Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 26:

I quoted yesterday from the two-part particle by 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). Today I want to look at another aspect of the issue of historical causation Cushing Strout discusses, the need to examine "what if" scenarios. Or, as Stout calls it, the "conditional query".

Looking at an alternative "what if" scenario can be useful in evaluating the significance of a particular event in the narrative flow the historian is developing. Stout uses the example of an alternative speculation about the 1860 Presidential election:

If the historian wonders why the South seceded after Lincoln's election, he might ask himself what would have happened if Senator Douglas had been elected. Since Southern Democrats had already rejected Douglas at the Charleston Convention, they might have found him intolerable as president. The historian cannot be sure, but the question points up the South's demands and highlights the importance to Southern eyes of Lincoln's being the leader of a sectional party committed to containment of slavery. Since men who act in history must calculate the possible consequences of various alternatives, the historian in trying to understand them is led to do the same.

He offers a different sort of example with considering scenarios in which the Civil War was avoided:

A merely utopian conditional question allows equally plausible but contradictory answers. It has, for example, been argued that if the North had let the South secede in peace, the two nations would have enjoyed future friendly relations, thus saving the terrible costs of war. It is not surprising that a Southerner might find this assumption convincing, but it clearly includes too many imponderables to justify any firm judgment. To raise questions that cannot be reasonably answered is an exercise in futility unless they are treated only as the indirect means of drawing attention to elements of an actual situation. Asking what would have happened if the North had "let the erring sister go", only serves to force a weighing of Lincoln's policy reasons for holding a symbol of federal authority in the South, as well as of the nationalistic sentiments of the Northerners who supported him. Provided the historian maintains his primary interest in what actually did happen, he may with propriety, under certain conditions, ask what might have happened or what would have happened. Such questions are especially useful for evaluating policy. [my emphasis]

Stout's point is that while such devices can be useful in evaluated what actually happened, what's important for the historian is the narrative of what actually happened in its various dimensions. The consideration of hypotheticals is valid as an aid to understanding and explaining what happened, but not as an excuse for ducking that task.

Or, as Strout puts it:

The historian conventionally speaks of "multiple causes" because he knows he has no monistic formula to explain the course of history and no single generalization to cover all the necessary and sufficient conditions for a civil war. This fashion of speech is, however, misleading because he cannot escape his difficulties by multiplying them. If he does not believe that each of the many "causes" could have produced the Civil War by itself, then he must assume that the whole collection of them acted together as one in bringing about that effect. He is then left with the familiar problem of accounting for this causal relation- ship by reference to confirmed generalizations. What he cannot do for one "cause", he cannot do for a set of them acting as one. [my emphasis]

Lost Cause Civil War revisionists like to use the complexity of the events leading up to the war to try to detract attention from the centrality of slavery to causing the war. But if approached realistically, that only multiplies the difficulties in the way that Stout says. If something other than slavery led to the war, one would have to explain how it was that all the major sectional controversies leading up the war somehow turned around the institution of slavery.

And, as Stout says, "It is worth emphasizing that the ultimate verification of any particular explanation of the Civil War will imply the elimination of all other explanations." Lost Cause dogma attempts to do exactly that with slavery: eliminate it as an explanation of the Civil War. But that just cannot be done with honest history.

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