THE CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR
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sorship of the mails, the gradual illegalization of dissent, the South
was in process of creating a real machinery of repression in order more
effectively "to defend its existence." No society, I suppose, encourages
criticism of its basic institutions. Yet, when a democratic society acts
in self-defense, it does so at least in the name of human dignity and
freedom. When a society based on bond slavery acts to eliminate
criticism of its peculiar institution,
it
outlaws what a believer in de–
mocracy can only regard as the abiding values of man. When the
basic institutions are evil, in other words, the effect of attempts to
defend their existence can only be the moral and intellectual stultifica–
tion of the society.
A society closed in the defense of evil institutions thus creates
moral differences far too profound to be solved by compromise. Such
a society forces upon every one, both those living at the time and
those writing about it later, the necessity for a moral judgment; and
the moral judgment in such cases becomes an indispensable factor
in the historical understanding.
The revisionists were commendably anxious to avoid the vulgar
errors of the post-Civil War historians who pronounced smug indi–
vidual judgments on the persons involuntarily involved in the tragedy
of the slave system. Consequently they tried hard to pronounce no
moral judgments at all on slavery. Slavery became important, in
Craven's phrase, "only as a very ancient labor system, probably at
this time rather near the end of its existence"; the attempt to charge
this labor system with moral meanings was "a creation of inflamed
imaginations." Randall, talking of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, could
describe it as "a law intended to subordinate the slavery question
and hold it in
proper
proportion" (my italics). I have quoted Ran–
dall's even more astonishing argument that, because major con–
troversies between downstate and metropolis in Illinois stopped short
of war, there was reason to believe that the Civil War could have
been avoided. Are we to take it that the revisionists seriously believe
that the downstate-metropolis fight in Illinois-or the agrarian-in–
dustrial fight in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations-were in
any useful sense comparable to the difference between the North and
South in 1861?
Because the revisionists felt no moral urgency themselves, they
deplored as fanatics those who did feel it, or brushed aside their feel-
