Reply #10: Okay ...

[RoyGBiv]

Note this part of the article:

"Revisionism can also refer to the reexamination of past historical events as in to question conventional wisdom on a subject and determine what really occurred during an historical event as in historical revisionism."

Conventional wisdom in the early part of the 20th century was that the war was all pretty much a big mistake, that slavery had little to do with it, and that Reconstruction was a failure because the freedmen had proved themselves incapable of the responsibilities of being citizens.

Early historians who challenged and "revised" this view of history, among them WEB Dubois, were largely dismissed as "revisionists" using your meaning of the term, i.e. "revising" the truth. This is incorrect. What they were revising was the manner in which facts were being interpreted, noting, for example, that one of the reasons freedmen were having so much difficulty fitting into society was that whites were doing a fine job of keeping them out of it using methods up to and including outright murder.

It is a misinterpretation of history to refer to abolitionists, as a group, as "pro-war" at any point prior to secession. Some minority elements among abolitionist circles were in favor of violent insurrection against the government if it continued to do nothing to put an end to the institution, John Brown among them, but this is quite different from being pro-war in the context of the Civil War. As noted, abolitionists were fragmented, as was Northern opinion in general on the subject of war with the South. Not until Ft. Sumter did Northern opinion gel into a pro-war stance on a large scale.

Now, I'm sorry you see this as a "lecture," by which I infer negative connotations. I'm simply frustrated by the misuse of the term in the context of historical analysis. Were it not for revisionists, we would still be taught that Native Americans were savages, that enslaved people were better off as slaves, and that slaves were generally happy with their lot. Pretty much everything I gather you believe to be true about this period has come from the work of self-described revisionists, e.g. Kenneth Stampp, Thomas Connelly, Leon Litwack, George Frederickson, Eric Foner, et al.

Of course one can revise the revision, which can be negative, but revisionism itself as a term to describe historical analysis is a neutral term. The quality of the work is what should determine its worth, positive or negative.