MDDM slavery WAS Re: Re[2]: Jefferson's Pillow

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<"[...]   More convincingly than any other historian I know of,

Blight explains one of the most troubling questions for the understanding

of American history: why it became accepted wisdom from the 1870s to the

1960s, among American historians as well as white students from grade

school through college, that states' rights, not slavery, was the cause of

the Civil War or, as many Southerners have long insisted on our calling it,

"the War Between the States." >>

Not wishing to pick a personal fight with Millison here.  However:

I'm not sure what to make of this, it being an incomplete excerpt of what 
someone has written about someone else's book.  Whereas, I suppose I agree 
with the general thrust that much--though by no means all--of America would 
rather not dwell on its own racist past, the examples cited make it seem like 
a poorly crafted argument.

I don't believe that the  grotesque ivy league professor quoted represents 
anything like a mainstream point of view, or even other than a bizarre anomal
y, either in 1947 or, more unbelievably, in the 1960s.  And I don't think 
that Uncle Remus and, fifty years later, Gone With the Wind, are part a 
single continuum or that they are are  in any way relevant to the way 
historians thought and wrote about the Civil War over a ninety year period.  
There were certainly people who were willing to believe in happy negroes 
dancing round the cat o' nine tails, and there undoubtedly still are, but 
these ideas are generally and rightfully marginalized as ludicrous.

I also question the premise here, that downplaying the race/slavery reasons 
for the Civil War  was to assuage American guilt, to accommodate "the 
yearning for a 'redemptive' sectional reconciliation."  I think for many, 
even most, Americans it is painful that the war wasn't fought for racial 
reasons and believe as a matter of faith that it was, "to free the slaves."  
My best understanding is that the war was fought to prevent Confederate 
secession and that secession became an issue (once delayed by the Missouri 
compromise) over the extension or not of slavery into the then territories.  
In short, power politics and failed compromise.  It seems a reason far from 
America's loftiest ideas of itself.  

Might it be that the writer or reviewer is a southerner?