Aaron Sheehan-Dean
“The Cultural Origins of the American Civil War.”
May 18, 2023
When Jefferson Davis declared that Northerners were “a people whose ancestors Cromwell had gathered from the bogs and fens of Ireland and Scotland,” he was framing the Civil War as a cultural conflict. At the heart of his reference was the seventeenth-century conflicts that we know today as the English Civil War. This historical memory provided a foundation for white Southerners as they developed a theory of cultural difference that demanded national autonomy. They identified a lineage connecting themselves to the Royalists who defended Charles I, which anchored them in a world of hierarchy and order. At the same time, they castigated Northerners as “Puritans.” In contrast, Northerners celebrated the accomplishments of Cromwell and abolitionists, especially New Englanders, took pride in carrying on the original Puritan legacy in their efforts to build a new Jerusalem. This lecture will explore how nineteenth-century Americans drew on history to craft sectional identities that drove the country toward civil war.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies and chairman of the History Department at Louisiana State University. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. He is the author of the award-winning The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia, and most recently Reckoning with Rebellion: War and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies and chairman of the History Department at Louisiana State University. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. He is the author of the award-winning The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia, and most recently Reckoning with Rebellion: War and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century.