Interpreting the larger meaning of Secession, the Confederacy, and the War

Here’s something to get us started in the blog. You may comment on this entry. (Note that this entry does not fit the research assignment requirements listed on BlackBoard.)

Most interpretations of the War era revolve in some way around slavery; my interpretation, as presented in this class, follows that framework. Other interpretations minimize the importance of slavery in the War era, or see slavery less as a causal factor in itself than as a result of more fundamental changes in economy or society. One non-scholarly (and entirely unconvincing) interpretation that minimizes slavery’s importance comes from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose website we’ve looked at in class. That organization interprets Confederate action in the War era as a protection of Constitutional liberties. This interpretation, as I see it, not only denies the historical reality of slavery, but it also erases entirely the history of Black southerners.

Another approach, much more intellectual stimulating, comes from the Marxist tradition. You can find a summary in the blog of retired Berea College professor Mike Rivage-Seul  (in a rather lengthy review of the recent movie, Lincoln). Marxist analysis sees historical change as driven by conflicts over “mode of production,” or the means by which subsistence and wealth is produced. As new classes of people able to exploit labor and wealth emerge, they compete with established classes for control over economic structures. In Marxist terms, the Civil War in the U.S. was ultimately a contest between rising industrial and financial classes (exploiting a class of wage labor) on the one hand and the remnants of the aristocratic, seigniorial class, represented by Southern planters (who were lords over slave labor). The victory of the North solidified the new age of capitalist dominance in the US (and the world). This is, of course, sweeping, deep-structure history, in which immediate and specific events are less important than broad changes in underlying economic relationships. Most historians today (including me) do not accept this narrative in full; few of us, for example, see Southern planters as an aristocratic class occupying a distinct mode of production from that of northern industrialists. Nonetheless, it is an interpretation that demands careful thought.