Last Thursday a rancid article appeared on Salon.com, written by
the magazine’s editor Joan Walsh. Titled “Everything you know
about the Civil War is wrong”, it is a fawning review of David
Goldfield’s newly published “America Aflame: How the Civil War
Created a Nation.” Walsh writes:
On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Americans
are engaged in new debates over what it was about. Southern
revisionists have long tried to claim it wasn’t about slavery, but
rather “Northern aggression” – which is a tough sell since they
seceded from the Union despite Lincoln’s attempts at compromise on
slavery, and then attacked the federal Fort Sumter in South
Carolina. That would be Southern aggression, by any standard.
But there’s still room for smart revisionism. Instead of the
traditional view that finds the Civil War a great moral and
political triumph, David Goldfield calls it “America’s greatest
failure” in his fascinating new book, “America Aflame: How the
Civil War Created a Nation.” It killed a half-million Americans
and devastated the South for generations, maybe through today. And
while many Northern Republicans came to embrace abolishing slavery
as one of the war’s goals, Goldfield shows that Southerners are
partly right when they say the war’s main thrust was to establish
Northern domination, in business and in culture. Most
controversially, Goldfield argues passionately — with strong data
and argument, but not entirely convincingly — that the Civil War
was a mistake. Instead of liberating African Americans, he says,
it left them subject to poverty, sharecropping and Jim Crow
violence and probably retarded their progress to become free citizens.
Apparently this kind of objectively pro-secessionist revisionism
has gladdened the hearts of at least one racist website in the
South. The Southern Nationalist Network endorses Walsh’s review,
stating “It’s … pleasantly surprising that Salon.com has is
running an article by Joan Walsh which reviews David Goldfield’s
new book America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. While
Walsh’s article and Goldfield’s book are not Southern-friendly,
they do attack many of the myths supporting the Yankee view of
American history. For this reason, Walsh’s article should be
welcomed and applauded by Southern nationalists.”
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/was-the-civil-war-a-mistake/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
