Elkins vs. McPherson: Comparing Slavery and Civil War Histories
This paper compares Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1968) and James McPherson's Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982), focusing on points of agreement and disagreement between the two historians. The analysis examines how each author introduces his subject, their contrasting treatments of the church's role during the slavery era, their differing views on the relationship between masters and slaves, and the role of laissez-faire capitalism in sustaining Southern slavery. The paper concludes with an assessment of the evidence each author employs and a judgment about which work provides the more thorough account of antebellum slavery.
- Introduction and Historiographical Approaches: How each author frames their subject matter
- Religion and the Church's Influence on Slavery: Contrasting views on Protestant and Catholic roles
- The Relationship Between Slaves and Masters: Differing accounts of slave autonomy and master power
- Laissez-Faire Capitalism and the Southern Economy: Cotton economy and the entrenchment of slavery
- Evidence and Scholarly Methods: Anecdotal and quantifiable sources compared
- Assessing Accuracy and Thoroughness: Judgment on which author is more thorough
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What makes this paper effective
- It organizes a comparative analysis around clear thematic categories — religion, master-slave relations, and capitalism — making it easy to track where the two authors agree and diverge.
- It consistently supports comparative claims with direct page-specific citations from both primary texts, giving the argument a concrete, verifiable grounding.
- The paper maintains an even-handed tone throughout before arriving at a reasoned conclusion about which author is more thorough, demonstrating critical judgment without overclaiming certainty.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates sustained comparative textual analysis — placing two secondary historical sources in dialogue with each other on the same set of themes. Rather than summarizing each book separately, the writer weaves them together within each section to highlight specific agreements and contradictions, which is a core skill in history and literature courses at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by contrasting each author's introductory framing, then moves through three thematic comparisons (religion, master-slave relations, capitalism), evaluates the quality of each author's evidence, and closes with a judgment on relative accuracy. This problem-then-theme-then-verdict structure is well-suited to comparative essays and keeps the argument focused from start to finish.
Introduction and Historiographical Approaches
Before examining the agreements and disagreements between the two authors discussed in this paper, it is worth considering how each one introduces his subject, since the approach each takes provides an important clue to his thinking. In his book Slavery, Stanley Elkins insists that the same moral arguments — right or wrong — have existed for as long as slavery has been both a cruel reality and a historical and economic fact of American life. "It continues to be the same debate," he writes (Elkins, 1968, 1); all the sources historians and journalists use to explore the history of slavery "have now been mined and re-mined" (Elkins, 2). A reader might wonder, then, why a historian would delve into a subject already so thoroughly examined. Elkins' introduction sets up a challenge for him to deliver a book that does not simply repeat what others have already written — an interesting rhetorical choice.
Elkins spends many pages cataloguing the scholarship previously done on slavery and offering brief critiques of the more notable works. Just about "anything" written about slavery during antebellum times had "a strong moral bias" (Elkins, 4), he remarks. Elkins fills page after page of his opening chapter, "An Introduction: Slavery as a Problem in Historiography," listing works that have been published on the subject.
James McPherson's book is more focused on the Civil War than on slavery per se, but in the chapters that open his discussion of slavery, he sets the stage by detailing not so much the moral issue as the attitudes of Southerners. He does not allude to the existing scholarship on the topic. Instead, he discusses the South's reluctance to accept Northern values on many levels, not just on the question of slavery. The "voices" of those who wanted industrial development in the South "were drowned out" by those who viewed the business and merchandising ethic of the North as a "form of vulgar Yankee materialism" (McPherson, 1982, 30–31). In other words, so long as slaves worked the land and performed the hard labor in the fields, the South would preserve its economy as it wished. McPherson notes on page 33 that slavery was "not only a system of labor exploitation, it was a method of racial control." The two authors do not disagree on these basic facts, but they are clearly writing from different angles.
Works Cited
Elkins, Stanley M. (1968). Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
McPherson, James M. (1982). Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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