Professor David Blight: So what caused the Civil War?
Somebody said "slavery."
Can I hear a "states' rights?"
Can I hear a "conflicting civilizations?"
Can I hear "unctuous fury?"
Can I hear "fanaticism?"
Can I hear "fear?"
Can I hear "stupidity?"
Can I hear "Goddamn Yankees?"
Or Jefferson Davis may have captured the kind of toxin that
was in the air, around southern secession,
in late 1860 and into this "distracted, sad year," as
Whitman called it, of 1861.
Jefferson Davis, soon to be the first
president--only president--of the Confederate States of
America; senator--former senator--from
Mississippi; former commandant of West Point;
former Secretary of War.
He tried to capture what the South was doing with secession
with a certain dignified reserve here.
This is at the very end of 1860, before Mississippi had
seceded, but it's not far away.
He said, the South now, quote, "is confronted by a
common foe. The South should,
by the instinct of self-preservation,
be united. The recent declarations of the
candidate and leaders of the black Republican Party,"
--and southerners made no--missed no opportunity to
rename the Republican Party a thousand times,
"the Black Republican Party."
At any rate, "The recent declaration of the
candidate and leaders of the Black Republican Party must
suffice to convince many who have formerly doubted the
purpose to attack the institution of slavery in the
states. The undying opposition to
slavery in the United States means war upon it,
where it is, not where it is not."
That is, the Republicans did not simply oppose slavery in the
territories, they opposed slavery in the slave states,
and they would not stop until they had obliterated it.
"And the time is at hand when the great battle is to be fought
between the defenders of the constitutional government and
the votaries of mob rule, fanaticism and anarchy."
Yes. Davis seemed to think a little
bit was at stake, for the South,
in 1861. However, after the war,
Jefferson Davis wrote what is probably the longest,
most turgid, belabored, 1200 page defense of
a failed political revolution in the history of language.
1,279 pages is his memoir, entitled The Rise and Fall
of the Confederate Government.
And by the time he wrote that, or published it,
in 1882, he was arguing everywhere,
on storied, famous, legendary tours of the South,
the war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery.
Listen to just one passage of that 1200 page defense of his
Constitutional Movement.
"Slavery," said Jeff Davis, by 1882, "was in no wise the
cause of the conflict but only an incident.
Generally African-American"--excuse
me--"Generally Africans were born the slaves of barbarian
masters, untaught in all the useful arts
and occupations, reared in heathen darkness,
and sold by heathen masters.
They were transferred to shores enlightened by the rays of
Christianity." Now he goes on, and I quote him.
Blacks, said Jeff Davis, had been, quote,
"put to servitude, trained in the gentle arts of
peace and order and civilization.
They increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions
of efficient Christian laborers.
Their servile instincts rendered them contented with
their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their
abode with unmeasured riches.
Their strong local and personal attachments secured faithful
service. Never was there happier
dependents of labor and capital on each other.
The tempter came, like the Serpent of Eden,
and decoyed them with the magic word, freedom.
He put arms in their hands and trained their humble but
emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed,
and sent them out to devastate their benefactors."
Now I could go on and on with this particular,
incredible passage.
What you have there in that 1882 passage is the core,
the life blood of the Lost Cause tradition.
In 1861--and you've read Charles Dew's book on this--in
1861 southern leadership, at least until after Fort
Sumter, argued every day and every way that they were about
the business of preserving a slave society--a civilization
based on slave labor, a racial system ordered by
slavery--now threatened by these anti-slavery black Republicans.
In the wake of the Civil War, however, so much energy will be
exercised, not only by southerners,
over time, to try to convince the American people and the rest
of the world that this event was not about slavery.
In a speech in 1878--like many other speeches he gave in the
last third of his life--Frederick Douglass was at
that point, 1878, already fed up with Lost
Cause arguments about what the war had been about.
He was also already, early in the process,
fed up with the ways in which Americans were beginning to
reconcile this bloody, terrible conflict around the
mutual valor of soldiers, and in his view forgetting what
the whole terrible thing might have even been about.
And at the end of a magnificent speech he gave at a veterans
reunion he said this: "The Civil War"--this is
Frederick Douglass--"was not a fight between rapacious birds
and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage
and endurance, it was a war between men of
thought, as well as of action,
and in dead earnest for something beyond the
battlefield."
He went on and on and on then to declare that the war had been
about ideas, and he described the difference between those
ideas, as he put it,
was the difference between, quote, "barbarism and
civilization."
Now, I'm going to spend this lecture just reflecting with you
on, first, secession, because I left you hanging in
the air about the various explanations of secession,
interpretations over time; and I want to re-visit that at
least briefly. And then I want to take you
through a little quick survey of the interpretations of Civil War
causation over time.
It's fascinating to understand how in the past,
now nearly a century and a half,
Americans have gone through this topsy-turvy,
twisting inside out, changing view of what caused
that war. But back to secession.
I left off with saying I was going to offer you five
different explanations.
I don't think they're all equal, necessarily,
but they're there.
In some ways they kind of fold into one another.
And I'd already talked about how the preservation of slavery,
a slave society, a society ordered by slave
labor and so forth, was a principle,
if not the principle, purpose of this secession
movement, at least in the Deep South, where it succeeded.
Remember now, there are still eight slave
states that have not seceded from the Union.
As of March 1861, when Lincoln was to be
inaugurated, the majority of the slave states are still in the
Union, not out; only South Carolina over to
Texas, the whatever-color-that-is of the
Deep South, was the Confederate States of America.
Had it remained only those seven states it's hard to
imagine exactly how the Confederacy would've mounted a
war effort, conducted and created a foreign
policy, and managed if the Lincoln government decides on
war--or coercion as the South will call it--it's hard to
imagine how the Confederacy would've survived,
as long as it did.
The four states that will join it--we'll come to this on
Thursday--do not secede, of course, until after Fort
Sumter. Virginia, North Carolina,
Tennessee, and Arkansas, in their initial secession
legislatures or conventions, either did not--chose not to
vote, or voted secession down, which Virginia decisively
did--before Fort Sumter.
And it's only after the firing on Fort Sumter in April of '61
that Virginia will vote secession;
and it's crucial, of course, given it's--that
it's Virginia, and the size of Virginia,
the significance and symbolism and power of Virginia,
the geographical location of Virginia and so on.
A second explanation of secession though is what I would
call the fear thesis; fear of many kinds.
And now this is, now, of course,
deeply related to the first explanation of preserving a
slave society but in some ways this was a racial fear as well.
If you look into those secession conventions,
and if you look deeply into all those quotations in Charles
Dew's book--and he loads them on you doesn't he?--there's an even
more immediate kind of racial fear among southern
secessionists, that they live on the potential
of a racial powder keg, of the potential of slave
insurrection over time, especially if the South and if
slavery continues to shrink within itself.
There's the phrase they kept returning to in Abraham
Lincoln's House Divided Speech from 1858.
They never let him forget it, that he and the Republican
Party, they said, were going to put slavery on a,
quote, "course of ultimate extinction."
That's fairly clear isn't it?
"We're going to make your system extinct--how do you like
that?" "Oh, not a problem."
Fear of the radicalism, now of John Brown.
John Brown had sort of made this equation,
that had always been there in the southern mind in vague ways,
explicit. If the Republican Party in the
North had succeeded in selling this slogan of a slave-power
conspiracy, well southerners now,
the planter class and the secessionists,
are very successful, especially in the wake of John
Brown's raid, of selling a mutual or a
counter-conspiracy theory.
And that conspiracy simply is "abolition emissaries."
There are lots of labels it goes by but the idea that if the
Republican politicians themselves aren't going to lead
bands into the South to attack the South,
they will end up nevertheless politically stimulating more and
more John Browns to make visitations on the South.
All over the rhetoric of secession you find the language
of--or the word frankly--of submission;
submission, we will not submit and so on.
Let me give you just one example.
In Charleston, South Carolina,
the editor of its most radical newspaper, its most secessionist
newspaper, was a man named Robert Rhett,
the Charleston Courier--I'm sorry,
the Charleston Mercury is what he edited--and he ran a
series of articles under the heading the,
quote, "Terrors of Submission," during the secession winter.
And in one of those pieces Robert Rhett wrote,
and I quote: "If the South once submits to
the rule of abolitionists by the general government there is
probably an end of all peaceful separation of the Union.
We can only escape the ruin they meditate for the South by
war. The ruin of the South by the
emancipation of her slaves is not like the ruin of any other
people. It is not a mere loss of
liberty, but it is a loss of liberty, property,
home, country, everything that makes life
worth living."
Rhett was full of some unctuous fury, without a doubt.
There were southern secessionists who absolutely
believed that even any discussion of slavery's future
in the U.S. Congress should be suppressed,
that they would no longer live in a union that even discussed
what to do about the future of slavery.
And I would say there's not only a kind of racial fear,
a fear of loss of slavery by the planter class,
but there's a certain kind of political fear going on as well,
and that is the fear that southern polls now had--they'd
had this for years, hadn't they?
The fear was the growing, or the growth now for them of a
kind of minority status, that that Republican Party in
the North now had the potential, given the population of the
North, this sectional,
anti-slavery party, had the potential to really
take over the House of Representatives,
in huge numbers. Then you get Lincoln in the
White House for four years--and what if you get him for
eight?--and he appoints the next two,
three, four, five members of the Supreme
Court. And he can control the
diplomatic corps around the world, and even more importantly
he can control patronage of the post office system,
which in those years, believe it or not,
was very powerful; nobody gives a hoot about who
runs the post offices now but boy they did then.
And what was at stake?
And we can see this all over their letters and their diaries,
their speeches in secession conventions,
was a loss ultimately for the slaveholding class of what James
Roark and other scholars have called "planter control."
So to say secession is about slavery is accurate,
but there are layers beneath it, in what I'd call a kind of
fear thesis. A third explanation is what we
might call--or a motivation for southern secession--we might
call southern nationalism, a sense of southern unity,
a dream for some southern secessionists--they were a
minority surely over time and they're even a minority,
I think, in the midst of the secession crisis--but a dream
over time of a southern nation, an independence,
of developing their own boundaries and their own
potential expansionist foreign policy,
where they would no longer ever be dependent on the United
States Federal Government, on one compromise after another
with northerners.
And now to many southern secessionists it would be
compromises with people they couldn't even conceive of
compromising with, these free soil,
anti-slavery, they believed,
abolitionist Republicans.
These southern nationalists were led by people like Edmund
Ruffin of Virginia, William Lowndes Yancey of
Georgia, Robert Rhett of South Carolina, James D.B.
DeBow, who published the DeBow's Review,
a very important southern magazine out of New Orleans.
It was a vision now of an independent southern nation.
In fact, Edmund Ruffin was so determined to try to gather the
spirit of an independent southern nation that in the wake
of John Brown's raid, he got himself to Harpers Ferry
and managed to collect 15 or 20 of Old John Brown's pikes;
you know, these spear things that John Brown was going to
give to slaves after his rebellion.
And Ruffin sent one of those pikes to the governor of every
southern state. These people were into
symbolism. Now, it's interesting that this
sense of a southern nationalism, if you like,
was born more, I would argue,
of fear of an enemy than it actually was of any kind of
planned vision of an organized nation.
As numerous, brilliant scholars of southern
nationalism, from Drew Faust to John McCardell and others have
argued--and I will come back to this in a couple of weeks--a
southern nation did come out of this confederacy,
but it was born almost overnight, and not by a lot of
long-term planning.
It was born more in resentment and defensiveness of knowing
what they were against and who their enemy might be than it was
actually born of a thought-out plan of what they were for.
And it's also-- there was also a theory at the root of this
kind of southern nationalist, fledgling as it was in the
Secession Crisis, that--and it's right there in
the secession debates.
It's rooted in the shrinking south theory,
it's rooted in the desire to preserve a slave society--but
it's the idea that the South's ultimate welfare would be better
outside of the union than in, requiring a certain thinking
about how to create a new nation.
A fourth possible explanation-- though I wouldn't hang too many
hats on this one because it's rather vague;
it used to have a lot of purchase among historians--is
what we might call agrarianism, the agrarian thesis,
the idea of King Cotton ideology, or King Cotton
diplomacy, or put more deeply,
a kind of Jeffersonian yeoman idealism.
This is the vague theory that secession was to protect an
agrarian, agricultural, planter civilization.
That the South was ultimately--they liked to think
of themselves, even the leadership--as a
people or a republic of farmers, small farmers.
Now the majority of them were small farmers.
The real South, this argument was,
was not in the slave owning master class but in the men of
the soil, protecting a way of life
against all that ignoble, go-getter, money grubbing,
Yankee individualism.
And there's something to this.
You can find these arguments all over the secession debates
as well. "Separate from those New
Yorkers, they're going to take your wallet;"
or as the saying went, you could hit a Yankee,
he wouldn't hit you back, but he would sue you.
This had a real vogue back in--this interpretation--back in
the 1920s, '30s, '40s, even into the 1950s and
beyond, among historians like Frank Owsley and others.
And its spirit, if you like,
is there in the Confederate Anthem--not Dixie,
but the other Confederate Anthem, the Bonnie Blue
Flag. You don't hear that as much,
but there's a verse in Bonnie Blue Flag that the
soldiers sang all the time.
It goes like this, and listen for its ironies:
"We are a band of brothers, native to the soil,
fighting for the property we gained by honest toil."
Whose honest toil?
Property. Well, for a yeoman farmer that
lyric made good sense.
And fifth, you can also argue that secession is deeply rooted
in some--some have argued this; certainly Bertram Wyatt-Brown
has and others--is rooted in this notion of a tradition of
southern honor. The thesis that at the heart of
the southern planter class, in particular,
at the heart of their cohesion, their self-understanding,
and their worldview, was a set of values by which
men, especially planters,
defined themselves, and therefore their society,
and when those values were threatened they circled the
wagons in defense.
And these were the manly virtues, the argument went,
of honesty, trustworthiness, entitlement,
social rank, the willingness to defend one's
honor, blood, lineage,
family, and especially home or homeland, to defend one's
community against not only invasion but also insult or
humiliation; to save face in the presence of
one's critics, one's enemies.
Nothing could be worse, said the honor code,
than public humiliation.
Disputes to the man of southern honor were personal,
not a matter of law.
And there comes a time, the argument went,
when to hell with the Supreme Court, to hell with compromises
in congress; "this is personal," they said.
Now, this one's hard to throw darts at and make it stick.
You can see the language in the secession movement--"we must
defend our honor, we must defend our society."
When is the southern secessionist planter speaking
from honor, and when is he speaking from the preservation
of the slave society, and when is he speaking from
his sense of agrarianism?
When is he speaking from a vision of an independent
southern national future, is never easy to know,
but you can hear it in a James Jones, for example,
a leading South Carolina secessionist in the South
Carolina Secession Convention who got up at the end of the
arguments and he said, well folks, quote,
"If we fail we have saved our honor and lost nothing."
Now, think of the logic there.
Of course he doesn't really know precisely yet what they're
going to fail at.
If a whole civilization goes down in ashes,
if a society will be destroyed at its root, you've lost
nothing.
Some of these same guys who were so caught up in defense of
honor, of course, loved Shakespeare.
They especially loved plays like Henry IV,
when Prince Harry is lecturing his soldiers to die with honor,
because if you die with honor you've lost nothing.
Now, in your more modern sensibilities life usually
doesn't equate with nothing.
But mix all those explanations up together and fold in a little
ambiguity, and you can begin to explain secession.
A final parting word though, did the South have the right to
secede?
Let's just have a show of hands, just to show,
just a poll, did the southern states have
the right to secede in 1861?
Yes? All right.
No? Bunch of Yankees.
[Laughter] Not sure?
You people are honest because this is a constitutional theory
that is very old and never ending.
But not sure, down here in the front--a
teaching assistant is not sure.
So, and he's remaining not sure.
David Huyssen is a prophet of ambiguity.
You got to watch him, he burns question marks on your
front porch if you're not careful.
[Laughter] I usually save that joke for
Unitarians, but I--anyway, never mind.
Okay, sorry, sorry.
[Laughter] Very quickly though,
in 1861, of course, people had to make huge
decisions here, not the least of which was
Lincoln and his circle of Republican advisors.
But Lincoln was very clear on this.
We're going to come back on Thursday to this whole question
of what Lincoln's policy was there in April 1861 and why he
moved with some force against the South.
But first of all, Lincoln's view,
and the nationalist unionist view of secession,
was essentially this.
And you can read this closely in your Lincoln Reader,
in many places. But it was basically that the
Union of the United States, so the argument went,
was created by the people not the states.
Now I know this gets a little bit like constitutional
hairsplitting, but a lot of hairs were at
stake here. So you had to split some of
them. The Union was created,
said this argument, by the people,
not by the states.
The Union was therefore older than those states that agreed to
join it, in the American Revolution and in the U.S.
Constitution. "We the people in order to form
a more perfect union," some unionists argued,
meant secession really is not possible.
There was the practical argument against secession.
A Union cannot survive, the argument went,
if it can be broken at will whenever someone gets upset.
I don't like this law and that law;
well I like these but I don't like those;
I will nullify those and not participate.
Hum, the argument is, that's not a good practical way
to run a republic.
And some unionists--and Lincoln was of course brilliant at this,
eventually, as you read his speeches--would
argue against secession from a position--sort of civil
religion, of almost mysticism.
What did Lincoln refer to at the end of that first inaugural?
That magnificent phrase about the "mystic chords of memory,
from every battlefield and patriot grave,
would yet swell the chorus of the Union."
That's about music and memory, not about the Constitution.
Unionists would invoke the fathers, just like the
secessionists will, of course,
and those fathers of the Constitution and the American
Republic, they would argue, were nationalist.
They wanted a more perfect Union, out of a Union that
wasn't at all perfect.
And sometimes they would even directly invoke Chief Justice
John Marshall, the Virginian,
the first great Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for
twenty-five, thirty years, and the forging of that
institution of the Supreme Court into a national institution of
cohesion and a certain power.
Now, the states' rightists, the secessionists,
of course, will argue, "no; no."
They will say, constitutionally,
the Union, they will argue, is a federal union;
federal in the sense that it was a compact,
a contract between its founders, and the founders were
the states that chose to join it.
And they will argue that states voted.
In the Continental Congress states voted on the Articles of
Confederation, states voted to approve the
U.S. Constitution or not.
States voted to ratify the Constitution and so on.
Then they will go to the Reserve Clause of the
Constitution--all powers not given to the Federal Government
in the Constitution, in Congress,
are, quote, "reserved for the states."
That beautiful, wonderful, tortured and
ambiguous, but, in some ways brilliant,
provision of the Constitution.
They will go to the language of experiment in republicanism.
They will say the American Republic has been an experiment;
it's been a fascinating, wonderful, world historical
experiment. But you know what they'll say?
It's just failed, and let us show you the reasons
why and the way, and let us go in peace;
it is our right. They will argue for the right
of secession, based on essentially the notion
of a contractual theory of government,
and that a contract in this sense, they will argue,
can be broken. Now as Allan Nevins once said,
secession though, after all the constitutional
historians and the lawyers have worked it though,
is a matter of power, and as Nevins said,
who has the most guns.
I'll leave that hanging for a moment.
We'll come back to secession in the wake of Fort Sumter and the
beginning of the war on Thursday.
But let me take you through a quick survey of what historians
have done with this story over time.
I love this kind of stuff, the historiographical debates
of historians is probably why some of use become historians--
we like the arguments.
Before I leave states' rights though, it's of course a theory
that's not going to at all die in the Civil War.
Secession may have died; well maybe, never say never,
who knows? Kosovo just seceded from Serbia
and Russia is making a big stink over it.
And I was listening to a Canadian radio station last
night--don't ask me why but it's what comes on right after NPR
goes off [laughter]--and the Quebecois in Quebec are using
the Kosovo model now to rev up once again the possibility of
Quebec secession from Canada.
So watch out; got to follow this.
And there's always threats after some of our elections,
somebody's deciding they want to secede,
which usually means they just want to move to New Zealand;
but New Zealand has strong immigration laws,
so don't even think it.
[Laughter] States' rights is a theory,
I'm going to argue, a theory of the proper
relations of the levels of government,
how power is distributed between those levels of
government. It is a theory of the nature of
federalism. But--and I think this is the
crucial point and you can argue this, we can argue this forever,
and we probably will if we're Americans--but I would argue
that the significance of states' rights is always and everywhere
in the cause to which it is employed.
States' rights for what?
A state's right to do what?
In the interest of what?
Now throughout our history some things have happened first in
states. Women's suffrage happened in
states first, and then grew over time into
finally a federal right to vote for women.
There are many other cases.
States' rights is not always a conservative or reactionary
idea. It is sometimes a progressive
idea. One might believe in more local
state control--but to what end, for what purpose,
to advance what issue, cause, what principle?
Just make your list of issues.
And where would you start first, for stem cell research,
for gay marriage, for or against?
Where did the right begin?
School curriculums, the right to vote,
women's economic rights, reproductive freedom,
collective bargaining for unions;
and on and on and on.
Old-age pensions began first in some states in the progressive
era, before we ever had a national Social Security.
The Civil War didn't eliminate states' rights.
It has this sloganeering power to it that never gets much
analysis. Well all right.
Now, somewhere on this outline I listed--Well,
in the wake of the Civil War, of course, and for that
generation, there were unionist and confederate blame laying,
interpretations of the war.
It's a fascinating collection of writing, there's a lot of it.
Much of it is score settling, of course, it's vindication on
the part of southerners, it's the forging of this Lost
Cause tradition--and I'll speak a lot more about that at the
very end of the course, because the lost cause became
an elaborate ideology over time, especially a racial ideology.
A lot of the debate among the generation that fought the war
over what had caused it got all caught up in labeling.
Was the war "The War of the Rebellion," which was the
official, northern, federal definition and label of
the war? This was not called the
American Civil War by the Federal Government,
it was called the War of the Rebellion.
If you go out and look at Civil War monuments on battlefields,
put up in the 1880s and '90s, it's called the War of the
Rebellion, if it's a Union monument.
In the south, it was early called "The War
Between the States."
It was sometimes called "The War for Southern Independence."
It was sometimes called "The War of Northern Aggression;"
that sometimes is used now as a euphemism.
My favorite label, and it wasn't just southern,
but by the 1890s and turn of the twentieth century a label
that got into the press and people loved it as a throwaway
joke line, was, quote, "the late
unpleasantness." [Laughter]
You want to start dissolving conflict--we had some late
unpleasantness here and slaughtered all these people,
but never mind. Now, I'll pass on examples of
this unionist and confederate tradition and perhaps we'll just
re-visit this at the end of the course,
because that's perhaps where it belongs anyway.
But by the late nineteenth century, the 1890s to be exact,
and into the early twentieth century,
one historian, named James Ford Rhodes,
and this kind of nationalist tradition in which he wrote,
had a tremendous impact on the way the vast majority of
Americans would come to understand Civil War causation.
Rhodes was a gifted amateur, a gentlemen scholar.
He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1848.
So he was a boy and a teenager during the Civil War,
but too young to have fought.
But he grew up helplessly fascinated with this event that
forged his life, his world.
He was very wealthy.
He retired to Beacon Hill in Boston, and between 1893 and
1907, a fourteen-year period, he published his seven volumes,
a series called History of the United States from the
Compromise of 1850.
They didn't worry about boring titles in the nineteenth
century. That title would never fly
though a publisher today, but that's what it was called.
Seven volumes Rhodes wrote.
Now, on the one hand Rhodes said the Civil War was
caused--he developed the sole cause theory,
and he said the sole cause is slavery;
make no mistake, it's slavery.
But it's what Rhodes did with this that is really important,
and it is still alive and well in our culture and you can't
kill it. He said the war was caused by
slavery, it was an irrepressible conflict, but he focused on
slavery as a system, on cotton and the cotton gin,
not upon any moral element to the story of slavery and/or
abolition. Slavery was a national curse,
he called it, never a national crime.
Slavery was a broad force, almost like climate,
it was almost like bad weather, and no one is to blame for bad
weather. Southerners deserved,
in Rhodes' view, sympathy and not censure.
Slaveholders, he argued, should be absolved
because they were themselves the victims of this system and
therefore the victims of history--a tragic lot,
destined to try to preserve a civilization that the world was
beginning to pass by.
He greatly admired antebellum southern society and
civilization, and there's a certain nostalgia
in Rhodes' work for my God what we lost,
in the great planters world.
He rose Robert E.
Lee to the status of national hero;
he didn't do it alone, there were a lot of people
helping him with that by 1900--that's Robert E.
Lee who led the Confederate armies to national hero,
I just thought I'd point that out.
I was in Richmond two weeks ago giving a lecture.
A woman came up afterward from New York or Boston,
born and raised in the North, and she has just moved to
Richmond. Oh, she's just full of
director or something for the city of Richmond now.
And I was speaking at this new museum about the Civil War and
she came up to me and she said, "I want to know what you think
of my idea. I think the first thing we need
to do in Richmond is just tear down all those Confederate
monuments." I said, "Oh."
Oh dear. [Laughter] Oh dear.
I didn't even know what to tell her.
She said, "If they can just take down that Robert E.
Lee statue and then that Stonewall Jackson statute.
Just take them down.
Wouldn't everything be all right?"
I went over in the bookstore, I got her a copy of Race and
Reunion, this book I did on Civil War memory,
and I said, "Here ma'am, just start here."
[Laughter] According to James Ford Rhodes
both sides had fought nobly, both sides had fought well.
There was to be no blame, in this historical verdict of
seven volumes and something like 3000-and-some pages,
in Rhodes' history.
Now, this put in place--and I'll leave it there--a kind of
nationalist, reconciliationist, quasi-scholarly,
popular historical tradition through which most other
interpretations of the Civil War causation would now have to pass
or breathe or move.
And then came Charles Beard and Mary Beard, by the
1930s--early--in the '20s.
How to sum up Beard.
Charles Beard, the great progressive
historian, so-called--and by that label we mean those
historians who came of age around the turn of the twentieth
century, first decade or two of the
twentieth century, and were still writing into the
1950s; some of them even into the '60s.
They tended to see the world--especially by the
1930s--they tended to see the world through a frame of the
Great Depression.
Well the frame of World War One and then a frame of the Crash of
'29, and the worldwide Great Depression of the '30s.
They tended to see history as essentially a story of
economics, essentially a story of capital and labor,
of wealth as an engine, or the pursuit of it as an
engine of history.
Charles Beard wrote a great book, in many ways--we now can
look at it and see all kinds of holes in it--a book called
The Economic Interpretation of the American Civil War.
He saw the South and the North as essentially two
economies--two civilizations, two economies.
There are rarely any people in Charles Beard's work,
there are economies, there are systems,
there are economic forces; there's cotton and free labor,
and there's shipping and merchants in the North,
and there are planters in the South.
There's the telegraph spreading across the North.
There are canals and there are railroads.
And in his interpretation the South rebelled to try to
preserve its economic way of life.
And ultimately the Civil War, in Beard's view,
wasn't really about any particular ideology--that is,
any racial ideology or any pre-slavery or anti-slavery
ideology--it was two economic systems living together in the
same society, the same nation,
and coming into conflict with one another in insolvable ways;
forces meeting at a crossroads and they had to clash.
Beard is laden with inevitability,
as any great economic determinist usually is.
He called the American Civil War, famously,
the "Second American Revolution."
But by that he didn't mean what Bruce Levine and Eric Foner and
other, many other historians of well my generation and the
generation before have called it,
when we've called it a second American Revolution.
What Beard meant by that is a kind of great dividing line
between an agricultural era and an industrial era.
All right, my clock says I'm running out of time.
I'm going to leave you hanging on this limb of wondering what
the "needless war school" people argued.
They thought it was needless, actually.
But I want to end with this, as a lead-in to Thursday.
Walt Whitman wrote a poem about this year.
He called it "1861."
And here are just a few lines of it, to give you a sense--I
think Whitman, as no one else could,
captured what was in the heads of northerners and southerners.
"Arm'd year--year of the struggle, No dainty rhymes or
sentimental love verses for you, oh terrible year.
Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping
cadenzas piano. But as a strong man erect,
clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying a rifle on
your shoulder, With well-gristled body and
sunburnt face and hands, with a knife in the belt at
your side. As I heard you shouting loud,
your sonorous voice, ringing across the continent.
Year, that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp'd
cannon. I repeat you,
hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted,
year." See you Thursday.