Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 10:02:38 AM
Have you ever mentioned the Civil War on a TH blog or in the comments to an article? If you have, you probably heard something along the lines of "The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery" or "The Civil War was all about states' rights" or "The Civil War was just about economics."
It is a problem common to amateur historians, and also to even those professional historians who insist on seeing every event from their own ideological perspective, the attempt to find "the cause" of any historical event. Amateur historians, usually because they want to make an impression by going against conventional wisdom, have a bad habit of not only finding a single cause for any event, but also finding the most surprising and counter-intuitive reason. Thus we hear again and again that Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, World War I had nothing to do with Slavic nationalism, and the Crusades had nothing to do with religion.
The problem with this approach is that there is no single cause for any historical event. Some Confederates fought to defend slavery, some fought for states rights, some fought because their neighbors did so, and so on. And the same for the Union. And those involved in politics at the time were much the same. Some were fighting to defend or to weaken states' rights, some to defend or to end slavery, some to strengthen the union, and some for more venial or personal motives. As the Civil War was not fought by one individual, there was no singular "cause of the Civil War" and those historians without an ideological axe to grind admit as much. Sometimes historians may attempt to discern the motives of a given individual or the range of motivations for a group, but rarely will a competent historian try to ascribe a single motive to any large group, or a single cause to any event.*
So, should you hear again someone arguing that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, you can be sure that, whatever the causes of the Civil War, that statement has nothing to do with history (or thought).
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* I suppose it is possible that there have been some rare events where all the participants agree they have a single motive. However, in those cases, one should be even more skeptical. For example, the First Crusade was nominally about reclaiming the Holy Land, and all the crusaders posited that as their motive. Yet in many cases the promise of land for younger sons or increased ecclesiastical power for lower echelon clergy motivated individual crusaders, no matter what they claimed. So, even when all the participants claim a single motive, we should be leery of listening to their professed motivations, and certainly should not simply accept this monolithic cause for that event.
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Note: And yet again, my spell checker surprises me by thinking that the word "axe" is invalid. I am beginning to realize that this software would actually make my writing worse. If I tried to avoid words it underlines my vocabulary would be quite pathetic, though I would think the word
"facer" is acceptable.