From The March to Fear Itself.

E. L. Doctorow’s 2006 novel The March is historical fiction, a genre I tend to avoid, having always preferred my history straight, not imagined.

However, my wife recently bought a copy for me, and truth be told, I actually enjoyed it. The upper-case March in question is William Tecumseh Sherman’s, along with tens of thousands of his troops. It began in the autumn 1864 after the capture of Atlanta, and ended in springtime in North Carolina with the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865.

In some quarters, it was considered sheer lunacy for an army of this size to plunge unsupplied and blind into hostile territory during wet and cold months considered the least suitable for movement, much less combat itself – and given that Sherman was prone to a measure of psychological imbalance, it probably was.

One factor that astounded foreign observers of the day was the improvisational ability of Sherman’s engineers to improvise solutions to mobility hindrances such as flooded rivers and vast swamps. Corduroying muddy roads and building pontoon bridges also provided outlets for the labor of freed slaves, who followed Sherman’s army in huge numbers, confounding the Union leader’s fragile patience.

The novel can be criticized for a handful of clichéd characterizations, and perhaps there is a certain absence of depth, but then again, Sherman’s March was not an exercise in subtlety. It was an extended, months-long exercise in calculated destruction, state-sanctioned search and confiscation, and the relentless daily bludgeoning of the South’s will to remain in a state of rebellion.

Conceptually, Sherman’s March reflected the grim certainty of its progenitor and his immediate military superior, Ulysses S. Grant, that the best way to bring the destruction of civil war to a halt was to apply maximum force to bear, as violently and incessantly as possible, whatever the misery and human cost.

After the rebels were beaten, it then would be left to the skills of the philosopher president, A. Lincoln, who fully approved of Grant’s and Sherman’s strategy of attrition – of bleeding the Confederacy dry – to re-stitch the national fabric. As we know, Lincoln did not live to participate in the aftermath.

Had he survived, it might not have altered the sad course of Reconstruction. In the end, the American Civil War resolved everything, and it resolved nothing, and the reason for this length prelude is a review in last Sunday’s New York Times of a book that explores a little-discussed aspect of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The President Proposes . . . ‘Fear Itself,’ a book by Ira Katznelson, reviewed by Kevin Boyle (New York Times)

 ... One connection, though, Katznelson considers utterly Faust­ian: to push their legislative programs through Congress, the New Dealers sold their souls to the segregated South.

The calculation was simple enough. Thanks to the disfranchisement of blacks and the reign of terror that accompanied it, the South had become solidly Democratic by the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South exclusively so. One-party rule translated into outsize power on Capitol Hill: when Roosevelt took office, Southerners held almost half the Democrats’ Congressional seats and many of the key committee chairmanships. So whatever Roosevelt wanted to put into law had to have Southern approval. And he wouldn’t get it if he dared to challenge the region’s racial order.

Katznelson spends much of “Fear Itself” detailing the dismal results ...