01-19-2024, 04:14 PM
(01-18-2024, 06:06 PM)bengalfan74 Wrote: You hit on an important point here. If you could go back and conduct a poll on the cause of the Civil war in 1875, you would probably get a little different answer than what you would in 1910, 1950, 1995 and so on. Times change, the lens that whatever is being viewed through changes.
And just for the record I'm not trying to say the Civil war wasn't about slavery. Just that it's very hard for us today to put ourselves in the shoes of someone in 1860.
Completely agree with the bolded.
I think 1890 was a turning point. As Union soldiers who actually fought in the war died off and/or went out of politics, it became more and more important to "unify" the country's history. The historians who wrote US history texts for American high schools, from the 20s to the 50s, are now famous for presenting the war over slavery with no discussion of ideas and motivations which led to the war, for fear of offending and "politicizing." Abolitionists like John Brown were presented as "fanatics." Texts for southern schools introduced the "states rights" interpretation to explain the "Great War of Northern Aggression." Slavery was often presented in them as rather benign and agreeable to the slaves themselves. The "states rights" cause was embraced by southern historians well into the 70s, but now continues to live on the internet in right wing blogs and websites, especially those making claims like "Blacks fought for the Confederacy too!"
"Left-leaning academics" began challenging that "neutral" history in the 70s and 80s, with partial success. Most of the people in this forum probably remember lots of "inserts" and boxes in their HS history texts--maybe one on Harriet Tubman and another on Frederick Douglas, and other minorities. Possibly also discussions sympathetic to the dispossession of Native Americans, as opposed to celebrations of manifest destiny which used to characterize such texts. There is still a lot of pushback against this kind of inclusion and balance though, as can be seen in current curricular battles in states like Texas and Florida. (See Dino's recent thread on the school bill up for consideration in Texas.)
Most professional historians now agree that slavery was the primary cause, but not simply so. Americans had tolerated or embraced slavery since the founding, and they had difficulty accepting legal equality of Blacks for a hundred years after the war. Also, "states rights" was not simply a southern issue; New England wanted to break with the Union over the War of 1812. So for historians today, the question is "why 1861 instead of 1855 or 1870"? What configuration of forces pushed the country war at that moment, not some other? That explanation has to include more than just slavery. (C-Dawg gave an accurate overview of the current consensus in post #19.)
Haley's difficulty in answering a simple question about the "causes" of the Civil War is another indication of how much MAGA ideology has come to trump historical accuracy, as well as legal and journalistic. There is a strong push to deny that racism has been a shaping force in US history; for that denial to be politically effective, professional history--and the academy which produces professional historians--has to be de-legitimized. That is easier for folks who got their US history in high schools pre-1980, which certainly discussed slavery and segregation, but without connecting them to any explicit racist ideology or racism as a feature of American life and politics. All that bad stuff just happened somehow, and then stopped somehow--though not because of MLK and "the left," or yes because of MLK construed as a "conservative" who only wanted people judged for the content of their character and not their color.
(01-18-2024, 06:06 PM)bengalfan74 Wrote: On the Civil war deaths it's very hard to put a hard number on. I believe about 6,000 were KIA at Gettysburg but Confederate numbers are hard to pin down. Moreover, how many that were wounded died a month later? a year later? and so on. How many reported "missing" were just blown to bits?
Many historians believe the 600,000 number is probably quite low.
Yes. The demographic historian J. David Hacker, examining population trends from the pre-war US, puts the number at about 750,000 total deaths. That's probably going to supersede the old 618,000 number. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html
I would add that, regarding the old number, over 250,000 in that stat were from disease, not battle deaths. WWII is still the highest number there, with over 400,000. I believe there were 51,000 casualties at Gettysburg, counting both sides. ("Casualties" includes wounded and missing--any one no longer present on the muster roll.)
