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ATHENA Roundtable 2011: Keynote Address by Historian Gordon Wood
At 9 AM sharp the 2011 ATHENA Roundtable on higher education began and, boy, what a way to start! ACTA Chairman of the Board Robert Lewit, M.D., kindly introduced keynote speaker and eminent American historian Dr. Gordon Wood. Dr. Wood gave us a rousing presentation on the Revolutionary Origins of the Civil War:
As we all know, 2011 marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and it is right that we reflect on it. Yet, Dr. Wood notes, our commemoration of the Civil War should in no way diminish the Revolutionary War, which Wood believes is still undoubtedly the single most important event in our national history. And, in many ways, the Civil War can be interpreted as the culmination of the Revolutionary War, where the ideals and ideas of the revolution were finally realized with the abolition of slavery.
Wood highlights Abraham Lincoln as an historical figure who, more than most, understood that the Civil War was a continuation of what our forefathers originally fought and died for. And Lincoln expertly used the memory of the revolution to justify the Civil War.
For it is not hard to understand why the South seceded, but it is more difficult to ascertain why the Northern States cared so much. To shed light on this, Dr. Wood has us go back to the revolution, namely the Declaration of Independence and the ideals of a republican society that it articulated.
Liberty and Equality. The bedrocks of American republicanism and the two themes most at odds with the institution of slavery. Only in the birth of the American nation did these two ideas come to the forefront of the American mind and only then did slavery suddenly seem totally incompatible with the society in which we live. The founders recognized this, but did little to set slavery on the path to extinction.
Lincoln, Wood tells us, harkened back to liberty and equality as a way to motivate Northerners to fight for countless black slaves that they had never met. Lincoln and others also looked around at the foreign nations of the world in 1850. All foreign attempts to replicate the American experiment in self-government had failed. America stood as the lone bastion of freedom in a tyrannical world. Lincoln and Northerners believed that America was the last, best hope of that men could indeed rule themselves without meeting their ruin. Lincoln was thus able to capture this national sentiment and motivate the North for war in order to keep the dream of successful self-government alive for America and the world.
A truly tremendous start to what is sure to be a provocative day of discussion and deliberation.
Posted by Max Brindle on November 04, 2011 at November 4, 2011 04:25 PM
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