An Historian and the Civil War, and: The Everlasting South (review)

BOOK REVIEWS An Historian and the Civil War. By Avery Craven. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Pp. 233. $5.95.) The Everlasting South, By Francis Butler Simkins. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963. Pp. xv, 103. $3.50.) It takes courage for any man—even ones as distinguished as Avery Craven or Francis B. Simkins—to reissue in a single volume his thoughts on a single subject spread over a quarter of a century or more. Changing times, new evidence, and new perspectives conspire to render past conclusions not only obsolete, but even embarrassing. Courage is demanded especially when, as in the case of Mr. Craven, no alterations have been made in the original articles. (Only one of the essays has not been published before.) Mr. Simkins has been less bold, for he has, by slight and judicious additions or excisions, brought his pieces up to date. No historian has wrestled so long, so persistently, and so thoughtfully with the question of the coming of the Civil War as Avery Craven. All but three of the fourteen essays in the volume deal directly with the subject; the earliest appeared first in 1936, the latest in 1964. Inevitably there is some duplication of illustrative examples and some reiteration of ideas. But it is the decided alteration in Mr. Craven's conception of the coming of the war that stamps the deepest impression. In the late 1930's he was pushing hard for the view that the war resulted principally from the emotions aroused by bitter and intransigent men of both sections, whose differences rested upon scant substance. At that time Mr. Craven ignored the question of why slavery, and no other issue, was the object of the emotionalism. Since then, however, his explanation has increasingly emphasized the substantial character of the slavery issue. The process can be clearly traced in this collection. As early as 1952, in an article, "The Price of Union," that is otherwise the weakest of the lot, he wrote that probably "Negro slavery was the fundamental factor in producing the American Civil War" and that without it the war might have been avoided. His reasons for thinking so were developed more fully in 1959 in another essay, and in Civil War in the Making, a chapter of which appears here. The South, with its anachronistic institution of slavery, stood athwart the path of progress, humanitarian Christianity, and democracy, which were then transforming the world of the nineteenth century. His mature judgment is contained in the hitherto unpublished essay "Why the Southern States Seceded," the title of which, incidentally, is also a precise statement of what most people mean when they talk about the 76 "causes of the Civil War." Few inquire why the North fought; yet northern willingness to do so was necessary to produce a war. Of all the essays, it is the best, being broadest in perspective and deepest in judgment. Only in this single essay, for instance, does Mr. Craven take seriously the humanitarian impulses that gave thrust to the antislavery movement. (Nowhere apparently, does he recognize slavery as disastrous for Negroes.) His evaluation of southern leaders is sharply critical: "They were demanding that the world stand still." The Republican party, once the embodiment of intransigence , is still the party of "industrial capitalism," but it is also the party of "the democratic-humanitarian impulses of the Modern World." The South's responsibility for the breakup of the Union is mitigated, to be sure, by its inability to abandon an institution tightly woven into its social fabric. But to recognize that fact only confirms the tragedy of the conflict; the fatal flaw was there from the beginning. In Mr. Craven's present view the Civil War may not have been quite "irrepressible," but it has now ceased to be as "repressible" as he once thought. No such obvious shift in fundamental attitude is evident in Mr. Simkins' thought over the years. In 1947 he published an essay in the Journal of Southern History with the same title as this collection, but for some reason he did not include it here. The content of that essay, like its title, still represents his view of...