The confederacy of silence on the lessons of the Civil War
Only incidentally, or deceitfully, does the truth emerge
What did you learn in school about the Civil War? In my generation, at least, we learned the bare facts. The American founding was followed by several decades of dispute over federal and state power, and a growing crisis over westward expansion, particularly regarding the admission of Missouri, Texas and California. The first and last were settled by compromises, the second was followed by war with Mexico. But the compromises didn’t last and that war only inflamed passions more. With the election of Abraham Lincoln1n 1860, 11 slave states seceded from the Union and the war was on.
Granted, that is a rather truncated portion of our history, but that bland take on it was pretty much what was told in a chapter or two of our textbook. In the writers’ determination not to take sides, they left out the momentousness and passion which America’s leaders and citizens undoubtedly felt. After all, the war went on for four bloody years, killing over half a million men. “Now let’s go on to the Industrial Revolution,” with as little explanatory commentary as for the previous era. In college, I took several U.S. history courses, seldom going beyond that virtual deadpan analysis. Or perhaps, I being a young person, the lessons went over my head.
That all changed in graduate school. In a course titled American Political Thought, we read the writings of Thomas Jefferson, The Federalist, and the writings of Abraham Lincoln. I enjoyed this thoroughly, gaining new insights into my country. The big surprise was Lincoln, who I learned was not only a noble and heroic man, but a political thinker of the first rank. By following his career, I learned what caused the Civil War. (I also learned then that southern historians rewrote the history of that period and argued that slavey was not central to it.)
Of course, there are sensible reasons for not re-litigating the bloodiest war in our history. But that is no reason to blind ourselves to what was truly at stake. In a nation dedicated in its founding to equal liberty for all, the existence of slavery is both a massive contradiction and huge embarrassment. Our ancestors could live with it for a time, but a combination of anti-slavery sentiment on the one hand and a passionate attachment to slavery on the other, something had to give—and it did.
Harry Jaffa, a pre-eminent professor of political philosopher, argued in a work on Lincoln that the Civil War was central to our history because of the conflict between the nation’s principles and its actual practices. The Left has been writing history books to put America in the worst possible light. But at least it’s an opening to discussion and debate—presuming they are permitted. Jaffa has influenced several generations of students and scholars, and some of whom established the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy to make the true state of our situation central to their study, and to their writings in the Claremont Review of Books.
No one caused the civil war more than the slave states, determined to keep slavery at all costs, but a close second was Lincoln who insisted that the expansion of slavery should not be permitted here in America or to our Latin neighbors. He began his campaign following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, whose author was Stephen Douglas. Dealing with the western territories, the law stipulated that each territory (or state for that matter) could decide whether or not to have slavery.
Called “popular sovereignty, this policy Lincoln derisively reduced to a “don’t care” approach, leaving the door open to slavery spreading throughout the nation. He preferred the South’s straightforward approach to the issue over Douglas’s snake in the grass strategy.
There was no reconciliation between these extremes because there was no common ground between them. Pray that our current crisis stops short of that. But our too widespread ignorance of the causes and consequences of the Civil War blinds us to it.