Historiography Flashcards
Slavery as a Cause of the War
McPherson: Although speeches and editorials in the upper South bristled with references to rights, liberty, state sovriegnty, honour, resistance to coercion, and identity with southern brothers, such rhetoric could not conceal the fundamental issue of slavery
Blight: Arguably the most important cause
Charles Joyner in Callaloo: “historical record … clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.”
BUT E. Varon/Edward Ayers agree not the place to finish. Ayers observes: “slavery and freedom remain the keys to understanding the war, but they are the place to begin our questions, not to end them.”
Lincoln’s election as the cause of the war
Michael S. Green, Lincoln and the Election of 1860: ‘the threads holding the Union together were thin, and the election of 1860 snapped them’
Economics as the cause of the war
In the 1920s, the idea of the war as an irrepressible economic, rather than moral, conflict received fuller expression from Charles and Mary Beard in The Rise of American Civilization (2 vols., 1927).
Slavery, the Beards claimed, was not so much a social or cultural institution as an economic one, a labor system. There were, they insisted, “inherent antagonisms” between Northern industrialists and Southern planters.
Eric Foner, in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970) and other writings, emphasized the importance of the “free-labor ideology” to Northern opponents of slavery
Gettysburg as a turning point
Though the war was destined to continue for almost two more bloody years, Gettysburg and Vicksburg proved to have been its crucial turning point.’ - James McPherson
On U.S. Grant
McPherson: ‘rarely clamoured for reinforcements, rarely complained, rarely quarrelled with associates, but went ahead and did the job with the resources at hand’
accused of running a “war of attrition” that required “no real military talent,” Foner explained. But “as those older views have abandoned, Grant’s reputation has risen, especially among military historian
On Lincoln
T. Harry Williams: “Lincoln stands out as a great war president, probably the greatest in our history, and a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.”
James McPherson: He enunciated a clear national policy, and through trial and error evolved national and military strategies to achieve it
Emancipation Proclamation significant
It did not free a single slave – that would come when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. But contemporaries understood that the character of the civil war was about to change - Foner
Emancipation Proclamation Insignificant
The North responds to the proclamation significantly in breath, but breath kills no rebels’
Like all great historical transformations, emancipation during the civil war was a process, not a single event. -Foner - can it be a turning point?
Gallagher on Confederate Nationalism
- Confed nationalism remained strong
- Men more important than strategy and none could be as good as Lee
McPherson overlooked the ability of Lee to sustain morale later
States’ Rights as the cause of the civil war
- 1860, J. Davis contends that slavery was not the cause of the civil war, but protection of states’ rights is.
Glaathaar: Although most southerners seceded and went to war first to preserve their “rights” and then to protect their homes, the issue of slavery was always central.
Historiography of Reconstruction: why reconstruction was a bad thing
James Ford Rhodes
Lamented the failure of Reconstruction and of granting Universal Suffrage to black americans
‘3,500,000 persons of one of the mo t inferior races of mankind had, through the agency of their superior , been transformed from lavery to freedom.
J.W. Burgess’ Reconstruction and the Constitution 1866-1876 (1902)
In place of government by the most intelligent and virtuous part of the people for the benefit of the governed, here was government by the most ignorant and most vicious part of the population for the benefit, the vulgar, materialistic, brutal benefit of the government set.
Dunning: Reconstruction: Political and Economic 1865-1877 (1907), two races only coexisted through slavery and white reasserted supremacy
1948 E. Merton Coulter
‘No amount of revi- sion can write away the grievous mistakes made in this abnormal period of American history,’ he meant that blacks holding state offices was ‘diabolical and to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated’,
D.W. Griffiths, Births of a Nation 1915
D.W. Griffiths Birth of a Nation (1915) film
The Klan, the heroic invisible empire, saves the South and white womanhood from the chaos and degradation of black domination and miscegenation
The film ends with a ringing vindication of the Klan and the symbolic reunification of North and South in a marriage between the Stoneman and Cameron families.
The’ impact of the film on its audience was electric. As Woodrow Wilson exclaimed after a private screening in the White House: ‘It is like writing history with lightning.
W.E.B. DuBois: Black Reconstruction in America, Reconstruction and its benefits
- Slavery caused war, blacks helped fight for their freedom
- Reconstruction also struggle for ‘fruits of one’s own labour’ (Tulloch)
- ‘the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery’.1
Revisionist take on role of blacks
James Richardson in The Negro in the Reconstruction ofFlorida, and John Blassingame in his Black New Orleans 1860-1880 (1973) painted a far more positive picture of the black’s contribution to Reconstruction
Revisionist take on reconstruction as progressive
Eric Foner stresses the unique, revolutionary and experimental character of Reconstruction in Reconstruction and Nothing but Freedom There was a revolution, the work of a new political class of freedmen backed by a newly empowered nation state determined to bring about weeping change . Where other saw the semi-peonage of harecropping a a defeat, Foner sese it as a practical compromise.
