Early Color Film

Heather Cox Richardson

In the late 1930s, Charles Cushman began to experiment with color film. For the next three decades, his photos documented the technological and social changes in America in striking images.

The images bring home the human dimension of history. Tractors didn’t just replace horse-drawn carts; farmers driving tractors down dirt roads passed farmers driving their horse-drawn carts the other way. Seeing the men in Cushman’s images brings home the human element imbedded in historical change. It’s impossible not to imagine the pride of the farmer with the new-fangled tractor as he sports the newest technology past his less-well-off neighbor, and to suspect that the man with the horses feels both left behind and superior to the man who has jumped on the latest fad. The photos draw you—and with luck, students—in, putting human experience of the twentieth century’s momentous changes front and center.

They are well worth a look.

Eugene D. Genovese (1930-2012)

Randall Stephens

To mark the passing of Eugene D. Genovese (1930-2012), I post here an excerpt from a recent forum in Historically Speaking (November 2011) on this influential historian's work and career, alongside that of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1941-2007).

As many know, Eugene Genovese's landmark Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon Books, 1974) had a profound impact on American historiography and went on to win the Bancroft Prize.  Genovese was instrumental in founding the Historical Society in the 1990s.

"The Intellectual World of Southern Slaveholders: Two Assessments of the Recent Work of Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese," Historically Speaking (November 2011)

The historical profession owes much to the power couple couple of Eugene D. Genovese and the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Their most recent books, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (2005) and Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order (2008), both published by Cambridge University Press, are landmark studies of the intellectual world of the southern slaveholders. We asked two distinguished historians, Peter Coclanis and Stanley Engerman, to assess these two signal contributions to our understanding of the antebellum South. 

"Sic et Non"
Peter Coclanis

For the better part of fifteen years in the 1970s and 1980s Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese were the power couple in the circles in which southern historians ran. Brilliant, prolific, stylish, even glamorous, they were our equivalent of couples such as Sartre-Beauvoir, McCarthy-Wilson, and Hardwick-Lowell. Their writings were debated, their feuds savored, their sightings remarked upon, their notice treasured. That Genovese and Fox-Genovese were associated with the Left during that period undoubtedly added to their allure, but scholars of all political persuasions respected and ad- mired their work, however much many may have disagreed with it.

In the late 1980s, however, the couple’s image began to change. To be sure, they still had their admirers, but over the course of the next fifteen years or so the general view of the pair shifted, in Kübler-Ross-like stages, from respect and admiration to bewilderment, then in turn to disbelief, anger, repudiation, and in- difference. Why? In my view largely because Genovese and Fox-Genovese—both of whom had always been cultural conservatives—were seen to have shifted both their political allegiances and, more important, their scholarly orientations sharply to the right.

Of course, it is possible to argue that Genovese and Fox-Genovese had “been disappeared” by “pro- gressive” scholars in part because (a) their work was becoming more rarified, esoteric, and abstract, or (b) the two scholars, whether writing individually or as partners, published some (but hardly all) of their work in less prominent and sometimes downright obscure venues. This said, it must be remembered that during the same period many “progressive” historians were devouring the opaque, not to say in- comprehensible work of writers on the Left such as Ranajit Guha, Fredric Jameson, and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. And, truth be told, few “progressives” had expressed much concern earlier when Genovese(and, to a lesser extent, Fox-Genovese) invoked the rarified, esoteric, and abstract—but Marxist—theorist Antonio Gramsci. Moreover, a large portion of Genovese’s and Fox-Genovese’s work continued to appear under distinguished imprints such as the University of South Carolina Press, University of Georgia Press, University of North Carolina Press, and Harvard University Press, which suggests to me at least that their “disappearance” was due rather more to their purported political and interpretive migration than to anything else.

In recent years, however, the worm has turned, as it were, and Genovese and Fox-Genovese have returned to scholarly view, if not necessarily to scholarly favor. Faute de mieux, one can point to the year 2004 as the turning point or, perhaps more accurately, tipping point. In that year the journal Radical History Review ran a very interesting “Genovese Forum,” and, more important, Michael O’Brien published his magisterial two-volume intellectual history of the antebellum South, Conjectures of Order, which covered some of the same terrain wherein Genovese and Fox-Genovese had situated themselves since the early to mid-1980s. The publication in 2005 of the massive Mind of the Master Class reminded historians that Genovese and Fox-Genovese were still with us, and Fox-Genovese’s untimely death in 2007 at the age of 66 led many to reread and reconsider her body of work. The appearance in 2008 of Genovese and Fox-Genovese’s Slavery in White and Black, a companion volume to The Mind of the Master Class, and the publication late in 2011 of another companion volume, Fatal Self-Deception, served further notice in this regard. And the publication of five volumes of Fox-Genovese’s essays by the University of South Carolina Press in 2011- 2012 in a series entitled “History and Women, Culture and Faith,” under the general editorship of David Moltke-Hansen, will also do much to keep the scholarly world attuned—once again—to the two scholars who captivated the world of southern history lo so many years ago.>>>

"The Richness of Intellectual Life in Antebellum America"
Stanley L. Engerman

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, individually and jointly, have done much to shape the study of southern history and the history of American slavery. These contributions are based on a combination of brilliant insights and exceptional research in primary and secondary sources. Despite the reactions of some to what they regard as their recent political inappropriateness, all scholars of these subjects must end up dealing with their writings and interpretations.

These two volumes do not describe the lives of slaves, as Eugene Genovese has done already in the masterful Roll, Jordan, Roll, but are principally concerned with the beliefs and worldviews of the southern slaveholders, most generally in the late antebellum period. The authors view the southern slaveholders as quite intelligent, knowledgeable in most regards about the world around them, and able to deal as equals with non-Southerners in terms of intellectual ability and, with one exception, concern with morality and the well being of the lower classes. The exception, as they point out, was the acceptance of the system of slavery and the horrors it imposed on the slaves. In their descriptions of free workers in the North and Britain, the Southerners demonstrated serious concern for the lower classes, one that seemed lacking in their dealings with their slaves.

The authors stress two important aspects of the slaveholder belief system. First, it represents a line of American conservatism, based on religious principles, that was consistently applied to the defense of their system while being critical of developments in northern and British society. Second, when slave- holders compared slave labor to northern free labor, they pointed to the many difficulties within the society of the North and thus argued for the human advantage of slavery. Fox-Genovese and Genovese emphasize Southerners’ belief in slavery in the abstract, “the doctrine that declared slavery or a kindred system of personal servitude the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race.”

They have researched extensively in many different varieties of writing by southern and northern authors, and provide a remarkable list of characters dealing with an exceptionally broad range of issues. In doing so, they offer a view of southern intellectual life that goes beyond the usual range of past and present collections of writings about southern thinkers, which deal almost exclusively with their proslavery arguments. Fox-Genovese and Genovese demonstrate that defenders of slavery had a broader vision than they are usually given credit for. There were many in the South thinking and writing about issues other than the defense of slavery. Southerners’ readings and writings show considerable knowledge of the nature of slavery in the past, and an awareness of the negative aspects of free labor and a capitalist society. Their knowledge of ancient and medieval slavery was often used to frame their discussions of slavery in the South.

Fox-Genovese and Genovese are, of course, not the only historians who have dealt recently with southern intellectual life. A major work by Michael O’Brien covers some of the same ground, pointing to the high level of the life of the mind in the South. O’Brien shows that Southerners were concerned not just with slavery and free labor but also religion, economics, politics, literature, and history. The southern intellectual elite often received college educations, in northern as well as southern schools, they traveled extensively in the North and Europe, they corresponded with northern and British intellectual figures, and read numerous books and journals—all of which meant that intellectuals in the South were on similar footing as those of the North. Part of the explanation for why antebellum Southerners have often been shortchanged is a frequent misreading of the 1850 census data on national literacy, which led to a major overstatement of North- South differences.

Those concerned with the economic arguments about slavery, and the presumed demise of the South on Malthusian grounds, will be interested to see that the same arguments were made, using the same basic economic model, to predict that the northern economy would also soon decline due to a population crisis with the ensuing immiseration of labor, and the possibility of worker revolts and riots.>>>

Good Fences

Dan Allosso

Robert Frost famously epitomized New Englanders with the wry phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors.”  But even if your neighbors are far enough away for comfort and you like them, fences have their uses.  I’ve been thinking about these as I continue to work on 19th-century American history while starting up a small farm in the upper Midwest.  It’s interesting, because I suspect I’m living through a moment of historic change, and it’s all about fences.

In addition to influencing the relationships of neighbors, I’m learning fences have a number of other uses on the farm.  Of course, they help keep your animals where you want them.  And hopefully they help keep predators off your animals.  And they may keep wildlife off your vegetables, although hungry deer will jump any fence less than eight feet high.  Less obviously, though, fences define our relationship to the land and the uses we can put it to.

Most everyone is familiar with the story of the colonial split-rail fence.  There’s one on the cover of William Cronon’s Changes in the Land.  The rail fence, roughly cut from the timber settlers needed to clear in order to turn wild eastern forest into farmland, symbolizes European ideas of land use and ownership that settlers brought with them and imposed on the environment and the natives they found there.

This style of fencing was cheap and easy where settlers found trees needing to be cleared.  I took this photo at the Genesee Country Village and Museum in western New York.  This section of the museum represents life around the year 1800, when farming was a family enterprise done with ox, horse, and human power (I spent a 4th of July weekend in that cabin with my family as "The 1800 Farm Family").  An energetic farmer could clear about seven acres of land in a year, and often the family farmstead was split between a small cultivated field, a pasture for grazing animals, and a woodlot for fuel.  As families moved west, however, they discovered plains of prairie grasses that towered over the heads of children like Laura Ingalls.  The wooden fences of the East were impractical in many parts of the Midwest, where lumber came from far away at great expense, and was reserved for building things like houses, barns, churches and saloons.  And without internal combustion and irrigation, much of the land farther west was unfit for cultivation, but ideal for grazing if the animals could just be contained.

Joseph Glidden (1813-1906) was a New Englander who moved to Illinois in 1843.  He patented barbed wire in 1873 and died a millionaire.  Among his holdings were 335,000 acres in Texas: range land that his invention had allowed to be fenced.  The enclosure of the rangelands is one of the mythic moments in the story of the American West.  Through books and movies like The Virginian (1902), Oklahoma (1943), Shane (1953), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Open Range (2003), it is as central to popular western history as Frederick Jackson Turner’s comments about the closing of the frontier are to the academic West.  Barbed wire fences dramatically expanded our ability to affordably control very large spaces.  Once again, Americans were able to impose our vision on the land (and also, once again, on the Indians).

Fences remain important to farmers, and their use is still a complicated affair.  Cattle and horses can be grazed on pasture enclosed by a few strands of barbed wire.  Sheep, with thick fleeces to protect them, will go through barbed wire.  Goats are even harder to contain – there’s an old saying that if your fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold goats.  And although chickens will usually come back home in the evening, there are a lot of varmints out there that will eat them in the meantime if they aren’t protected by a fence.  Farmers have used woven wire, hardware cloth, rigid panels, and electric wire to contain and protect animals.  Each comes at a price, and it adds up: a decent four-foot high sheep and goat fence will run you over a dollar a foot.  So these fences tended to be expensive and permanent.  Most small farmers use and endlessly reuse a variety of materials based on what they can get cheap, and hoard the bits they aren’t currently using.

As sustainability and soil depletion have come into sharper focus in recent years, innovative farmers have rediscovered what the old-timers knew before the age of chemical fertilizer: pastures will support a larger number of animals if they are grazed in succession.  Sheep and goats prefer to eat different plants than cows, so they can coexist with cattle on a pasture without competing.  And then the poultry can follow, eating bugs out of the droppings; which not only breaks up the fertilizer and spreads it over the fields, but also actually reduces the number of parasites and pathogens.  This is a win-win-win, the animals are better off, the farmer produces a larger quantity and wider variety of protein on a given plot of land, and the land itself is improved in the process.  The only catch is, you have to enclose and protect all these different types of creatures!  

That’s where the story gets interesting.  The cost of fencing has traditionally made it difficult for farmers to fence appropriately for intensive pasturing, and the effort involved in setting and moving fences has made land use inflexible.  But recently, battery-powered low-impedance fence chargers and moveable electric fences have changed the game again for small farms.  Deep-cycle batteries like the ones in your boat or RV can run miles of low-cost electric tape, twine or netting.  They can even be hooked to solar chargers.  And they’re easy to set up and move, allowing farmers to raise temporary paddocks and move animals as quickly or slowly as needed over the land.

This may not seem like such a big deal, but I think it may turn out to be.  The world’s food supply depends heavily on fossil fuels, both for transportation and for the production of synthetic fertilizers like anhydrous ammonia.  It currently takes fifteen calories of energy to put a calorie of food on your table.  If there’s any truth to either climate change or peak oil, multi-thousand acre cornfields and factory-style feedlots may turn out to be as much of a twentieth-century anomaly as McMansions and jet-setting to conferences.  But it has been suggested that the world’s food needs could be met by intensive techniques combining grazing with gardening.  Farmers like Joel Salatin claim that not only would intensive pasturing solve the world food problem, but “in fewer than ten years we would sequester all the atmospheric carbon generated since the beginning of the industrial age” (Folks, This Ain’t Normal, p. 195).  If true, this is a really big deal; and even if Salatin is not quite right about this, intensive pasturing still seems like a really good idea.  And these new fences make it possible.  That could be historic.

Crowd Sourcing Public History

Heather Cox Richardson

In 1901, electrical inventor Nicholas Tesla bought 200 acres of potato field on Long Island to establish a wireless telegraphy plant. Backed with J. P. Morgan’s money, Tesla hired Stanford White to design a red brick laboratory building in what is now Shoreham, New York. Tesla’s tenure in the building was short. In 1903, creditors repossessed his equipment and the man from whom Tesla had bought the land for the laboratory sued the inventor for nonpayment of back taxes. For the next eighty years, Wardenclyffe, as the building was named, passed through the hands of a number of different companies.

Now a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to creating a regional science and technology center on eastern Long Island is trying to raise the money to restore Wardenclyffe as a science center.  But money for building new education centers is hard to come by, especially these days. So the organization has turned to crowd sourcing to raise the necessary funds.

The Wardenclyffe fund-raising film raises for me two questions. The first is why the board of directors focused the message of the film on the history of the building, rather than on the purpose of the center. Watching the film leaves a viewer with no sense of why the building is important, aside from its admittedly beautiful structural details. And yet, it seems reasonable to assume that there would be an audience for the idea that a center dedicated to spreading knowledge about science and technology among school children. So why did the directors decide to focus instead on being part of Tesla’s legacy, especially when he was only in the building so briefly?

Are historians right after all, that history matters and people think it’s cool?

The second question involves the role of crowd sourcing in public history. There is no doubt that we are in a new era. It has long been a source of frustration for organizations trying to attract grants—especially federal grants—that the success of applications often seems to depend on the political biases of the scholars the granting institution managed to dragoon onto that year’s advisory board. Crowd sourcing circumvents that problem.

In the process, crowd sourcing forces the people supporting a new project to explain to people—real people, not a blind grant panel—why their project is important enough for individuals to hand over cash to support it. This seems to me to offer a necessary spur to historians to articulate why what we do is important.

There are downsides to crowd sourcing, of course, but it seems to me to be the wave of the future. Historians had better learn how to ride it effectively.

The Battle of Antietam and War Photography

Heather Cox Richardson

One hundred and fifty years ago this weekend, 75,000 Union and about 38,000 Confederate troops massed near Sharpsburg, Maryland. One hundred and fifty years ago on Monday morning, a clear fall day, September 17, 1862, the two armies engaged. The ensuing battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest one-day battle in American history.

Antietam changed the way societies would see war for ever after.

After a successful summer of fighting, Confederate general Robert E. Lee had crossed the Potomac River into Maryland to bring the Civil War to the North. He hoped to swing the slave state of Maryland into rebellion and to weaken Lincoln’s war policies in the upcoming 1862 elections. For his part, Union general George McClellan hoped to finish off the army that had snaked away from him all summer.

The armies clashed as the sun rose about 5:30 on September 17. For twelve hours the men slashed at each other. Amid the smoke and fire, soldiers fell. Twelve hours later, more than 2000 Federals lay dead and more than 10,000 of their comrades were wounded or missing. 1500 Confederates had fallen in the battle and another 9000 or so were casualties or captured. The Union had lost 25% of its fighting force; the Confederates 31%. It was a slaughter. The First Texas Infantry lost 82% of its men.

Eighty-two percent.

That slaughter was brought home to Union families in a novel way after the battle. Photographer Alexander Gardner, working for the great photographer Matthew Brady, brought his camera to Antietam two days after the guns fell silent. Until Gardner’s field experiment, photography had been limited almost entirely to studios. People sent formal photos home and recorded family images for posterity, as if photographs were portraits.

Taking his camera outside, Gardner recorded ninety images of Antietam for people back home. His

stark images showed bridges and famous generals, but they also showed rows of bodies, twisted and bloating in the sun as they awaited burial. By any standards these war photos were horrific, but to a people who had never seen anything like it before, they were earth-shattering.

Matthew Brady exhibited Gardner’s images at his studio in New York City. People who saw the placard announcing “The Dead of Antietam” and climbed the stairs up to Brady’s rooms to see the images found that their ideas about war were changed forever.

“The dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams,” one reporter mused. “We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type.” But Gardner’s photographs erased the distance between the battlefield and the home front. They brought home the fact that every name on a casualty list “represents a bleeding, mangled corpse.” “If [Gardner] has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it,” the shocked reporter commented. [New York Times, October 20, 1862, p. 5.)

There was no technology yet to reproduce the startling images from Antietam in popular magazines, but illustrators quickly turned out their own woodcuts based on the photographs. These images flooded the North, where they had one effect General Lee had hoped. They helped to undercut Lincoln and the Republican Party in the 1862 midterm elections, as Americans began to think that anything, even compromise with the Confederacy, would be better than the kind of carnage they had seen at Antietam.

The import of Gardner’s images from Antietam stretched far beyond the fall of 1862. Never again could war be distant, so long as photographers could be there to record what they saw. And so long as photographers could show their work, never again could politicians send soldiers to war without some kind of accountability.

Was the Civil War a “War of Choice”?

Todd Arrington

"Camp Meeting," A. Rider, ca. 1835.  NY Historical Soc.

David Goldfield, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, recently penned a column that has appeared in several major newspapers this summer, including the July 22 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  (Link is to fredericksburg.com, where Goldfield’s article first appeared.) 

In the column, entitled “Give Peace a Chance: Avoid the Carnage of War,” Goldfield bluntly states, “The Civil War was not a just war.  It was a war of choice brought on by the insidious mixture of politics and religion that caused our political process and, ultimately, the nation to disintegrate.”  As the U.S. commemorates the war’s 150th anniversary with battle reenactments, scholarly lectures, new books, and feature films, the question Goldfield poses is a legitimate one: was the Civil War truly necessary? 

Obviously, Goldfield believes it was not.  His objection to the war stems from his belief that by the year 1861, “the Bible had replaced the Constitution as the arbiter of public policy, particularly over the issue of extending slavery in the Western territories.”  The Second Great Awakening had swept across the United States in the early nineteenth century, and the evangelical Protestantism that resulted was a leading cause of the rise of social reform movements, including abolitionism.  At the same time, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant groups emerged as well, eventually resulting in the creation of the so-called “Know Nothing” political party.  Evangelicals and Know Nothings sought to spread democracy across North America, and to do so meant that, in Goldfield’s words, “America must expiate its sins, foremost among them slavery and the Roman Catholic Church—two forms of despotism that undermined democracy and Christianity.”  

Bombardment of Fort Sumter by Currier and Ives.  UC-Davis.

Professor Goldfield makes some very compelling points about the ties between early political parties and evangelicals, and such observations are still relevant today.   But are these ties the only reasons the nation went to war with itself in April 1861?  To argue that they are greatly oversimplifies a century of conflict over the presence of slavery in America.  It also seems to place the blame for the war directly at the feet of Republicans like Abraham Lincoln simply because they were Republicans.  While Lincoln the politician was deft with his pen and able to incorporate biblical ideas and verses into many of his speeches, Lincoln the man was not an overly devout Christian and was certainly no evangelical.  He is also the president that told the South in his March 4, 1861 inaugural address, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.  The government will not assail you.  You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”  However, according to Goldfield, “When the Republicans, avowedly evangelical and proudly sectional, took control of the government in March 1861, Southerners were rightly concerned to expect the worst.  And the worst happened.

The worst did happen, and the war began on April 12, 1861.  If one reads Goldfield’s assessment, one might be led to believe that Lincoln ordered the U.S. Army to invade the South as soon as he finished his inaugural speech.  In fact, southerners fired on Fort Sumter, a federal bastion in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor.  Regardless of how “evangelical” or “sectional” the Republicans were, the South fired the first shot of the war that would last four years and claim approximately 750,000 lives.   And for what?  Why did the Confederates in Charleston attack Fort Sumter?  Why did southerners feel compelled to secede in the first place?  In sum, for what did the South fight?  Perhaps understanding this will shed light as to whether or not the war was truly necessary.

Lincoln, November 25, 1860.  By Samuel G. Alschuler.

Despite former Confederates’ postwar assessments that the South fought merely to defend itself from a tyrannical North or for the always vaguely-defined “states’ rights,” the war was fought primarily because the South wanted no part of a nation that questioned the value, morality, or legality of slavery.  When Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, southern leaders—despite Lincoln’s constant assurances that he sought only to contain slavery in the South, not abolish it—convinced themselves and their constituents that the so-called “Black Republicans” would soon cross the Potomac and march through the South, freeing slaves and encouraging the twin horrors of black civil rights and miscegenation.  Secession movements began in earnest before Lincoln’s election but picked up steam after it was confirmed that Lincoln would become president in 1861.  Regardless of how passionately abolitionist they may have been, few northerners had ever openly threatened secession in response to outrages such as slaveholders being elected to the presidency or appointed to the Supreme Court.

The South fought to preserve and expand the institution of slavery.  While it is true that the majority of Confederate soldiers and sailors were not slave owners, they did fight for a government and a socioeconomic system built on slavery.   If a war to preserve the world’s only working democracy and free people from bondage is not necessary or justified, then what war is?  “I believe the war will soon take the shape of Slavery and Freedom,” wrote future Union General and President of the United States James A. Garfield just two days after Fort Sumter.  “The world will so understand it, and I believe the final outcome will redound to the good of humanity.”  Garfield also shared his opinion that “I hope we will never stop short of complete subjugation.  Better lose a million men in battle than allow the government to be overthrown.”

As further proof of his opinion that the Civil War was a conflict of choice, Goldfield includes this statement: “And what of the former slaves, on whose behalf this carnage was allegedly undertaken?  The Civil War sealed their freedom, but little else.  It would be more than a century before African-Americans attained the basic rights of that freedom.”  True, but does Goldfield actually believe that the failures of the post-war era—which, of course, no one could know or envision before or during the conflict—negate the war’s necessity in the first place?  Based on this line of reasoning, African Americans would have been better off to remain as slaves than to be free in an admittedly imperfect and unfriendly atmosphere at war’s end.  One wonders how many slaves would have volunteered to stay in bondage had they known how difficult their path to equality under the law would be after the war.  Goldfield appears to believe that since the “new birth of freedom” Lincoln spoke of in the Gettysburg Address was not immediate, it was not worth fighting for at all. 

Finally, Goldfield asks if peace, not war, might have ended slavery sooner and guaranteed the legal and political equality of African Americans.  He does not define what he believes “peace” to be.  Is it merely the absence of war?  Or is there more to it than that?  Consider that the North and South argued (relatively) peacefully about the existence, boundaries, and morality of slavery from before the Constitutional Convention until “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856—a period of 70 years.  During that time, Congress forged many compromises that appeased both northerners and southerners, but none ever permanently held.  Peaceful legislative compromises and solutions were pretty well exhausted by 1856, when pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas brutally fought over whether that territory’s constitution would allow or outlaw slavery.  This mini civil war was merely a preview of things to come on a national scale five years later.  “Give peace a chance” is a great slogan and a great John Lennon song, but peace merely for the sake of avoiding war was tried for three-quarters of a century before the Civil War.  As John Brown—one of the most violent of those who fought on either side in Bleeding Kansas—predicted on his way to the gallows in December 1859, “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

This blog post does not mean to glorify or advocate war.  David Goldfield is correct when he writes “Wars are easily made, difficult to end and burdened with unintended consequences and unforeseen human casualties.”  As the Union General William T. Sherman told the citizens and leaders of Atlanta in 1864, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.  War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”  This quote would help make Goldfield’s case if it ended there.  But Sherman continued: “…but you cannot have peace and a division of our country…I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war.”  

Perhaps David Goldfield is appalled by war in general and not just the Civil War specifically.  If so, few would disagree.  Based on his criticisms of the early Republicans’ ties to evangelicalism, he also appears to be repelled by religion.  He is certainly not alone in that, either.  However, is it possible that he is taking his personal distastes for war and religion in 2012 and using them to oppose the Civil War, which started over 150 years ago?  

The United States has unquestionably fought wars during its history for dubious reasons and unclear goals, but the Civil War was not one of them.  That war began as a fight to preserve this union, but evolved into a conflict that sought to ensure that union’s liberties and freedoms were and are made available to everyone—thereby making it better by forcing it to live up to the promise of its Constitution.  That is worth fighting for. 

Blog Hiatus

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While we take a break, have a look at these HS posts on the American Civil War.

Heather Cox Richardson, "The Battle of Olustee, February 20, 1864," February 23, 2012

Heather Cox Richardson, "Civil War Soldiers and Conversation Hearts,"  February 14, 2012

"The Conspirator Roundup," September 15, 2011

Todd Arrington, "The National Park Service Takes an Expansive Look at the Civil War," April 19, 2011

Randall Stephens, "More on Our Virginia: Past and Present," February 11, 2011