{"id":557,"date":"2014-07-03T11:29:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-03T11:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/07\/everything-you-know-about-the-civil-war-is-wrong.html"},"modified":"2014-07-03T11:29:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-03T11:29:00","slug":"everything-you-know-about-the-civil-war-is-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/07\/everything-you-know-about-the-civil-war-is-wrong.html","title":{"rendered":"Everything You Know About the Civil War is Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Americans are engaged in new debates over what it was about. Southern revisionists have long tried to claim it wasn\u2019t about slavery, but rather \u201cNorthern aggression\u201d \u2013 which is a tough sell since they seceded from the Union despite Lincoln\u2019s attempts at compromise on slavery, and then attacked the federal Fort Sumter in South Carolina. That would be Southern aggression, by any standard.<\/span><\/div>\n
But there\u2019s still room for smart revisionism. Instead of the traditional view that finds the Civil War a great moral and political triumph, David Goldfield calls it \u201cAmerica\u2019s greatest failure\u201d in his fascinating new book, \u201cAmerica Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.\u201d It killed a half-million Americans and devastated the South for generations, maybe through today. And while many Northern Republicans came to embrace abolishing slavery as one of the war\u2019s goals, Goldfield shows that Southerners are partly right when they say the war\u2019s main thrust was to establish Northern domination, in business and in culture. Most controversially, Goldfield argues passionately \u2014 with strong data and argument, but not entirely convincingly \u2014 that the Civil War was a mistake. Instead of liberating African Americans, he says, it left them subject to poverty, sharecropping and Jim Crow violence and probably retarded their progress to become free citizens.<\/span><\/div>\n
Whether or not you accept that premise \u2013 more on that later \u2013 Goldfield shows definitively that Northern evangelical Protestants were the moral force behind the war, and once they turned it into a religious question, a matter of good v. evil, political compromise was impossible. The Second Great Awakening set its sights on purging the country of the sins of slavery, drunkenness, impiety \u2014 as well as Catholics, particularly Irish Catholic immigrants. Better than any history I\u2019ve seen, Goldfield tracks the disturbing links between abolitionism and nativism. In fact, he starts his book with the torching of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Mass., in 1834, a violent attack on Catholics which Goldfield shows was \u201cincited\u201d by Lyman Beecher, the father of the Beecher clan, most of whom turned out to be as anti-Irish Catholic as they were anti-slavery. To evangelical Protestant nativists, Catholicism was incompatible with democracy, because its adherents allegedly gave their loyalty to the Pope, not the president, and the religion\u2019s emphasis on obeying a hierarchy made them unfit for self-government. Also, rebellious Irish Catholics didn\u2019t show the proper discipline or deference to conform to emerging industrial America. The needs of Northern business were never far from some (though not all) abolitionists\u2019 minds.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Americans are engaged in new debates over what it was about. Southern revisionists have long tried to claim it wasn\u2019t about slavery, but rather \u201cNorthern aggression\u201d \u2013 which is a tough sell since they seceded from the Union despite Lincoln\u2019s attempts at compromise on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEverything You Know About the Civil War is Wrong<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Americans are engaged in new debates over what it was about. 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