976
PARTISAN REVIEW
They have resorted instead to broad affirmations of faith: if only
the conflict could have been staved off long enough, then somehow,
somewhere, we could have worked .something out. It is legitimate, I
think, to ask how? where? what?-at least,
if
these affirmations of
faith are to be used as the premise for castigating the unhappy men
who had the practical responsibility for finding solutions and failed.
Where have the revisionists gone astray? In part, the popularity
of revisionism obviously parallels that of
Gone with the Wind- the
.victors paying for victory by pretending literary defeat. But the es–
sential problem is why history should be so vulnerable to this literary
fashion; and this problem, I believe, raises basic questions about the
whole modern view of history.
It
is
perhaps stating the issue in too
portentous terms. Yet I cannot escape the feeling that the vogue of
revisionism is connected with the modern tendency to seek in optimistic
sentimentalism an escape from the severe demands of moral decision;
that it is the offspring of our modern sentimentality which at once
evades the essential moral problems in the name of a superficial ob–
jectivity and asserts their unimportance in the name of an invincible
progr~.
The revisionists first glided over the implications of the fact that
the slavery system was producing a closed society in the South. Yet
that society increasingly had justified itself by a political and philo–
sophical repudiation of free society; southern thinkers swiftly developed
the anti-libertarian potentialities in a social system whose cornerstone,
in Alexander H. Stephens'S proud phrase, was human bondage. In
theory and in practice, the South organized itself with mounting
rigor against ideas of human dignity and freedom, because such ideas
inevitably threatened the basis of their own system. Professor Frank
L. Owsley, the southern agrarian, has described inadvertently but
accurately the direction in which the slave South was moving. "The
abolitionists and their political .allies were threatening the existence of
the South as seriously as the Nazis threaten the existence of England,"
wrote Owsley in 1940; " ... Under such circumstances the surprising
thing is that so little was done by the South to defend its existence."
There can be no question that many southerners in the fifties
had similar sentiments; that they regarded their system of control
as ridiculously inadequate; and that, with the book-burning, the cen-
