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THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE PROBLEM OF "PRESENTISM": A Reply to Phillip S. Paludan John S, Rosenberg in 1969 ? published an essay calling for a new attitude toward our Civil War.1 After a historiographical discussion of how the revisionism of Avery Craven and James Randall and the new nationalism of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had been influenced by their assumptions about the efficacy of war, the centrality of slavery, and the worth of the Union that was preserved,2 1 suggested that it was time for a new interpretation of the Civil War to match the understanding of America that the generation of the 1960's was developing out of its experience with Vietnam abroad and racial crisis at home. In sketching an outline of this new outlook I questioned whether the preservation of the Union was worth the slaughter. While recognizing that freedom is better than slavery and that American blacks are better off than had they not been freed as a by-product of war, I also questioned whether the racial progress that can be directly attributed to the war (that is, that would not have occurred anyway) has been sufficient to justify the 600,000 dead. I attempted, in short, to show the connection between the way we view our country and its history in general and the way we view the Civil War in particular. I sought, finally, a "new revisionism" that would reject the "friendly, almost affectionate attitude" toward our past that Samuel Eliot Morison noted with approval in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1950 and that is so embedded in most recent interpretations of the Civil War.3 1 John S. Rosenberg, "Toward a New Civil War Revisionism," The American Scholar, 38, No. 2 (Spring, 1969), 250-272. 2 I quoted, for example, James G. Randall on "the hateful results of the war" and Avery Craven's comment on the state of the Union in 1939—"Workers talking of 'wage slavery,' capitalists piling fortunes high while poverty and starvation stalk the streets. . . . To such ends did . . . four years of bitter warfare make substantial contributions." Ibid-, 255. 3 In the same address Morison had harsh words for revisionists, who, "Caught in the disillusionment that followed World War I, belittled wars, taught that no war did any good, even to the victor." ¡bid., 256, quoting Morison, "Faith of a Historian," American Historical Review, LVI (Jan., 1951), 272, 266-267. 242 Now comes Professor Phillip S. Paludan of Kansas, attacking not only my argument but my professional competence and even my alma mater.4 My "presentism," he says, is "enslaving"; my essay, he suggests , is an exercise "in shaping the past to satisfy [my] fondest hopes for the present or to verify [my] outrage against current national misdeeds"; my argument, he allows, "is hardly surprising" and even "understandable" because it was written during a time of national turmoil when I was "a young graduate student at Stanford University, one of the most militantly antiwar campuses in the nation," but, though "understandable," what I wrote is not "defensible." My professional judgment "overwhelmed," he claims, I wrote an essay that "is harmful not only to the writing of history but to the very causes [I seek] to serve today."5 When I first read these charges, I confess, my first impulse was to reply in kind, and in search of ad hominem ammunition I even looked up William Allen White's famous 1896 editorial, "What's The Matter With Kansas?"6 Upon reflection, however, I realized that I objected to the substance of Professor Paludan's article even more than to its offensive tone, and it is to his argument that I wish to respond. Or rather to his arguments, for not only does he maintain that we should view the war as a Good Thing—a remarkable enough proposition— but he also rejects my criticism of this view as "presentisi." Since this charge implies that my argument is methodologically deficient, I intend to respond not only to his defense of the Civil War but also to his attack on my "presentism." According to Professor Paludan, when I wrote my essay the nation seemed...

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