchan’s perspective on that life.