The Meaning of the Civil War

Abstract

The Civil War lasted four years; the debate over its meaning and significance continues. During the last century and in the first part of this one the discussion oscillated between those who saw the war, often in moral terms, as the working out of the end of slavery and those who praised the triumph of constitutional government. In 1927 Charles and Mary Beard called the war the Second American Revolution, soon others argued that a blundering generation had made the war, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the aftermath of World War II, embraced the conflict in moral terms. In reviewing the historical debate in Americans Interpret Their Civil War (1954), Thomas J. Pressly concluded that the participants had understood the war's meaning as well as or better than later historians. In the 1960s a younger generation of historians announced the birth of the new social history.1 Their principal purpose was to study the lives of ordinary people. Caught up in the fervor of the civil rights movement, they eagerly examined slavery in all its aspects and replaced the then prevailing view that Reconstruction had been a failure with the morally drawn conclusion that it had been a betrayal. They virtually ignored the Civil War. They ignored this war, I believe, for several reasons. First, they rejected war philosophically as part of the civil rights movement's commitment to nonviolence. Second, they had no desire to be associated with the military historians who were then helping to stage nostalgic centennial reenactments of Civil War battles. Third, they insisted upon studying the lives of ordinary people, and the Civil War, as conceived at the time, meant the study of politicians, generals, and battles in which the voices of ordinary people were all