The Coming of the Civil War (review)

Book Reviews EDITED BY CHARLES T. MILLER B-Il University HaU Iowa City, Iowa The Coming of the Civil War. By Avery Craven. Second edition, revised. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1957. Pp. xi, 491. $5.00) this volume, first PUBLISHED in 1942, took its place as a major statement of the "revisionist" explanations of the coming of the American Civü War. The book was reviewed by historians with a mixture of praise and criticism (see, for example, the foUowing reviews by historians: The New York Times Book Review, May 24, 1942, p. 3; The Saturday Review of Literature, May 30, 1942, p. 5; The Yale Review, Winter, 1943, p. 407; TAe American Historical Review , April, 1943, p. 587; The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, December, 1942, p. 436; The Journal of Southern History, November, 1942, p. 564). One of the reviews led to an exchange of letters in The American Historical Review (October, 1943) couched in such angry language as to make the letters unusual even in the realm of controversies between historians concerning the Civü War. Now, fifteen years after the publication of The Coming of the Civil War, this "second edition, revised" has made its appearance and has been chosen as a selection of the Givü War Book Club. The interest of historians in this second edition wiU probably center around the question of what changes have been made from the earlier edition. Concerning this point, Professor Craven writes that in the new edition an effort has been made to make some points more clear, and the entire text has been proofread—a task which was prevented in the first edition by the absence of the author on a government project. The changes in the second edition which this reviewer has found are few in number and, with two possible exceptions which wül be discussed below, do not constitute major shifts in interpretation. The two editions are similar 351 352civil war history enough so that their pagination is the same, except for the addition of a "Preface to the Second Edition" which is a Uttie over one page in length (and which does not change the pagination of the text); no changes seem to have been made in the thirty-eight pages of notes, and, of the 440 pages of text, changes have been made on only ten pages. Most of the changes made in these ten pages of text involve only a few words and seem designed to correct statements of fact or to make relatively minor changes in wording. The two passages in the second edition where changes have been made which might possibly be interpreted as a shift in point of view (the question is debatable) are worth quoting here because, whether or not they signify a changed point of view, they provide a summary statement in Mr. Craven's words of his conclusions on two important questions: the institution of slavery and the coining of the Civü War. The institution of slavery is described in the fourth chapter of both the 1942 and the 1957 editions. The chapter in the earlier edition is concluded with a nineteen-line summary which begins with this sentence: It is thus perfectly clear that slavery played a rather minor part in the life of the South and of the Negro. The chapter on slavery in the 1957 edition ends with a twenty-six-line summary in which the above sentence becomes: It is thus perfectly clear that slavery did not work alone in changing the life of the South and of the Negro. The summary in the 1942 edition ends with this two-sentence paragraph: The patient Negro, meanwhile, went on with his tasks generaUy unconscious of the merits or the lack of them in the system under which he toiled The weather and the fields brought enough trouble without his borrowing more. In the 1957 edition, the above two sentences are omitted and the summary ends with the foUowing three-sentence paragraph: But if slavery was somewhat less important in die life of the Negro and the South as a whole, the idea of holding men in bondage and buying and selling them as property...