Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research

Abstract

Noting that “taking stock of where we are and where we are going can prove useful,” Paul D. Escott has written a book in which he examines recent works on the Civil War era and discusses new interpretive directions. His book is short—140 pages of text, divided into seven chapters—but it is indeed useful (p. xi). Much of what Escott has to say about changing historical interpretations—especially concerning the coming and the nature of the Civil War—is sensible and informative. Considering newly prevalent interpretations of Civil War causation, Escott suggests—approvingly—that historians have recently tended to focus on the “big picture” rather than providing detailed narratives of “particular events,” taking an “outside in” rather than an “inside out” approach (pp. 3, 2). Despite widespread agreement on the importance of slavery in precipitating the war, he argues, scholars still need “to define more convincingly and comprehensively the South's economic system … and its relation to modernity” (p. 10). The debate over the extent to which the Confederates were hobbled by internal divisions, he states, has reached a “dead end” since “documentary evidence abounds for both determination and disaffection” (p. 22). And he points to general agreement on the importance of recognizing African American agency as well as the centrality of violence to the Southern wartime experience.