Why Americans Are Satisfied with Simple Explanations of Foreign Wars

The Civil War is the only war in American history in which it was primarily the losers who were allowed to tell the story. North and South, it was the "Lost Cause" that captured the popular imagination. For a full century, the tragic romance of the South's "Lost Cause" was unfolded in the most popular novels, in the most popular play of the late nineteenth century, Shenandoah, and in motion pictures, from Hollywood's first extravaganza, the wildly acclaimed Birth of a Nation, idealizing the Ku Klux Klan, to the greatest box office success, Gone with the Wind.

This way of interpreting the Civil War stands in stark contrast to the way all other American wars have been interpreted. Wars require the sacrifice of human life, the highest of human values. Wars are therefore customarily justified by other high values. Even the shabbiest military adventures are often explained by some version of "these died so that the nation might live free."

It might appear that, of all American wars, the Union cause would have the best claim to such high ground. The Union victory put back together a broken nation and freed four million slaves. But the most popular heroes of literature and film fought for a slave society and to make permanent the broken nation. And the conflict is remembered as a tragic misunderstanding between the "North" and the "South." Why this anomaly?

The victorious Republicans found it less awkward to allow the defeated Southerners to tell about the cause that they lost than it was for the winners to tell about the cause that they betrayed. After the war the Republicans and their financial backers became less interested in full freedom for blacks and democratic institutions in the South than in restoring the flow of plantation mortgage payments to northern banks and the flow of raw materials, produced by cheap southern labor, to northern industry. As a result, the GOP, with the acquiescence of the Democrats, came to an understanding with the ex-Confederates and abandoned their Southern black and white Unionist allies to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. Behind the heroic legend of the "Lost Cause" stands the dark secret of how the principle issues of the Civil War were settled.

The legacy of the Civil War is different from that of other American wars in another respect: historians have looked more closely at its causes and at the issues that were at stake. And these have been the subject of on-going debate. The causes and issues of the nation's other wars have stirred far less controversy, less scrutiny. For the nation's foreign wars, historians have shown a greater willingness to accept as definitive whatever reason a president may give for leading Americans into war.

The Mexican War, for example, was publicly justified by the announcement of President Polk that there had been an unprovoked attack on American forces. This "cause" of the war was challenged on the floor of the House by Representative Abraham Lincoln. But he suffered a severe political battering.

Few historians have been as bold as Lincoln, either in challenging a president's justification for a war or telling the truth about it later. To be sure, historians, especially in works intended chiefly for other scholars, have considered the controversies and the political pressures surrounding a president deciding for war. But the approach is still one-sided. How much has been said, for example, about the discussions of Japanese leaders prior to their attack on Pearl Harbor or those of North Korean leaders before their invasion of South Korea?

As for history textbooks, what they offer for the coming of foreign wars is even more ethnocentric than that offered in scholarly works. The writers of history textbooks are typically far more generously rewarded than those writing scholarly works, but they are more closely monitored by state and local authorities. The economics and politics of textbook adoption thus inspire writing in which "patriotism" limits critical rigor. Such official history has persuaded many in each rising generation that foreign wars are caused by foreigners.

But there is no way that historians of the Civil War, whether writing scholarly monographs or textbooks, could view that conflict through the narrow lens of ethnocentric "patriotism." Responsibility is necessarily focused on things that we know best, American politics and American institutions. Debates about the causes and issues of the war have never ceased.

For a hundred years the historians of the "Lost Cause" held the field. As they saw it, for Southerners the issues of slavery and preserving the Union were incidental. What Southerners really fought for was the integrity of the sovereign states and the Constitution as they understood it. Closely related was the idea that the war had been caused by "extremists" on both sides. But it was antislavery "extremists" who were most responsible. This "Southern" view became national. And like the "Lost Cause" novels, dramas and films, it camouflaged a scandal: while Lincoln had become a national icon, the party of Lincoln had now become the party of John D. Rockefeller and had recanted full citizenship and civil rights for blacks.

In the 1950s, the eruption of the Black Freedom Movement turned around Civil War scholarship. Heretofore few historians had defended the cause of black Americans, or their white abolitionists and Radical allies. And the views of even these writers had been largely excluded from mainstream scholarship. Now, "Lost Cause" history gave way to civil rights history. A new generation of scholars saw the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction as a struggle between those who stood for a free labor society and for equal legal rights for whites and blacks against those who stood for slavery and a "white man's country."

The Civil War stands alone in the sophistication of its historiography. No educated American would take seriously a person who said the war came because the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. And it is the only American war in which we now hear the story of both sides. All the principle actors have been investigated, prosecuted and defended. If we knew as much about the nation's other wars there might be fewer of them.