Board Members Column – July 2011
What This Cruel War Was Over
by Brian King
George Santayana famously said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If my daughter’s classmates’ papers on the Civil War are any indication, look out! Now I don’t want to turn this into an “in my day” rant. I will say up front that absolutely the only thing I remember about my ninth grade American History class is that the students called Mr. Hill, the teacher, “Bunker Hill” and that he was rumored to have a metal plate in his bald head that made him short-tempered and that he may have killed a student from a previous grade but the school board had to cover it up.
I have no complaints about the amount of class work or the depth of the material. Each student is required to write an 8-12 page thesis paper on the Civil War. The teacher’s intention to read and grade those papers shows remarkable dedication, and his enthusiasm and love of history is obvious. What gives me pause is the content, particularly the question of why the war was fought. While understanding that in a war with millions of participants motivations are many and varied, today’s students seem to have been given a muddled and vague storyline. Textbook publishers may get a large share of the blame, but the problem goes beyond high school students. A recent Pew Research poll showed 48% of Americans said states rights were the main cause of the Civil War while only 38% said slavery.
Southern politicians championed states rights in the years before the war, but it is hard to ignore the fact that the right they were talking about was the right to own slaves. A recent book by Chandra Manning “What This Cruel War was Over” looks at letters and diaries written by Civil War soldiers and makes it clear that southern soldiers were primarily fighting to preserve slavery. Even non-slaveholding whites were motivated by the fear of what would happen to their homes and families if blacks became free.
The story of northern soldiers is a little more complicated. Abolitionists and northern blacks were always certain that the war was being fought over slavery, but the majority of Northerners went into the war to preserve the Union. Remember that at the time America was still an experiment. The flame of democracy had yet to catch on in the other major nations of the world. The concern was that if the country split over even a significant issue like slavery, the idea of democracy would be shown to have a fatal flaw. The words of Lincoln in the Gettysburg address reflect the resolve “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
During the course of the war, Union soldiers soon became exposed to the realities of southern slavery and their views changed. Soon they were writing home to say that they were fighting to bring an end to slavery and to avoid the need for another war. Those letters influenced their families and eventually northern politicians.
The cost of the war was devastating. One soldier died for every six slaves that were freed. Later historians tried to explain away this apparent disparity by finding larger issues such as economic, cultural, or even religious differences that could better explain the root of the war. Historian James Ford Rhodes attempted to quash such foolishness at the turn of the last century:
“The question may be isolated by the incontrovertible statement that if the Negro had never been brought to America, our Civil War could not have occurred.”
Other historians argued that slavery had become uneconomic and that the institution would have died on its own in a matter of 25 to 50 years. I think the hundred years between the end of the war and the civil rights act has shown this to be an overly optimistic. That still leaves unanswered the question of whether extending slavery for even that period of time would have been too large a cost to pay to avoid a war.
If you spend any time thinking about these issues, you can’t help but realize that race and racism play a huge role in how Americans have interpreted their history. I think history has a lot to teach us about the role racism has played in our society, but seeing that clearly, and helping others to see it, may be harder than we realize.