What follows is an excerpt of my interview with Eric Foner for my Civil War essay. I ended up not quoting Professor Foner, but as will become obvious, his work and his thoughts, were deeply influential on my own writing. Professor Foner is the Dewitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University and the author of (among others) Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery which won the Pulitzer last year.
See the escalation of this long argument here, here, here, here, here, and here. See the conclusion for the magazine here. We'll have an interview with David Blight up in the next few days.
I wanted to first begin with this basic question I've been hashing over in some of my writing at the Atlantic. Is the Civil War tragic?
On the one hand you can say any war is tragic. But it's kind of metaphysical and that has nothing to do with a historic situation. When people today say "the Civil War was tragic" what we're getting [now] is an odd combination of two things. One, there's a long standing conservative view that the war was unnecessary, that slavery would have died out anyway, and therefore the Civil War is tragic because people died for no reason.
Lately, on the more liberal end, there's a different angle that comes to much the same conclusion but is a more general anti-war sentiment. Whenever people get fed up with war, it reverberates back. That is fed by a general cynicism about politics and political leaders. "Well political leaders are all corrupt anyway." Or "Yeah they talked about slavery but..."
When I lecture, I am amazed how many people come up to me and say, "It was really about the tariff." There's an unwillingness to look slavery in the face. But slavery is the bottom-line for beginning to talk about the Civil War.
The tragic notion also feeds on the idea of "the brothers war. White people killing each other, how tragic." But blacks are not the brothers of these guys. I'm almost a pacifist nowadays, and if someone can show a plausible route to getting rid of slavery without the Civil War I will say "OK it's tragic." But there is no such route.
Right now, people find it easier to talk about the Civil Rights movement which is 50 years ago, than the Civil War. We'd rather have a defanged Civil Rights movement, than talk about slavery 200 years ago.
How do you balance those two things though--Your own abhorrence of war and, in this case, it's seeming necessity?
You have to be skeptical. One does not have to ignore the many negative things that happened in the Civil War. War always generates infringement on liberties, for instance.
Is part of how we avoid the cause, slavery, by focusing on soldiers and valor? I'm thinking of the "brothers" narrative, here.