The Civil War: An Illustrated History.

The Civil War:

An Illustrated History, by Geoffrey C. Ward with the Burnses. Here one can pore over the illustrations and note every detail, gaze into the thousands of faces and ponder the thoughts and fears they reflect, read and re-read the poignant letters written by soldiers and their loved ones, some barely literate, others profoundly beautiful. Altogether there are five hundred pictures, paintings, and lithographs, including some rare ones that not even veteran historians will recognize. In addition to the authors' well-written narrative, they have called on four distinguished historians-Barbara Fields, Don Fehrenbacher, James McPherson, and C. Vann Woodward--for interpretive essays. And Ken Burns interviews historian Shelby Foote, who enthralled viewers of the documentary with his commentaries, at once witty and moving.

Mr. Leckie's book, a "saga" in which he enlarges upon the Civil War portion of his comprehensive Wars of America, would probably have received more attention had it not coincided with the Burnses' more ambitious project. Still, it is the product of enormous research and gives excellent background for the broader historical currents of the period. Mr. Leckie mentions, for instance, General Beauregard's spy network in Washington but fails to name the network's principal spy; Ward and the Burnses, more oriented toward detail, tell us that she was Rose O'Neal Greenhow. Where Ward and the Burnses open with the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in 1837, Leckie begins with the Mexican War and a portrait of America at midcentury. None Died in Vain ends with the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators, The Civil War with the fiftieth reunion of veterans of Gettysburg.

But despite differences in scope and emphasis, both reject the view of some modern scholars that slavery was but a surface issue concealing the economic tensions that really caused the war. True, as he came to the Presidency Lincoln said that slave states need not fear for their peculiar institution. But in his mind and the minds of those who fought and died, slavery was the issue. Lincoln was prepared to tolerate the institution only where it already existed, with the expectation that it would, in time, pass away. But he would not allow it to spread further, and this, both books contend, was the decisive point.

One is left wondering whether slavery would in fact have passed away. What if the Southern fire-eaters had not pressed the issue to the point of secession and had spared us the bitter legacy of war? Would the increasingly archaic institution of slavery have died a natural death by the century's end? Such questions only make our sense of loss in studying the war that much deeper.