Slavery, the Civil War, and the Reintegration of American History: The Civil War, and the Reintegration of American History

Bancroft Prize-winning historian Freehling ( Prelude to Civil War ) offers a thoughtful collection of essays--some new, some thoroughly revised--reflecting 30 years of thoughts on the nature of slavery and the causes of the Civil War. Particularly interesting are the individual introductions to the essays, in which he reappraises his own work, as in the introduction to his revised version of his 1972 ``The Founding Fathers and Slavery'' where he reflects on his ``partial disenchantment'' with his original ``overemphasis'' on the Founders' antislavery accomplishments. In other essays he examines slaveholder expansionism; the movement to solve the ``slavery problem'' by deporting blacks; the internal divisions that led to the Confederate defeat; and the slaveholders' paternalism, in the context of freedman Denmark Vesey's 1822 conspiracy against Charleston slaveowners who were shocked at the idea that these black ``family friends'' could actually hate them. Unlike those historians who call the Civil War a clash of industrial and agrarian cultures or a battle over ``states' rights,'' Freehling insists that the conflict cannot be understood without first understanding slavery's role in the balance of power between North and South, what he calls in his final essay ``this epic American story of slavery, sectional crisis, Civil War and emancipation.'' Although slavery remains difficult to understand on any but an abstract level, it is to Freehling's great credit that he has offered an immensely readable explanation of the forces that created--and ultimately made impossible--what the slaveholders chose to describe simply as the ``Peculiar Institution.'' (Apr.)