These are the letters of a common man, who was both a soldier and a recent immigrant. Valentin Bechler knew little English and was imperfectly literate in his native German. He evinced no martial spirit, but thought of his military service as a job of work. His letters place more emphasis on camp and hospital than on the battles in which he was engaged. To the historian, Bechler is all the more valuable a witness for these reasons; for all too often war and immigration are to be seen only through the testimony of exceptional men. Almost equally valuable are his wife's letters from Newark, New Jersey, which show, in a form equally unpolished, what life was like on the home front for a family both foreign and poor.

One would expect from the relatively sophisticated industrial society into which Britain had developed by the 1860s a complex reaction to the immense crisis which struck the United States in that decade, euphemistically described in the British press as ‘the American Difficulty’. The enormous heterogeneity of economic, ideological, political and group interests involved in the English response – together with the spectrum of issues raised by the break-down of the Union – should enforce caution upon the historian who wishes to paint his Civil War scene in bold and simple strokes. During the war itself it was natural that Americans of both sections should make the simple demand of European opinion ‘is it pro-North or pro-South ?’ But the continuation of this tradition by later historians lasted too long, and has ended by befuddling rather than clarifying the situation. The search for partisan alignments too often provides a kind of distorting mirror through which events are viewed, or becomes a Procrustean device by which the data is chopped or stretched into the required form.

If the Civil War had erupted in 1861 because the two sections had failed to produce a formula capable of reconciling their many differences, then it would not be inaccurate to assert that in 1865, four years later, that long-sought basis of settlement was even more remote and unlikely. Yet the search for mutually acceptable terms of agreement continued. As practitioners of the art of negotiation and reconciling differences, Reconstruction politicians on both sides aimed at reunion and talked of compromise. One hundred years later, many revisionist historians also assumed that compromise solutions were available after the war. Somehow both politicians and historians manifested a conventional response in presuming that bargain and negotiation leading to settlement were applicable and meaningful approaches to the problem of reconstruction. Yet perhaps the underlying reality was such that this traditional political approach was likely to be ineffective and quite inappropriate. Perhaps the interests and attitudes of the groups in power within each section were irreconcilable short of the capitulation or extinction of one of them. In that case political realism would have required that attempts to conciliate, moderate or compromise should be rejected, and other methods of achieving political goals tried and experimented with.

The first Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts was a congressional leader of the highest calibre. W. Stull Holt has written: ‘no one can read in the Congressional Record during [Lodge's] career without being impressed by his mastery of parliamentary technique, by his adroit maneuvers to extract his party from a tight situation or to entangle his opponents, and by his knowledge of what to do under all circumstances’. Similarly, Denna Frank Fleming has said: ‘in skill of parliamentary maneuver, in ability to manipulate factions against each other and to his own purpose Lodge may never be excelled’. The picture conveyed by these two authorities is one of an extraordinarily talented congressional leader dedicated to the greater glory of the Republican Party. But as Holt and Fleming also recognized, it is not enough to dismiss Lodge as a mere partisan; he was also a devoted son of the Senate, keenly aware of the importance of the separation of powers and particularly sensitive to encroachment on the legislature by the executive. Most of the earlier assessments of Lodge's part in defeating Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations policy were made before the Senator's papers became available, but a re-examination of his role, in the light of his correspondence and other documents, clearly demonstrates his overwhelming concern for the two institutions that he served so long and so well, the Republican Party and the Senate.

Richard Hofstadter wrote history out of a tense, but reflective, engagement with the world of ideas, politics and people in which he lived. There was no disjunction between his working and social lives; he carried on with his friends and colleagues an almost ceaseless dialogue that was always serious but often delightfully gay. His intellectual energy was relentless; and, towards the end, his work literally helped to keep him alive. Sometimes he described himself as less a historian than a historical critic, a remark that might, from one of the most influential historians of the age, have seemed ironically self-deprecatory, but was meant as a serious comment on his own historical style.

The crucial issue facing the novelists of the pre-Civil War South was the expression of the Negro in their writings. A fine balance had to be struck between the deliberate attempt to present, as William Taylor suggests in Cavalier and Yankee (Garden City, New York, 1961), a favourable image of the slave-holding society, and the subjective impulse to express the powerful forces of racial destruction that were covert in the ante-bellum South. Such a balance rarely occurred. Rather, as social tensions increased with the approach of the Civil War, the writers retreated from their confrontation with the image of the Negro. Kenneth Lynn, in Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1959), shows a progression which finds the authors using increasingly younger narrators, which Lynn feels absolves them of the responsibility of maturely facing the issues. But the novels of John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms reveal rather different forms of evasion. Kennedy, the more didactic writer, as the war approached, increasingly removed his novels from the present. This simply relieved him of the obligation of expressing concretely documented reality, and allowed a shift into fantasy. The image of the Negro could be safely excluded from such a context. However, fantasy is, if anything, a more congenial environment for the expression of covert social forces. Thus, a curious irony occurs in Kennedy's later novels. The image of the Negro disappears from works such as Rob of the Bowl (1838), but the forces of demonic malevolence with which he is associated are transferred to the figure which replaces him, the indentured Indian. A racial equation emerges, and in this chiaroscuric world of night and fire the Indian offers a glimpse of the malevolence suppressed in the image of the Negro.

In our society it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems rather to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to lay.

(Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), p. 304)

It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one's own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others.

(James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York, 1961), p. 172)

William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictional account of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt, is, in the author's words, ‘less an “historical novel” in conventional terms than a meditation on history’. It produced an immediate and continuing response from American readers, and was greeted both as ‘superlative history’ and as the distorted creation of a ‘vile racist imagination’. Certainly, no recent American novel has evoked such partisan controversy and made so apparent the already deep but widening emotional and intellectual rift between white liberals and the new generation of black militants in search of a usable past. Nor has any treatment of Negro slavery and the slave personality since the publication of Stanley Elkins's seminal essay been so avidly praised or so bitterly condemned. The question in dispute has been less Styron's treatment of the events of the Turner revolt (Styron incorporates most of Turner's own alleged ‘Confessions’ into the narrative) than the historical accuracy of the author's descriptions of the workings of the slave system, particularly its effects on whites and blacks. A summary of the conflicting responses best indicates the range and impact of Styron's novel and provides also a framework within which to set and evaluate the intentions and achievements of the novelist as historian.

The address which William Faulkner delivered in Stockholm on 10 December 1950, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize, is a challenge to his fellow writers to recall that ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself’ are the true subject of art. The artist who forgets this, Faulkner warned, ‘writes not of love but of lust’ if he does not dedicate himself to ‘the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths’, then his art is ‘ephemeral and doomed’; and the artist himself ‘labors under a curse’.