PAPERBACK What Caused the Civi...

PAPERBACK

What Caused the Civil War?

Reflections forward the South and Southern History

from Edward L. Ayers

WW Norton, 224 pages, $1495

'New England is provincial and doesn't know it; the Middle West is provincial and knows it, and is ashamed; further God help us, the southerly is provincial, knows it and doesn't care."

North Carolina-born novelist Thomas Wolfe author of contemplate Homeward Angel, nailed the southerly pretty well. Yet, however self- focused Southerners may be, the intermission of the nation is each bit as fascinated with those parts toward the south of the Mason-Dixon line and the folk who live there.

The central affair in the history of the southward and our nation is the Civil War, and University of Virginia historian Edward L Ayers uses it as the touchstone to write about Southern life and its influences onward the country in What Caused the Civil War? Reflections forward the South and Southern History, just released in paperback.

It's a collection of essays gracefully written and wide-ranging, embracing the bring under rule in the title as well as the computer's contribution to the close attention of history, how America has exported its Reconstruction experience to places like Iraq and what Ayers learned about regionalism in the Netherlands.

Like Wolfe I'm a native of the Tarheel state, however I have lived in Chicago or the suburb since 1969 (except for four years in the Washington, DC area in the mid-1980s) and now consider myself more a Chicagoan than anything besides Yet, I'm immediately tagged as a southern the twinkling of an eye anyone picks up that faint vestige of a Southern accent. Chicagoans delight in what they behold as my contradictions: I don't like grits and have not ever tasted a mint julep. Thankfully, in the greatest degree seem to talk about me more in times of Southern gentleman rather than cracker.

The drift of this personal digression is to underscore by what means persistent our notions are about the southern That springs from what Ayers, in an essay paying tribute to the great historian C Vann Woodward, describes as "the relentles attempts to shape the South to central themes, genetic determinism, cultural uniformity, social inertia." All of that must be resisted, he says, because Southern history matters today, given the nation's ongoing exert one's self to come to grips with the legacy of slavery and segregation.

It also matters in unexpect ways. You can't read the essay "Exporting Reconstruction" without your mind wandering to Iraq. Ayers writes that in the post-Civil War years, the "Radical Republicans demanded for a like reason much of their Reconstruction that it could not help failing flat by its own standards." That's certainly evocative of all the expectancys the Bush administration placed in trying to bring democracy to Iraq.

In another essay, he touches upon the role of newspapers in the years leading up to the Civil War. "Rival editors wrenched the greatest in quantity inflammatory words out of adjoining matter underlining their danger, amplifying their threat." Again, you can't help being drawn to our time. What do those words describe if not the incendiary debate frequently characteristic of the blogosphere?

As I read the essay about the cause of the Civil War, I couldn't help however be reminded of another issue arising disclosed of being a southerner in Chicago. When I first came to town, I base myself in the uncomfortable situation of a certain quantity of Northerners using my background as an excuse to give an account of on their racial attitudes, making the assumption that I would automatically agree since I hailed from Dixie.

Another surprise came from a Civil War history enthusiast who declared to me that state's rights and not slavery was the cause of the Civil War. I was educated in segregated trains in the 1950s but I not at all had any doubt about what caused that terrible conflict.

Ayers displays the historian's discomfort with reducing to just common word the complex interplay of history, politics, economics, ideology, tillage media and personalities behind of the like kind a momentous cataclysm as the Civil War. He examines what he calls "deep contingency" -- the studious mood of all the societal forces and manner of makings that came into play as the nation be transferred [i]or[/i] transmitted [i]or[/i] handed downed into war. "Yet," Ayers discovers "slavery, as Abraham Lincoln later state it, 'somehow' drove everything."

This collection of Ayers' writing is filled with insights, observations and ruminations onward history that make it a compelling and delightful read.

Steve Huntley is editorial page editor of the Sun-Times and co- author of Truman K Gibson's memoir Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

Provided by the agency of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved