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 Sir Winston S. Churchill remains, four
decades after his death, perhaps the most admired Englishman of all time. His
indomitable leadership as British prime minister during World War II and his
close personal ties to both Roosevelt and Truman are still remembered here;
less well-known is the fact that his mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American.
Churchill loved history throughout his life,
and often wrote about it. When he was virtually exiled from the British
government in the 1930s, he supported his family through his writing. He won
the Nobel Prize for Literature for his four-volume History of the
English-Speaking Peoples, and it is from those books and several others that
Churchill's grandson, who bears the same name, has collected and edited
Churchill's writings on America. Churchill's Great Republic: A History of America (Random House 1999) is a sweeping overview of American history from
Columbus's voyages to the dawn of the Cold War.
Churchill was very interested in the Civil
War. He took an extended coast-to-coast tour of the U.S. in late 1929, and
visited Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, and the
battlefields of the Seven Days campaign. He knew the war well, and once
corrected FDR when the President mistakenly referred to the Battle of
Gettysburg as having been fought in 1864. In "Old Battlefields of
Virginia," Churchill wrote that Virginia was "beaten down, trampled
upon, disinherited, impoverished, riven asunder and flung aside while Northern
wealth and power and progress strode on to empire. And yet it had to be.
Hardly even would the adherents of the Lost Cause wish it otherwise." At
Spotsylvania, Churchill's battlefield guide was a man who'd been just eight at
the time of the battle, but still remembered its tumult and carnage.
Churchill, always a glutton for military detail, was thrilled.
In "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of
Gettysburg," Churchill spun a bizarre what-if tale in which Jeb Stuart's
cavalry wreaks havoc in the Union rear while Gen. Robert E. Lee's troops are
able to seize Little Round Top. The Army of the Potomac is routed. Lee
captures Washington, D.C. and abolishes slavery throughout the South. Oh,
sure. Even if Lee had wanted to, he was too much the obedient soldier to issue
such an edict, which would have been strenuously opposed by his
commander-in-chief, to say nothing of the Confederate Congress. Even so, it
makes for an interesting - if utterly implausible - read.
In his nonfiction writing on the Civil War,
Churchill largely reflected the conventional wisdom of his times. He admired
Lee and Jackson, criticized Grant for butchery, and thought Union victory was
virtually inevitable. I was most
 surprised by his defense of Gen. George B.
McClellan. Churchill believed that McClellan got "ill treatment"
from the Lincoln administration, and that he was held to impossibly high
expectations after assuming command. Churchill didn't seem to understand that
McClellan was largely responsible for these unrealistic expectations in the
first place, and he wrote little about McClellan's obvious arrogance, lack of
fighting will, and contempt for President Lincoln. Still, for a trans-Atlantic
view of American history by a masterful writer, I recommend Churchill's book.
Great Republic: A History of America
By Winston Churchill |
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