Perspectives & Reflections

Our newsletter includes independent opinions of scholars invited to comment on the Center and its approach. Here is a sample of different perspectives from recent issues.

James M. McPherson, Ph.D., George Henry Davis '86

Professor of History, Princeton University

The Civil War was probably the pivotal event in our history, even more important, perhaps, than the American Revolution. The Revolution and the Constitution left unresolved two crucial questions that threatened to divide and destroy the creation of the Founding Fathers. First, whether this fragile experiment in the republican form of government and the democratic form of participation in government would survive the divisive pressures that threatened to tear it apart. And second, the question of the place of slavery in a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created with an equal right to liberty.

James O. Horton, Ph.D., Benjamin Banneker

Professor of American Studies, The George Washington University, and Director of the African American Communities Project of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Although the best historical scholars over the last generation or more have argued convincingly that slavery and race were at the heart of [the Civil War], and although most Americans at the time of the war understood this fact and said so, today that argument is more difficult to make beyond the range of professional historical discussion. For many Americans "The War," as it is still referred to, remains too personal to be considered dispassionately...Evidence of slavery's significance in bringing on secession and the war that followed is abundant in the letters, speeches, articles, and resolutions written by those who established and supported the Confederacy. While the United States did not seek abolition in the slaveholding states at the start of the war, the testimony of Confederate leaders and their supporters makes it very clear that slavery was at the core of what most Southerners considered the "Southern way of life." This is the cause for which many Southern whites, slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike, were willing to leave the United States.

William J. Cooper, Jr.

Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University, Trustee of the Museum of the Confederacy, and author of Jefferson Davis, American

Why did Confederates fight? It is so easy for us today to oversimplify and slide over complexities, to glorify or demonize the people we study instead of looking at them as human beings. While the Confederacy came into existence to defend slavery, Confederates actually fought for many reasons. Psychologically speaking, to defend their homeland was the most important. Making the distinction between the political origins of the Confederacy and the fundamental motivation of its people helps us understand how many modern-day Southerners can honor their Confederate ancestors while regretting that slavery and notions of white supremacy ever blighted the South.