Did the “Vietnam syndrome” affect how historians viewed the U.S. Civil War? Here’s an argument that it did.
But first, recognize that historians have mixed feelings about the present. On the one hand, today’s issues can shed light on the past because “each generation asks a different set of questions.”[1] On the other, they can lead to presentism—reshaping the past by imposing today’s viewpoints.
I’m always on the lookout for such interplays. And that may have happened with the post-Vietnam era. I just learned that in 2002 the prominent Civil War historian Brian Holden Reid argued that the Vietnam War reshaped historians’ understanding of the American Civil War. [2] Reid’s article appeared in the journal of a British military-security think tank.
Of course, thousands of pages—thousands of books, perhaps—have been written trying to explain why the North won and the South lost. A major trope used to be that the North initially failed to win because it lacked bold generals willing to take their troops into battle—until Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commanding general.
A New Interpretation
Reid suggests that after the Vietnam War, Civil War history became more about why the South lost—by failing to take a more defensive strategy—and why, in historians’ view, big battles were futile.
The “Vietnam syndrome” was the guilty, regretful, and gloomy mood following the U.S. defeat. The Vietnam ordeal shifted historians’ attention from the Yankees’ victory to the Confederates’ loss, says Reid. “The two defeats, in 1865 and 1975, have a symbiotic relationship in that they feed off one another.” [3]
Before Vietnam, Reid says, historians believed in the “utility of military power, and its ability to secure decisive military victory, so long as the system of command could adapt to new methods of fighting.” (Reid continues to be in this camp.) “The personal factor, command, was central to their interpretations,” he says, referring specifically to the 1920s writings of two British military historians, J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell. [4] That is consistent with the view that Grant, at last, began to win battles.
Battles Are Futile?
But in Vietnam there were no decisive victories. Taking another look at the Civil War, historians decided that the battles there, too, were largely worthless and accumulated too many casualties.
Robert E. Lee came under criticism for seeking “an impossible, decisive victory,” says Reid, describing the 1973 assessment by Russell F. Weigley, whom he considers “the dean of American military historians.” Weigley thought Lee wanted to be “Napoleonic.” And Thomas L. Connelly criticized Lee’s “penchant for the offensive”; instead, Lee should have recognized the value of a defensive strategy. [5]
“The Confederates bled themselves to death in the first three years of the war by making costly attacks more often than did the Federals,” wrote Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson in 1982. [6] Indeed, says Reid, their book “assumes that the defensive is always more economical with lives than the offensive whatever the circumstances.” [7]
Not surprisingly, McWhiney and Jamieson chastised Grant for being excessively aggressive—even though he led the North to victory.
To Reid, after Vietnam historians became focused on casualties (in 1970s language, “body bags”). McWhiney and Jamieson supported the defensive strategy by noting that Northern armies lost 119,00 men when they attacked, but only 88,000 when they were on the defensive. (It should be noted that Civil War casualty statistics are highly uncertain, and it is known that half the dead were killed by disease.)
Reid observes that a parallel negative reaction occurred after the First World War among British historians. Just as they saw World War I as a mistake, they “argued that the Civil war was both ‘needless’ and avoidable.” [8]
Reid’s article is complex. He praises some of the post-Vietnam historians for incorporating new sources of material into their writing. He also indicates that the U.S. military was initially shaken by the Vietnam experience but was (as of 2002) beginning to shift focus to more respect for aggressive attacks. But overall he perceives a demoralized and demoralizing sense that war is hopeless—an attitude that disparages “the power of the offensive and the utility of the decisive battle.” [9]
Is He Right?
Is Reid right about the shift in historiography he describes? Regrettably, I am unschooled in Civil War history (and its historiography). So I decided to look at an American history textbook that was published, in successive editions, from 1930 to 1980. [10] I thought it might reflect changing thinking about the Civil War, as suggested by Reid.
Interestingly, its analysis of the Civil War was roughly the same in 1942 as it was in the last edition in 1980. In 1942, Samuel Morison and Henry Steele Commager wrote:
“The Confederacy, in order to win, needed merely to defend her own territory long enough to weary the Northerners of war. The United States [in contrast], in order to win, had to conquer an empire and crush a people.” [11]
So they, too, thought that a defensive strategy would have enabled the South. to win. The North had to “conquer an empire.” Somehow, it did. Perhaps that was due to winning battles
Image of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial taken by Steve Wilson is from Pixabay.
Notes
[1] Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1.
[2] Brian Holden Reid, “The Influence of the Vietnam Syndrome on the Writing of Civil War History,” RUSI Journal 147, no. 1 (2002): 44–52, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03071840208446740
[3] Reid, 48.
[4] Reid, 47.
[5] Reid, 48–49.
[6] Quoted in Reid, 48.
[7] Quoted in Reid, 48.
[8] Reid, 50
[9] Reid, 50
[10] Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic , Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942).
[11] Morison and Commager, 653.