History happens, but historians (however scholarly and objective) tend to see and record events through differing lenses. The Civil War, which established the American society of today, has been the most interpreted event in American history, and from ever-changing and conflicting points of view. An account of these successive interpretations has recently been given in Thomas J. Pressly’s Americans Interpret Their Civil War (Princeton, 347 pp., $5.00), and a noted historian here attempts to trace the factors in the times and intellectual climate which influenced these varying interpretations of the writers of history.
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The historians are pretty well in accord about the nature of such periods and movements as the Revolution, Jeffersonian democracy, the Jacksonian era, and the Progressive movement. But there are certain others where deep, even violent, differences remain.
The two phases of American history which have provoked the most controversy are the causes of the Civil War and the character of the Reconstruction years—the reasons for and the results of our national quarrel. That these periods should still remain subjects of dispute is significant but not surprising. Americans have not quarreled like this about the Revolution because they believe that the Revolution settled some matters of fundamental importance. It determined that this nation would be a republic and provided a basis for future national development; the results were generally accepted as being good and permanent. The Civil War, on the other hand, raised more problems than it solved; it engendered issues, like the race question, that have never been finally settled. Americans have not been able to agree on the results because they have never been sure what they want the results to be. As long as the issues produced by the Civil War are causes of division in our national life, so apparently will the causes and the nature of that war provoke discord among historians.
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Professor Thomas J. Pressly, in his recent book Americans Interpret Their Civil War, has gathered together all the different interpretations of the causes of the Civil War that have been offered so far. He has analyzed them, classified them according to schools, and related them to the intellectual climate from which they emerged. It is an intriguing book, even more interesting for its general implications as to history and history-writing than for its specific theme. Better than any account that I know, this volume illustrates the truth that historians in describing the past are influenced by the opinions and attitudes of their own era. It is probably not true that every generation rewrites history to gratify its own needs; in most of the writing about the American past objectivity predominates over relativism; but Pressly’s study demonstrates that a great pivotal event in a nation’s history—such as our Civil War, or the Revolution of 1789 with the French—generates issues of lasting importance, and scholars will interpret the meaning of these issues in terms of their own emotions and loyalties. His book also reflects the different and sometimes confused views which Americans have held on the subject of war itself.
The first interpretations of the Civil War were written during the conflict and, in the years following its close, by amateur historians and literate politicians. They divided into three schools of opinion: the case for the Union (presented by men like Henry Wilson and J. T. Headley); the case for the Confederacy (E. A. Pollard, A. T. Bledsoe); and the case for peace (Henry S. Foote, Clement L. Vallandigham). The Union and Confederate side had each a starkly simple explanation: the war had been caused by the machinations of evil men on the opposing side. Almost as artless was the formula of the peace men, Who charged that the war had been precipitated by the actions of irresponsible extremists on both sides. It was all very neat—the war for the Union, the war for Southern rights, the needless war—and it was all a question of personal war guilt for somebody else. These explanations satisfied the war and postwar generation in North and South; they answered its need to understand what had happened. These explanations would continue to be accepted until another generation felt impelled to examine the Civil War in terms of its own experience.
The next interpretation, which emerged in the 1890’s, may be called the “nationalist tradition.” Although its pioneer was the businessman-historian James Ford Rhodes, most of the writers who formulated the nationalist synthesis were trained historians from the new graduate schools, men like Woodrow Wilson, Edward Channing, and Frederick Jackson Turner. They presented a much more sophisticated analysis than earlier authors. Discarding completely the question of war guilt, they said that the struggle had had fundamental causes for which no man or group of men were to blame; both sides had fought for what they thought was right. This pleased both the Northerners and the Southerners who read the books of the nationalists. It is important to note that the nationalists believed that the Civil War had had real causes: social differences between the sections, and the slavery question. In their view it had been an irrepressible conflict. Especially important is the fact that they considered slavery to have been the greatest single cause of the war; this showed that they were aware of the significance of moral issues in politics. Finally, the nationalists held that the results of the war—the destruction of slavery and the preservation of the Union—were worth the suffering and the bloodshed.
The nationalist interpretation was popular from 1890 until 1914. Most scholars, including many Southerners, subscribed to it. It is the only explanation of the Civil War that has ever been accorded anything like the status of an accepted synthesis. Why was it so widely accepted? Back in those years Americans could believe that the Civil War had settled some vital questions and had settled them right. The United States was advancing to the position of a great power; it faced the world and the future with the confidence of growing strength. Americans of all sections took pride in this development, and all Americans could agree that the war that had decided that America would be one nation had been a worthwhile war. Furthermore, there were no remaining issues of political conflict inside the country that could be related to the Civil War. The Federal government, presumably representing the majority North, had abandoned its attempt to define the status of the Negro in the South. Southerners could now accept the results of the war because they felt that they had salvaged something from defeat.
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In the 1920’s another, newer interpretation arose to challenge the nationalist tradition and, eventually, secure its repudiation. It came from the school of American historians led by Charles A. Beard, and proclaimed that economic motives were the fundamental factors in historical causation. In his Rise of American Civilization, Beard called the Civil War “the second American Revolution.” According to him and his followers, it had indeed been an irrepressible conflict, but not because of moral differences over slavery. Two different economic systems, the industrial North and the agricultural South, had fought to decide which would control the nation. One or the other had had to go down, and the war determined that it would be the South. The “second American Revolution” brought the triumph of industry and the political dominance of the industrialists.
Beard and the Beardians were profoundly influenced by the Progressive movement and the crusade for social reform—and profoundly disillusioned with the apparent failure of both. Viewing the nation in the 1920’s, they were disgusted with what they saw—big business, materialism, Republican rule. These things, they decided, were the fruits of the Civil War; hence it had not been worth fighting. Beard almost took the position that the agrarian ideals of the Confederacy had been the higher ones. Certainly he lamented the subordination of agriculture to industry, which to him was the sole vital consequence of the war.
Although the economic interpretation of the Civil War won many adherents and even today enjoys wide support, it never became an accepted synthesis. This was largely because other interpretations emerged almost immediately to compete with it. In the 1930’s a school of Southern historians put together another formula, using some of the ammunition supplied them by the Beardians. These men, repreresented by Frank L. Owsley and Charles W. Ramsdell, may be termed the new vindicators of the South. In many ways their views marked a return to the pro-Southern case of the 1860’s. They charged that the Civil War had been started by the Abolitionists and Radicals of the North. It had been irrepressible because these elements were determined to destroy the social structure of the South and make it over in a Northern image. The results, of course, were completely bad. Industry was in the saddle, a shoddy urban culture had displaced the old agrarian way, a powerful central government was threatening the mores of the minority South. Prominent if not dominant in the thinking of the new vindicators was the small value they attached to the continuance of the American nation. What was so wonderful about the Union—they asked in effect—that it had been worth a war to preserve? What would have been so awful if it had been dissolved?
A similar lack of feeling for the Union ran through the writings of another school, which emerged in the 1930’s and reached the apex of its influence in the 1940’s—the revisionist school led by the late James G. Randall and Avery Craven. The revisionists presented an interpretation that became more widely accepted than any other except the “nationalist tradition.” Although dressed up in modern verbiage, it was remarkably similar to the explanation of the peace group of the 1860’s. The revisionists said that the Civil War had been needless because war itself is needless if men only act reasonably. They denied that fundamental factors, whether moral or economic, had caused the war, because wars are never caused by fundamental factors. War is abnormal and artificial and is always brought on by the agitation of evil or irresponsible men. Hostilities could, and should, have been averted by compromise, which is always preferable to war. The North, which had done most of the agitating, should as the stronger party have done most of the compromising. Implicit in the revisionist argument was the idea that anything is preferable to war. In fact, one of the latest revisionists, Kenneth M. Stampp, has stated that a peaceable separation of North and South into two different countries might well have been accepted by the North. Holding the views they did of the Civil War’s causes, the revisionists could see little good in its results.
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It is evident that there are many points of similarity between the two schools that arose in the depression decade. Both thought that the war had been fought for unworthy or unnecessary causes; both disliked many aspects of the new industrial order; and both questioned the values of nationalism. The Southern vindicators, however, were moved by motives peculiarly their own. They reflected in scholarly terms the fear and anger felt in the South as the Federal government, under the New Deal, sought once more to control certain areas of Southern life, especially race relations. The revisionists, on the other hand, expressed the profound disillusionment with war (as with American “capitalist” society) which most American intellectuals felt in the 1930’s. Although few of them were doctrinaire pacifists, they were, whether they knew it or not, trying to use the Civil War as a warning against future wars.
Though the revisionist interpretation did not pass without challenge, no serious criticism was leveled at it until the era of World War II. That war caused many intellectuals to revise their ideas about the values of nationalism and industrialism. Faced by the Nazi and then the Communist threat, they realized that the Union after all might have been worth preserving, and that an industrial society had its strengths and values.
Thus in the postwar years some scholars began to attack the revisionist position. Bernard De Voto and others pointed out that it evaded the basic facts of the historical situation: the fact of slavery and the fact of secession. It was not enough to say, as the revisionists did, that people in the 1860’s had acted crazy. The important question was why they had. These writers, impressed by the moral and ideological aspects of the recent world war, reasoned that Americans of the Civil War period must have been moved by similar forces. They doubted that tensions between sections and nations were as easily resolved as the revisionists believed. Some of these critics were so zealous in depicting the war as a struggle for democratic nationalism that they placed on the South the burden of war guilt, using arguments similar to those offered by the pro-North writers of the 1860’s.
This criticism of the revisionist formula presaged the emergence of a new school of interpretation—one that Pressly calls the “new nationalist.” Its adherents represent, it must be emphasized, a tendency rather than a fully developed movement. Their views have been presented for the most part in scattered articles and book reviews, and have not always been in agreement or in the same focus. Some have devoted their chief attention to attacking the ideas of Beard instead of those of the revisionists. Some have said that the South was the victim of a historical situation, while others have ascribed personal or sectional war guilt to Southerners. The new nationalists seem to hold in common the belief that the war had moral rather than artificial or economic reasons; that the North was right and the South wrong; that war does accomplish something and is preferable to a surrender of principle; that the Civil War settled some important matters.
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Although the new nationalist tendency resembles the older view in many ways, it is the product of a different intellectual climate. The first nationalist interpretation appeared in a time of optimism and security, when both on the domestic and the international scene there seemed to be no great problems to be solved or no great dangers to be encountered. It was formulated when sectional reconciliation was a dominant theme in American life. And it did not have to struggle for acceptance against already widely supported interpretations. The new nationalist interpretation emerged after the Great Depression and the Second World War, in a time of insecurity and gloom, when there seemed to be problems on every hand. To the new nationalists it seems that evil and war constantly recur in the historical process and are never entirely overcome by progress. They have arrived at their interpretation at a moment—and this is very important—when political and economic issues that could be related to the Civil War have reappeared in our political life: the question of majority (Northern) rule and minority (Southern) rights; the place of the Negro in American society; the proper economic policy for the national government to adopt. Many of the new nationalists found in the war and its aftermath support for the liberal-New Deal position. Lastly, the new interpretation faced the competition of existing schools of thought.
One historian has attempted a systematic presentation of the new nationalist view—Allan Nevins, in his multi-volume work, still unfinished, The Ordeal of the Union. Although Nevins concedes that some men in 1860 were stupid or irresponsible, and although he stresses economic differences between the sections, his is essentially a return to Rhodes’ and Channing’s thesis: that the Civil War had real causes, the chief of which was slavery. He places more emphasis than the older historians, however, on the related issue of racial adjustment. The war was probably irrepressible, says Nevins, because some permanent solution to the slavery problem had had to be found. One section or the other had had to yield its position. Such a solution was possible but unlikely without war. As yet, Nevins has not stated his views on the results of the war, but other new nationalists have indicated his probable conclusion: the results were partly good and partly bad, with the good predominating—which is to say that the Civil War operated like any other historical process in a democracy.
Obviously Nevins is trying to harmonize several interpretations in a common synthesis. It may be doubted, however, that he has produced much harmony. The issues of the war are still too vibrant. Some Southern scholars have attacked his work as being pro-Northern, and some Northern scholars have charged him with being pro-Southern. As the 1950’s opened, the historians were writing about the war with a bitterness exceeded only by the authors of the 1860’s. In fact, listening to the charges of personal and sectional war guilt, one could almost imagine oneself back in the time of the Civil War. Pressly suggests that American attitudes about the war are beginning to approximate those of the French toward their Revolution of 1789. “The disagreement of the French people in evaluating their revolution,” he writes, “has been reflected in divisions of major proportions in many areas of their national life.”
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If similar cleavages over Civil War issues should develop in this country, it would indeed be a matter of serious concern. But Pressly’s fear seems exaggerated. There is a fundamental difference between the French Revolution and the Civil War that he fails to consider. The Revolution did not gain the assent of certain powerful conservative elements in French society who never completely accepted its great result—a republic. When opportunities presented themselves, as in the time of Louis Napoleon or under the Nazi occupation, these groups were able to find enough support in the country to establish an anti-republican regime. Such attempts have not lasted because the large majority of Frenchmen are committed to 1789; but the fact that they can be made and can temporarily succeed is evidence of the weakness of the French revolutionary settlement.
The difference between the French situation and ours is that the great result of the Civil War—the endurance of the Union—was accepted by all important elements in American life. Since 1865 no faction or class or section has even thought of trying to break up the Union; no support for such an attempt could possibly be secured. Some historians, looking back, may have regarded a divided nation as a desirable possibility, but their views demonstrate only how insulated scholars often are from the realities of national life and opinion. What Americans have differed over, and will continue to differ over for some time, is the character of the Union. They accept the concept of the American nation, but disagree as to the role and function of the national government. Put another way: they accept the general result and quarrel about the specific effects. But no matter how bitter the controversies or how strong the emotions of the contending parties, no group has held that its interests would be safer outside the national framework or in a different political system. The issues produced by the Civil War have caused division but never disruption. In our national historical consciousness, if still not in the consciousness of all our historians, the modern American Union was cemented in the Civil War. The refusal, or the inability, of Americans even to contemplate abandoning that Union is proof of the strength of our internal settlement.
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