Like you, I hope, I have been incredibly fortunate in my teaching. In a range of areas, I have benefited from top-notch teaching. At the moment, I am thinking about the American South — the history of. In college, I had two teachers, both of them protégés of C. Vann Woodward. One was Barbara J. Fields; the other was J. Mills Thornton III (a perfect moniker, particularly for an Alabamian). I wrote about the former in a 2021 piece called “Back to School”; I podcasted with the latter in 2017, here.
(In graduate school, I had David Herbert Donald. Do you know what he told students, about how to write better? Among other things, “watch Fred Astaire dance.”)
Professor Thornton taught a course called “The Ordeal of the Union.” It ended with the firing on Fort Sumter. I’ll never forget how he began the course. “What was the cause of the Civil War?” he asked. He then answered, “Slavery.” But it came out in three syllables: “slay-ver-eey.” He quickly qualified, “It was a necessary but insufficient cause of the war.”
And so the course proceeded.
The impetus for our podcast decades later, in 2017, was President Trump — remarks he had made: “People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
Trump further said, “I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’”
That is a peculiar interpretation of American history.
Have you seen Nikki Haley’s answer, quickly infamous? (Find it here.) Vomitous. Sometimes, a politician is too much a politician, if you know what I mean. He’s afraid to state his name, if there might be an electoral drawback to it.
I wonder how Trump would answer, today. I wonder how Ron DeSantis and the other remaining candidates would. Maybe they ought to prepare. Maybe they already have.
How would I answer? Well, if you don’t have an hour, you can just refer your questioner to the Gospels — in particular Matthew or Luke — and the passages about a house divided. I wonder whether anyone ever thought of doing that.
It is an unforgettable thing — a powerful and unforgettable thing — to see a college professor cry. On the last day of our course, Professor Thornton quoted “Dover Beach,” the Matthew Arnold poem, and its final lines, about ignorant armies clashing in the night. And he wept.
So could I, almost, at the memory and thought of it.