A People’s History Of The Civil War: Struggles For The Meaning Of Freedom, by David Williams

It is no surprise that this book is terrible. The book is a doctrinaire Marxist text about a deeply complex and deeply controversial topic; there is no way that is going to be a good book. There are, though, still good reasons to ponder why this is such a bad book. The author’s political agenda leads him to engage in full-bore intersectionalism in a way that leads the author to talk about the victimization and the slavery faced by everyone from native Americans to women to working class people to immigrants to actual black slaves. The author’s insistence that the state of women and ordinary workers was a form of slavery detracts from the uniqueness of slavery in the South and ends up serving, ironically enough, to bolster claims made by Southern apologists at the time and since then that the working class of the North was just another mudsill oppressed class, and so Southern slavery wasn’t really that bad. Similarly, the author’s intent to make everyone sound like a hypocrite while also being a victim, except for wealthy and corrupt elites, ends up making the book itself incoherent and frequently self-contradictory, to say nothing of contradictory with the historical record. On top of this, the author utilizes the pathetic fallacy over and over again, leading the book to read like an endless string of data-free sad stories about common people suffering during America’s bloodiest and costliest war in between the author’s theorizing and activist cant. The end result is a book that ought to serve as an example of how not to write history from the bottom-up or any other way. The book is so devoid of value that its own editor (Marxist “historian” Howard Zinn) gives a blurb for it as if he is a fair-minded reader of the book rather than someone trying to urge his fellow travelers to read more slop coming from a fellow based comrade.

This book is about 500 pages long, and it is divided into 8 large chapters. The author begins with acknowledgements and then discusses in a short introduction his ideas about the Civil War being an example of the people at war, claiming that no one has ever written before this a genuine popular history of the Civil War, which immediately clues one in that the author is delusional and unprepared to write a serious history. This is followed by a chapter that argues that the Civil War, especially the Northern response, was all for the benefit of the wealthy (1), even if poor people were doing a great deal of the fighting. After this the author discusses the burden of taxation, inflation, and military service that fell upon the ordinary people during this time (2). After that there is a discussion of the rise of women and their desire to fight in drag, serve as nurses, or otherwise better their lives, whether that meant shaming men into fighting at the beginning of the war or begging for them to abandon the war and return home to them at the end of the War, at least in the South (3), while also seeking the vote. The author then laments about the tough life of common soldiers while officers enjoyed a better experience (4). The author then discusses the politics of draft dodging and resistance, at one point blaming Abraham Lincoln for not pardoning a draft resister who had shot a government official to death as being insensitive and cruel as a result (5). The author then deals with the ambivalent and partial nature of the freedom given to black slaves as a result of the war (6), freedom which was not extensive enough to his or their liking. The penultimate chapter of the book examines the dubious principle that the native Americans had no fight with the whites (7), which was definitely not true in places like Minnesota or Oklahoma, alas. The book then ends with a chapter of whether the war was in vain (it wasn’t) (8), followed by a brief afterword, notes, bibliography, and index.

At the heart of this book and the Marxist approach as it relates to American history in general there is a fatal contradiction, or rather several of them. The author laments the division of the country, but America and every other country are divided into people with different interests. The Civil War happened because divisions had reached such a point where people would rather fight than either accept division or accept rule by a sectional party that they viewed as an unacceptable threat. It goes without saying that in a Civil War people are often divided, by definition, and that you do not have a civil war in the first place unless those divisions have reached a critical level of hostility. The author seems to think that people in a divided nation ought to be able to join hands and sing kumbaya between freed black slaves, blacks looking for freedom and property of their own, women looking for more property and political rights, working class people looking for their own lands, immigrants looking for land and economic opportunity coming from European poverty, native Americans looking to keep their land in the face of a massive push for settlers who were townspeople, farmers, miners, and ranchers. It goes without saying that there are going to be some conflicts there. Similarly, the author views everyone who is hostile to America’s elites and to America’s government in some way as being good, but at the same time the authors themselves are a corrupt intellectual elite that is part of a parasitic class that remains dependent on government support, largely through tenured professorial jobs, with a political base that consists of fellow corrupt parasites like themselves, which means that the hostility to government shown here only points to the authors themselves as hypocrites of the highest order.

The author comments that the Civil War was a struggle over the meaning of freedom. The meaning of freedom has always been contested. Some people want freedom from expropriation and tyrannical authorities, be they corrupt governments, big businesses, slaveowners, or domineering husbands and fathers. Others want freedom that is provided by government from poverty and economic difficulties, which often requires some sort of theft from those who have in order for those who do not have to obtain what they need for survival and comfort but which they cannot or will not provide for themselves. As is often the case with the most hostile critiques of elites and government, those who are the most shrill in their condemnation of those in authority are often those whose hostility springs from deeply personal but also deeply unadmitted problems. Criminals rail against authority because their anarchical desire to oppress and dominate others through theft and violence is thwarted by legitimate institutions of law and order. Corrupt elites like Marxist intellectuals (the authors of so many terrible books over the past 150 years or so) oppose governments because they seek to be the elites of unfree nations that rule and dominate over hundreds of millions of people who will enjoy lives of no freedom and no opportunity of any kind if they get their way. Their hypocrisy is self-serving, the complaining of those who think they are entitled to rule and who cannot understand why every institution they run is immediately driven into the ground by the failure of their misguided ideology.