History is revisionist in scope

History is an on-going conversation and a constant process of reexamination that is based upon continual new discoveries and evidence. For example, let's explore the primary reason of why the North fought Civil War.

• What do most Americans believe was the primary reason for fighting the Civil War? To free the slaves.
  • Why is this not true? Because freeing the slaves was not a Union goal until early 1863 when it was feared that the North might lose the war if England and/or France supported the Southern endeavor. Lincoln needed a higher purpose for the war in order to stop such support.
  • Why would England or France enter the war or support the South? Because the South supplied them with 75% of all their cotton and because England in particular would be pleased to see the failure of the experiment in democracy that broke up their empire 75 years earlier.
  • Why would it be difficult, if not impossible, for England or France to enter the war after the Emancipation Proclamation? Because both were dedicated to the prohibition of slavery and could not support the South if the war was really about freeing the slaves.
• So let's ask again - What is your revised belief about why the Union initally entered the Civil War?
  • To keep the Union together and to show the world that a democracy could exist and that the Constitution was a sound document.
  • To set an example for the functioning of a democratic nation.

So why do we teach our children that the Union fought the Civl War to free the slaves when the real reason is far more complicated?

• Because this was the commonly held belief even by most historians until the 1960s. Why - what changed in the 60s? After Vietnam, the GI Bill was widely available to veterans.
• Who then, entered our universities for the first time in large numbers? Minorities - especially African Americans - and women. And as many of them went on to get graduate degrees, they began to explore their history and to reexamine what had been taught to them as facts.
• As they looked at the primary documents and evidence, they revised history. And those reasons became far more complex and often unpopular. It is a far more humanistic story to say that the Union entered the war to free the slaves - and a much less humanistic story to say that for the Union, freeing the slaves was not a goal for the first two years of the war. Lincoln and his fellow Republicans wanted to keep the Union together - and if they could do it keeping slavery in tact, they would do so.