afreema3's review against another edition
Read for my course on the American Radical Tradition
It was interesting, but my one problem Prof. Oakes' book is that he constantly refers to Radical Republicans and Radical antislavery Politicians, but never really explains why they were radical. Here is a quote that made me realize this, "But for Giddings and most antislavery politicians including radicals like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens" pg. 155. Throughout the book Oakes says something along the lines "radicals like so-and-so and Thaddeus Stevens" or "radicals like Thaddeus Stevens and so-and-so" but he never explains who Stevens is or what makes him a radical compared to Lincoln. I may have missed something, but I find it weird that Oakes does not state this or even state who Thaddeus Stevens was, even though he quotes him in the first chapter. This book is definitely meant for people that are familiar with the time period and the History of American political antislavery. I know who Thaddeus Stevens is because he was the congressman for my home of Lancaster, I've visited his house, know people that went/go to Thaddeus Stevens College as well as visited the campus, and watched Tommy Lee-Jones portray him in Lincoln, but if you don't have the connection to Stevens then the constant reference to "the radical Thaddeus Stevens" would be confusing. Thaddeus Stevens is just one example of a multitude of names that appear throughout the book with no context.
I guess I'm somewhat bugged by this because my professors would definitely take points off for not giving context to a name I just randomly throw in. I was in class discussing Eugene Debs and other prominent Socialist and Union activists and was stopped in the middle of my sentence by my professor telling me to explain who Eugene Debs was.
I will just say though that this book was extremely informative and interesting, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in Civil War history or pre-Civil War history. I was just bugged by the constant name drop and never the context.
It was interesting, but my one problem Prof. Oakes' book is that he constantly refers to Radical Republicans and Radical antislavery Politicians, but never really explains why they were radical. Here is a quote that made me realize this, "But for Giddings and most antislavery politicians including radicals like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens" pg. 155. Throughout the book Oakes says something along the lines "radicals like so-and-so and Thaddeus Stevens" or "radicals like Thaddeus Stevens and so-and-so" but he never explains who Stevens is or what makes him a radical compared to Lincoln. I may have missed something, but I find it weird that Oakes does not state this or even state who Thaddeus Stevens was, even though he quotes him in the first chapter. This book is definitely meant for people that are familiar with the time period and the History of American political antislavery. I know who Thaddeus Stevens is because he was the congressman for my home of Lancaster, I've visited his house, know people that went/go to Thaddeus Stevens College as well as visited the campus, and watched Tommy Lee-Jones portray him in Lincoln, but if you don't have the connection to Stevens then the constant reference to "the radical Thaddeus Stevens" would be confusing. Thaddeus Stevens is just one example of a multitude of names that appear throughout the book with no context.
I guess I'm somewhat bugged by this because my professors would definitely take points off for not giving context to a name I just randomly throw in. I was in class discussing Eugene Debs and other prominent Socialist and Union activists and was stopped in the middle of my sentence by my professor telling me to explain who Eugene Debs was.
I will just say though that this book was extremely informative and interesting, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in Civil War history or pre-Civil War history. I was just bugged by the constant name drop and never the context.
balzat28's review
3.0
Twenty-five years after the end of the American Civil War, small groups of Southerners arose to rewrite its story. Led--but in no way started--by organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the United Confederate Veterans, the movement's goal was simple: scrutinize school textbooks and demand a more sympathetic view of the South, its attitudes toward slavery, and its reasons for fighting the Civil War. This was an almost direct extension of the pro-slavery propaganda promulgated by elected Southern officials during the war, who had depicted Union soldiers as elements of an unwarranted full-scale invasion and the emancipation of their slaves as the theft of lawfully-protected and God-given property. Unlike this propaganda, however, the crusade to indoctrinate children through revisionism was done to justify and expunge the sins that had led to war in the first place, and to make sure that false information was passed down as fact in the generations to come.
As recounted by historian James McPherson, some of the most overt examples of revisionism from the post-war South could be found in textbooks and the recommendations of grassroots committees. There was Susan Pendleton Lee, whose history of the United States included a justification of not only slavery--after all, she said, "hundreds of thousands of African savages had been Christianized under its influence"--but the Ku Klux Klan, which she claimed to be necessary "for protection against...outrages committed by misguided negroes.” There was also Mildred R. Rutherford, whose criteria for the instant rejection of a textbook, according to McPherson, included any book asserting that "the South fought to hold her slaves," that "speaks of the slaveholders of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves," or that "glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis." (Even more ridiculous, the recommended corrections for these alleged errors included an attempt to depict the Southern slave-owners as victims: "Southern men were anxious for the slaves to be free. They were studying earnestly the problem of freedom, when Northern fanatical Abolitionists took matters into their own hands.")*
This kind of revisionism, now referred to as "neoconfederate," has remained strong in the 150 years since the war ended, and in many cases the lies have remained exactly the same: that the North was the aggressor and the South was simply exercising "state's rights," which was guaranteed by the Constitution; that secession was about taxes instead of slavery, and that the South was embracing the same civil disobedience of the Founding Fathers when they broke away from England; that slavery was already a waning institution, one that should have been "allowed" to die a natural, free-market death; and that Lincoln could have bought Southern slaves their freedom with federal money, sparing the nation the great costs of the Civil War.
It is these last two ideas--that the Civil War could have been prevented with proactive measures--that historian James Oakes hopes to debunk with his own short study of the subject, which traces the political and social discourse leading up to the Civil War. In 180 pages, Oakes demonstrates just how immovable the two opposing sides were when it came to slavery, with abolitionists arguing for full emancipation and the pro-slavery factions basing their arguments on a misreading of the Constitution, passages cherry-picked from the Bible, and bigoted ideas about the inferiority of other races. (Oakes makes sure to points out that many Northerners held these same despicable views on racial superiority, though these attitudes were much more widespread in the slave states.) Believing that a compromise could have been reached to avert the war, even after so many previous compromises had only exacerbated the issue, is foolish; after all, if you believe that your ideas are ethically and Constitutionally correct, why would your side bargain them away?
Oakes further discusses the long history of emancipation through military intervention--that is to say, during war--as a viable military and humanitarian strategy and not the "theft of property," thereby disproving the idea that slaves were anything other than subjugated human beings. Even during the Revolutionary War, before our nation's misguided belief in slavery was enshrined into law, military leaders on both sides understood the importance of slaves to achieving decisive victories, and promises of freedom were extended in order to gain loyalty and manpower in the fight over colonial control. (In the end, slaves who fought for the British were taken back to England by the thousands, where they could live in a society that had already abolished the practice.) Because the Confederacy was so devoted to the idea that slaves were property, they did not follow suit and offer freedom in exchange for military service, even though, as Oakes points out, a quarter-million conscripted slaves could easily have changed the dynamic of the war for the South; and counting as only six percent of the overall slave population, their freedom after the war would have had a negligible effect on the South. (This is an admittedly perverse way to think about history, but it's also factually sound and demonstrates once again the severity of the Confederacy's racism. What's more, a thought experiment, especially when supported with statistics and used only to highlight an important point, is still far more acceptable than revisionism.)
Oakes' book is in no way a comprehensive refutation of Civil War revisionism, and at times his research suffers from a narrowness that takes the speeches and writings of a few and applies them broadly across both sides. This is a worrisome, albeit editorially sound, practice only because it mirrors the very same strategy of neoconfederates when they take the words of a half-dozen minor historical figures and conflate them to give the appearance of a majority viewpoint. That's not to say Oakes should have quoted or cited as many politicians as possible, and the people he does cite are some of the most important from that era--Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Thaddeus Stephens, and so on. But this book--based, Oakes states at the end, on a series of lectures he delivered--could and should have been much longer. A cursory look online reveals that Civil War revisionism has not been given the due scrutiny it deserves, at least not in book form. (Even the McPherson text I quoted before is derived from an essay about the Civil War rather than a fully realized book all its own.) Neoconfederate writings and viewpoints have not lessened with the passage of time, and they will not lessen in the years to come; someone needs to debunk as much of the mythologized South as possible, and Oakes comes awfully close. Where history is concerned, however, close is not good enough.
*All of the information on post-war revisionism and textbook committees comes from the work of James McPherson, a portion of which can be read at the blog of Kevin Levin. The information I have presented herein is either quoted directly from McPherson's work or are summaries and paraphrases presented by Levin.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
As recounted by historian James McPherson, some of the most overt examples of revisionism from the post-war South could be found in textbooks and the recommendations of grassroots committees. There was Susan Pendleton Lee, whose history of the United States included a justification of not only slavery--after all, she said, "hundreds of thousands of African savages had been Christianized under its influence"--but the Ku Klux Klan, which she claimed to be necessary "for protection against...outrages committed by misguided negroes.” There was also Mildred R. Rutherford, whose criteria for the instant rejection of a textbook, according to McPherson, included any book asserting that "the South fought to hold her slaves," that "speaks of the slaveholders of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves," or that "glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis." (Even more ridiculous, the recommended corrections for these alleged errors included an attempt to depict the Southern slave-owners as victims: "Southern men were anxious for the slaves to be free. They were studying earnestly the problem of freedom, when Northern fanatical Abolitionists took matters into their own hands.")*
This kind of revisionism, now referred to as "neoconfederate," has remained strong in the 150 years since the war ended, and in many cases the lies have remained exactly the same: that the North was the aggressor and the South was simply exercising "state's rights," which was guaranteed by the Constitution; that secession was about taxes instead of slavery, and that the South was embracing the same civil disobedience of the Founding Fathers when they broke away from England; that slavery was already a waning institution, one that should have been "allowed" to die a natural, free-market death; and that Lincoln could have bought Southern slaves their freedom with federal money, sparing the nation the great costs of the Civil War.
It is these last two ideas--that the Civil War could have been prevented with proactive measures--that historian James Oakes hopes to debunk with his own short study of the subject, which traces the political and social discourse leading up to the Civil War. In 180 pages, Oakes demonstrates just how immovable the two opposing sides were when it came to slavery, with abolitionists arguing for full emancipation and the pro-slavery factions basing their arguments on a misreading of the Constitution, passages cherry-picked from the Bible, and bigoted ideas about the inferiority of other races. (Oakes makes sure to points out that many Northerners held these same despicable views on racial superiority, though these attitudes were much more widespread in the slave states.) Believing that a compromise could have been reached to avert the war, even after so many previous compromises had only exacerbated the issue, is foolish; after all, if you believe that your ideas are ethically and Constitutionally correct, why would your side bargain them away?
Oakes further discusses the long history of emancipation through military intervention--that is to say, during war--as a viable military and humanitarian strategy and not the "theft of property," thereby disproving the idea that slaves were anything other than subjugated human beings. Even during the Revolutionary War, before our nation's misguided belief in slavery was enshrined into law, military leaders on both sides understood the importance of slaves to achieving decisive victories, and promises of freedom were extended in order to gain loyalty and manpower in the fight over colonial control. (In the end, slaves who fought for the British were taken back to England by the thousands, where they could live in a society that had already abolished the practice.) Because the Confederacy was so devoted to the idea that slaves were property, they did not follow suit and offer freedom in exchange for military service, even though, as Oakes points out, a quarter-million conscripted slaves could easily have changed the dynamic of the war for the South; and counting as only six percent of the overall slave population, their freedom after the war would have had a negligible effect on the South. (This is an admittedly perverse way to think about history, but it's also factually sound and demonstrates once again the severity of the Confederacy's racism. What's more, a thought experiment, especially when supported with statistics and used only to highlight an important point, is still far more acceptable than revisionism.)
Oakes' book is in no way a comprehensive refutation of Civil War revisionism, and at times his research suffers from a narrowness that takes the speeches and writings of a few and applies them broadly across both sides. This is a worrisome, albeit editorially sound, practice only because it mirrors the very same strategy of neoconfederates when they take the words of a half-dozen minor historical figures and conflate them to give the appearance of a majority viewpoint. That's not to say Oakes should have quoted or cited as many politicians as possible, and the people he does cite are some of the most important from that era--Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Thaddeus Stephens, and so on. But this book--based, Oakes states at the end, on a series of lectures he delivered--could and should have been much longer. A cursory look online reveals that Civil War revisionism has not been given the due scrutiny it deserves, at least not in book form. (Even the McPherson text I quoted before is derived from an essay about the Civil War rather than a fully realized book all its own.) Neoconfederate writings and viewpoints have not lessened with the passage of time, and they will not lessen in the years to come; someone needs to debunk as much of the mythologized South as possible, and Oakes comes awfully close. Where history is concerned, however, close is not good enough.
*All of the information on post-war revisionism and textbook committees comes from the work of James McPherson, a portion of which can be read at the blog of Kevin Levin. The information I have presented herein is either quoted directly from McPherson's work or are summaries and paraphrases presented by Levin.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
greeniezona's review against another edition
3.0
This book approaches the Civil War with a laser focus -- illuminating only its tight path through the conflict in four narrow realms -- the prevalence among Northern abolitionists of the idea that slavery would end itself if only it could be strictly restrained to existing slave states (like "a scorpion girt by fire" -- it would sting itself to death), the conflicting interpretations of law and the Constitution arising from the starting proposition that slaves were either men OR property, the inextricability of race relations from the issue of slavery, and a history of wartime emancipation in the United States.
I am sure that I would have found this book irritating had I not read it already deep in the context of my Less Stupid Civil War Reading Group. As it was, it brought some interesting context to my developing understanding of the era. But really, otherwise, the intense focus and sometimes jarring shifts in such would be very alienating. Not a good book to start with if you want to understand the Civil War.
But as a supplement -- it was interesting to see the complement of [b:Battle Cry of Freedom|35100|Battle Cry of Freedom|James M. McPherson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388185755s/35100.jpg|35039]'s portrayal of pre-war Southerners as near-panicked that slavery be able to extend its reach -- into the territories, into Central America, etc., so that it shouldn't die -- with the portrayal that Northern abolitionists had the same idea, but in reverse. The history of military emancipation was also interesting, as I had basically no idea of it as a factor in wars prior to the Civil War. Also of note was the bit on the use of postmasters to suppress free (abolitionist) speech in slave states.
Interesting, if sometimes disjointed.
I am sure that I would have found this book irritating had I not read it already deep in the context of my Less Stupid Civil War Reading Group. As it was, it brought some interesting context to my developing understanding of the era. But really, otherwise, the intense focus and sometimes jarring shifts in such would be very alienating. Not a good book to start with if you want to understand the Civil War.
But as a supplement -- it was interesting to see the complement of [b:Battle Cry of Freedom|35100|Battle Cry of Freedom|James M. McPherson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388185755s/35100.jpg|35039]'s portrayal of pre-war Southerners as near-panicked that slavery be able to extend its reach -- into the territories, into Central America, etc., so that it shouldn't die -- with the portrayal that Northern abolitionists had the same idea, but in reverse. The history of military emancipation was also interesting, as I had basically no idea of it as a factor in wars prior to the Civil War. Also of note was the bit on the use of postmasters to suppress free (abolitionist) speech in slave states.
Interesting, if sometimes disjointed.
archytas's review
2.0
I picked this book up because I rather foolishly thought it might look at the movements against slavery - both the Northern anti-abolitionist movements, and the activities and actions of slaves themselves, the latter of which was decisive in defeating slavery, and yet, somehow, never seems to warrant serious consideration. Rather, this is a tightly written analysis of the writings of major Republicans and Democrats - mostly Lincoln - in the lead up to the war. Cause heaven knows, the world needs another look at that. The author is seeking to argue that the Republicans believed slavery could be dispensed with by making it untenable, without ever having to centrally abolish it; and then; in a final chapter the length of the rest of the book, argues that wartime emancipation was well-recognised as a legitimate war time tactic. I can only assume that this book was written to refute a Confederate view that the war was all about states rights, and that emancipating a man's slaves was downright unfair tactically. I shudder to think such an argument is needed, but that doesn't mean it isn't.
Having said that, I just end up finding this approach, like most civil war scholarship, so dismissive it is offensive. The reason that emancipating slaves is an *effective* war time tactic is that it provides a scant increase in hope to slaves. African-American slaves who fought back, who ran, who joined the Union Armies in staggering numbers, who sabotaged and destroyed equipment, are not just a white man's tactic. They were men and women who fought for and won an end to enslavement. So why is it so hard to find their stories?
Having said that, I just end up finding this approach, like most civil war scholarship, so dismissive it is offensive. The reason that emancipating slaves is an *effective* war time tactic is that it provides a scant increase in hope to slaves. African-American slaves who fought back, who ran, who joined the Union Armies in staggering numbers, who sabotaged and destroyed equipment, are not just a white man's tactic. They were men and women who fought for and won an end to enslavement. So why is it so hard to find their stories?
depost83's review
4.0
A thorough look into the real causes of the Civil War.
Significant takeaways:
(1) the Republican Party considered freedom national or federal, and slavery sectional (states and regions). As a result, the Party's tactic--also known as the scorpion's sting--was to limit or impede slavery for the purposes of watching slavery dwindle away into the realm of nonexistence.
(2) Military emancipation: there is large chapter on this subject and it even goes as far as to say that the Confederacy might have saved itself had it utilized the policy of freeing some slaves in return for defending Southern independence.
(3) Constitutional powers: nothing in the Constitution gave Congress the power to abolish slavery in states where it already existed. This made a war explicitly for the purpose of abolishing slavery impossible, which is why the 'scorpion sting' was the best alternative.
Significant takeaways:
(1) the Republican Party considered freedom national or federal, and slavery sectional (states and regions). As a result, the Party's tactic--also known as the scorpion's sting--was to limit or impede slavery for the purposes of watching slavery dwindle away into the realm of nonexistence.
(2) Military emancipation: there is large chapter on this subject and it even goes as far as to say that the Confederacy might have saved itself had it utilized the policy of freeing some slaves in return for defending Southern independence.
(3) Constitutional powers: nothing in the Constitution gave Congress the power to abolish slavery in states where it already existed. This made a war explicitly for the purpose of abolishing slavery impossible, which is why the 'scorpion sting' was the best alternative.
sprinklesugarbunbun's review
4.0
It was an easy, interesting read. While my class complained about the repetition, I was rather unfazed by it. It's a thesis after all. You're going to re-state important points of the argument, and it wasn't all that repetitive. The chapters had interesting topics that were all linked to an over-arching theme: antislavery/proslavery sentiments within the mid-1800s. I came away with a better understanding of the ideology of the era's congress (and from them, a reflection of the parties and their sects).
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