The mission of the Abbeville Institute, to redeem what is worthwhile
in the Southern tradition, is an embattled one. The dominant powers in
American discourse today have succeeded in confining the South to a dark
little corner of story labeled “Slavery and Treason.” This is already
governing the public sphere of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Such an
approach not only libels the South, it is a fatal distortion of American
history in general, and, I dare say, even of African-American history.
The old Radical Republican propaganda that portrays John C. Calhoun
as a scheming fanatic who brought on civil war by his determination to
spread slavery has re-emerged. A little over a half century ago, the
historiographical picture was quite different. Margaret Coit’s admiring
biography won a Pulitzer Prize. A leading expert on the subject wrote
that Calhoun understood the mysteries of banking and money better than
anyone else at the time. Numerous scholars, mostly of a liberal and
progressive disposition, praised Calhoun’s concurrent majority as a
brilliant and useful concept. A United States Senate Committee chaired
by John F. Kennedy named Calhoun one of the five greatest Senators of
all time.
One is tempted to conclude that historical knowledge is not
cumulative and to agree with Orwell that who controls the present
controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future.
Certainly the present discourse reflects not historical judgment but a
political/ideological agenda.
In the Jacksonian era, so-called, I have learned that one must not
only look for political bias, one must look for comic book versions of
history.
