Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 5: History and the moral issue of slavery

"Contraband" slaves in Virginia taken in by the Union Army

I discussed in the previous post in this series Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s article in the October 1949 Partisan Review, "The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism" which criticizes a trend in professional US history that had become popular during the 1930s among historians like James Randall, Avery Craven, and Alan Nevins that I described as the Blundering Generation school of Civil War history. In this post, I look at Schlesinger's argument about how that school failed to appreciate the role of moral issues in history in their treatment of the Civil War.

He argues that the Blundering Generation historians failed to take account of the historical fact that slavery was a major moral issue. Schlesinger reminds us that part of the reason that the South couldn't work out their own peaceful way to ending slavery was that the defenders of slavery in the South shut down public debate over the subject after the Virginia debate over compensated emancipation in 1831-1932:

The revisionists first glided over the implications of the fact that the slavery system was producing a closed society in the South.

Here, Schlesinger means a closed society even among whites.

Yet that society increasingly had justified itself by a political and philosophical repudiation of free society; southern thinkers swiftly developed the anti-libertarian potentialities in a social system whose cornerstone, in Alexander H. Stephens's proud phrase, was human bondage. In theory and in practice, the South organized itself with mounting rigor against ideas of human dignity and freedom, because such ideas inevitably threatened the basis of their own system. Professor Frank L. Owsley, the southern agrarian, has described inadvertently but accurately the direction in which the slave South was moving. "The abolitionists and their political allies were threatening the existence of the South as seriously as the Nazis threaten the existence of England," wrote Owsley in 1940; " ... Under such circumstances the surprising thing is that so little was done by the South to defend its existence." [my emphasis]

For opponents of slavery, the process taking place in the slave states restricting freedom even for white was a real political and moral issue with slavery. And he contends that historians have to face the kind of moral choice this forced on the participants and on historians:

A society closed in the defense of evil institutions thus creates moral differences far too profound to be solved by compromise. Such a society forces upon every one, both those living at the time and those writing about it later, the necessity for a moral judgment; and the moral judgment in such cases becomes an indispensable factor in the historical understanding.

He explains that the Blundering Generation school makes Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois their hero. Douglas' doctrine of "popular sovereignty" over slavery in the territories turned Kansas into Bleeding Kansas, generating a mini-civil war all its own:

The revisionist hero was Stephen A. Douglas, who always thought that the great moral problems could be solved by sleight-of-hand. The phrase "northern man of southern sentiments," Randall remarked, was "said opprobriously ... as if it were a base thing for a northern man to work with his southern fellows."

By denying themselves insight into the moral dimension of the slavery crisis, in other words, the revisionists denied themselves a historical understanding of the intensities that caused the crisis. It was the moral issue of slavery, for example, that gave the struggles over slavery in the territories or over the enforcement of the fugitive slave laws their significance. These issues, as the revisionists have shown with cogency, were not in themselves basic. But they were the available issues; they were almost the only points within the existing constitutional framework where the moral conflict could be faced; as a consequence, they became charged with the moral and political dynamism of the central issue. To say that the Civil War was fought over the "unreal" issue of slavery in the territories is like saying that the Second World War was fought over the "unreal" issue of the invasion of Poland. The democracies could not challenge fascism inside Germany, any more than opponents of slavery could challenge slavery inside the South; but the extension of slavery, like the extension of fascism, was an act of aggression which made a moral choice inescapable. [my emphasis]

And he observes that the fact that advocates of a cause may have serious human failings doesn't in itself invalidate their cause or make it somehow irrelevant:

An acceptance of the fact of moral responsibility does not license the historian to roam through the past ladling out individual praise and blame: such an attitude would ignore the fact that all individuals, including historians, are trapped in a web of circumstance which curtails their moral possibilities. But it does mean that there are certain essential issues on which it is necessary for the historian to have a position if he is to understand the great conflicts of history. These great conflicts are relatively few because there are few enough historical phenomena which we can confidently identify as evil. The essential issues appear, moreover, not in pure and absolute form, but incomplete and imperfect, compromised by the deep complexity of history. Their proponents may often be neurotics and fanatics, like the abolitionists. They may attain a social importance only when a configuration of non-moral factors - economic, political, social, military - permit them to do so.

I wouldn't describe the Abolitionists as fanatics, though some of them were. But they were certainly widely considered as such by many of their contemporaries, an attitude enthusiastically encouraged by slaveowners and their partisans.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south