What Do We Want History To Do?
by Drew Gilpin Faust


Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from a talk given by Professor Faust at the Gilder Lehrman Institute's Historian's Forum on October 30, 1996. Professor Faust gives us a concrete example of what the Bradley Commission meant when they said that the study of history develops the habit of mind allowing us to "perceive past events and issues as they were experienced by people at the time, to develop historical empathy as opposed to presentmindedness."

In my book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, I wanted to tell a new kind of war story, not a soldier's story but an equally compelling drama of social and personal crisis for thousands of nineteenth century southern women.

But Mothers of Invention as a women's war story raises important questions about what we want history to do. What do we regard as significant about the past? What do we want to communicate to readers?

I became a historian at a moment when answers to these questions were changing dramatically. I entered graduate school in the early 1970s, just as history was beginning to incorporate a variety of new approaches and subjects. Central to what we have demanded of history in the past generation is greater inclusivity. We began to try to tell everyone's story.

The result turned out to be not just new stories to add to the old ones we thought we already knew. Instead we found we had to revise our interpretations of the old ones.

Civil War history has been particularly resistant to these new perspectives. Perhaps because statesmen and generals were in fact so influential as the nation exploded in military and political upheaval, historians focused on their actions to the almost total exclusion of supposedly less important lives. In my explorations of the South's wartime experience, for example, I kept coming across references to the Confederate "homefront" as a critical factor determining the South's fortunes. Weak productivity and morale on the homefront, historians argued, played a significant role in southern defeat. At the same time, I read descriptions of Confederate mobilization, noting that three out of four white men of military age entered the Confederate army. When I put these two together, it struck me that "Confederate homefront" meant a world of white women and slaves. How did failures of productivity and morale relate to the high proportion of white women left on the homefront?

I found these questions of central importance not just to white Confederate women but to the Confederate government and its fate. In a society where responsibilities were sharply gendered the departure of so many white males had profound effects. Women confronted unanticipated burdens as they, in the words of one Texas woman, tried "to do a man's business" providing for their families and running southern agriculture. Some women even found themselves in the fields, behind a plow, for the first time.

Furthermore, white men of the pre-Civil War South had borne another heavy responsibility. They had managed the slave system, controlling the labor of 4 million African slaves and protecting the white South from slave rebellion. In the antebellum years the exercise of the violence fundamental to slavery had been overwhelmingly the responsibility and the prerogative of white men.

In Mothers of Invention I describe women struggling with feelings of profound inadequacy as they tried to manage slaves and produce crops. Many were frightened and resentful as they found themselves on plantations or in the countryside where they were outnumbered by slaves and bereft of the white male protection they had come to regard as their due. Hundreds of women petitioned Confederate officials demanding that white men be returned from the army to protect white females in areas with large slave populations.

Women's difficulties in managing slaves had another implication. Recently historians have noted the disintegration of slavery across the South even before the moment of Confederate defeat--a disintegration they see as arising in large degree from slaves' efforts to challenge the circumstances of their bondage and thus literally free themselves. But as we think about the departure of white masters and their replacement by white mistresses, we gain new perspective on "disintegration." To what extent was it aided by the inability of white female slave managers to exert physical domination?

As Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina observed in the middle of the war, Master's eye and voice are much more potent than mistress'. After her husband left, Ellen Moore of Virginia complained that her family's slaves all think I am a kind of usurper & have no authority over them.

Here once again, looking for women, making them visible, alters our historical understanding. The meanings of "the failure of the Confederate homefront," and "disintegration of southern slavery" change when we add women to the equation.

Women make a difference in how we understand the Civil War. But this argument I make for greater historical inclusivity differs from most such arguments because the women in my book are different from the subjects of much of women's history.

A popular justification for historical inclusivity is that history could or should offer role models. But the women in my book lived off the labor of four million slaves; they regarded slavery as justifiable--even moral and humane. Such objections as they raised to it derived from the burdens slavery placed on them as managers. My mothers of invention are unlikely candidates for celebration today.

Other scholars have recently published studies of Nazi women, of fascist women in Italy, of women in the KKK. We have begun to move to a new phase of women's history in which we begin to define different reasons for history's inclusivity, new answers to the question: What do we want history to do?

One part of the revolution in historical studies beginning in the '60s and '70s was a desire to tell a more complicated story. More people's stories, different people's stories would make the Big Picture more complex, more varied, more nuanced. But as we focused on celebrating the pasts of groups previously left out of the historical canon, we began to "decelebrate" the pasts of those who had already been there, transforming earlier heroes into no more than "dead white males." The author of the Declaration of Independence, for example, became a hypocrite as historians decried his ownership of slaves. What then do we want from our changing version of the past? Have we just slipped from unexamined celebration to unmixed blame?

My goal in writing about women who were in many ways far from admirable, but nevertheless had to deal with difficult situations, was to move to a more complicated understanding. My task was to present them in ways that did not excuse their shortcomings, yet allowed them to explain themselves and the world as they saw it.

I hoped to give a sense of how people are shaped and constrained by the world into which they are born, of how their choices are limited by the "taken for grantedness" of their social universe. I wanted to show how hard it is to cope with change, to adjust to a new world, even a world that to us seems unquestionably more morally and socially desirable--and to show how people managed not just to accept, but to justify social arrangements we today find abhorrent.

We need not forgive their rationalizations, but it is imperative that we understand them. I would like us to recognize that we too are subject to self delusion, to the limited vision imposed by the social arrangements of our own time. As we understand how people in the past fashioned and maintained their beliefs, we can better evaluate, criticize, and perhaps change our own. A complex history ought above all to yield a sense of new possibilities.


Drew Gilpin Faust is the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. For a copy of Prof. Faust's entire talk, send a self-addressed, stamped (78ยข), envelope to: Faust, c/o NCHE, 26915 Westwood Rd., Suite B-2, Westlake, OH 44145.