Thursday, Jan 17, 2013 06:45 AM CST
Just how factual is “Lincoln”?
Historians question whether Spielberg has made the 16th president into an unrealistic hero
By Daniel D'Addario
The debate over the facts in “Zero Dark Thirty” rages on, as the sources behind Kathryn Bigelow’s self-proclaimed work of cinematic journalism remain obscure. Fortunately for Steven Spielberg, his film has not been the target of media scrutiny. But while “Lincoln” arguably leads the field for the best picture Academy Award and is a huge financial hit, there are historians who believe the film paints a simplistic view of the Great Emancipator and the process of passing the 13th Amendment.
“It coheres, in some ways, very well, and, in some ways, not so well,” says Bruce Levine, a historian from the University of Illinois who just published the well-received Civil War history “The Fall of the House of Dixie.” ”I give them a mixed review.”
The film’s focus on a narrow period of history — from after the 1864 election to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination — necessarily overemphasizes Lincoln’s role in ending an institution that was nearing its death, said Levine. “There are fundamental gaps in ‘Lincoln.’ Watching the film, you don’t know that by the time of the events described, slavery is already badly undermined — slaves have been running away from their masters in border states and Confederate states even before fighting began.”
Indeed, Levine argues, the 13th Amendment fight that the film paints as a nail-biter was not really in doubt. “The 1864 election gave Republicans enough votes in Congress,” he said, “so that when the new Congress convened, the Republicans could have passed a constitutional amendment with their new Congress … historians are really loath to say anything is inevitable, but the passage of this amendment was almost a foregone conclusion.” Sure, Lincoln’s force of will in taking on slavery was admirable and instrumental in this instance — but slavery may indeed have been doomed to begin with, thanks to the abolitionist movement.
This rising tide — whereby the end was drawing near despite the film’s attempts to portray slavery as a thriving institution — bothered Columbia professor Eric Foner as well. Foner, who won a Pulitzer for his book “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery,” questioned the film’s inside-the-Beltway focus for restricting viewers’ understanding of just how quickly slavery was dying across the North and South. “You get no sense that the end of slavery is happening all over the place: In the South, for instance, with armies freeing slaves, and slaves rising up to take over plantations. It was a very chaotic moment and dramatic moment. This is the worst thing you can say about a Hollywood movie: It’s kind of boring compared to the drama in the nation.”
The film is based on a section of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals” dealing with the end of slavery (albeit a short section: “She must have a very good lawyer to get her name on the screen,” cracked Foner). The Columbia professor believes “Lincoln” privileges psychological insight into Lincoln at the expense of a panoramic view of the national scene. “People read Doris’ book for the same reason they read Jane Austen — to get inside human character. They don’t read it for the full, big, chaotic end of slavery, with a lot of historical actors.”
Those actors include African-Americans, who are, as a New York Times Op-Ed argued, passive when not absent in “Lincoln”: There’s a brief opening scene in which black soldiers reverently recite the Gettysburg Address to the president and there’s Mary Todd Lincoln’s confidante Elizabeth Keckley, who is portrayed as a quietly strong seamstress, though in reality, she raised money for newly freed slaves. Said Foner: ”She was political, she was out there in the streets doing something. If you go to the other extreme, with ‘Django Unchained’: That’s a total fantasy, but at least it’s got black people as historical actors.”
“Lincoln” can best be understood, perhaps, as an example of Hollywood’s quest for truth, limiting its scope to known knowns — Lincoln did, in fact, preside over the rough-and-tumble passage of the 13th Amendment, and was indeed a forcefully charismatic and visionary individual — while eliding that which is more complicated. Peter S. Carmichael, the director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, praised the film for depicting the process of arm-twisting and vote-buying that went into passing the law. “Today, cynicism prevails because there’s no sense of history and how our system functions. When people confront corruption today, they think we somehow lost the purity of our government. ‘Lincoln’ should remind people that democracy is impure, hopelessly corrupt, but out of that can come powerful and inspiring change.”
And historians acknowledge that to vociferously fight Hollywood history would be an uphill battle, and not a very enjoyable one. “The historian is known as a killjoy,” said Foner. “People go to the movies and enjoy themselves and the historian comes along. One of the very good things about the movie is that it does put slavery right at the center. Nobody’s going to go away thinking the Civil War was about the tariff, or whatever.”
The context for the action of “Lincoln” — the cultural climate that made freeing all slaves possible and necessary — will remain, for now, the stuff of history books. “The existence of the movie is definitely for the good,” said Levine, “precisely because it has stirred up so much interest in this very important subject. I am happy for its existence, and I wish it had portrayed history more accurately.”
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Bruce Levine - The Fall of the House of Dixie
This book chronicles the decline and fall of The South during the Civil War. It is a sad story becaue the South brought destruction upon itself by seceeding from the Union. I will be adding to this post.
One thing I will say unequivocally: Southern slaveholders before the war remind me of today's Republicans: dumb and stupid.
One thing I will say unequivocally: Southern slaveholders before the war remind me of today's Republicans: dumb and stupid.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Endless Lincoln Comments
And I've only included a few of the more interesting comments on the Lincoln movie. FLH
.Tony Kushner's Real Source For "Lincoln"?
The Two Americas
Kushner Replies About Sources
DreamWorks Pictures Tony Kushner today received an Oscar nomination in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay for Lincoln. Lincoln is a superb film, and Kushner's script is (along with Daniel Day-Lewis's performance in the title role) the very best thing about it. He richly deserves the Oscar he will almost certainly win. But the nomination for "Best Adapted Screenplay" raises the question, "adapted from what"?
As has been widely noted, Lincoln isn't adapted in any meaningful way from its nominal source, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, which despite its many virtues dedicates only a few pages to the film's central narrative--the passage of the 13th amendment to the Constitution. The claim that the film is based ("in part") on Team of Rivals mainly attests to the fact that Steven Spielberg purchased the rights to Goodwin's book before it was even, um, written. (This was in 1999. Goodwin was at the time a historical consultant to a multimedia event called The Unfinished Journey that Spielberg was preparing as part of Washington's millennium celebration. The deal was finally "inked," as they say in Hollywood, in 2001, four years before Team of Rivals was published.)
A good case can be made that Kushner's screenplay shouldn't be eligible for the "Best Adapted" category because it wasn't really "adapted" from anything. Kushner has made clear in interviews that he did quite a bit of independent research in preparing his script--enough so that the logical category to nominate it for would be "Best Original Screenplay." Goodwin probably helped him do the research; apparently she was involved in the project after the rights were purchased. So perhaps the screenplay credit should be "based in part on help from Doris Kearns Goodwin."
But that begs the question of what, if not Team of Rivals, is Lincoln's principal source. The answer is almost certainly Michael Vorenberg's Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, first published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. Vorenberg's book (which I made my TNR "best book of 2012" pick) is widely recognized as the definitive history of the political machinations involved in passing the 13th Amendment, a subject that received scant attention prior to publication of Final Freedom because most historians have tended to focus instead on the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln is known, after all, as the Great Emancipator, not the Great Manipulator of Congress Into Codifying the Executive-Branch Freeing of Slaves, Which Only Ever Applied To Confederate States, In A Constitutional Amendment That, After Lincoln's Death, Still Required Passage In State Legislatures. Vorenberg (who, incidentally, is an associate professor of history at Brown) writes in his introduction:
Historians have written much about the fate of African Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation, but they have not been so attentive to the process by which emancipation was written into law. In part, the inattention is a natural consequence of the compartmentalization of history. Because emancipation proved to be but one stage in the process by which enslaved African Americans became legal citizens, historians have been prone to move directly from the Emancipation Proclamation to the issue of legalized racial equality. In other words, historians have skipped quickly from the proclamation to the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which granted "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws" to every American. Within this seamless narrative, the Thirteenth Amendment appears merely as a predictable epilogue to the Emancipation Procalamation or as an obligatory prologue to the Fourteenth Amendment.
We all know different now, thanks to Lincoln. But before Lincoln there was Final Freedom, a book rich in narrative detail that Kushner surely feasted on.
After I touted Vorenberg's book in TNR's year-end books roundup, he sent me a lovely letter. "If my book helped add accuracy to the film," Vorenberg wrote,
I can take some pleasure in that. Certainly there was plenty in the film that could only have come from my book. I wasn't sure whether to be flattered or shocked. I guess I'm a bit of both.
Also, your suspicion that my contribution to the film, whatever it may have been, was 'uncompensated' is accurate....
Vorenberg emphasized in a later e-mail that he feels in no way resentful about any use of his book for the film, and that by "shocked" he means "pleasantly surprised, not horrified." There was, he points out,
No reason for me to expect compensation or credit from the film makers. Films don't have to have footnotes, and it's hard to imagine how film makers could pay everyone who happens to have contributed to knowledge about a particular subject.
I asked Vorenberg for details in the film that "could only have come from my book." His reply:
I'll just give a few examples. With each one, by the way, the film makers took some understandable liberties with the facts. One episode involves the part of the film in which the Democrats try to bait Thaddeus Stevens into saying that the amendment grants "negro equality" in all respects, but Stevens sees through the gambit and responds that it grants only "equality before the law." The film does a nice job dramatizing that part of my book, though it leaves out Samuel "Sunset" Cox as Stevens's primary antagonist in that part of the debate. The omission of Cox is understandable (a film can do only so much) but too bad, as Cox was a pretty interesting character, and he played an important role throughout the amendment debate.
The film also uses my book for the specifics on how Alexander Coffroth's vote for the amendment was most likely secured--the promise of a resolution in his favor in an election controversy. Again, the film takes some liberties--there's no evidence that Lincoln or Stevens was involved in the discussions with Coffroth--but again, such liberties probably made for better film making.
The presence of African Americans in the congressional galleries at the final vote is a fact that most likely though not necessarily comes from my book....
Also, the film probably relied on my book to understand the way that the debate on the amendment was intertwined with the trip by Francis Blair, Sr. to Richmond to speak with Jefferson Davis and the ensuing trip north by the three Confederate envoys led by Alexander Stephens. The relationship between the so-called peace efforts and the amendment was complicated (I say "so-called" peace efforts because, despite the machinations and protestations on all sides, neither Abraham Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis thought that a peace could be negotiated at this point), probably more complicated than any film could depict. The film oversimplifies the connection between peace proposals and the amendment, but it does get at the important fact that these things were indeed connected.
Clearly Kushner is well within his rights to help himself to narrative details that he found in Final Freedom and elsewhere. Nobody owns history. But even if Vorenberg isn't troubled, I find it (on his behalf) a bit disappointing that neither Kushner nor Spielberg has acknowledged what a valuable resource they had in Final Freedom. (I've sent an e-mail to Kushner and will add an addendum if he replies.) Perhaps the lawyers told them they'd better not. And I find it downright galling that when you go to Lincoln's Web site and click on "publishing" you'll find links to Team of Rivals; to a movie-tie-in essay collection called Lincoln: A President For The Ages to which Vorenberg did not contribute; to a couple of movie-tie in books about the making of the film; and to Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery In America, a book that Lincoln historian Harold Holzer published a couple of months ago as yet another tie-in to the film. You'll find all these books, and that's terrific, let's hope lots of people read them. But you won't find a link to Final Freedom.
Vorenberg, incidentally, is (like me) a Lincoln fan. "I'm glad that it got so many Oscar nominations," he e-mailed me, "and I suspect it will have many Oscar victories. The renewed press may help get even more people to go see it. I'm not making any plans to retire on my book royalties, but I'm happy that an interesting and important chapter of history is getting out to a broader public."
Update, 3:15 p.m.: Slate just posted a good piece on all this by Aisha Harris. Here's what Harris got out of Kushner:
I emailed Kushner about his research, and he informed me that in the future he plans to create a comprehensive list of the many books and other documents he consulted during his six years of preparation. So as not to leave any names off the list, he declined to provide more details, but he did point out that his historical advisors Harold Holzer and James McPherson are also credited, and their respective books were extremely helpful to him.
What about Final Freedom? Kushner did not mention it specifically....
.Tony Kushner's Real Source For "Lincoln"?
The Two Americas
Kushner Replies About Sources
DreamWorks Pictures Tony Kushner today received an Oscar nomination in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay for Lincoln. Lincoln is a superb film, and Kushner's script is (along with Daniel Day-Lewis's performance in the title role) the very best thing about it. He richly deserves the Oscar he will almost certainly win. But the nomination for "Best Adapted Screenplay" raises the question, "adapted from what"?
As has been widely noted, Lincoln isn't adapted in any meaningful way from its nominal source, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, which despite its many virtues dedicates only a few pages to the film's central narrative--the passage of the 13th amendment to the Constitution. The claim that the film is based ("in part") on Team of Rivals mainly attests to the fact that Steven Spielberg purchased the rights to Goodwin's book before it was even, um, written. (This was in 1999. Goodwin was at the time a historical consultant to a multimedia event called The Unfinished Journey that Spielberg was preparing as part of Washington's millennium celebration. The deal was finally "inked," as they say in Hollywood, in 2001, four years before Team of Rivals was published.)
A good case can be made that Kushner's screenplay shouldn't be eligible for the "Best Adapted" category because it wasn't really "adapted" from anything. Kushner has made clear in interviews that he did quite a bit of independent research in preparing his script--enough so that the logical category to nominate it for would be "Best Original Screenplay." Goodwin probably helped him do the research; apparently she was involved in the project after the rights were purchased. So perhaps the screenplay credit should be "based in part on help from Doris Kearns Goodwin."
But that begs the question of what, if not Team of Rivals, is Lincoln's principal source. The answer is almost certainly Michael Vorenberg's Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, first published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. Vorenberg's book (which I made my TNR "best book of 2012" pick) is widely recognized as the definitive history of the political machinations involved in passing the 13th Amendment, a subject that received scant attention prior to publication of Final Freedom because most historians have tended to focus instead on the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln is known, after all, as the Great Emancipator, not the Great Manipulator of Congress Into Codifying the Executive-Branch Freeing of Slaves, Which Only Ever Applied To Confederate States, In A Constitutional Amendment That, After Lincoln's Death, Still Required Passage In State Legislatures. Vorenberg (who, incidentally, is an associate professor of history at Brown) writes in his introduction:
Historians have written much about the fate of African Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation, but they have not been so attentive to the process by which emancipation was written into law. In part, the inattention is a natural consequence of the compartmentalization of history. Because emancipation proved to be but one stage in the process by which enslaved African Americans became legal citizens, historians have been prone to move directly from the Emancipation Proclamation to the issue of legalized racial equality. In other words, historians have skipped quickly from the proclamation to the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which granted "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws" to every American. Within this seamless narrative, the Thirteenth Amendment appears merely as a predictable epilogue to the Emancipation Procalamation or as an obligatory prologue to the Fourteenth Amendment.
We all know different now, thanks to Lincoln. But before Lincoln there was Final Freedom, a book rich in narrative detail that Kushner surely feasted on.
After I touted Vorenberg's book in TNR's year-end books roundup, he sent me a lovely letter. "If my book helped add accuracy to the film," Vorenberg wrote,
I can take some pleasure in that. Certainly there was plenty in the film that could only have come from my book. I wasn't sure whether to be flattered or shocked. I guess I'm a bit of both.
Also, your suspicion that my contribution to the film, whatever it may have been, was 'uncompensated' is accurate....
Vorenberg emphasized in a later e-mail that he feels in no way resentful about any use of his book for the film, and that by "shocked" he means "pleasantly surprised, not horrified." There was, he points out,
No reason for me to expect compensation or credit from the film makers. Films don't have to have footnotes, and it's hard to imagine how film makers could pay everyone who happens to have contributed to knowledge about a particular subject.
I asked Vorenberg for details in the film that "could only have come from my book." His reply:
I'll just give a few examples. With each one, by the way, the film makers took some understandable liberties with the facts. One episode involves the part of the film in which the Democrats try to bait Thaddeus Stevens into saying that the amendment grants "negro equality" in all respects, but Stevens sees through the gambit and responds that it grants only "equality before the law." The film does a nice job dramatizing that part of my book, though it leaves out Samuel "Sunset" Cox as Stevens's primary antagonist in that part of the debate. The omission of Cox is understandable (a film can do only so much) but too bad, as Cox was a pretty interesting character, and he played an important role throughout the amendment debate.
The film also uses my book for the specifics on how Alexander Coffroth's vote for the amendment was most likely secured--the promise of a resolution in his favor in an election controversy. Again, the film takes some liberties--there's no evidence that Lincoln or Stevens was involved in the discussions with Coffroth--but again, such liberties probably made for better film making.
The presence of African Americans in the congressional galleries at the final vote is a fact that most likely though not necessarily comes from my book....
Also, the film probably relied on my book to understand the way that the debate on the amendment was intertwined with the trip by Francis Blair, Sr. to Richmond to speak with Jefferson Davis and the ensuing trip north by the three Confederate envoys led by Alexander Stephens. The relationship between the so-called peace efforts and the amendment was complicated (I say "so-called" peace efforts because, despite the machinations and protestations on all sides, neither Abraham Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis thought that a peace could be negotiated at this point), probably more complicated than any film could depict. The film oversimplifies the connection between peace proposals and the amendment, but it does get at the important fact that these things were indeed connected.
Clearly Kushner is well within his rights to help himself to narrative details that he found in Final Freedom and elsewhere. Nobody owns history. But even if Vorenberg isn't troubled, I find it (on his behalf) a bit disappointing that neither Kushner nor Spielberg has acknowledged what a valuable resource they had in Final Freedom. (I've sent an e-mail to Kushner and will add an addendum if he replies.) Perhaps the lawyers told them they'd better not. And I find it downright galling that when you go to Lincoln's Web site and click on "publishing" you'll find links to Team of Rivals; to a movie-tie-in essay collection called Lincoln: A President For The Ages to which Vorenberg did not contribute; to a couple of movie-tie in books about the making of the film; and to Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery In America, a book that Lincoln historian Harold Holzer published a couple of months ago as yet another tie-in to the film. You'll find all these books, and that's terrific, let's hope lots of people read them. But you won't find a link to Final Freedom.
Vorenberg, incidentally, is (like me) a Lincoln fan. "I'm glad that it got so many Oscar nominations," he e-mailed me, "and I suspect it will have many Oscar victories. The renewed press may help get even more people to go see it. I'm not making any plans to retire on my book royalties, but I'm happy that an interesting and important chapter of history is getting out to a broader public."
Update, 3:15 p.m.: Slate just posted a good piece on all this by Aisha Harris. Here's what Harris got out of Kushner:
I emailed Kushner about his research, and he informed me that in the future he plans to create a comprehensive list of the many books and other documents he consulted during his six years of preparation. So as not to leave any names off the list, he declined to provide more details, but he did point out that his historical advisors Harold Holzer and James McPherson are also credited, and their respective books were extremely helpful to him.
What about Final Freedom? Kushner did not mention it specifically....
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
It's Amazing How the Lincoln Movie Was Talked About
January 4, 2013, 6:52 pm 7 Comments
Historians Look Back, and Inward, at Annual Meeting
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
NEW ORLEANS — Some 4,000 historians descended on New Orleans on Thursday for the American Historical Association’s four-day annual meeting, replacing the chants of departing Sugar Bowl revelers with more sober talk of job interviews, departmental politics, and — at least in the official panels — the past itself.
As usual, the meeting’s 300-plus sessions touched on contemporary issues like climate change, the 2012 presidential election, and the Arab Spring, along with more purely scholarly topics big (“Horstory: Equines and Humans in Africa, Asia and North America”) and small (“Trash and Treasure: The Significance of Used Goods in America, 1880-1950″). But for many in attendance, the most urgent question was the state of the historical profession itself in an era of budget cuts and declining humanities enrollments.
At a panel called “The Skyscraper Index, the Hemline Index, Champagne, Nail Polish and the Dow Jones,” scholars analyzed the colorful — and usually suspect — metrics that journalists and other commentators sometimes use to track the state of the economy.
In the official conference hotels clustered on Canal Street, it was tempting to look for similarly offbeat indicators of the perennially troubled job market for history doctorates: The number of special “historian-themed cocktails” quaffed at the conference hotel bars? The profusion of sessions with titles like “The Entrepreneurial Historian” or “Exploring a Range of Careers Outside the Academy”? The rueful Twitter post noting that the meeting was generating only .5 tweets per minute, compared with the 13 per minute for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association held simultaneously in Boston?
Or perhaps it was the hearty laughter that followed when the journalist Michael Pollan, at Thursday night’s opening plenary panel, asked: “Why do people like me who use your work end up selling more books than you do?”
Tension between popular and scholarly approaches to history can get rancorous, as the recent dust-up over Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” can attest. But Mr. Pollan’s quip wasn’t meant as a victory dance. The deep perspective offered by professional historians, he said, is an essential public good in a world where “every politician would have us forget what he said yesterday,” and too few journalists are willing (and perhaps able) to cry foul.
And there was little disagreement from his fellow panelists, four distinguished historians and one publisher who had been summoned to ponder “The Public Practice of History in a Digital Age.”
“If we were as lost in space as we are in time, we would be freaking out,” said Edward Ayers, the president of the University of Richmond and a host of the popular podcast “BackStory with the American History Guys.”
But there was less agreement over what was to blame for the marginal status of academic history in a world that gobbles heroic biographies of the Founders and turns Twitter feeds like Real Time WWII into viral sensations, but takes a pass on the kind of impersonal, analytic history that academic departments reward.
For William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the outgoing president of the history association, the problem is insufficient attention to basic storytelling. Historians, he said, tend to default to a dry omniscient voice that hasn’t changed since the 19th-century, despite the fact that historians no longer believe in that kind of omniscience.
“We are a deeply narrative discipline, but we give very little thought to who the narrator is,” he said.
Niko Pfund, the president of Oxford University Press, seconded the notion, pointing additionally to the history profession’s continued reliance on the scholarly monograph for tenure decisions. Historians, more than any other group of scholars, he said, remain “absolutely imprisoned in the format of the printed book,” a situation he called “borderline catastrophic.”
Not that all the panelists were ready to throw footnotes and peer-review standards out with the monograph. The designated power-blogger on the panel, Claire Potter, a professor at the New School and the author of the blog Tenured Radical, questioned the printed book’s status as a professional “fetish object,” but defended the value of traditional historical training against those who have called on departments to stop training so many doctoral students who will later find themselves without jobs.
“I think we should be educating as many Ph.D.’s as possible,” she said.
In the end, the panel seemed to agree on a loose and egalitarian notion of who counted as a “historian.” Jon Stewart, several agreed, was a good public historian simply for confronting politicians with inconvenient truths about the past. A historian, Mr. Ayers added, is simply someone who has interesting things to say about the past, and can point to the documentary record to prove them.
That why-can’t-we-get-along outlook, coming from scholars who had already run the tenure gauntlet, drew a mixed response from the audience. And it hardly seems likely to defuse intellectual turf wars like the debate over “Lincoln.”
At a packed panel earlier in the day on “The Emancipation Proclamation at 150,” a question about the film’s “great man” view of emancipation drew an awkward silence from the panel followed by a laugh.
Kate Masur, a professor at Northwestern University who wrote a much-discussed New York Times Op-Ed blasting the film for ignoring African-Americans’ active role in their own emancipation, said that her view of the film softened somewhat after she went to see it again with groups of students.
David Blight, a professor at Yale who was briefly an adviser on the film, defended it, cautiously, as delivering a useful public lesson on the 13th Amendment, even if it ended up reinforcing a simplified heroic narrative of Lincoln.
The movie, Mr. Blight said, shows us Lincoln the great abolitionist, rather than the “much messier” and more conflicted pre-1863 Lincoln who believed, among other things, that African-Americans should ultimately be “repatriated” to Africa.
“But no one is going to make that movie,” he added.
.
Historians Look Back, and Inward, at Annual Meeting
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
NEW ORLEANS — Some 4,000 historians descended on New Orleans on Thursday for the American Historical Association’s four-day annual meeting, replacing the chants of departing Sugar Bowl revelers with more sober talk of job interviews, departmental politics, and — at least in the official panels — the past itself.
As usual, the meeting’s 300-plus sessions touched on contemporary issues like climate change, the 2012 presidential election, and the Arab Spring, along with more purely scholarly topics big (“Horstory: Equines and Humans in Africa, Asia and North America”) and small (“Trash and Treasure: The Significance of Used Goods in America, 1880-1950″). But for many in attendance, the most urgent question was the state of the historical profession itself in an era of budget cuts and declining humanities enrollments.
At a panel called “The Skyscraper Index, the Hemline Index, Champagne, Nail Polish and the Dow Jones,” scholars analyzed the colorful — and usually suspect — metrics that journalists and other commentators sometimes use to track the state of the economy.
In the official conference hotels clustered on Canal Street, it was tempting to look for similarly offbeat indicators of the perennially troubled job market for history doctorates: The number of special “historian-themed cocktails” quaffed at the conference hotel bars? The profusion of sessions with titles like “The Entrepreneurial Historian” or “Exploring a Range of Careers Outside the Academy”? The rueful Twitter post noting that the meeting was generating only .5 tweets per minute, compared with the 13 per minute for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association held simultaneously in Boston?
Or perhaps it was the hearty laughter that followed when the journalist Michael Pollan, at Thursday night’s opening plenary panel, asked: “Why do people like me who use your work end up selling more books than you do?”
Tension between popular and scholarly approaches to history can get rancorous, as the recent dust-up over Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” can attest. But Mr. Pollan’s quip wasn’t meant as a victory dance. The deep perspective offered by professional historians, he said, is an essential public good in a world where “every politician would have us forget what he said yesterday,” and too few journalists are willing (and perhaps able) to cry foul.
And there was little disagreement from his fellow panelists, four distinguished historians and one publisher who had been summoned to ponder “The Public Practice of History in a Digital Age.”
“If we were as lost in space as we are in time, we would be freaking out,” said Edward Ayers, the president of the University of Richmond and a host of the popular podcast “BackStory with the American History Guys.”
But there was less agreement over what was to blame for the marginal status of academic history in a world that gobbles heroic biographies of the Founders and turns Twitter feeds like Real Time WWII into viral sensations, but takes a pass on the kind of impersonal, analytic history that academic departments reward.
For William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the outgoing president of the history association, the problem is insufficient attention to basic storytelling. Historians, he said, tend to default to a dry omniscient voice that hasn’t changed since the 19th-century, despite the fact that historians no longer believe in that kind of omniscience.
“We are a deeply narrative discipline, but we give very little thought to who the narrator is,” he said.
Niko Pfund, the president of Oxford University Press, seconded the notion, pointing additionally to the history profession’s continued reliance on the scholarly monograph for tenure decisions. Historians, more than any other group of scholars, he said, remain “absolutely imprisoned in the format of the printed book,” a situation he called “borderline catastrophic.”
Not that all the panelists were ready to throw footnotes and peer-review standards out with the monograph. The designated power-blogger on the panel, Claire Potter, a professor at the New School and the author of the blog Tenured Radical, questioned the printed book’s status as a professional “fetish object,” but defended the value of traditional historical training against those who have called on departments to stop training so many doctoral students who will later find themselves without jobs.
“I think we should be educating as many Ph.D.’s as possible,” she said.
In the end, the panel seemed to agree on a loose and egalitarian notion of who counted as a “historian.” Jon Stewart, several agreed, was a good public historian simply for confronting politicians with inconvenient truths about the past. A historian, Mr. Ayers added, is simply someone who has interesting things to say about the past, and can point to the documentary record to prove them.
That why-can’t-we-get-along outlook, coming from scholars who had already run the tenure gauntlet, drew a mixed response from the audience. And it hardly seems likely to defuse intellectual turf wars like the debate over “Lincoln.”
At a packed panel earlier in the day on “The Emancipation Proclamation at 150,” a question about the film’s “great man” view of emancipation drew an awkward silence from the panel followed by a laugh.
Kate Masur, a professor at Northwestern University who wrote a much-discussed New York Times Op-Ed blasting the film for ignoring African-Americans’ active role in their own emancipation, said that her view of the film softened somewhat after she went to see it again with groups of students.
David Blight, a professor at Yale who was briefly an adviser on the film, defended it, cautiously, as delivering a useful public lesson on the 13th Amendment, even if it ended up reinforcing a simplified heroic narrative of Lincoln.
The movie, Mr. Blight said, shows us Lincoln the great abolitionist, rather than the “much messier” and more conflicted pre-1863 Lincoln who believed, among other things, that African-Americans should ultimately be “repatriated” to Africa.
“But no one is going to make that movie,” he added.
.
Forever Free
Disunion January 7, 2013, 1:40 pm 40 Comments
(As Professor Oakes notes, the traditional understanding has always been that the war initially was only to preserve the Union, and that only gradually later on did emancipation become a necessary goal also to concluding the war victoriously for the North. Oakes challenges this view although I'm not sure he's saying anything new. Preservation of the Union and ending slavery were intertwined from the start. I think this is all he's saying and I'm not sure what difference his point of view makes.)
Forever Free
By JAMES OAKES
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Two weeks after the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, S.C., surrendered to the Confederates, the New York World predicted that if Republicans persisted in their fanatical campaign against slavery, they would provoke “wide-spread negro insurrections” that would spread “horror” across the South. The World was a Democratic newspaper, and like most Northern Democrats its editors believed that slavery had no place in a war whose sole purpose was the restoration of the Union. Democrats were demanding that Republicans answer the question, “What is the object of the war?” But Republicans turned the tables and demanded that Democrats answer a very different question. “Shall the American Republic be destroyed or shall Slavery perish?” asked Horace Greeley, the most powerful Republican editor in the country. If you asked Northerners that question, he declared, their overwhelming response would be, “‘The Republic must live, even though Slavery should have to die!’”
When I first discovered Republicans saying such things, I was surprised. It’s common wisdom among historians that in the early phases of the war, Northerners, including most Republicans, disavowed any intent to interfere with slavery. Yet there were all those Republican editors and politicians, one after another, right as the war began, spelling out in broad terms the policies they expected to implement to emancipate slaves and abolish slavery. Did we, as a profession, have our timing wrong?
I was already familiar with Republican Party ideology; I recognized the arguments Republicans used to criticize slavery. Early on, Abraham Lincoln talked vaguely about putting slavery on “the course of ultimate extinction.” But what did he mean by that? Answering that question has forced me to rethink many of the things I always assumed about the way slavery was destroyed in the United States.
Like most historians, I long believed that over the course of the struggle between North and South, the “object” of the war shifted from Union to emancipation. Having initially resisted attacking slavery itself, the federal government supposedly moved slowly, hesitantly, toward grudging acceptance of emancipation. Not until the last years of the war, we were taught, did Northerners come belatedly to accept the need for slavery’s complete destruction. This is a familiar story among historians, arguably the closest thing to orthodoxy in Civil War studies. There’s even an established series of items that we check off when teaching survey courses, like groceries on a shopping list, showing that when the war began the North had no interest in freeing the slaves.
Somewhere along the way, however, the familiar story of a shift “from Union to emancipation” began to collapse beneath the weight of my research. During the secession crisis, for example, Republicans offered the South a constitutional amendment forever banning the government from abolishing slavery in the states. It turns out that nearly everybody — including most abolitionists — believed that the Constitution already prohibited the government from abolishing slavery in the states.
What about the supposedly pointless Confiscation Act, which Congress passed in early August 1861, a few months after the war began? If it freed no slaves, I wondered, why had Congress bothered to pass it? The answer to that question turned out to be a revelation. In the Congressional debates during the first summer of the war, Republicans made it clear that they intended to pass a law freeing slaves. Two days after Lincoln signed the bill his secretary of war issued the instructions for implementing the first Confiscation Act, immediately freeing hundreds of slaves, and ultimately tens of thousands.
Pretty soon nothing looked the same. Familiar events took on entirely new meanings. The Crittenden-Johnson resolution is a good example. Passed in the summer of 1861, it put Congress on record declaring that the purpose of the war was the restoration of the Union. This resolution is widely read as evidence that the North was initially unwilling to attack slavery. In fact, all the Crittenden-Johnson resolution did was to reaffirm the standard Republican position: the Constitution did not allow the government to prosecute a war for any “purpose” other than the restoration of the Union. Republicans justified their early attacks on slavery because they hated slavery and because slavery had caused the war. But the purpose of the war, at least officially, was always the restoration of the Union. This was just as true in 1865 as in 1861.
If Lincoln and the Republicans did in fact begin freeing slaves in August 1861, the president’s famous order to Gen. John C. Frémont the following month, in which he told him to rescind an order to free slaves in Missouri, can no longer stand up as evidence of Lincoln’s reluctance to emancipate. In fact, Lincoln did not prohibit the general from freeing slaves in Missouri; he merely told Frémont to rewrite his order to conform to the Confiscation Act. But that law was supposed to emancipate slaves.
And what of Lincoln’s subsequent revocation of Gen. David Hunter’s abolition order of spring 1862, applying to slaves on the South Carolina coast? Actually, Hunter issued two orders. The first emancipated slaves in the area under his control, and Lincoln let that order stand. The second abolished slavery in several states. Here was the problem: everyone agreed that the federal government had no constitutional power to abolish slavery in the states, and even if it did, generals didn’t make policy. Hunter’s first order conformed to the law as Congress passed it and as the Lincoln administration implemented it. The second order was illegal, regardless of the president’s views on slavery itself.
.So it went: Lincoln’s promise not to interfere with slavery in the states, the Crittenden resolution, the first confiscation act, the orders to Frémont and Hunter — one by one, each of these famous incidents failed to demonstrate that the North was “reluctant” to attack slavery when the war began. The familiar narrative arc taking the Civil War from Union to emancipation no longer made any sense.
If emancipation did in fact begin long before Jan. 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, what changed on that day? It’s hard to say, because the significance of that document has always been obscured by both myth and cynicism — either it freed all the slaves, or it didn’t free a single one — so much so that 150 years after it was issued we still cannot answer the simplest but most important question: what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do?
It immediately transformed Union antislavery policy in two crucial ways. First, it lifted the ban on enticement of slaves from farms and plantations in the rebel states. Ever since the Confiscation Act of August 1861, Union soldiers were authorized to emancipate all slaves who “come within your lines” in the seceded states. But the Army was not to “entice” with slaves on peacefully functioning farms and plantations in the Union-occupied areas of the South. The Emancipation Proclamation lifted the ban on enticement. Thereafter, Northern soldiers went onto those farms, announced to the slaves that they had been emancipated and actively encouraged able-bodied men to enlist in the Union Army.
Black enlistment was the second major policy change initiated by the Emancipation Proclamation. It was justified as an “emancipation” policy, because by then everyone understood that for slavery to be abolished the North had to win the war. Eventually, Lincoln and his generals concluded that the 180,000 African-Americans who served in the Union Army were “indispensable” to Northern victory, and therefore indispensable to emancipation.
By late 1863, however, Lincoln and the Republicans realized that military emancipation would not be enough to destroy slavery completely. Contrary to their initial assumptions, slavery proved to be deeply entrenched, and slaveholders deeply committed to protecting it against all enemies. The Republicans began to worry that the war might end without slavery’s having been abolished. To prevent that from happening, the Constitution itself would have to be amended.
The Emancipation Proclamation was also crucial in a way that went beyond the specific shifts in policy. It helped create the political will that made the 13th Amendment possible. Lincoln seems to have understood that Northern voters, having accepted the Emancipation Proclamation, would have less trouble supporting an abolition amendment. The proclamation created the expectation among Northerners that when the war ended, slavery — the thing that had caused the war — would be ended as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(As Professor Oakes notes, the traditional understanding has always been that the war initially was only to preserve the Union, and that only gradually later on did emancipation become a necessary goal also to concluding the war victoriously for the North. Oakes challenges this view although I'm not sure he's saying anything new. Preservation of the Union and ending slavery were intertwined from the start. I think this is all he's saying and I'm not sure what difference his point of view makes.)
Forever Free
By JAMES OAKES
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Two weeks after the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, S.C., surrendered to the Confederates, the New York World predicted that if Republicans persisted in their fanatical campaign against slavery, they would provoke “wide-spread negro insurrections” that would spread “horror” across the South. The World was a Democratic newspaper, and like most Northern Democrats its editors believed that slavery had no place in a war whose sole purpose was the restoration of the Union. Democrats were demanding that Republicans answer the question, “What is the object of the war?” But Republicans turned the tables and demanded that Democrats answer a very different question. “Shall the American Republic be destroyed or shall Slavery perish?” asked Horace Greeley, the most powerful Republican editor in the country. If you asked Northerners that question, he declared, their overwhelming response would be, “‘The Republic must live, even though Slavery should have to die!’”
When I first discovered Republicans saying such things, I was surprised. It’s common wisdom among historians that in the early phases of the war, Northerners, including most Republicans, disavowed any intent to interfere with slavery. Yet there were all those Republican editors and politicians, one after another, right as the war began, spelling out in broad terms the policies they expected to implement to emancipate slaves and abolish slavery. Did we, as a profession, have our timing wrong?
I was already familiar with Republican Party ideology; I recognized the arguments Republicans used to criticize slavery. Early on, Abraham Lincoln talked vaguely about putting slavery on “the course of ultimate extinction.” But what did he mean by that? Answering that question has forced me to rethink many of the things I always assumed about the way slavery was destroyed in the United States.
Like most historians, I long believed that over the course of the struggle between North and South, the “object” of the war shifted from Union to emancipation. Having initially resisted attacking slavery itself, the federal government supposedly moved slowly, hesitantly, toward grudging acceptance of emancipation. Not until the last years of the war, we were taught, did Northerners come belatedly to accept the need for slavery’s complete destruction. This is a familiar story among historians, arguably the closest thing to orthodoxy in Civil War studies. There’s even an established series of items that we check off when teaching survey courses, like groceries on a shopping list, showing that when the war began the North had no interest in freeing the slaves.
Somewhere along the way, however, the familiar story of a shift “from Union to emancipation” began to collapse beneath the weight of my research. During the secession crisis, for example, Republicans offered the South a constitutional amendment forever banning the government from abolishing slavery in the states. It turns out that nearly everybody — including most abolitionists — believed that the Constitution already prohibited the government from abolishing slavery in the states.
What about the supposedly pointless Confiscation Act, which Congress passed in early August 1861, a few months after the war began? If it freed no slaves, I wondered, why had Congress bothered to pass it? The answer to that question turned out to be a revelation. In the Congressional debates during the first summer of the war, Republicans made it clear that they intended to pass a law freeing slaves. Two days after Lincoln signed the bill his secretary of war issued the instructions for implementing the first Confiscation Act, immediately freeing hundreds of slaves, and ultimately tens of thousands.
Pretty soon nothing looked the same. Familiar events took on entirely new meanings. The Crittenden-Johnson resolution is a good example. Passed in the summer of 1861, it put Congress on record declaring that the purpose of the war was the restoration of the Union. This resolution is widely read as evidence that the North was initially unwilling to attack slavery. In fact, all the Crittenden-Johnson resolution did was to reaffirm the standard Republican position: the Constitution did not allow the government to prosecute a war for any “purpose” other than the restoration of the Union. Republicans justified their early attacks on slavery because they hated slavery and because slavery had caused the war. But the purpose of the war, at least officially, was always the restoration of the Union. This was just as true in 1865 as in 1861.
If Lincoln and the Republicans did in fact begin freeing slaves in August 1861, the president’s famous order to Gen. John C. Frémont the following month, in which he told him to rescind an order to free slaves in Missouri, can no longer stand up as evidence of Lincoln’s reluctance to emancipate. In fact, Lincoln did not prohibit the general from freeing slaves in Missouri; he merely told Frémont to rewrite his order to conform to the Confiscation Act. But that law was supposed to emancipate slaves.
And what of Lincoln’s subsequent revocation of Gen. David Hunter’s abolition order of spring 1862, applying to slaves on the South Carolina coast? Actually, Hunter issued two orders. The first emancipated slaves in the area under his control, and Lincoln let that order stand. The second abolished slavery in several states. Here was the problem: everyone agreed that the federal government had no constitutional power to abolish slavery in the states, and even if it did, generals didn’t make policy. Hunter’s first order conformed to the law as Congress passed it and as the Lincoln administration implemented it. The second order was illegal, regardless of the president’s views on slavery itself.
.So it went: Lincoln’s promise not to interfere with slavery in the states, the Crittenden resolution, the first confiscation act, the orders to Frémont and Hunter — one by one, each of these famous incidents failed to demonstrate that the North was “reluctant” to attack slavery when the war began. The familiar narrative arc taking the Civil War from Union to emancipation no longer made any sense.
If emancipation did in fact begin long before Jan. 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, what changed on that day? It’s hard to say, because the significance of that document has always been obscured by both myth and cynicism — either it freed all the slaves, or it didn’t free a single one — so much so that 150 years after it was issued we still cannot answer the simplest but most important question: what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do?
It immediately transformed Union antislavery policy in two crucial ways. First, it lifted the ban on enticement of slaves from farms and plantations in the rebel states. Ever since the Confiscation Act of August 1861, Union soldiers were authorized to emancipate all slaves who “come within your lines” in the seceded states. But the Army was not to “entice” with slaves on peacefully functioning farms and plantations in the Union-occupied areas of the South. The Emancipation Proclamation lifted the ban on enticement. Thereafter, Northern soldiers went onto those farms, announced to the slaves that they had been emancipated and actively encouraged able-bodied men to enlist in the Union Army.
Black enlistment was the second major policy change initiated by the Emancipation Proclamation. It was justified as an “emancipation” policy, because by then everyone understood that for slavery to be abolished the North had to win the war. Eventually, Lincoln and his generals concluded that the 180,000 African-Americans who served in the Union Army were “indispensable” to Northern victory, and therefore indispensable to emancipation.
By late 1863, however, Lincoln and the Republicans realized that military emancipation would not be enough to destroy slavery completely. Contrary to their initial assumptions, slavery proved to be deeply entrenched, and slaveholders deeply committed to protecting it against all enemies. The Republicans began to worry that the war might end without slavery’s having been abolished. To prevent that from happening, the Constitution itself would have to be amended.
The Emancipation Proclamation was also crucial in a way that went beyond the specific shifts in policy. It helped create the political will that made the 13th Amendment possible. Lincoln seems to have understood that Northern voters, having accepted the Emancipation Proclamation, would have less trouble supporting an abolition amendment. The proclamation created the expectation among Northerners that when the war ended, slavery — the thing that had caused the war — would be ended as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Using the Constitution to Avoid the Debt Limit Issue
President Obama is being urged by some Democrats, including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, to avoid the debt limit problem with the Republicans by citing the 14th Amendment. Here is what it says:
Amendment XIV Section 4
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
Seems clear enough to me.
Amendment XIV Section 4
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
Seems clear enough to me.
William J. Cooper - We Have The War Upon Us
Professor Cooper, who domiciles at LSU, gives us his version of the events from Novemberr, 1860, to April of 1861. The events leading up to the war have occupied scholars ever since.
The dominant Civil War scholar of the 20's, 30's, and 40's, was James G. Randall of the U of Illinois. He established the thesis that the country bumbled into war when reason and compromise failed because of fanatics on both sides. The abolitionists squared off against the Southern "fireaters," who watned secession no matter what. There was no room in the minds of these two groups for compromise. Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, but he refused to compromise on the extension of slavery into the territories. The inevitable results of the failure of compromise was war. Randall seemed to blame the abolitionists more than the fireaters.
This work falls into this category of understanding the onset of the war. Cooper's hero is Seward, who, along with others, tried mightily to forge a compromise, willing to compromise on the extension of slavery, but thwarted by Lincoln, the party leader, he finally had to fall in line behind his President. In this book I learned for the first time that Seward would have bended on the extension of slavery into the territories.
It seems to me from what I've read over various sources that the fireaters would never have compromised; it was secession or nothing. Mr. Lincoln was right to not compromise. As he said, "the rub" had to come sooner or later.
It seems to me that Cooper presents a Southern view of the secession crisis as he seems to blame Republicans for being partisan, the root of the matter rather than Southern diehards, and what he calls the "left" in the Republican party. I have never heard another scholar refer to abolitionists and those who stood firm on not expanding slavery into the territoriesas the "left."
The bumbler advocates never talk about what would have happened if the war had been avoided by compromise. Slavery would have continued into the 20th century? No 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments? Seems likely. It seems to me that war was, indeed, inevitable unfortunately. We are fortunate that it happened with Lincoln as President and we were able to enact those Amendments. The 14th is the cornerstone of the modern interpretation of the Constitution.
The dominant Civil War scholar of the 20's, 30's, and 40's, was James G. Randall of the U of Illinois. He established the thesis that the country bumbled into war when reason and compromise failed because of fanatics on both sides. The abolitionists squared off against the Southern "fireaters," who watned secession no matter what. There was no room in the minds of these two groups for compromise. Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, but he refused to compromise on the extension of slavery into the territories. The inevitable results of the failure of compromise was war. Randall seemed to blame the abolitionists more than the fireaters.
This work falls into this category of understanding the onset of the war. Cooper's hero is Seward, who, along with others, tried mightily to forge a compromise, willing to compromise on the extension of slavery, but thwarted by Lincoln, the party leader, he finally had to fall in line behind his President. In this book I learned for the first time that Seward would have bended on the extension of slavery into the territories.
It seems to me from what I've read over various sources that the fireaters would never have compromised; it was secession or nothing. Mr. Lincoln was right to not compromise. As he said, "the rub" had to come sooner or later.
It seems to me that Cooper presents a Southern view of the secession crisis as he seems to blame Republicans for being partisan, the root of the matter rather than Southern diehards, and what he calls the "left" in the Republican party. I have never heard another scholar refer to abolitionists and those who stood firm on not expanding slavery into the territoriesas the "left."
The bumbler advocates never talk about what would have happened if the war had been avoided by compromise. Slavery would have continued into the 20th century? No 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments? Seems likely. It seems to me that war was, indeed, inevitable unfortunately. We are fortunate that it happened with Lincoln as President and we were able to enact those Amendments. The 14th is the cornerstone of the modern interpretation of the Constitution.
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