Dusty Bookshelf: Five Lectures on the American Civil War (1861-1865)

Raimondo Luraghi (Sean Mark, Tr.), Five Lectures on the American Civil War (1861-1865). John Cabot University Press, 2013. 71 pages

This little book, a translation of short lectures originally published in 1997 by the Italian authority on the American Civil War Raimondo Luraghi (who wrote many longer works on the subject), is more than simply a case of American readers saying “enough about me, what do you think about me?” Luraghi has his own take on the Civil War, formed by knowledge of European history, and how European history developed in the twentieth century.

There’s plenty of name-dropping of European generals and statesmen who are compared to allegedly comparable figures of the U. S. Civil War. For instance, Lincoln is portrayed as a national unifier like Otto von Bismark (while transcending the Blood and Iron Prussian in depth of vision). Naturally enough for a European scholar, Luraghi is fascinated by the foretaste shown by the Civil War of total war, the famous economic factors of the war, and military strategy.

There are a few interjections by Luraghi on how more research may still uncover truths about the American Civil War. But that doesn’t stop Luraghi from having strong views which reflect a European (and pre-woke European, at that) perspective on its subject.

The war itself takes up plenty of space, but there are plenty of arresting comments in the section of the lectures on the causes and consequences of the war. From comments dropped by Luraghi, it sounds (14) as if Luraghi is saying Lincoln was a member of the Free Soil Party (he never was), that Fillmore ran as a Whig in 1856 (19 – the ex-President was officially a Know-Nothing candidate that year but indeed tried to appeal to peace-loving Whig elements), that Calhoun had no challenge to Southern leadership at the time of the nullification crisis (11, Calhoun was never able to get all the slave south in a bloc behind him, though of course he was a very powerful and agenda-setting man).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, influence acknowledged, is nonetheless dismissed as “entirely detached from the reality of the South,” ignoring Stowe’s meticulous Key trying to establish her book to critics as fact-based (17-18). This anticipates Luraghi’s treatment of the Emancipation Proclamation, where he sees it as all realpolitik unmixed with idealism. But maybe the realpolitik and the idealism were mixed together in the Proclamation, its development, and its enforcement.

Of particular interest is Luraghi’s idea that the “wider ramifications” of the Lincoln conspiracy were still unknown in 1997. We know that there’s been plenty of discussion of the subject since then, and it’s hardly a closed subject. What’s interesting is Luraghi’s choice of suspects for the assassination conspiracy. Luraghi seems inclined to see the assassination plot as a sort of false flag, Southern-perpetrated in appearance but in reality traceable to the schemes of the advocates of a “Carthaginian peace” who thought Lincoln would be too lenient on the South after the war.

Unwoke as he is, Luraghi sees Reconstruction as a horrible policy – a case of radical Republicans “wav[ing] the bloody toga” – the reference is to Mark Anthony waving the assassinated Caesar’s bloodstained garments, not to some Republican orator showing the bloody garments of a more lowly figure like a tax collector who was beaten by unreconstructed Confederates. But unlike Mark Anthony, whom Luraghi doesn’t seem to blame for Caesar’s death, the Radical Republicans are considered perhaps guilty of pulling off the killing and exploiting it for political purposes by blaming it on the Confederates.

This particular theory seems to need more proof. One would think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but these short lectures don’t allow room for development of these theories.

On a more conventional level, the lectures contrast the limited vision of McClellan who focused on winning the war on the Virginia front, and the broader vision of the amphibious warfare advocates of the North (like Grant), and the push for victories in the West. A purely Virginia-focused campaign would not have finished off the South in 1862, Legheri thinks, contra McClellan. It took joint Army-Naval operations – establishing a base for the Northern blockade and preparing the way for the conquest of Vicksburg – to start moving the war toward a more decisive victory by progressing on different fronts.

Lee, meanwhile, is portrayed as the South’s greatest military leader, a worthy successor to Napoleon, albeit constrained by the backwardness of his region, its inadequate rail stock, etc. Militarily, Luraghi thinks Lee would have hurt the North more in 1863 by diverting forces to the rescue of Vicksburg. But on the other hand, Luraghi suggests that the Gettysburg campaign made more political sense, with a Southern victory achieving more demoralization in the North. Luraghi praises Lee’s final campaigns by comparing them to Napoleon’s in 1814, but don’t forget that the great Napoleon lost those campaigns, too.

From what I saw of Luraghi’s biography, his prescholarly career was heroic, involving conflicts with literal Nazis, and I can only imagine that his experiences may have opened him to historical possibilities (such as elaborate conspiracies) which make sense to people who have lived through dreadful times and seen things happen which more sheltered people may simply rule out of consideration. This doesn’t make him right, of course.