The American public recently watched a surprising event: After months of saying that he would stay in the presidential race, Joe Biden dropped out. What interested me most was the predictions that preceded it.
Some pundits were adamant that he would stay in; others, such as Bill Maher and Vivek Ramaswamy, were certain he wouldn’t. (I have had difficulty finding the words of those other than Donald Trump who said he would keep going. Maybe they know how to “bury negative search results” on Google.)
Did the “Vietnam syndrome” affect how historians viewed the U.S. Civil War? Here’s an argument that it did.
But first, recognize that historians have mixed feelings about the present. On the one hand, today’s issues can shed light on the past because “each generation asks a different set of questions.”[1] On the other, they can lead to presentism—reshaping the past by imposing today’s viewpoints.
I’m always on the lookout for such interplays. And that may have happened with the post-Vietnam era. I just learned that in 2002 the prominent Civil War historian Brian Holden Reid argued that the Vietnam War reshaped historians’ understanding of the American Civil War. [2] Reid’s article appeared in the journal of a British military-security think tank.
Of course, thousands of pages—thousands of books, perhaps—have been written trying to explain why the North won and the South lost. A major trope used to be that the North initially failed to win because it lacked bold generals willing to take their troops into battle—until Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commanding general.
Recent “woke” campaigns have raised a legitimate question: How could the founders of our country espouse the ideals of freedom, especially in the Declaration of Independence, and still support slavery?
A related question (not so often asked by critical theorists) is: How did the country ultimately conduct a deadly war (with 600,000 combatants killed) to end slavery?
The argument reflected in these essays is that ideological, emotional, and political support for slavery changed over time. Southern founders such as Washington and Jefferson believed that slavery was a “necessary evil,” but a temporary one. Beginning around 1830 (after most if not all the founders were dead) Southern elites argued instead that slavery was a “positive good.” The development of what Grynaviski and Munger call institutional racism was a “conscious project of ideological reconstruction.”[2]
Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century orator, abolitionist, and escaped slave, is a hero of our country. Many biographies of him have been written, one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner; at least six books deal with his relationship with Abraham Lincoln; and a book has even been devoted to one famed speech of 1852, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”
Douglass is not famous only for his eloquence, but also because of his long years of political activity in which his unfailing message was that the United States could and should carry out the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. That message did not end when the Civil War ended.
But for a long time Douglass and his message were eclipsed by history. The purpose of this post is, in addition to honoring Douglass on the Fourth of July, to explain why Douglass’s fame faded for more than half a century. At the same time, I recommend two books that will clarify this further. One is a short biography by Timothy Sandefur; the other is David Blight’s massive Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.[1] Continue reading ““What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?””
Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War?
We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand as the nation moved westward. [1] It is less well-known that the South experienced widespread deterioration of its land during the half-century before the Civil War. Much of the South was planted in large monocultures, first tobacco and then cotton. Growing cotton and tobacco year after year takes the nutrients out of the soil.
