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SECOND-GUESSING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR:
A Reassessment of Revisionism and Repressibility
INTRODUCTION
Copyright © 1995 Dee Sparling
In 1933 Revisionist historian Richard H. Shryock denounced the “optimistic philosophy of history” that had dominated the historiography of Civil War causation well into the twentieth century. 1 His target was the “irrepressible conflict” school, which held that military confrontation had been the inevitable result of trying to accommodate two radically different cultures -- one slave, the other “free” -- within a single national fabric. More recently dubbed “slavery-culturalism,”2 the position maintains that war was the only realistic way to solve what Edmund S. Morgan has called the American “paradox” of slavery and freedom,3 thus clearing the way for the nation’s modernization and subsequent rise to world-power status.
Shryock’s concern was the presumption that because war was the “only” avenue to solving the dilemma, it is to be celebrated as an example of America’s uncompromising dedication to “freedom” at any cost. He called this the “sentimentalism of optimists” who tend to ignore the democratic breakdown which preceded war and sideline the voices of antebellum moderates who saw virtue in the possibility of peaceful solutions to domestic problems. Hence, posterity has been deprived of living in the America that might have been, and of looking back with pride at the innovative way with which national leaders solved the American paradox. The elusive “kinder, gentler America” that today’s leaders seek to create may well have been dealt its death blow in the 1850s when so many American virtues were violated with the introduction of “higher law,” a concept unveiled by Northern abolitionists but misused equally by proponents of Southern interests.
Revisionists contend that the historiographical predominance of “irrepressibility” in post-Civil War America represents nothing more than a process of legitimation by default. 4 The historical fact of war tends to foil any contemplation of what “post-peaceful emancipation” America might have been like. A common national experience is built more easily around historical reality than imaginary alternatives. Therefore, with no historical basis for comparison, one can only assume, and may as well assume, that the Civil War legacy is essentially positive. While this optimism may cultivate national pride and solidarity, it comes at a great price. Instead of advocating education, patience and tolerance, “freedom-fighters” begin to take violent shortcuts, until the cultivation of “freedom” becomes nothing more noble than the imposition of one subjective value system over another. Suddenly a new paradox has emerged: Coercion in the name of freedom.
It was Charles W. Ramsdell who fired the first effective challenge at the “irrepressible” school. In 1929 he stated that “success justifies itself; in the long run the victor is always right,” thereby destroying the facade of consensus. 5 Before long many historians had joined ranks with what would be called the Revisionist school, which enjoyed arguable predominance for nearly thirty years before apparently being “discredited.” Today some proponents remain, but tend to be heard merely as voices crying in the wilderness preserves of the Fonerian empire. 6
Revisionism was neither the first nor the last of the schools to rise and fall in the face of slavery-culturalism. The Beardian school of economic determinists opened this century claiming the war had been the climax of competition between two economic elites, Northern and Southern, for control of the nation’s government, resources and moral spirit. 7 The 1960s brought the “ethnoculturalists,” who claimed that explanations for the course of Jacksonian politics in general could be discerned through a study of regional and national voting patterns, which apparently reveals how secondary the slavery issue may actually have been, especially in regard to the Republican rise in the 1850s. 8
In a sense, all three of these challenges to slavery-culturalism were “revisionist,” but only the capital `R’ Revisionist perspective ever countered “irrepressibility” on its own conceptual turf. Economic determinism implied inevitability, and thus was a scaled-down version of the traditional approach, into which it was eventually absorbed. Ethnoculturalism fell victim to its own negative ambiguity by stressing “what did not happen,” yet failing to offer an alternative. The Revisionists, however, were the only school to deny the traditionalists room to maneuver. Their challenge was uncompromising, oppositional instead of accomodating, and therefore had to be faced rather than deflected. They explained slavery’s centrality to antebellum politics in terms of the political and social propaganda that alienated two otherwise similar peoples, leading ultimately to a war that need not have been fought.
This historiographical study of Civil War causation will attempt to demonstrate why Revisionism has been discredited, and argue that the reduced status is unwarranted. Do American historians, and Americans in general, simply refuse to countenance Revisionism? Does it make them so uncomfortable with their national history that they willingly dismiss the entire argument on the basis of technicalities? And most importantly, has an “optimistic” view of the Civil War contributed to what might be considered an over-zealous foreign policy in the twentieth century, one based on coercing other nations into “welcoming” American conceptions of freedom?
The study will not claim to answer these queries in a definitive manner. It willl argue simply that they deserve considerably more attention than has been afforded them in recent decades. This neglect is symptomatic of the ways in which the Revisionist position has been misinterpreted, misread, and indeed misrepresented. Most of all, it reflects a rather hypocritical assertion that the counterfactual arguments sometimes employed by Revisionists are of no true relevance to the debate over causation. Not only does much of the alleged “counterfactual” have an actual basis in antebellum “reality,” but many of the slavery-culturalist criticisms are themselves based on supposition. Regardless, if one cannot weigh the merit of historical decisions by asking “what if,” then it must be conceded that the study of history itself lacks meaningful worth.
This reassessment takes the following form. The opening chapter presents literature from the four historiographical perspectives, offering an explanation as to how and why each of the three challengers have been sidelined, as well as providing the reader with a taste of the debate. The following three chapters will form the heart of the study, devoting one chapter to each of the three pioneer Revisionists, Charles W. Ramsdell, Avery Craven, and James G. Randall, whose positions respectively form the core of the interpretation: the “natural limits” of slavery’s expansion, the triumph of emotionalism and myth-making over reason, and the “needless war” that engulfed a nation by the propaganda of sectional leaders. The concluding chapter will summarize the ground covered here, and address the possible consequences of glorifying an event which might easily be viewed as shamefully tragic. Did the American Civil War, and its peculiar historiography, consolidate a national mentality that too readily equates bloodletting with the pursuit of “freedom?” Perhaps historians, and Americans in general, should try to approach the complex issue of causation through a lens that downplays a cultural, “road to war” determinism, focusing instead on the way antebellum circumstances were mishandled by contemporary players. Only then will historians come closer to discerning the extent to which the war was the climax of an “irrepressible conflict,” or merely a self-fulfilling prophecy. The latter possibility necessarily introduces the apparently terrifying spectre of accountability, which is what Revisionists have sought all along.
Notes
1. Richard H. Shryock, “The Nationalistic Tradition of the Civil War: A Southern Analysis,” originally published in South Atlantic Quarterly, XXXII (1933), from which excerpts have been reproduced in Kenneth M. Stampp (Ed.), The Causes of The Civil War (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965). See page 52 of Stampp for the cited passage.
2. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 194.
3. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).
4. Charles W. Ramsdell, “The Changing Interpretation of the Civil War,” The Journal of Southern History, 3 (Feb. 1937, No. 1): 3-27. See page 7.
5. Ibid.
6. The slavery-culturalist school has been led through the 1970s, 19802, and early 1990s by the Marxian flavour of Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). He has acted as consulting editor for two recent volumes offering cultural determinist interpretations of Civil War causation, Bruce Levine’s Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), and Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery: 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).
7. Charles A. Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics and Related Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), pp.194-196. Compiled and annotated by William Beard.
8. Lee Benson first suggested this approach in his seminal work The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961). But the “new political historians” did not enter the Civil War causation debate until such releases as Joel H. Silbey’s The Transformation of American Politics, 1840-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1967), pp. 9-14. Michael F. Holt also was a major proponent of this perspective, publishing a number of articles that eventually were compiled under the title Political Parties and American Political Development: From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).
