By Joshua S. Treviño
Wednesday, August 05, 2026
Wesley J. Smith aptly exposed the absurdity of Anthony Conwright’s essay in the New York Times denouncing
the use of “Civil War” to describe, well, the Civil War. As Smith notes, the
nomenclature, in addition to being objectively defensible, was invoked by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, and that
ought to be the final word on the question. Certainly nothing prevents
Conwright from using his preferred name for the war, the “Slaveholders’
Rebellion against the United States,” just as Southern diehards may use “War of
Northern Aggression” as they wish. Neither will get far, for good reason.
One element that Smith notes deserves a bit of expansion,
as it involves one of the pressing crises of our time in the use and abuse of
history. Smith correctly states that “Conwright is furious about Trump’s
January 6 pardons,” and this proximate motivation likely has quite a bit more
to do with the essay, and the Times‘ decision to publish it, than any
concern for history as such.
In the classic sitcom Arrested Development, one of
the gags involves the dim-witted Buster Bluth, who takes revenge on a maid by
throwing away what he believes to be her favorite toy: a vacuum cleaner. This
is broadly the relationship of much of the American left to American history,
which engages the topic solely through the lens of presentist politics and what
it imagines its enemies hold dear. (As it happens, melting down a statue of
Robert E. Lee did not at all affect the reelection of Donald J. Trump.)
A critical mass of those on the left are gripped by the conviction that they
are themselves merely the latest participants in a grand drama across
centuries, in which a virtuous faction of Americans (themselves) is charged
with the holy mission of subduing a villainous faction (everyone else). In this
narrative framework, a strike at the Civil War South of the 1860s is a strike
at the American right of the 2020s: never mind that the motivating fulcrum of
the latter is, these days, arguably in the Great Lakes states and Northeast.
(Never mind, too, that the foremost proponents of Calhounian democracy in
modern America have been on the left for the past generation.) There is a
civilizing mission at hand, and it is all-encompassing.
The roots of this pretense are in the Civil War, although
not ours. The English Civil War of the mid-17th century established a
Puritan–Cavalier divide that was very much alive and recognized as
fundamentally causative in the American Civil War, and continues to shape
American politics four centuries on. That deserves more exposition than a Corner
post: soon.
As I wrote in my National Review essay on the uses and abuses of
Second World War history, the imperative is not to eschew the use of
history in politics but to understand the history thus used. That
understanding is, to be charitable, limited in cases like Conwright’s, and the
American left’s in general. The American Civil War was not monocausal, even as
there is little credible disputation that the bleeding civic wound of slavery
was at its center. Look to the Virginia secession convention of 1861, in which the
secessionists resoundingly lost the vote — only to win it when it when
reconvened after Fort Sumter and the federal call for volunteers. What is the
lesson from history there? Well, there’s a reason we still discuss it after
more than a century and a half. The risk in declarative, conversation-ending
redefinitions does not accrue to the American right but to American civics left
and right, which in losing the ability to discuss history loses the
ability to discuss the present, and therefore in time the capacity for
self-governance.
The reality is that attacking the South, or the
Confederacy, or the historiography of the American Civil War through the lens
of present-day politics does little to impede or hinder the American right
today. It does, however, achieve something sinister and malign, not in how it
shapes the right but in how it shapes the left. The American right does not
understand itself to be the inheritor of the Southern cause: the proposition is
absurd. (How, one may ask, does one fit Buckley, Nixon, Reagan, Trump, Vance,
and the decisive Pennsylvania/Michigan/Wisconsin swing voter into that?)
But the large and meaningful segment of the American left that sees itself as
the inheritor of the Union cause fixates on only one aspect of that cause.
Those so fixated do not perceive themselves as aligned with the
still-breathtaking civic generosity, patriotism, and vision of Lincoln, Grant,
Sherman, or Chamberlain. Here too their grasp of history is narrow,
constricted, and telling of who they are and what they intend for us. Their
part for themselves is solely in the Shenandoah, or Georgia, bearing torches
and arms, the instruments of vengeance — and destroying all before them.
No comments:
Post a Comment