Academics’ attitudes towards the South color their teaching about the region, particularly lessons on the Civil War, and their histories, thus, often project myth rather than reality. “Many historians, myself excepted, go in with an argument before they have done their research and seek to impose their present policy positions on the past,” University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall said on March 11 in an appearance at the Cato Institute here. “I prefer to go in plug ignorant.”
McDougall is the author of the recently released Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1879. “Truth versus error doesn’t make a lot of difference in academic circles now,” Herman Belz, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, said later in the same forum.
Despite his own admonition, McDougall finds an “irresistible parallel” “between “Reconstruction and Operation Iraqi Freedom.” “Reconstruction was America’s first experiment with nation-building,” he explains.
If that analogy holds, it does not bode well for the current effort abroad. “Reconstruction was a failure,” Belz avers. “Freed blacks did not get freedom.”
“Emancipation brought segregation,” and “the national government got bigger.” Although McDougall and company point to “wounded pride” as “the reason for secession,” the debate over the size and scope of the federal government, their evidence suggests, may have also been a motivating factor, even more than slavery itself was.
On the one hand, “Discussion of slavery rarely happened in public forums,” Anne Sarah Rubin, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore campus notes. Meanwhile, “Every time Jefferson Davis tried centralization, he faced opposition.”
Both Rubin and McDougall agree that the proportion of southerners who actually owned slaves topped out at about one-third of the population below the Mason-Dixon Line, according to the census figures at the time. “But even the ones who didn’t own slaves wanted to,” Rubin says.
“Slavery did not cause secession,” Belz argues. The percentage of large plantation owners was even smaller in scope, about 5 percent, Rubin and McDougall agree.
Nevertheless, “The vast majority of southerners threw their allegiance to the Confederacy without a backward glance,” Rubin said. After the war, “Moderate Republicans wanted to get on with Reconstruction,” Belz relates. “Radical Republicans wanted to rule the South.”
“The effects of the war were catastrophic,” Belz points out. “Southerners were broke.”
“Cities were laid waste.”
“The South lost to the North due to the latter’s wealth and resources,” Rubin stated. “Confederate nation states ceased to exist in the spring of 1865.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
