Communications

COMMUNICATIONS To the Editor of Civil War History: In his recent essay, "The Causes of the American Civil War" (CWH, Sept., 1974), Eric Foner indiscriminately lumps together and criticizes the "new political history," including my Birth of Mass Political Parties. While Foner concedes that the new histories have "broadened our understanding ," he presents a larger picture of them as blighted by reductionism , religious determinism, conspiracy theories, and elitist biases— in fact, they are "fundamentally ahistorical." In a footnote Foner accuses me specifically of being unable to cope with "simple problems of interpreting data." Nowhere else in Foner's essay can one find such animated fault-finding—no other historians, singly or collectively, call forth such harsh judgements from Foner. Why? It may be that he simply misunderstands. His first sentence merely describing this work reveals a persistent simplifying of the choices available to historical analysts: "[The new histories] have deemphasized 'national' issues like slavery and the tariff, and substituted ethnocultural conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, or between pietistic and ritualistic religious groups, as the major determinants of voting behavior." Here, Foner's inaccurate implication that ethnocultural conflicts refer only to religious groups is overshadowed by his mixing up of two different questions: 1) which issues were most important to voters and 2) what social cleavages underlay party divisions. I, for one, did not "substitute" one thing for another, but tried, for example , to show how "Slavery" (or the Slave Power) symbolized a variety of social conflicts, including ethnocultural and religious. It is true that Foner and I give different emphasis to issues in the 1850's—but his inaccurate use of "substituted" is revealing of his either/or vision which he projects onto me and others. Foner's assault on my book particularly serves the purpose of defending his 1969 book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. I did not read Foner's book until after completing mine, but the two do differ fundamentally . If my view of Northern voting, party loyalty, and realignment in the 1850's is accurate, then Foner's cannot be sustained. Thus, Foner's severe critique of behavioral approaches did not exactly reflect scholarly detachment on his part. Rather, to understand his response one must begin with the concepts, methods and theses that Foner was trying to protect. Foner's book bears the subtitle the Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. Thus his definition and use of the term "ideology" are of some interest. He began with a loose and useful definition: "I shall not use it in the recent sense which implies dogma, a rigid, doctrinaire , black-and-white understanding of the world, but, rather, as a 185 186CIVIL WAR HISTORY system of beliefs, values, fears, prejudices, reflexes and commitments —in sum, the social consciousness—of a social group, be it a class, a party or a section" (p. 4). Now there are many kinds of social groups besides classes and parties; indeed, most sections and parties are composed of quite a number of social groups. Despite the initial flexibility of his definition, Foner attributed ideology only to class, party, or section. And they acquired it only at times decided by Foner: "Political parties today are consciously non-ideological, but in the 1840's and 1850's ideology made its way into the heart of the political system, despite the best efforts of Whigs and Democrats to keep it out" (p. 8, italics mine). In effect, Foner pictured ideology as though it came trom outside of political culture. He did not see it as a normal part of political life. After seemingly attributing belief-systems to all social groups—economic, regional, cultural, religious, occupational, or whatever mixture—Foner slipped into a kind of vulgar Hegelianism. Further , the only Northerners with belief-systems tended to be Republicans , and they on inspection were mostly middle-class. Foner did not even attempt to study Northern society to establish his concept of "class" empirically. "Class," as he used the term, embraced a great variety of groups with belief-systems. But one must begin rather with the actual groupings of people (within classes, parties, or sections), and not the analysts' abstractions. It is ironic that Foner...