Schlesinger and "The State Rights Fetish": A Note

SCHLESINGER AND "THE STATE RIGHTS FETISH": A NOTE Lewis O. Saum In 1949 the editor of a book of readings devised for college students delivered the following judgment of an old argument pertaining to the sectional controversy and the Civil War; In our own day the long and involved constitutional studies ofStephens and Burgess can be safely allowed to gather dust on the shelves, for Arthur Schlesingers devastating essay entitled 'The States Rights Fetish' has made it impossible for any self-respecting historian to accept the states' rights issue as a fundamental cause of the Civil War.1 In the subsequent fourteen years, a good many thousands of students encountered that assertion,2 and probably very few of them troubled to go to the 1922 essay which, they were informed, did so much to rid us of one approach to Civil War causation. The following note is by no means meant to revivify or further to mortify the historical role of state rights doctrine; nor is it meant to quarrel with the assertion quoted above. In fact, though it would be exceeding difficult to gauge, that ascription of influence to Chapter X of New Viewpoints in American History may well be accurate. Rather, the attempt here will be more nearly to suggest the intellectual provenance from which Schlesinger^ essay came and, as well, to suggest a certain peculiarity in the logic unfolded in it, the conclusion reached by it and the construction that some—editor Edwin Rozwenc, for example—have placed upon it. The degree of influence exercised by Schlesingers essay lies, of course, beyond determination, but a few indications regarding the essay and the book of which it was a part might be offered before going to primary concerns. Surveying his colleagues in the profession early in the 1950's, John Walton Caughey found that New Viewpoints ranked number 10 among historical works of the vintage 1920-1935.3 When one 1 Edwin C. Rozwenc, "Introduction" in Edwin C. Rozwenc (ed.), Shvery asa Cause of the Civil War (Boston, 1949), vii. The 1963 revised edition of this book did not retain the reference to "The State Rights Fetish." 2 In letters to the author of Sept. 28 and Oct. 19, 1977, David K. Johnson, Director of Marketing, College Division, D.C. Heath and Company, has provided me with general information regarding the sales of this publication. 3 "Historians' Choice: Results of a Poll on Recently Published American History and Biography," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXXIX (Sept., 1952), 299. In an 351 352CIVIL WAR HISTORY narrows the focus to Civil War literature, one finds less trace of "The State Rights Fetish" than a comment such as that of Edwin Rozwenc might suggest, partly, one assumes, because Schlesinger^ essays were not meant to present original research but were meant rather "to bring together and summarize in non-technical language"4 what was already known to specialists. Well-known books related to the theme and published in 1925 and 1930 by Frank Lawrence Owsley and Jesse T. Carpenter seem to have been unaffected by "The State Rights Fetish."5 And Thomas J. Pressly did not mention that particular essay in his fine study of Civil War historiography, turning instead to larger works such as those of Charles A. Beard to illustrate the emphases of the 1920's.e In a book published in 1950 Kenneth Stampp referred to the essay as "an excellent, brief discussion"7 of its subject, and a dozen years later David Potter cited it for exposing "the formalistic weakness of the concept of states' rights versus nationalism."8 And an even fifty years after the appearance of "The State Rights Fetish" Bert James Loewenberg wrote of it as follows in his chapter treating "The Civil War in American Historiography:" it demonstrates "that states' rights was more often a fetish than a viable method of balance of power," and it "strips the argument" regarding state rights as a causal factor of "historical validity ."9 Moving directly from a single essay by Schlesinger in 1922 to two volumes by Charles A. and Mary R. Beard in 1927, Loewenberg presented the argument holding that "legal and constitutional arguments were simply verbalizations...