Historian and Partisan

Recently Brooks D. Simpson responded to a Tweet with the following:

“Someone who moralizes for the Confederacy is upset with me. Someone who hasn’t read any of my scholarship…”

Dr. Simpson has an impressive list of published material including books and a significant number of journal articles and chapters in books. It would be fair to say he is an expert on Ulysses S. Grant. In fact, Ron Chernow references one of Simpson’s books and two of his articles in his biography of Grant. Let’s stipulate that Dr. Simpson has published scholarship worthy of praise. Does this mean he cannot be guilty of moralizing against the Confederacy as charged in the Tweet he was responding to?

Here are some of his thoughts from an article with the esteemed bi-partisan Southern Poverty Law Center.

“First of all, without slavery there’s no Civil War in the first place, there’s no irreconcilable conflict, so that’s a sine qua non”.

Without oxygen there are no forest fires. Oxygen is the cause of forest fires.

“The Confederates of 1861–65 were much more honest about the importance of slavery than are the neo-Confederates of today.”

Slavery was important to the South and the United States. Some states may have seceded over slavery. So called neo-Confederates are responding to the all-out assault on a heritage that includes slavery but is not defined by slavery.

“Lincoln is often derided as being some sort of dictator-tyrant in the White House, but I think he actually toed the Constitutional line a lot more carefully than people give him credit for.”

Northern men made a compelling case that Lincoln repeatedly violated the Constitution, and they include Clement Vallandigham, Benjamin R. Curtis, and Alexander Long. Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman argued recently in The New York Times that Lincoln destroyed the original Constitution with his repeated violations.

“For Grant, it was the color of the uniform, not the skin, that mattered.”

Lee would not exchange black prisoners of war who were slaves because the laws of the Confederacy forbade it. The laws of the United States did as well until June of 1864 when the Fugitive Slave Act was repealed.

Dr. Simpson is an effective left of center partisan as well as an historian. The latter does not necessarily lend credibility to the former.