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Brown professor lectures on slavery and the morality of early Americans

Brown University history professor emeritus Gordon Wood, the recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History, discussed how the issue of slavery cannot explain the outbreak of the Civil War without taking into account its context within the Revolutionary War.

Wood began by noting that the Civil War, for all its importance, should not surprass the American Revolution in historical significance. “[The Revolution is] the single most important event in our nation’s history,” he said.

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One reason why, he said, is that movements as recent as abolition can’t explain the Civil War’s outbreak. “What is ... difficult to explain is why the Northern states cared,” Wood said. “We have to go back to the Revolution and the ideas and ideals that came out of it.”

One of the driving factors behind Civil War tensions, Wood said, is that at the time of the Revolution “America was a new nation in a world of monarchies ... dedicated to ... [the goal that] all men are equal.”

“If the American experiment in self-government failed,” the entire crusade for democracy itself would be lost, he said.

“By the 1860s, America was a lone beacon of democracy,” Wood then explained. “[It was] the last best hope for the future of democracy.”

“That responsibility is what sustained Lincoln through the [Civil] War,” he added.

Because of this, he said, “in commemorating the Civil War, we commemorate the Revolution ... the glorious cause that united all Americans, created national bonds that were not easily broken and still hold us together.”

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Another point Wood emphasized, both during the lecture and the Q-and-A session that followed, was that it is hard to judge the morals of the early Americans retrospectively.

Many founding fathers, according to Wood, recognized that slavery was inconsistent with the ideals of democracy they were fighting for but did not do much to fight it.

The biggest reason for that apathy, he said, was that the founding fathers truly believed that “slavery was on its last legs and headed for eventual [destruction].”

However, Wood noted that “American slavery, in fact, was on the verge of its greatest expansion.”

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“[The founding fathers] wanted to believe the best,” he said.

During the Q-and-A session, Wood emphasized that the Civil War would have happened regardless of any one event or leader.

“The cotton gin was inevitable,” he said. “It wasn’t the brilliance of Whitney ... it had to happen.”

Other individual events also did nothing to stop the onset of war.

“I don’t think there was a single thing that could have stopped the conflict,” he said.

The tragedy, however, according to Wood, is that slavery would have ended anyway by the end of the 20th century.

“The pressure would have been enormous on the country,” he said.

Only in hindsight, he said, can we make such judgments.

Wood is also the recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal for “scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.”

His lecture, titled “The Revolutionary Origins of the Civil War,” was the annual Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture on America’s Founding Principles, sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.