By Thomas Best
Last week, I began a look back at an issue of Time Magazine. I found this in a pile of materials I had stored away in my attic after teaching for over 25 years at Monmouth College and the course I taught on the Civil War.
The cover title declared that readers consider “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War: The endless battle over the war’s true cause would make Lincoln weep.” The cover art featured a photograph of Abraham Lincoln with a tear rolling down his face.” The feature article, written by David Von Drehle, was entitled: “The Way We Weren’t: North and South shared the burden of slavery, and after the war, they shared in forgetting it. But 150 years later, it’s time to tell the truth.”
David Blight, one of our nation’s most thoughtful historians, noted in this 2011 article that historians were increasingly forced to challenge the misguided perspective that slavery was not main cause of the cause of the war. In 2011, a survey taken among people living the former states of the Confederacy already revealed that nearly 2/3 of all adults surveyed said that “states rights” was more of a motivating cause of the war than slavery. In this era, I had been part of two Teaching American History Grant tours of the former Confederacy. From the sites of former cotton and sugar plantations and battlefields ranging from Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Atlanta to state houses where secessionists voted to leave the Union, I spoke to docents, educators, and historians who were increasingly speaking of a concern about how the Civil War was being remembered.
From speaking personally to historians such as the early mentioned David Blight, he emphasized that slaves were the biggest financial asset in the U.S. in the mid-19th century. Slaves were then worth about $4 billion dollars—more than the value of all U.S. railroads, banks, factories, and ships put together. Cotton, produced by slave labor across the South, was the largest U.S. export by a wide margin. In fact, cotton sales enriched not only southern farms but those who produced textiles in large New England factories. Even Wall Street investors relied heavily on stocks with ties to slave labor.
Of course, while most Northerners were not abolitionists, by the late 1850s more former Whigs had left that party for the new Republican Party. This earliest version of the GOP was born under the unifying principle of opposition to the expansion of slavery. Those folks who gathered in Galesburg in October 1858 on the campus of Knox College heard the new Republican candidate—Abraham Lincoln—challenge Democrat Stephen Douglas over the issue of the increasingly caustic and violent conflict over slavery’s growth onto the western plains of Kansas. As he said adamantly at one point, slavery’s expansion was not merely a political or economic issue, but one of right and wrong. Douglas and the cancer of slavery was “blowing out the moral lights around us.” And yet, Lincoln lost that race.
Next week, I will wrap up this discussion by examining what historians were thinking in 2011 and what advances or retreats have been witnessed in the last 13 years.
