THE CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR
979
An
acceptance of the fact of moral responsibility does not license
the historian to roam through the past ladling out individual praise
and blame: such an attitude would ignore the fact that all individuals,
including historians, are trapped in a web of circumstance which
curtails their moral possibilities. But it does mean that there are
certain essential issues on which it is necessary for the historian to
have a position if he is to understand the great conflicts of history.
These great conflicts are relatively few because there are few enough
historical phenomena which we can confidently identify as evil. The
essential issues appear, moreover, not in pure and absolute form, but
incomplete and imperfect, compromised by the deep complexity of
history. Their proponents may often be neurotics and fanatics, like
the abolitionists. They may attain a social importance only when a
configuration of non-moral factors-economic, political, social, mili–
tary-permit them to do so.
. Yet neither the nature of the context nor the pretensions of the
proponents alter the character of the issue. And human slavery is cer–
tainly one of the few issues of whose evil we can be sure. It is not
just "a very ancient labor system"; it is also a betrayal of the basic
values of our Christian and democratic tradition. No historian can
understand the circumstances which led to its abolition until he writes
about it in its fundamental moral context. "History is supposed to
understand the difference between a decaying economy and an ex–
panding one," as Mr. De Voto well said, "between solvency and bank–
ruptcy, between
.a
dying social idea and one coming to world ac–
ceptance.... It is even supposed to understand implications of the
difference between a man who is legally a slave and one who is leg–
ally free."
"Revisionism in general has no position," De Voto continues,
"but only a vague sentiment." Professor Randall well suggested the
uncritical optimism of that sentiment when he remarked, "To suppose
that the Union could not have been continued or slavery outmoded
without the war and without the corrupt concomitants of war is
hardly an enlightened assumption." We have here a touching after–
glow of the admirable nineteenth-century faith in the full rationality
and perfectibility of man; the faith that the errors of the world
would all in time be "outmoded" (Professor Randall's use of this
word is suggestive ) by progress. Yet the experience of the twentieth
