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Roland book review
Why Civil War came, its theories
“History Teaches Us to Hope: Reflections on the Civil War and Southern History,” by Charles P. Roland, 353 pgs., hard cover, The University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
Reviewed by
DR. PAUL D. ROMINGER
Bugle Staff Writer
This is a book well worth your time.
Charles Pierce Roland is alumni professor emeritus of history at the University of Kentucky and is one of America’s most distinguished and respected historians of the Civil War and the American South.
Two parts of the volume concern the Civil War. Of these, attention is focused on the brilliant discussion in Part Two: "Why the War Came."
Roland quotes Lincoln's Second Inaugural saying slavery was "somehow the cause of the war," with "somehow" being a vague and elusive explanation.
Roland mentions all the prominent theories: Was this a war between democracy and aristocracy; a struggle between industrial, capitalistic society and agrarian, paternalistic society; sectional struggle for financial control; a war between those favoring centralized government versus decentralized government; a continuation of the Anglo-Saxon versus Celtic conflict, or religious society versus atheistic society?
Roland revisits the Charles Beard Civil War economic theory – Northern industrialism vs. Southern agrarianism, now getting renewed interest, to show the complexity of causes. And he discusses the questions asked in the 1930s and 1940s - Was this a war that had no fundamental cause and could have been avoided?
He quotes James McPherson of Princeton in 1983 that the South's pre-Civil War version of America departed less from the revolutionary model than did that of the North. The South was fighting to preserve traditions, rights and values, including limited government. The North was fighting to preserve the Union.
Roland cites Louisiana State University’s Bell I. Wiley who maintained that it is not fair to judge the causes of the war on the basis of today's concepts about the nation and the states, and beyond this to what was viewed as sincere and honorable at that time.
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