22/01: Civil War Historiography 101
Category: American History and Politics
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
Historiography is the history of history. We are becoming accustomed to the notion that the recording of history is an intellectual battle with winners and losers. Here is an extremely brief note on how the history of the "Cause" developed over time:
With a few notable exceptions, the historiography considering the causes of the war consistently identified slavery as the main artery of conflict. That is, the issues of Constitutionalism, sectionalism, state rights, et al revolved around slavery and drew their emotional power from slavery. To some extent the debate over causation mirrored the sectional conflict and even the course of the actual war—with the Southern revisionism eventually succumbing to the numerical superiority of northern scholarship.
Northern explanations of the hostilities, from the near-contemporaneous account written by Henry Wilson to the initial scholarly discussion offered by turn-of-the-century historian James Ford Rhodes to the mid-century work of Allan Nevins and Arthur Schlesinger, revolve around the immorality of slavery. Transplanted Westerners David M. Potter, Don Fehrenbacher and Kenneth Stampp provided later affirmations of the centrality of slavery.
The three great twentieth-century divergent explanations occurred during the first fifty years. The Dunning School, named after a pioneer historian from Columbia University, unleashed a swell of Southern and Midwestern scholars, U.B. Phillips and William E. Dodd foremost among them, who defined the system of slavery as benign and justified the South’s actions leading to the war.
After the Dunning heyday of the 1920s, the second wave of revisionists declared that a “blundering generation” of politicians mishandled the sectional crisis of the 1850s. The post-World War I generation of historians accused the ante bellum generation of politicians of stumbling into a devastating war that could have been avoided through skillful statesmanship. The underlying premise, of course, was that slavery was not something over which a nation should have fought a civil war.
The other great threat to the “primacy of slavery” explanation came from the Charles and Mary Beard thesis, also offered during the 1920s, in which the Progressive historians pronounced the war to be the “Second American Revolution,” the product of economic transformation, and the ultimate triumph of capitalism over agrarianism. While economic determinism captured the imagination of radical historians and enjoyed a brief revival among some prominent Marxist historians during the 1960s and 1970s, in the end, even Beard himself repudiated this notion.
With a few notable exceptions, the historiography considering the causes of the war consistently identified slavery as the main artery of conflict. That is, the issues of Constitutionalism, sectionalism, state rights, et al revolved around slavery and drew their emotional power from slavery. To some extent the debate over causation mirrored the sectional conflict and even the course of the actual war—with the Southern revisionism eventually succumbing to the numerical superiority of northern scholarship.
Northern explanations of the hostilities, from the near-contemporaneous account written by Henry Wilson to the initial scholarly discussion offered by turn-of-the-century historian James Ford Rhodes to the mid-century work of Allan Nevins and Arthur Schlesinger, revolve around the immorality of slavery. Transplanted Westerners David M. Potter, Don Fehrenbacher and Kenneth Stampp provided later affirmations of the centrality of slavery.
The three great twentieth-century divergent explanations occurred during the first fifty years. The Dunning School, named after a pioneer historian from Columbia University, unleashed a swell of Southern and Midwestern scholars, U.B. Phillips and William E. Dodd foremost among them, who defined the system of slavery as benign and justified the South’s actions leading to the war.
After the Dunning heyday of the 1920s, the second wave of revisionists declared that a “blundering generation” of politicians mishandled the sectional crisis of the 1850s. The post-World War I generation of historians accused the ante bellum generation of politicians of stumbling into a devastating war that could have been avoided through skillful statesmanship. The underlying premise, of course, was that slavery was not something over which a nation should have fought a civil war.
The other great threat to the “primacy of slavery” explanation came from the Charles and Mary Beard thesis, also offered during the 1920s, in which the Progressive historians pronounced the war to be the “Second American Revolution,” the product of economic transformation, and the ultimate triumph of capitalism over agrarianism. While economic determinism captured the imagination of radical historians and enjoyed a brief revival among some prominent Marxist historians during the 1960s and 1970s, in the end, even Beard himself repudiated this notion.
Tocqueville wrote:
Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new Constitution, and why. He is the first and only historian to do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions are startling.
McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich. "These [debt relief/bankruptcy laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard's hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent," says McDonald. He adds: "Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write."
While Beard theorized that the Framers of the Constitution were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, McDonald showed that, "The most common and by far the most important property holdings of the delegates were not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and public security investments, but agricultural property." Most were farmers or plantation owners, and owning a lot of land did not make one rich in those days.
"Finally," McDonald concludes, "it is abundantly evident that the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything but a consolidated economic group."
McDonald then goes into an exhaustive and detailed state-by-state ana lysis of the state constitutional ratifying conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into law. For example, in the State of Delaware, which voted for ratification, "almost 77 percent of the delegates were farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Only slightly more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men - doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands."
In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small farmers.
In Maryland, "the opponents of ratification included from three to six times as large a proportion of merchants, lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and manufacturing as did the delegates who favored ratification."
In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who carried the day: "No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for ratification." In New Hampshire, "of the known farmers in the convention 68.7 percent favored ratification."
But did farmers support the Constitution because they were slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Beard had guessed back in 1913?
McDonald shows that this certainly wasn't the case in northern states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave states. But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two largest slaveholding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it protected their economic and slaveholding interests?
"The opposite is true," writes McDonald. "In both states the wealthy planters - those with personality interests [slaves] as well as those without personality interests - were divided approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification."
After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state by state McDonald sums up: "Beard's thesis... is entirely incompatible with the facts."
See this Wall Street Journal piece: http://opinionjournal.com/l...