Americans Interpret Their Civil War (review)

Book Reviews103 have never championed a plan that was not likely to serve Virginia. . . . You are a Virginian, not a Confederate." Beloved, in short, is a book that creates people out of names. That they were indeed as Mrs. Delmar creates them is of course open to question, but her surmises are as good as any and better than most. In the final analysis, the novel is what it was intended to be, the story of Judah Benjamin. One comes away from it primarily with the impression of Benjamin as a singularly gifted person who won the respect of his contemporaries but who would have appreciated a larger measure of their affection. John C. Gerber Iowa City, Iowa Americans Interpret Their Civil War. By Thomas J. Pressly. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1954. Pp. xvi, 347. $5.00.) this is the first book on the historiography of the Civil War, although ten years ago Howard K. Beale, in his excellent condensation of "What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War," clearly pointed out the importance of the changing interpretations and existing controversies. Mr. Pressly's book deals with the varying points of view from 1861 to the fairly recent reviews of Allan Nevins' Ordeal of the Union. The author begins with a summary of certain Northerners who wrote in the war years — Horace Greeley, for example, who defined the struggle as "the War of the Rebellion" and its chief cause as the institution of slavery. The Confederate definition of a "War between the States" is best represented by Edward A. Pollard. There follows a digest of another group who declared that the conflict was a "Needless War" brought about by Northern and Southern extremists, whose incessant agitation for almost fifteen years finally resulted in the appeal to arms. Perhaps the best known of this group were H. S. Foote of Tennessee and Samuel S. Cox of Ohio, representing a significant number of Americans who disliked intensely the choice thrust upon them by the crisis of Fort Sumter. Issues and attitudes were thus early defined; the author makes clear that between 1861 and 1870 almost every interpretation given thereafter had already been stated. The next two chapters bring the reader into the twentieth century. The author describes the development of a "nationalist" tradition, involving such historians as James Ford Rhodes, Frederick J. Turner, Woodrow Wilson, Edward Channing, and J. B. McMaster. Their position was that the war had been brought about by the moral issue of slavery, and they clearly stated their satisfaction with the results — the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery. Charles A. Beard and his followers, however, were not in complete accord with this explanation, and their search for causes added to the complexity of the problem. In addition to the theses that "both sides were right" and that "both sides were wrong," that the war was an "irrepressible conflict" and a "repressible" one, historians became increasingly involved in economic causation. 104CIVIL WAR HISTORY A later chapter, "The New Vindication of the South," deals with the works of U. B. Phillips, Charles W. Ramsdell, and Frank L. Owsley. In his preface (p. xii) the author states that "wherever possible, I have tried to indicate what seems to me pertinent information about the backgrounds of the individuals discussed in this book," with the further implication that such information need not be considered as evidence of a biased interpretation. On p. 240, however, the author is deeply concerned over the possibility that "Southern-born historians, trained in the South, writing the history of the South at Southern universities, and using predominantly Southern sources, might become as "biased' in their own way as were the Outsiders' of whom they complained." There follows an examination of the "revisionist" view of a "repressible" conflict, centered around James G. Randall and Avery Craven, as opposed to such historians as D. L. Dumond and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who disagree with the "revisionists" with emphasis on the moral issue. The final summary is of what the author calls "the new nationalist tradition" developed by Allan Nevins, Bernard DeVoto, and others — an interpretation with which the author agrees. Competent historians are fully...