Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 25: Causation in history

Back in 1961, Lee Benson and Cushing Strout took on some then-contemporary issues in professional historiography in "Causation and the American Civil War. Two Appraisals" [i.e., separate ones by Benson and Strout] History and Theory 1:2 (1961). They focused on some of the challenges presented by determining causation for historical events. They were primarily addressing academic historians, so they weren't specifically addressing deliberate falsifications of history like those so common to Lost Cause/neo-Confederate pseudohistory. The Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative, of course, is also found in academic history, unfortunately. Though in the professional context, historians have tended to treat the Lost Cause arguments of historians like those of J.G. Randall and Avery Craven as mistaken analysis. There is a difference between bad analysis and just making stuff up, though the former can encourage the latter.

Cushing Stout makes this important point about how the notion of causation emerges in history writing:

The causal problem would be greatly clarified if both historians and philosophers realized that in telling a story the historian is committed to the "logic" of drama. In explaining the Civil War he necessarily seeks to recreate the strife of opposing forces out of which the war came. The connective tissue of his account then has a dialectical form: a person or group takes a position and performs an action because of and in relation to the position or action of another person or group. The historian's story becomes a narrative of this reciprocal response.

This was during the Cold War, so he is careful to specify that his use here of a "dialectical method does not entail any Hegelian scheme."

Thus, by a crude sketch, the explanation of the event would have this character: Lincoln saw in the South's pro-slavery position a threat to the democratic traditions of the American community; the South saw in his election the menace of future interference with their "peculiar institution" and growing domination by an industrial North; Lincoln and the North saw in Southern secession a challenge to federal authority and the prestige of national union; the South saw in the provisioning of Fort Sumter an intolerable danger to independence of the Confederacy... [ellipsis in original] In such terms, but with much greater richness and concreteness, the historian tries to reconstruct the dramatic "logic" of a sequence of events which demands to be humanly understood rather than scientifically explained. [my emphasis]

Stout puts the matter of slavery within the context of the narrative nature of history:

The pragmatic meaning of the assertion that slavery was "the fundamental cause" is only that the institution was so deeply entangled in the issues that divided the sections that it provides a valuable focus for examining the skein of events which culminated in war. [my emphasis]

Taken in isolation, that statement could be twisted to say that Stout was saying that slavery is just a convenient way for telling the story but not the actual cause of the Civil War. But in the context of his article, that is clearly not what he is saying. He continues directly:

The historian does his work in good conscience, despite the difficulties of causality, because so much of his labor does not depend upon causal judgment. Whatever some philosophers may say, he knows that explanation is broader than causal explication. He may tell his readers much about the issues between Lincoln and Douglas, the legal status of slavery, the structure of classes in society, the economic interests of the sections, the character of the abolitionist movement, the balance of power in the Senate, the social and ideological differences between North and South, and the chronology of events without venturing beyond descriptive analysis into causal judgment. Characteristically, the historian explains by showing how a certain process took shape, answering the "why" with more of the "what" and "how". "The careful, thorough and accurate answer to the question How", writes the English historian C. V. Wedgwood, "should take the historian a long way towards answering the question Why..." The historian is inescapably committed to narrative. [my emphasis in bold]

In other words, it is possible for historians to honestly and legitimately disagree about the particular roles that some individuals played in events or what weight should be given to which factors in evaluating what happened.

Making up claims that don't accord with the facts, e.g., Robert E. Lee's alleged prewar opposition to slavery, is a different issue. So is arbitrarily constructing the narrative in a way that falsifies actual occurrences, i.e., the pretension that Southern leaders were so deeply dedicated to "states rights" in the decades leading up to the Civil War that the fact that slavery was also a "states rights" issue made slavery incidental to their commitment to "states rights" as their reason for seceding. And so is deliberately ignoring the obvious, like the Lost Cause habit of ignoring the many prominent, explicit, and unambiguous references to slavery as the central concern of the secessionists.

Stout's point about the why emerging from the narrative of the what and how (and, obviously, the who) is important. Causation in history can't be tested in a laboratory experiment where the laboratory conditions are repeated many times and by separate teams in different places. They have to be deduced from events, each of which has significant unique features. As Stout puts it:

Grateful as the historian may be for generalizations about, say, the voting behavior of Americans, he is ruefully aware that recurring evidence for the behavior of Americans in civil wars is fortunately not available.

But that doesn't mean that determining causation in history is impossible. Or even necessarily all that difficult, depending on the situation. It just means that history isn't chemistry or physics.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south