The blood-soaked terrain.

Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, by Harry S. Stout (Viking, 576 pp., $29.95)

No topic is more studied or written about in our country than the Civil War. The books never stop coming--they will probably never stop coming. Is there anything new to say? Well, the claims for Harry S. Stout's book are large. You will never see blurbs more excited. "The wait is now over," says one endorser--for a book that really gives us the Civil War. A "stunning new interpretation," says another.

Our stunning new interpreter is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale. He sets out to discover whether the Civil War was a "just war," obeying the principles of "proportionality," "discrimination," and so on. He answers, in a word, no--although he has this to say in his afterword: "I cannot bring myself to say that 620,000 men died in vain." And he says in his introduction, "[I]t is possible, and, I believe, reasonable to conclude that the right side won in spite of itself."

Professor Stout's theme is succinctly stated in the book's jacket copy: that, in the Civil War, "patriotism trumped morality"--on both sides, from the first shot to the last. Clergymen were "cheerleaders" for butchery. Zombie-like Americans had a "bloodlust" that would not be sated until the last corpse at Bentonville, or wherever it was. (Perhaps it was in Ford's Theater.)

In the course of his book, Stout proves what we have long known: that each side was convinced of its own righteousness, and of the holiness of its own purpose. The South quickly adopted an identity as a Christian nation, whose motto was "Deo Vindice" ("With God as Our Defender"). They pointed out that the U.S. Constitution--now the Northern constitution--failed to mention God at all. The North, for its part, began the war with the idea of saving the Union; they soon determined to abolish slavery, and thereby redeem the nation. Without abolition, how could the carnage be justified?

It should surprise no one that, on a continent of Christians, virtually all involved thought of their behavior as Christian, or hoped it was.

Each side beseeched God for victory. Each side interpreted battles won as signs of divine favor, and battles lost as signs of divine disfavor (to be puzzled over, learned from). Near the end of the war, Lee wrote to his wife: "[T]rusting in a Merciful God, who does not always give the battle to the strong, I pray we may not be overwhelmed."

Professor Stout has described his book as a "moral history," and so it is: but it is also a general history, a political history, a military history--a history history. Stout seems to have poured everything he knows and thinks about the war into this long book. (If he has more in him, he is indeed a prodigy.) I think his book would have been better off narrower: more focused, more philosophical, and much shorter. He simply quotes too many sermons, too many letters, too many editorials. I kept thinking, throughout the chapters, "Tighter, tighter!" I believe a tighter book would have given his argument a greater impact. But he had a different book in mind.

The writing is good, neither too dense nor too spare. Stout says some funny things, of course--it is probably inevitable in a book of this length, and complexity. He writes that, in theater, Lincoln "preferred Shakespeare or comedy." How about Shakespeare's comedies? He misspells a very, very commonly misspelled word: "supersede." But at least he does so consistently.

The main problem with the book, as I see it, is a certain arrogance. In his introduction, Stout promises not to be too judgmental, not to be too much of a retrospective scold. But his book is monumentally judgmental, and, as I said, arrogantly so. He can write as if he were the only one ever to be sensitive to the awfulness of war. He is more anti-war than thou. From Civil War Americans came a "moral silence." "[N]o one asked hard questions." No one reflected on the lives lost. Stout's sneering references to "America's God" pile up.

It occurred to me, as I read the book, that perhaps the populations of North and South knew as much about the horrors of war as Professor Stout. After all, they were living through one of the worst bloodbaths in history; a great many were starving. And how to account for this notion that, before Stout, no one ever truly absorbed the barbarity of the war? Listen to the blurbists: "Stout strips the veneer off all the comfortable illusions about the Civil War ..." "Harry Stout raises troubling questions about the American Civil War ..." "His searing critique ... will undoubtedly upset some readers even as it deepens our understanding ..." "Lovers of the Civil War beware: your favorite event is no longer a safe haven from our own world of moral confusion about war."

Oh, come off it. Americans have long understood that the Civil War was four years of sheer hell, worse than all of our foreign wars combined, and not just in casualties. I remember my 8th-grade American-history teacher--an old and tremulous woman--crying about it. That leaves an impression.

You will find, in Stout's book, intimations and declarations about a latter-day America. He uses words like "terrorism," "preemptive war," "realpolitik." He writes, "By linking emancipation and the 'crusade' against slavery to total war and a 'crusade' against the Confederacy, Lincoln's administration watered the seeds of an American-led Christian imperialism that was not without costs in later American history." In his afterword, he writes that "[m]any American wars of conquest and imperialism merely confirm the impalpable truth that because we are the world's last best hope, we are for the same reason the world's greatest threat." I thought of one of Donald Rumsfeld's favorite rebukes, or protests: "America is not what's wrong with the world."

In my eyes, the towering figure in this book is Lincoln. He is simply bigger than everyone else: bigger in mind, spirit, heart. When Stout has him speak, the president stands as a voice of reason. He makes more sense than anyone else in these pages, including the author. That author levels many charges against Lincoln, for example hypocrisy: but he barely nicks him. Lincoln emerges stronger and more remarkable than ever. A eulogist is quoted as saying that the fallen president gave "moral genius" to the country. Nothing in this book contradicts that.

To his credit, Stout does not duck that mother of all questions: Was the Civil War worth it? Each of us must answer that question for himself, and Professor Stout may be of help. You know his answer: "I cannot bring myself to say that 620,000 men died in vain." And why? "In part because, for the most part, they did not say it." We should consider, too, this question of slavery, and its abolition. For generations, people on all sides have labored to take slavery out of the Civil War, or to minimize it in some way, and it is impossible. Lincoln spoke of "a gigantic Rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal ..." General Grant, writing in reflection, said that the Southern cause was "one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse." But that cause will never be without defenders.

As I have been clear about some of my objections to Professor Stout's book, I should be clear about this, too: It is an impressive book. It is in many ways a deep book, and one to wrestle with. I imagine Stout is a force in the classroom.

And his book reminded me of one of my own professors--that 8th-grade teacher was not the only one to cry. This professor was a Southerner, and he taught a course on the run-up to the war. On the first day--indeed, these were his first words--he said, "What was the Civil War about? Slavery!" (He pronounced that word in three syllables: slav-er-y.) Yes, slavery was the "necessary but insufficient cause" of that conflict. And on the last day, he quoted Dover Beach, with its "ignorant armies," clashing by night. He said that this concept could apply to the Blues and the Grays. And then he cried--as well one might.