Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
THE CAU'SES OF THE CIVIL WAR:
A NOTE ON HISTORICAL SENTIMENTALISM
The Civil War was our great national trauma. A savage
fraternal conflict, it released deep sentiments of guilt and remorse–
sentiments which have reverberated through our history and our lit–
erature ever since. Literature in the end came to terms with these
sentiments by yielding to the South
in
fantasy the victory it had been
denied in fact; this tendency culminated on the popular level in
Gone with the Wind
and on the highbrow level in the Nashville cult
of agrarianism. But history, a less malleable medium, was constricted
by the intractable fact that the war had taken place, and by the
related
~umption
that it was, in William H. Seward's phrase, an
"irrepressible conflict," and hence a justified one.
As
short a time ago as 1937, for example, even Professor James
G. Randall could describe himself as "unprepared to go to the point
of denying that the great American tragedy could have been avoided."
Yet in a few years the writing of history would succumb to the psy–
chological imperatives which had produced
I'll Take my Stand
and
Gone with the Wind;
and Professor Randall would emerge as the
leader of a triumphant new school of self-styled "revisionists." The
publication of two vigorous books by Professor Avery
Craven-The
Repressible Conflict
(1939) and
The Coming of the Civil War
(1942)-and the appearance of Professor Randall's own notable
volumes on
Lincoln-Lincoln the President: Springfield to Gettysburg
(1945), Lincoln and the South
(1946), and
Lincoln the Liberal
Statesman
(1947-brought about a profound reversal of the profes–
sional historian's attitude toward the Civil War. Scholars now denied
the traditional
~umption
of the inevitability of the war and boldly
advanced the thesis that a "blundering generation" had transformed
a "repressible conflict" into a "needless war."
