The War That Made Us Whole : THE ROAD TO DISUNION, VOL. I; Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 <i> By William W. Freehling (Oxford University Press: $30; 640 pp.; 0-19-505814-3) </i>

Though most books sink without a trace, a fortunate few stir up powerful waves. Witness Lincoln’s remark about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”

That war, for long the narrow preserve of academic specialists, sectional patriots, moonlight-and-magnolia romantics, and especially of military hobbyists, re-enactors and hero-worshipers, is now attracting a general audience, thanks largely to James McPherson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Battle Cry of Freedom.” A best seller despite its 900 pages and unsentimental tone, McPherson’s book offers the cream of recent scholarship to readers who want more than cliches about Missy Scarlett, “gallant cavaliers” and “brave boys in blue.”

More realism lies ahead. Tonight will see national public television throughout the country--including Los Angeles’ KCET, Channel 28--spend five consecutive evenings on Ken Burns’ grim documentary history of a war in which disease and industrialized, intensified firepower combined to kill 620,000 men.

Publishers’ lists also are bulging with new works, not least because the traditional battle-and-leader accounts are giving way to the new military history, of technology and logistics, cohesion and morale.

William Freehling of Johns Hopkins is part of this no-nonsense realism. Like McPherson’s book, his “The Road to Disunion” is a sweeping synthesis, apparently meant for a general audience--though his eccentric style (of which more below) and casual way with key names and dates make it very hard to follow.

His focus is the relationship among ideas, attitudes, anxieties (particularly of Southern whites about slave uprisings) and key political events: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the role of slavery in the annexation of Texas in 1945, the Compromise (or “armistice,” in Freehling’s words) of 1850, and so on.

Though Freehling does offer some acid personality sketches, his true concern is with the great ideological questions: personal freedom versus slavery; mass democracy versus oligarchy; the future of the unique, egalitarian republic of the New World versus the hierarchical, segmented society of the South. Hence his concern with what Southern gentlemen thought, said and wrote about slavery; with their fears that a splendid, cultured past was giving way to a vulgar, democratic future; and with their ideological and political counterattacks on the enemies--black and white--at the gate.

The aristocrats fought on several fronts: against Northern abolitionists and all those who resented the Southern grip on Congress; against the many Southerners--like Jefferson--who were soft on slavery; and against the aggressive Southern Populism of Andrew Jackson, who despised the cultivated, lordly gentlemen of the seaboard South. Freehling brilliantly describes the proud, snobbish world of Charleston, “where the Ashley and the Cooper unite to form the Atlantic Ocean.” He sees the 30-year crisis that ushered in the war as one of Southern dis unity, heterogeneity and strife, from which slavery’s champions nevertheless emerged triumphant, carrying everyone with them to Fort Sumter; a second, post-1854 volume will cover this process.

All this gives us a book both exhilarating and exasperating. Exhilarating, because Freehling addresses big issues in a big way: What ideas triggered the would-be Southern revolution of 1861? And revolution it was: This was no mere “War Between the States,” that shrewd leaders like Martin Van Buren, “the Little Magician,” might have finessed, settled by compromise. No, Freehling suggests, this was indeed an irrepressible conflict, truly “The War of the Rebellion,” a conscious attempt by the Southern oligarchy to smash American democracy both North and South, creating a secessionist, big-landowners’ country, whose consolidation of slavery marched parallel to South Africa under apartheid, or even to Nazi-occupied Europe after 1940. Freehling’s constant references to Herrenvolk rule--master race--may shock but are apt nevertheless.

So far, so good. But this also is an exasperating book because of its Christmas-fruitcake literary style, so rich and overwritten, so crammed with nuts, raisins and candied sweets, as to render it nearly indigestible.

Consider such sentences as: “The now-most-northern South learned a less savory lesson. To reduce costs of emancipation, southern legislatures could decree post-nati abolition, then allow slaveholders to sell post-nati blacks into permanent Deep South thralldom before the liberating birthday.” Or: “So long as drivers balanced the tightrope between loyalty to the Big House and sensitivity to the quarters, these ‘boys’ could maintain more credibility with The Man than could a wage-earning overseer charged with making slavery unlike wage slavery.”

Read it once, read it twice: Translate it from Freehlingese to English as you go. Freehling is skilled at blunt, shrewd remarks, but his sentences lack balance and cohesion: Where have they come from? Where are they going? It’s hard to say, not least because pronoun references are confused, words are given obscure meanings, articles are casually dropped, and grammar is twisted topsy-turvy. Where is Maxwell Perkins when we need him? And why is Oxford University Press putting its imprimatur on all this?

And yet . . . Freehling does offer ideas that rouse, stimulate, spur our thinking. A minor example: Remember the patrician style, grooming, and bearing that Gen. Westmoreland displayed in Vietnam--and which reporters derided? Westmoreland is a South Carolinian, his concern for hierarchy and deference little different from the Charleston aristocrats that Freehling portrays. And, like them, Westmoreland hardly fit in an increasingly democratic, egalitarian world.

Another example: Southern suspicions of outsiders. How many books and especially movies have begun with a stranger encountering wariness, even hostility, in a small Southern town? Is this merely a Yankee stereotype? No; Freehling offers much evidence that Southerners--fearing that abolitionist preaching might trigger slave violence--inevitably distrusted outsiders, who risked lynching or near-lynching if they spoke out.

A final, vital example: racial fears and political manipulation. A multi-ethnic, -racial and -religious society of immigrants, which preached democracy while practicing inequality, was peculiarly vulnerable to politicians skilled at exploiting public fears, particularly of slave rebellions. Hence the violent white reaction to the abortive Denmark Vesey rising in Charleston--yes, Charleston again!--during 1822, and to the bloody Nat Turner rebellion of 1831. Always fearing a terrible eruption, uneasy white masters sought scapegoats for their guilt in benefitting from slavery. John C. Calhoun and other clever ideologues helped identify the enemy--up North.

Freehling provides the essential background of the scapegoating that Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style” in American life. J. Edgar Hoover employed it against radicals--and against Martin Luther King; Lee Atwater (of South Carolina) deployed it brilliantly in the 1988 election with the Willie Horton case, and Charles Stuart of Boston used it no less effectively when, having murdered his wife, he blamed it all on an imaginary black intruder.

The conclusion toward which Freehling directs us is that, even by the 1830s and certainly after that, slavery had become an enormous lie, and not merely the economic anachronism alluded to by the conventional wisdom. This lie demanded a vast racist cover-up, based on the assumption that childlike blacks, recognizing their inferiority and incompetence, sincerely wanted a patriarchal white massa.

Slavery was an economic lie, with the South falling behind an industrializing North to which white immigrants flooded. It was a political lie, for the democratic currents stirred by the American and French revolutions rendered slavery indefensible, forcing Southern ideologues to take refuge in the dreary legalism of “states’ rights.” And it was a moral lie, for no Harriet Beecher Stowe was required to uncover the brutality, sexual hypocrisy, aristocratic arrogance and widespread fear, to which gossip and folklore constantly alluded. Slavery was a bone in the throat that the South could neither swallow nor spit out; its constant choking convulsed the entire nation.

A bone in the throat: Doesn’t this remain true of black-white relations? And doesn’t this problem, when added to a Vietnam disaster that itself had racist overtones, perhaps dispose sadder but wiser Americans to outgrow the romanticism of Missy Scarlett and face, fairly and realistically, a civil war that was shaped by race?

Freehling’s book could help us--if only his eccentric and convoluted prose didn’t undercut the important story he is trying to tell.