What is a Historian?

[Rob Wick]

Quote: I'd agree that a historian shouldn't in, his/her work, consider the morality of the events.

Mike,

I'm curious as to your reaction to the following. I once presented a paper on James G. Randall's "Blundering Generation" thesis in which Randall said the Civil War came about because of the emotionalism on both sides and both side's failure to compromise (this is oversimplified). In 1949 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., challenged Randall and the other revisionists in an article. Since the article is under copyright, I've extracted from my paper the area where I discuss Schlesinger's objections including his belief that historians were required to consider moral stances.

There was little question that this revisionist view would encounter objections and challenges. One of the most elaborately argued came from the young Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a 1949 article in Partisan Review, challengingly titled, “The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism.” Schlesinger argued that the emotionalism that Randall and Craven abhorred had been a trenchant fact throughout American history; “But, if the indictment ‘blundering generation’ meant no more than a general complaint that democratic politics placed a premium on emotionalism, then the Civil War would have been no more nor less ‘needless’ than any event in our blundering history.”

Much (if not most) of Schlesinger’s argument focused on the revisionist idea that slavery was not enough of a reason for war to erupt. Schlesinger charged that to sustain the idea of slavery’s relative unimportance as a cause of the war, Randall, Craven and the other revisionists “must show…that there were policies with which a non-blundering generation could have resolved the slavery crisis and averted war; and that these policies were so obvious that the failure to adopt them indicated blundering and stupidity of a peculiarly irresponsible nature.” If no such policies existed, Schlesinger concluded, it would be unfair to blame the political generation of the 1850s for failing to see what didn’t exist.

Schlesinger argued that if it had indeed been possible to resolve the issue of slavery so as to avoid war, there were three possibilities for slavery’s destruction: through “internal reform in the South; through economic exhaustion of the slavery system in the South; or through some government project for gradual and compensated emancipation.” Schlesinger then showed how none of these aforementioned possibilities could have borne fruit. Internal reform in the South, which never was a serious option in Schlesinger’s view, became impossible when Southern whites quashed discussion of slavery. As for the economic exhaustion of slavery, Schlesinger said that with its history of blaming northern exploitation for its economic problems, no one in the South “would have recognized the causes of their economic predicament and taken the appropriate measures.” Finally, compensated emancipation was rebuffed by slaveowners when Lincoln presented the option in 1862. “The hard fact, indeed, is that the revisionists have not tried seriously to describe the policies by which the slavery problem could have been peacefully resolved.”

So what, Schlesinger asked, lay behind the revisionist’s beliefs? “I cannot escape the feeling that the vogue of revisionism is connected with the modern tendency to seek in optimistic sentimentalism an escape from the severe demands of moral decision; that it is the offspring of our modern sentimentality which at once evades the essential moral problems in the name of a superficial objectivity and asserts their unimportance in the name of an invincible progress.”

Schlesinger argued that the revisionists—that all historians for that matter—were obliged to pronounce moral judgments on actions that ran counter to the democratic ideals that America’s founding documents pronounced, although he warned that that obligation was no license for forgetting that individuals were prisoners of their own times and societal pressures. In Schlesinger’s view, the error of the revisionists was to bend over so far backward to avoid easy and smug moral judgments on historical actors that they renounced any need to consider moral issues in history at all.

In his conclusion, Schlesinger demanded an acknowledgement that every historian “imports his own set of moral judgments into the writing of history by the very process of interpretation….” Whereas Randall had no problem in expressing what Schlesinger termed his “moral feeling” that the abolitionist’s attitude was “unctuous” and “intolerant” Randall (in Schlesinger’s reading) could not express any moral feeling about the cause of fighting to free the bondsman. It was a severe indictment indeed.

Best
Rob