Edward Porter Alexander (review)

180CIVIL WAR HISTORY model for classifying political systems, and the sixth, a heavy-handed attack on Turner's frontier thesis.) After "refuting" the works of Barrington Moore, Jr., Eugene Genovese, David Donald, and Eric Foncr in an analysis filled with ad hominem remarks and distortions of their interpretations, Benson offers his own "tentative" interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. In the process he makes numerous assumptions for which there is little or no evidence. Hc asks us to accept on faith, for example, because "the assumption seems reasonable," the propositions that "Southern society tended to develop individuals with authoritarian personality traits" and that "no such thing exists as an initate human instinct for aggression, hostility or violence." More to the point, Benson offers no convincing reason why anyone should accept his interpretation , which contains an unscientific combination of the plausible , the obvious, and the unlikely, and portions of which strongly resemble —despite the forbidding language—portions of other well known interpretations. Insisting that the Civil War should be understood as a "separatist internal war" waged by a "territorial culture group" rather than a social revolution (couldn't it have been both?), he blames the "radically defective political system" created by the American Constitution , especially the overly strong presidency, for producing an environment conducive to civil war. But the real question, Benson insists, is not what caused the war, but who caused the war. (Why the allocation of personal responsibility is the most important question Benson fails to explain.) Rejecting his own distorted version of Barrington Moore's position, that northerners caused the war, Benson insists that the blame be placed squarely on the shoulders of southern extremists. "The Southern Nationalists," he concludes, "caused" the Civil War "by working unyieldingly, intensively, rationally, to achieve" it. The lesson of this volume is that it is one thing to advocate conceptual and methodological reforms, and another to achieve them. While Benson's call for better history is commendable, the results of his own efforts in that direction arc unimpressive. Good history depends, as docs good science, on creative ideas and logical thought, not on the advocacy of creative ideas and logical thought. Few scientists spend much time discussing the scientific method; they leave that to the philosophers and historians. It is a pity that historians do not emulate scientists in this respect, for although good history may be produced by making methodological innovations, it is rarely produced by talking about how much we need methodological innovations. Peter Kolchin Johns Hopkins University Edward Porter Alexander. By Maury Klein. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971. Pp. xii, 279. $11.00.) Professor Maury Klein propounds a problem that has perplexed some other historians of the Civil War era—the astonishing fact that no biog- BOOK REVIEWS181 raphy of Edward Porter Alexander has previously been attempted. All serious students arc aware of Alexander. They know that he was a soldier of amazing versatility and a master artillerist, and they recognize that his Military Memoirs of a Confederate is one of the superior personal accounts of the war. Moreover, he left abundant source materials on which to construct a biography. But nobody touched him. Hc has remained, in Klein's words, "a secondary and rather shadowy figure in most accounts." Perhaps it is the old story of the scholar shying away from the significant subject that requires large labor. Alexander is deserving of treatment as a soldier but he has a larger importance. Hc was a type or a representation of an age. Bom in 1835, he was a young man when the Civil War started; and as he lived until 1910 he was a mature man during the age of industrialism and Social Darwinism. Because of his comparative youth in 1865 and because he had unusual talents, he made the transition from plantation culture and the war with relative case. He became an executive of several railroads, and this new career "plunged him into the mainstream of American industrial development" and into "the complex dynamics of finance capitalism and the techniques of railway management." As Klein vividly puts it, he "seemed to embody both the rich individualism of nineteenth century romanticism and the hard, calculating...