Close reading of K-12 history textbooks has suddenly become popular among adults (not so much among students). This is surprising given how bored most American adults were in their history classes and given Americans’ focus on the immediate present. (“The only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today,” said history-maker Henry Ford.) But conservatives have opened another front of the culture wars as they seek to regain lost ideological territory. The schools are their chosen battlefield. One such engagement is over the connection between slavery and the Civil War.

Union soldiers guarding a slave dealership turned into a jail for Confederate captives, Alexandria, VA
For generations, downplaying slavery’s role in bringing on America’s most traumatic and consequential war has not only burnished the image of Southern ancestors but also lightened the South’s guilt for the racial divisions in the country. (If slavery was only incidental to the war–if the war was about states rights perhaps–maybe slavery was also only incidental to today’s racial inequalities.) Ironically, some on the left have also been eager, for other reasons, to find the causes of the Civil War elsewhere than slavery.
In a 2012 Journal of American History article, Michael E. Woods reviewed the current scholarship on the causes of the Civil War. Preeminent historians have, he pointed out, “reaffirmed that slavery’s centrality . . .[is] beyond a reasonable doubt.” But Woods’ and yet more recent articles[1] (h/t Woods) provide new insights into just how slavery was, in several ways, key to the conflagration.
This scholarship is not just about setting the historical record straight. It is also about setting straight our understanding of America today.