Charles T. Pace - Southern Independence: Why War?: The War To Prevent Southern Independence

When I read an early draft of Dr. Charles Paces study of the War to Prevent Southern Independence a while back, I knew at once that this was an important work, perfectly argued, soundly based on fact, hard-hitting, and very timely for the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

People have argued since the war itself over its proper name. Dr. Pace was the first to give it a precisely accurate designation: The War to Prevent Southern Independence. That is exactly what it wasnot a rebellion, not a civil war, not even strictly speaking a war between the states or a war for Southern independence. War was made to prevent Southern independence. I confess that I have appropriated Dr. Paces term for the war in my own writing and speaking, and the usage has spread to the best-selling author Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo, among others.

The precision of Dr. Paces name for the war perhaps reflects something of the authors scientific training in medical diagnosis. His analysis of the war certainly reflects his long acquaintance with the people it affected in his native Eastern North Carolina. He tells the familiar story of Americas central conflict in a way it has never been written before.

Celebratory American mythology insists that the war is best understood as the triumph of Northern freedom and idealism over Southern selfishness and slavery. Actually, this interpretation has not always reigned as totally as it does today in all official and mainstream discussion. It is the original propaganda position of the Lincoln party that carried out and won the war on the South (incidentally, with far more opposition among the people of the North than has been admitted). It is the official rationale of the winning side paraded as impartial history.

The growth of professional historianship in the first half of the 20th century brought other views into attention. Professional historians of an earlier time than ours knew that vast historical events never have only a simple cause, and being inhabitants of the horrid 20th century they tended to doubt that any war could be justified as an entirely idealistic and moral affair. They believed that to properly understand history you had to look at all sides and viewpoints, not just those of the victorious party. And, most importantly, they believed (and practiced) a method that required close inspection of the primary sourcesthe documentary record of what the participants actually said and did day by day.

For a considerable part of the 20th century, an atmosphere prevailed among historians and the public of openness of discussion of what other considerations might have been involved in the mighty conflict than the idealism of emancipating the slaves. Life, and thus true history, is always more complicated than that. There was a willingness, not too long ago, widespread if not universal, to accord the Confederacy a little more respect than an evil dark thing that had to be destroyed, and to notice that its destroyers did not always wear haloes.

The professional historians of the 21st century have repudiated and now ignore all the progress made by their predecessors toward a more sophisticated and impartial understanding. They have returned zealously to the original party linethe war was about slavery and nothing but slavery. Any contrary interpretation is beneath consideration and its advocates are dismissed as too ignorant to understand what the experts have decreed to be true. This has nothing to do with historical expertise, but resembles the blackballing exercised by an exclusive club. It has nothing to do with the understanding of history, which should be the product of vigorous, ongoing investigation and debate. It has to do with the conformity of thought enforced by Political Correctness and with the obsession with race that marks recent American history.

Dr. Pace, though not a professional, works with the method and skill of a real historian. He brings to light material that has nowhere else been gathered together or so cogently, that casts the great war in a very different than the official light. The author also demonstrates a quality that most historians lacka mature wisdom about human motives and behaviour. No honest person who reads Dr. Paces labour, a work of many years of research and thought, will ever again think that the great war of 18611865 was an exercise of righteousness in the suppression of evil.

American public discourse has long been a matter of abstractionsequality, war to end all wars, Great Society, global democracythings that never have existed and never will. We are even told that Americans are not a people but a proposition as decreed by Lincoln. This strange national proclivity perhaps owes something to the minds of Massachusetts Puritans poisoned by Petrus Ramus and to the ideological zeal of the German revolutionaries who flocked to Lincolns cause. It certainly reflects the pretentiousness of shallow learning that American education excels in producing.

Lincoln was a master at such abstractions, heavy with empty meaning, as the author shows us. It may be that a relative immunity from abstractionism explains why the South was so long deviant from proper Americanism. Dr. Pace speaks from a real place and in love of a real people. The place may be unrecognizable to contemporary Americans, but it was (still is, here and there) very real. It is deeply Southern and thus, of course, deeply American.

Clyde N. Wilson

Carolina, 2014