Recasting the US Civil War
I have had to unlearn most of what my high school and college teachers taught me about the US Civil War (1861-1865). This includes jettisoning ideas ranging from Lincoln as a non-racist liberator to the South’s “Lost Cause.” The former I learned at my NJ high school; the latter I learned at my historically white Christian undergrad. Both are fictions that maintain racist patterns of organized forgetting.
James McPherson is one scholar I read to acquire a more accurate understanding of the US Civil War. Let me quote two paragraphs from his book The War That Forged a Nation to show why I think with him. Here’s McPherson on place, race, ideology, economics, and power before and after the war.
A Southern slaveholder had been president of the United States two-thirds of the years between 1789 and 1861, and two-thirds of the Speakers of the House and presidents pro tem of the Senate had also been Southerners. Twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices during that period had been from slave states, which always had a majority on the Court before 1861. After the Civil War a century passed before another resident of a Southern state was elected president—Lyndon Johnson in 1964. For half a century after the war only one Southerner served as Speaker of the House and none as president pro tem of the Senate. Only five of the twenty-six Supreme Court justices appointed during that half century were Southerners. The institutions and ideology of a plantation society and a slave system that had dominated half of the country and sought to dominate more went down with a great crash in 1865 and were replaced by the institutions and ideology of free-labor entrepreneurial capitalism. For better or for worse, the flames of Civil War forged the framework of modern America.
That last point requires some elaboration. Before 1865 two distinct socioeconomic and cultural systems completed for dominance within the body politic of the United States. Although in retrospect the triumph of free-labor capitalism seems to have been inevitable, that was by no means clear for most of the antebellum generation. Not only did the institutions and ideology of rural, agricultural, plantation South, based on slave labor, dominate the U.S. government during most of that time, but the territory of the slave states also considerably exceeded that of the free states before 1859, and the Southern drive for further territorial expansion seemed more aggressive than that of the North. Most of the slave states seceded from the United States in 1861 not only because they feared the potential threat to the long-term survival of slavery posed by Lincoln’s election, but also because they looked forward to the expansion of a dynamic, independent slaveholding polity into new territory by the acquisition of Cuba and perhaps more of Mexico and Central America. If the Confederacy had prevailed in the 1860s, it is quite possible that the emergence of the United States as the world’s leading industrial as well as agricultural producer by the end of the nineteenth century and as the world’s most power nation in the twentieth century might never have happened. That it did happen is certainly one of the most important legacies of the Civil War—not only for America but also for the world.
Paragraphs like these have recast my understanding of the US Civil War’s conditions and consequences. And as a son of Boricua and the South, they help me better understand my family history.
