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ings as the artificial product of emotion and propaganda. The revi–
sionist hero was Stephen A. Douglas, who always thought that the
great moral problems could be solved by sleight-of-hand. The phrase
"northern man of southern sentiments," Randall remarked, was "said
opprobriously ... as if it were a base thing for a northern man to work
with his southern fellows."
By denying themselves insight into the moral dimension of the
slavery crisis, in other words, the revisionists denied themselves a
historical understanding of the intensities that caused the crisis. It was
the moral issue of slavery, for example, that gave the struggles over
slavery in the territories or over the enforcement of the fugitive slave
laws their significance. These issues, as the revisionists have shown
with cogency, were not in themselves basic. But they were the avail–
able issues; they were almost the only points within the existing con–
stitutional framework where the moral conflict could be faced; as a
consequence, they became charged with the moral and political dy–
namism of the central issue. To say that the Civil War was fought
over the "unreal" issue of slavery in the territories is like saying that
the Second World War was fought over the "unreal" issue of the in–
vasion of Poland. The democracies could not challenge fascism inside
Germany any more than opponents of slavery could challenge slavery
inside the South; but the extension of slavery, like the extension of
fascism, was an act of aggression which made a moral choice inescap–
able.
Let us be clear what the relationship of moral judgment to
history is. Every historian, as we all know in an argument that surely
does not have to be repeated in 1949, imports his own set of moral
judgments into the writing of history by the very process of inter–
pretation; and the phrase "every historian" includes the category "re–
visionist." Mr. De Voto in his paraphrases of the revisionist position
has put admirably the contradictions on this point: as for "moral
questions, God forbid. History will not put itself in the position of
saying that any thesis may have been wrong, any cause evil. . . .
History will not deal with moral values, though of course the Re–
publican radicals were, well, culpable." The whole revisionist attitude
toward abolitionists and radicals, repeatedly characterized by Randall
as "unctuous" and "intolerant," overflows with the moral feeling
which is so virtuously excluded from discussions of slavery.
