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In the social science, historical theories and concepts are criticized by current scholars in search of new knowledge. If new evidence is discovered, scholars critically analyze it in consideration to the past evidence provided. The reason for revisionism is history relies on past distant events, and very little evidence is used in postulating of theories, therefore, when more evidence is found, it call for revision of the earlier theories or critic their explanation to the past event. This essay focuses on the civil war and the views of the revisionist via a Vis Stampp disapproval of them.
How and why do revisionists argue that the civil war was a needless or repressible war? The proponent of revisionism argued that the case for a civil was a moral judgment of whether slavery was right or wrong. In addition, the agitators for antislavery had questionable attitudes towards the issues of slavery as political issues. As Steven Douglas argued, slavery was an issue of the southern people, and it did not affect people in the north. Therefore, the issues of slavery were better left to the white in the south to deal with and not engage in an unnecessary war.
Moreover, revisionist says that the moral indifference of slavery was not a big issue to fight over it. Men and women are created sane and would solve their differences in a sane manner and avoid unnecessary bloodshed. According to Ulrich Philips, the black people had no problem being slaves because, in their nature, they were submissive, amiable, and light-hearted, imitative, ingratiating, and they were not progressive by the fact that they were Negroes. Philips also argues that the case for the plantation system among the slave was nothing ethical but nostalgia.
Therefore, slavery was not a cause for the alarm, to instigate civil war because it had nothing to excite (Stampp 191-245). Another revisionist, Frank L, Owsley says that slavery was a moral issue and was not economic determinism of civilization in the south. He says that the issue of slavery has been dragged in the wrong case of the causes of a civil war. Furthermore, Randall believed that the black slave in the south had adapted to bondage without much resistance, and performing their tasks cheerfully.
Randall also argues that, the southern slaves were abused, and this amounted to mistreatment, but it was a lenient way of treating slave by their slave owners. Randall says that, in reality the slave’s owners were more enslaved than the black by the set out institutions (Stampp 191-245). Craven brought his assertion that the different between the West and East were much greater than that of the North and South. Craven argues that abolition of slavery hindered the understanding of the effect of slavery to the modern employee –employer relationship.
According to Craven, the life American worker today is much like that of the slave. Craven note that, even during the debate of the relevancy of slavery in the south, the patient blacks continued with their tasks unconsciously never minding the merits of the system he was working. David Potter in his analysis of revisionism says that, the facts that slave were left to live and even to grow and expand in a new world, was better off than engaging in a war. David concedes that emancipation of four million slaves was of great value, but he says it came at a greater cost.
According to David, for every
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