• Introduction: The Civil War documentary by Ken Burns relies on the Lost Cause narrative, which focuses on states' rights rather than the economic and socio-political issues surrounding slavery, leading to a skewed public understanding of the conflict.

• Argument: Historians like Charles Dew and Stephanie McCurry highlight that slavery was central to Southern culture and secession efforts, with secessionists using violent tactics to suppress Unionist sentiments and push for secession.

• Conclusion: Modern historiography aims to provide a more inclusive and representative narrative of the Civil War, moving away from traditional histories that exclude diverse voices and focusing on critical events like the 14th Amendment.

Introduction

The Civil War, an early 1990’s Public Broadcasting Service documentary by famed producer Ken Burns is a public history project that relies on a Lost Cause narrative as its source material, lacking diverse viewpoints and modern historical scholarship, and painting a stylized picture of the United States Civil War as ‘remembered,’ primarily by its supporters, as a fight over States’ rights.  Modern scholarship suggests that a narrative developed from Lost Cause-remembrances of the Civil War is deficient in explaining the economic, and socio-political differences around chattel slavery, the actual cause of this hyper-violent conflict.   This tension between popular public historical narratives and professional historiography surrounding the Civil War has a corrosive effect on the body politic, and challenges each engaged American to combat mythos with historical evidence, elevate contemporary and previously unheard narratives, and actively revise narratives concerning early U.S. history to comport with modern historical interpretation. This essay analyzes 21st century historiography of the cause of this 19th century conflict, investigates the development of modern historical narrative trends related to this era, and offers some insight into the parallels between tactics and vehicles employed by proponents of Southern secession and events in modern U.S. economic and socio-political history.

Argument

In contrast to the popular historiography that Ken Burns burnishes in The Civil War Professor and historian Charles Dew in his monograph Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001) describes a chattel slavery that was “at the core, the very heart” of Southern culture, including politics, religion and especially the economy.  In his investigation and research of period documents from the southern United States’ secession commissioners, Drew draws a clear picture of these men and their singular state of mind as they corresponded, delivered speeches, and developed legislation and some popular support to protect the South’s economic interests in working toward the formation and ratification of the Confederate States of America.  From these documents, which mention state’s rights only obliquely, in word and deed the Southern states cajoled citizens for votes, developed harassing state militias to punish Unionist-leaning citizens, and drafted pointed secession legislation all to retain the right to traffic in Black slaves and use them for economic gain. The monograph is an arresting document, both for the reader and the author, as Charles Dew was raised in the deep south and came to a new realization about the myth of the Lost Cause in graduate school.  Drew uncovers the voices of powerful slaveholding elites and wrestles with the economic issues that an end to Southern U.S. chattel slavery would present in this New South.  “How could we not see what we were doing back then, treating human beings as livestock, buying and selling them, tearing families apart, extracting labor from them – millions of the – by force,” he asks?  A sinister thread is present throughout Drew’s book, and it hints that more than half of the population of the Southern states were non-slaveowners and rejected secession, and that commissioners for the Southern Secession used hard-knuckled tactics to force reluctant citizens and legislators to support their cause. 

Dr. Stephanie McCurry and Professor of History at Columbia University illuminates these tactics.  She notes that in Alabama. William Yancy, a local secessionist, declared in a fiery screed that pro-Unionist adherents “are the Enemies of the people of Alabama,” and, as had occurred in Georgia, pushed for immediate passage of an ordinance of secession to quell dissent. Small majorities were assembled to push through Acts of Secession in Louisiana and other secessionist states.  Called fire-eaters, they were oligarchs who “combined popular political mobilization and tight…control of the electoral process…[grafting] onto the established military system of beat districts, which organized all male citizens into state militia units and slave patrols a network of explicitly secessionist vigilante and Minute Men associations, armed organizations of local ‘freeman,’” who strong armed, tarred and feathered, mutilated, and sometimes killed pro-Unionist citizens.  McCurry goes on to explain that during the secessionist movement, Senators roamed the halls with guns while citizens girded for confrontation over President Lincoln’s imminent re-election.

Conclusion

These are just a couple of thousands of new historiographic narratives that help to re-center a viewpoint of historical events on different, critical, and representative voices, and away from traditional histories that typically exclude women, minority, and other everyday people’s contributions.  Dr. David Bright, a historian at Stanford University describes in his lecture titled “The Civil War in American Memory’ (2014) ‘oracles’, such as important individuals or events, which act as anchors in our memory from which history is constructed and described.  The Civil War was such an oracle, according to Dr. Bright, a fulcrum around which the whole modern history of the United States pivots, answering ‘the big questions’ about what type of citizen we are today. As events of recent years have proven, and as historians such as McCurry and Drew have helped make explicit, it’s incumbent on historians in the 21st century to provide dynamic and varied historical narratives.  Ken Burns’ sentimental but flawed documentary speaks to the trouble of affixing historical attention to a singular ‘oracle’ as events transpired unevenly before and during secession.  Bright considers for students a new ‘oracle’ in the 14th amendment to the Constitution which guarantees life, liberty, and property to every natural citizen, for a changing U.S. today, which sees a cycle of nationalism and religious fervor more present in our modern body politic.  Unleashing a new historiography that is more inclusive, and representative of the nation’s past emphasizes the need for more dialogue among partisans and offers students new and fresh perspectives to inform them as citizens in the modern era.

References

Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville. University Press of Virginia. 2001.

David Blight, “The Civil War in American Memory,” YouTube video. 2013.

Stephanie. McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War. South Cambridge. Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 2010.