HE
CAU"SiES
OF TH /E
CIVIL
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of slavery as a possible solution. Craven,
it
is true, has argued that
"most of the incentives to honest and sustained effort, to a contented,
well-rounded life, might be found under slavery.... What owning and
being owned added to the normal relationship of employer and em–
ployee is very hard to say." In describing incidents
in
which slaves
beat up masters, he has even noted that "happenings and reactions
like these were the rule [sic], not the exception." But Craven would
doubtless admit that, however jolly this system might have been, its
perpetuation would have been, to say the least, impracticable.
If,
then, revisionism has rested on the assumption that the non–
violent abolition of slavery was possible, such abolition could con–
ceivably have come about through internal reform in the South;
through economic exhaustion of the slavery system in the South; or
through some government project for gradual and compensated eman–
cipation. Let us examine these possibilities.
1)
The internal reform argument.
The South, the revisionists
have suggested, might have ended the slavery system if left to its
own devices; only the abolitionists spoiled everything by letting loose
a hysteria which caused the southern ranks to close in self-defense.
This revisionist argument would have been more convincing if
the decades of alleged anti-slavery feeling in the South had pro–
duced any concrete results.
As
one judicious southern historian, Pro–
fessor Charles S. Sydnor, recently put it, "Although the abolition
movement was followed by a decline of antislavery sentiment in the
South, it must be remembered that in all the long years before that
movement began no part of the South had made substantial progress
toward ending slavery.... Southern liberalism had not ended slavery
in any state."
In any case, it is difficult for historians seriously to suppose
that northerners could have denied themselves feelings of disapproval
over slavery. To say that there "should" have been no abolitionists
in America before the Civil War is about as sensible as to say that
there "should" have been no anti-Nazis in the nineteen-thirties or
that there "should" be no anti-Communists today. People who indulge
in criticism of remote evils may not be so pure of heart as they im–
agine; but that fact does not affect their inevitability as part of the
historic situation.
Any theory, in short, which expects people to repress such spon-
