It’s 4:17 AM. Sleep has never come easily. I reach for one of the books I delve into for relaxation—non-fiction always. Facts, nothing but facts are my preference; well-reasoned opinions I have in abundance. I get to “Civil War America, 1850-1870,” in Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People. Facts? Perhaps in the strictest sense of the word: timeline, dates, etc. Otherwise, the section is simplistic and biased. To wit, Lincoln was as pure as the driven snow (his wife thought otherwise, describing him as a good-for-nothing lay about around the home). Southern secession was undemocratic and nonsensical. Jefferson Davis was an imbecile. The dispute between North and South was purely about slavery, no more; the South being steeped in that Original Sin, but not the North.
“If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” The Ghostbuster of this dross is my friend, historian Clyde Wilson. In “Derailment of Civil War History,” Prof. Wilson muses about the rigidity of “fixed and eternal dogmas in the interpretation of the past”:
… the Civil War sesquicentennial has received slight public interest and produced little in the way of new knowledge and perspective. This is true despite the fact that the great war of 1861—1865, with its prelude and sequel, arguably remains the most significant (as well as the most interesting) part of American history. Is it possible that this lack has something to do with the now official and pervasive dogma that the Civil War was “about slavery” and “caused by slavery”? Any challenge to this understanding is, in the Marxist language now prevalent in American academic discourse, condemned as “revisionism,” no longer a good thing but defined as the conniving of evilly-motivated people to challenge the party line established by the all-wise experts. There has even been created a whole literature dismissing dissidents as deluded victims of a “Lost Cause Myth.” Gary Gallagher, one of the celebrity historians of present Civil War historianship, describes such people as suffering from a mental “syndrome.” [1]
But, in fact, it is impossible to find any qualified historian of the first half of the 20th century who accepted the current party line of “slavery and nothing but slavery” in regard to the Civil War. This current dogma is nothing more than a replay of the early partisan presentation of the war as a morality play about the suppression of slavery and treason by the forces of righteousness. A little Marxist class conflict and racial vengeance has been mixed in to update the tale. Responsible historians before the present era realized that no large human event can be understood in such a trivial way, and that “about” and “caused by” are deceptive terms when applied to great happenings. Historians of the not-too-distant past realized that their proper task was to go beyond the claims of partisans. In pursuit of such a mission, a large literature was created treating the Civil War as a thing of great complexity and moral ambiguity. This great scholarly achievement has been washed down the Memory Hole. Thus the study of history is no longer a matter of cumulative knowledge. To control understanding of the past has always been an objective of power-seekers. We live in a time when such control flourishes.