In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Partisans, New History, and ModernizationThe Historiography of the Civil War's Causes, 1861–2011
  • Frank Towers (bio)

From 1861 until today, three successive research agendas, each lasting roughly half a century, have guided scholarly inquiry into the causes of the Civil War. The first originated in self-justifying defenses made by friends and foes of the Union. The partisan research agenda concentrated attention on the merits of Confederate attacks on Republican centralization and unionist criticism of slaveholder aggression. Around 1900, its guiding assumptions began to lose their hold on historians' attention. On the one hand, historians working within the partisan framework synthesized the debate over blame by removing the odium of demagoguery from the leaders of either side. On the other, critics rejected wholesale the partisan program's focus on leaders and official rationales in favor of a "new history" that went beyond "dead politics" and "the drum and trumpet" to get at "the real history of men and women."1

The new history research agenda, lasting from the 1910s to the 1950s, reflecting the influence of Progressive Era reform, emphasized the long-term economic, environmental, and geographic causes of the Civil War. This change in methodology moved narrative attention from parties and leaders to the sections they represented and the interests that lurked beneath formal justifications for secession and war. Along with Progressivism's economic perspective, the new history was shaped by the racial ideology of Jim Crow segregation. The new history's skepticism of partisan interpretations encompassed Slave Power conspiracies and states' rights legalism, as well as the relevance of both slavery and the abolitionists' moral indictment of the institution. By the 1930s the new history agenda had spawned a debate over whether underlying sectional differences made the war inevitable. In the next decade, efforts to reconcile this debate introduced an irrational, emotionally overheated public as the force that converted sectional disputes into armed conflict. [End Page 237]

The irrationality synthesis continued to dominate the field well into the 1950s, but skeptics raised doubts that pointed to a new research agenda organized around the concept of modernization that reframed the Civil War as a struggle between a forward-looking North and a backward-looking South. When, in 1960, David Donald questioned whether historians "will find anything new worth saying," he referred to synthetic resolutions of the new history agenda and ignored criticisms of its premises that had been building for a decade.2 During the struggle against fascism and communism abroad and racial discrimination at home, critics attacked the new history's indifference to proslavery extremism and its dismissal of abolitionism as either a mask for power or a collective neurosis. By the 1960s, this combination of synthesis and critique shifted attention to a third research agenda that foregrounded slavery as the war's cause, situated within a global process of modernization. Social changes that had their prototypes in Victorian England were in the United States most advanced in the northeast and least developed in the slave states. The modernization agenda's guiding assumptions were formulated alongside a larger debate over America's status as an exception to the class and cultural extremes of a war-torn world. Although many scholars challenged the story of liberal-democratic consensus advanced by some proponents of American exceptionalism, their critiques incorporated the narrative framework of a transition from tradition to modernity and treated slavery as a retrograde institution that made the South distinct.

In the past decade, the modernization agenda has shown signs of collapse. Several historians have offered syntheses of its long-running debates over the extent of southern white unity behind secession and antislavery sentiment's influence on the rise of the Republican Party. Meanwhile, dissenters have either found flaws in modernization's premise of a developmental lag between the sections or simply ignored its central concern with American exceptionalism and its corollary, southern distinctiveness. As with the partisan agenda in 1910 and the new history in 1960, this combination of synthesis and critique points to the abandonment of modernization as the dominant framework for studying the causes of the Civil War. Similar to earlier transitional periods, however, new perspectives point in several directions that have yet to...

pdf