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FALL 2013 77 Review Essay Cause and Consequence The Meaning of the Civil War Today Aaron Sheehan-Dean I s the Civil War a story about defeat—of the broken and humbled South? Or is it a story of victory—not just by the Union but for freedom? The distinct perspectives implied by these questions lead the two historians whose books are reviewed here to trace different casts of characters and offer different conclusions about the experiences and meaning of the Civil War. Bruce Levine, in Fall of the House of Dixie, proposes that the common people of the South—both black and white—contributed to the collapse of the Confederacy’s mighty edifice . James Oakes, in Freedom National, explains how black and white abolitionists destroyed slavery by promoting an interpretation of the Constitution that protects freedom for all people. These books also provide different models for engaging the public: one synthesizes the historical literature to challenge popular attitudes and the other offers an original argument that challenges both scholars and lay readers. They both illustrate the vitally important role that academic scholarship can still play in our times. Levine’s study, clearly aimed at a popular audience, will challenge readers still under the sway of older interpretations that deny the centrality of slavery to the Civil War. Levine centers slavery in his picture of the antebellum South and shows how what was once the region’s leading asset became its greatest liability in war. In describing the nature of slavery, for instance, he uses well known and admired figures such as Robert E. Lee to represent the typical slaveholder who brutally punished runaways. Levine captures the optimism of white southerners in the 1850s as their region’s products generated fabulous wealth and power. Like Stephanie McCurry in her recent Confederate Reckoning, Levine highlights the arrogance that propelled slaveholders to imagine they could command millions of people to fight and die on their behalf. But unlike McCurry, whose book transcended the old debate about why the war ended the way it did, Levine seeks to explain “how this great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the Old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite.”1 Befitting a book that opens with the story’s conclusion, Levine explains that the dilemma of holding the allegiance of white nonslaveholders and controlling the fifth column of enslaved southerners proved the Confederacy’s undoing. CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCE: THE MEANING OF THE CIVIL WAR TODAY 78 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY His analysis sweeps past the traditional political events that litter the pages of most secession histories; instead, Levine suggests that “the long-term pattern of economic, social, cultural, and intellectual developments in the North” made it impossible for elites to rely on nonslaveholders’ support. This argument highlights the long-term vision of secessionists—who were wise to secede in 1861 before they lost all political influence—and suggests the difficulties of sustaining a war from a minority position. Still, previous historians have offered much fuller accounts of internal resistance and class conflict in the Confederacy, a tack that Levine does not follow.2 Levine does show the ways that slavery became a liability for the Confederacy: slaveholders refused to sanction the impressment of their slaves to work on military projects; enslaved people rebelled as oversight slackened when white men enlisted in the armies; and, most dangerously, black southerners proved stalwart allies of Union troops, offering intelligence to northern soldiers and enlisting in Union Armies. Levine uses the war’s military narrative as context for his deeper interest—the collapse of slavery within the South—but the book does not supply a detailed enough analysis of that process to generate new insights. A host of scholars have studied the wartime breakdown of slavery at the state level. From these careful social histories Levine sketches his portrait. At the risk of critiquing the book that Levine did not write, it is hard not to escape the feeling that readers would have been better served if he turned his analytical eye and elegant pen toward a James Oakes. Freedom National:The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861...

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