The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities
J. Morgan Kousser, "The Irrepressible Repressible Conflict,"Reviews in American History 21 (1993): 207-212.

SYNOPSIS:

Kousser reviews Michael F. Holt's collection of essays in Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln. Kousser considers Holt a revisionist on the causation of the American Civil War and points out that many explanations of causation depend on when a study starts and the width of the focus. Kousser is convinced that revisionist historians of the Civil War have avoided facing the importance of slavery and race in the causation of the war, instead preferring to substitute a range of explanations--the fears of whites that they would be enslaved, the ethnocultural tensions between parties, the politics of Abraham Lincoln, the Republicans' attempt to create a national party in 1864 around issues other than slavery, and the importance of republicanism to both North and South in the crisis.

EXCERPT:

"American historians keep wanting the Civil War not to have happened, the slavery issue not to have been intractable, keep wanting to deny the centrality of racial problems to our history, to downplay the facts that many whites positively enjoyed racial discrimination and profited from it while many others genuinely hated it and sacrificed to end it." (207)

"Revisionism is partly a matter of how fine-grained one's picture is. Focus on broad demographic and economic developments--different rates of immigration to North and South, westward expansion, the growth of the slave population, and the glowing prospects of the slave-based economy--and the clash between a potentially politically powerful North and a thriving, expansionist slavocracy seems unavoidable. Focus on how to explain the failure of four state delegations to be represented at the Whig nominating convention in 1839, and chance looms large. Begin a political history in 1819 and end in 1861, and one must face up to the deep sectional split over slavery. Begin in 1852 and end in 1856, and a welter of swirling, unsettled issues and alignments cloud the image." (210)

"By 1852 at least, no issue tied any large attitudinal or demographic group securely to the Whigs, so the party could not survive severe electoral adversity. Slavery mattered to the electorate, but not to the Whigs." (211)

Points of Analysis to this Historiography:

"White people in Augusta rarely discussed slavery openly and for the most part only did so under provocation when they hoped to defend their institution."

"Franklin County's papers spent more ink--almost all of it negative--on its nearly two thousand free blacks than Augusta did on its five thousand enslaved people."


Citation: Key = H048
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