Peter Parish’s 1975 synthesis of American Civil War history appeared amidst a high “tide of new work on the subject,” as the preface to the book notes. But not all of that recent scholarship made it into the book.
In part, according to Parish, this was by design: “I have taken as my text some words of no less a Civil War authority than Abraham Lincoln himself: ‘I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views,'” Parish wrote, warning that this might “offend those who prefer the opposite principle of adopting true views insofar as they appear to be new views” (12).
That said, the perspective provided by the 1970s certainly did offer Parish some “new views” of old facts. So far in my reading, I’ve earmarked a number of gems, like this telling comparison on page 68:
… Lincoln’s victory [in 1860] was perfectly legal and unquestionable, even though his proportion of the popular vote was comparable with, say, Barry Goldwater’s in 1964, or George McGovern’s in 1972.
At other points, Parish makes deft comparisons to the Cold War to understand the decision-making of Civil War leaders during the crisis of the Union, as on page 74:
Lincoln’s preference was to keep open as many options as possible. Like the modern grand designers of nuclear strategy, he sought to interpose as many stages as possible before the ultimate, irreversible decision was reached; when driven to decisions, he preferred those which kept open the widest possible choice of future decisions.
Or on page 92:
From Texas to Oregon, from Missouri to Kansas, from California to Cuba, North and South were practising a strategy of escalation a century before the term was invented. What technology is to the nuclear arms race, the frontier was to sectional rivalry over slavery. Far from providing a safety-valve, westward expansion created a dangerous cut-throat competition between North and South.
That last quote comes from Chapter 4, an expert and still useful review of past historiographical debates on the coming of the Civil War. It is told from the unique vantage of a historian at the University of Glasgow who is writing for audiences on both sides of the pond:
Non-Americans probably tend to underestimate the genuine feelings—nay, the burning passions—which such questions [about constitutional arguments] can stir in American breasts, especially when their profound suspicion of centralised authority is aroused. The constitution, as Sir Denis Brogan has observed, is something like the American equivalent of Magna Carta and the battle of Britain rolled into one (86).
Yet for all its strengths, nothing dates Part 1 of Parish’s book (or better demonstrates how dramatically the historiography has changed in the last fifty years) more than this. The first time an African American figure is mentioned by name is on page 57, when Dred Scott briefly appears as the man, not just the case. None other is named again during the first 100 pages, which cover the entirety of the antebellum era.
