Q&A with Civil War historian, UNC professor Fitzhugh Brundage

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the most famous Civil War battle — and UNC history professor Fitzhugh Brundage is one of several scholars calling into question some common assumptions about the war.

State & National Editor Sarah Brown spoke with Brundage about the aspects of the war people often forget.

THE DAILY TAR HEEL: Could the Civil War have been avoided entirely?

FITZHUGH BRUNDAGE: That’s, of course, the $10,000 question — or $60,000, or million-dollar question.

I’m not saying history would have been better — that the outcomes of equality and inclusion would’ve been better — if we hadn’t fought the war.

But … I think we need to teach it as an expose of a revealing disclosure of the limits of American political culture and institutions to resolve a really difficult problem.

It’s not a war that should make you feel proud to be an American.

DTH: How do most school textbooks teach the Civil War?

FB: If you pick up a textbook nowadays, or take a course on the American Civil War, it’s more or less become … the crucial turning point in American history.

It put the nation on a new footing — a footing in which equality was the purpose of American government.

I don’t think there are many Americans left who would argue that emancipation (of the slaves) wasn’t one of the great triumphs for liberty in American history. It’s understandable that textbooks end up dwelling on that.

DTH: Is that problematic?

FB: My one caveat is the way in which we seemingly have reached the conclusion … that the Civil War was a good war, and that the Civil War was what was required in order to purge the nation of slavery.

In that calculation, there are two things we should take into account. One is that the Civil War was an incredibly destructive and deadly war.

And second, we are concluding that American political institutions were so fundamentally flawed that the only way to rectify a problem in American society was to resort to the most brutal war in our history.

DTH: How bad were war casualties?

FB: If you lined up five white men who once served in the Confederacy, one of them would have been killed on a battlefield, one of them would have been wounded, one of them would have been captured and put in a Union prison camp — where the mortality rate ran about 20 percent — and one of them would have deserted or gone missing.

A minority of them came home to continue their lives without real tangible scars.

DTH: On this anniversary, is there something positive we can remember about the war?

FB: Once the institution of slavery was destroyed, then it was possible for the United States to begin to expand democracy to include all manner and groups of people.

(The 1857 Dred Scott ruling) had essentially declared African-Americans were not citizens. That’s a turnabout in a decade that is incredible.

(Without this progress), it’s hard to imagine the United States being a nation … in which the Supreme Court just ruled that same-sex marriage is not unconstitutional.