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The Blundering Generation Revisited: James G. Randall, Methodism and the Necessity of the Civil War

On May 2, 1940, James G. Randall took the lectern before several hundred of his peers at the thirty-third meeting of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in Omaha, Nebraska. Randall stood proudly in the main ballroom of Omaha’s regal Hotel Fontanelle ready to deliver his presidential address. Despite amplifier problems, which caused some hearing issues in the room, Randall’s speech was well received. Indeed, of all his papers presented, articles published and books written, Randall’s remarks on that warm spring evening in the Midwest proved to be his lasting legacy—a legacy he embraced to his dying day almost 13 years later.1

Randall had intended to call his paper “Some Reflections on the Civil War Generation,” a workmanlike if boring title. The reason for the title change is lost to history, but after some thought Randall came up with the phrase that became synonymous with his name and would distill his work. The new title adopted by the reticent scholar from the University of Illinois was “The Blundering Generation.”2

Earlier that day, the Omaha Evening World-Herald reported that Randall would be part of a panel discussion titled “Philosophy of the Sectional Conflict” although the article’s headline tried to recount the scholarly discussion with journalistic flair: “Debate if Abolitionists Were Idealists or ‘Nuts.’ Arguing the “idealists” side was University of Michigan professor Dwight L. Dumond while Arthur Y. Lloyd, former professor at the University of Kentucky, spoke in favor of the “nuts” argument. Randall was to present “a more conservative view of the same period.”3

Randall’s overarching argument—that war was not inevitable and was the result of emotionalism and uncontrolled passions—has been analyzed and remarked upon so often that only key points need summarized. Randall, the realist, began his interpretive journey with the

words of a sentimentalist, the literary critic Joseph Hergesheimer. Although Hergesheimer is forgotten today and had the misfortune of seeing his literary reputation decline in his own lifetime, in his day he was a giant. Overwrought as Hergesheimer’s prose was, it’s very floridity probably suggested itself to Randall as a useful jumping-off point. What better way to highlight the cool rationality of Randall’s own analysis of the war then to contrast it with the hyperbolic prose of a man who wrote that the Civil War was “the last romantic war?”4

Randall quickly disabused his audience of the notion of a romantic war. “The soldier who was brutally struck by a sentry of his own company or who contracted malaria would hardly think of his experience as a thing of romance,” Randall said. In deference to the beloved clichés of the Civil War, Randall added, “That there was heroism in the war is not doubted, but to thousands the war was as romantic as prison rats and as gallant as typhoid or syphilis.”5

As Randall told his audience, he found explanations for the bloodbath incomprehensible. Noting that most wars were said to be results of cultural differences or economic situations, Randall objected: “It may be seriously doubted whether war rises from fundamental motives of culture or economics so much as from the lack of cultural restraint or economic inhibition upon militaristic megalomania.”6

And what of slavery? Slavery, Randall said, was trivial as a cause of the war. While not suggesting that slavery itself was trivial, Randall said the issues regarding slavery, especially those raised by the abolitionists, were not important to the principal players of the struggle. “It

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was no part of the Republican program to smash slavery in the South, nor did the territorial aspect of slavery mean much politically beyond agitation. Southerners cared little about actually taking slaves into existing territories. . ..”7

Those who advocated peace never had a chance, Randall said. Noting that if such a foe of war as Ralph Waldo Emerson could show support for this war, Randall pointed out “it was not to be expected that pacifists would have a hearing. The broad cause of peace was one of the casualties of war.” Opposing a war in progress was seen as defeatist, a “surrender to forces

which northern idealists considered destructive and evil.” Peace itself, Randall said, had become a matter of politics.8

Randall called for further study. Keeping in mind a firm grasp of the carnage and brutality which his generation witnessed during World War I, Randall offered lessons which would benefit leaders who faced those same challenges as another war neared. “In the present troubled age it may be of more than academic interest to reexamine the human beings of that war generation with less thought of the “splendor of the battle flags” and with more of the sophisticated, and unsentimental searchlight of reality.”9

This presidential address was not the first time Randall had observed how historians had misperceived the causes of the war. Indeed, Randall wasn’t the first historian to broach the subject. As Thomas N. Bonner has shown, beginning as early as 1900, some historians—a distinct minority, to be sure—began to picture the war as unnecessary and to question how central the issue of slavery should be to analyzing the war’s causes. Although Bonner believed the concept of causation to be meaningless to historians, saying it required insights unavailable to the human mind, he admitted that it didn’t matter to most writers who plowed ahead.10

Bonner argued that the work of Charles and Mary Beard, ironically, set the stage for what later scholars would call the “revisionist school’ of Civil War causation. Ironically, because the Beards questioned not the war’s inevitability, but rather the prevailing focus on the moral issue

of slavery, which they believed to be too simple an interpretation. They argued, Bonner wrote, that “[t]he antislavery party was not opposed to slavery for moral reasons but to gain political ascendancy in order to fasten the economic stranglehold of northern capitalism upon the South.” Southern historians, such as William E. Dodd, one of Randall’s mentors at the University of Chicago, embraced the Beards’s hypothesis because it substituted a palatable interpretative approach for a noxious one. A historian need not risk the appearance of defending slavery; rather he could advance the more acceptable view (at least to Southern minds) that southern plantation owners were defending their fields against Northern bankers and capitalists, and that the only way that they could do so was by secession.11

Nor was Randall the first to discuss the subject of an avoidable conflict. Avery Craven, who would for a time be a colleague of Randall’s at the University of Illinois, wrote of a repressible conflict in the 1930s while teaching at the University of Chicago. Craven, who like Randall also studied under Dodd, moved the thesis forward in fits and starts until 1942 when he published The Coming of the Civil War which in Bonner’s words “represented his ripest contributions to Civil War revisionism.” Craven argued that the war came about because of a generation of “well- meaning Americans, who…permitted their short-sighted politicians, their over-zealous editors,

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and their pious reformers to emotionalize real and potential differences and to conjure up distorted impressions of those who dwelt in other parts of the nation.”12

There was little question that this revisionist view would encounter objections and challenges. One of the most elaborately argued came from the young Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a 1949 article in Partisan Review, challengingly titled, “The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism.” Schlesinger argued that the emotionalism that Randall and Craven abhorred had been a trenchant fact throughout American history; “But, if the indictment

‘blundering generation’ meant no more than a general complaint that democratic politics placed a premium on emotionalism, then the Civil War would have been no more nor less ‘needless’ than any event in our blundering history.”13

Much (if not most) of Schlesinger’s argument focused on the revisionist idea that slavery was not enough of a reason for war to erupt. Schlesinger charged that to sustain the idea of slavery’s relative unimportance as a cause of the war, Randall, Craven and the other revisionists “must show…that there were policies with which a non-blundering generation could have resolved the slavery crisis and averted war; and that these policies were so obvious that the failure to adopt them indicated blundering and stupidity of a peculiarly irresponsible nature.” If no such policies existed, Schlesinger concluded, it would be unfair to blame the political generation of the 1850s for failing to see what didn’t exist.14

Schlesinger argued that if it had indeed been possible to resolve the issue of slavery so as to avoid war, there were three possibilities for slavery’s destruction: through “internal reform in the South; through economic exhaustion of the slavery system in the South; or through some government project for gradual and compensated emancipation.” Schlesinger then showed how none of these aforementioned possibilities could have borne fruit. Internal reform in the South, which never was a serious option in Schlesinger’s view, became impossible when Southern whites quashed discussion of slavery. As for the economic exhaustion of slavery, Schlesinger said that with its history of blaming northern exploitation for its economic problems, no one in the South “would have recognized the causes of their economic predicament and taken the appropriate measures.” Finally, compensated emancipation was rebuffed by slaveowners when Lincoln presented the option in 1862. “The hard fact, indeed, is that the revisionists have not

tried seriously to describe the policies by which the slavery problem could have been peacefully

resolved.”15

So what, Schlesinger asked, lay behind the revisionist’s beliefs? He indicted the revisionists for failing to see the issues of slavery and of fighting a war to end slavery as the moral issues he believed them to be. “I cannot escape the feeling that the vogue of revisionism is connected with the modern tendency to seek in optimistic sentimentalism an escape from the severe demands of moral decision; that it is the offspring of our modern sentimentality which at once evades the essential moral problems in the name of a superficial objectivity and asserts their unimportance in the name of an invincible progress.”16

Schlesinger argued that the revisionists—that all historians for that matter—were obliged to pronounce moral judgments on actions that ran counter to the democratic ideals that America’s

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founding documents pronounced, although he warned that that obligation was no license for forgetting that individuals were prisoners of their own times and societal pressures. “The revisionists were commendably anxious to avoid the vulgar errors of the post-Civil War historians who pronounced smug individual judgments on the persons involuntarily involved in the tragedy of the slave system. Consequently they tried hard to pronounce no moral judgments at all on slavery.” In Schlesinger’s view, the error of the revisionists was to bend over so far backward to avoid easy and smug moral judgments on historical actors that they renounced any need to consider moral issues in history at all.17

In his conclusion, Schlesinger demanded an acknowledgement that every historian “imports his own set of moral judgments into the writing of history by the very process of interpretation….” Whereas Randall had no problem in expressing what Schlesinger termed his “moral feeling” that the abolitionist’s attitude was “unctuous” and “intolerant” Randall (in

Schlesinger’s reading) could not express any moral feeling about the cause of fighting to free the

bondsman. It was a severe indictment indeed.18

Although Schlesinger was not questioning Randall’s personal integrity, he did argue that anyone claiming to understand what he termed “the great conflicts of history” must acknowledge that there are some issues worth the shedding of blood, and to fail to accept that slavery was one of those issues is a failure either to acknowledge or to understand that slavery was “a betrayal of the basic values of our Christian and democratic tradition.” Like a logjam, a great moral wrong such as slavery sometimes required violence and force to expel it permanently from our society.19

Whether one accepts Schlesinger’s argument or not, a further question emerges from his general indictment of revisionism, especially where Randall is concerned. Many who have written about Randall argue that his devout Methodist faith, along with the general disappointment in society felt by his post-World War One generation, informed much of his belief in the futility and horrors of war. Whereas their reading of the significance of Randall’s faith for his work as a historian is true, that reading doesn’t begin to answer a complex and intricate question: how could such a religious man, whose life story fit the textbook definition of reformer, deem a war to free human beings from bondage unnecessary? To answer this question, we must study not only Randall’s personal devotion to his faith, but what his faith said about enduring human questions that faced its membership—namely, racial tensions between white Methodists and blacks.

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana on June 24, 1881, Randall, the son of Horace and Ellen Randall, first absorbed his faith from his upbringing within the Methodist Episcopal Church. At the time of his birth, the Methodist Episcopal Church began to change focus from poorer and more rural congregations onto the emerging urban white middle class, of which Horace Randall, a businessman, was a member. As the religious historian William Warren Sweet has observed, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, “the most serious problem faced by American Methodism as a whole at this time was its rapidly increasing wealth.”20

The Methodist Episcopal Church in Indianapolis championed the Social Gospel, which Randall also embraced. Just how strongly that reforming tradition captured his loyalty is indicated by Randall’s close attention to two areas of social reform—the adoption of the Social

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Creed by the church and its stand against the use of alcohol, which as Kevin Corn has pointed out, was especially strong in Indianapolis Methodist congregations.21

As nineteenth-century society began to feel the effects of industrialization and many people started to amass wealth, the institutional church saw in its membership a reflection of troubles that workingmen throughout the country felt. Many saw their employers as exploiting their labor to enrich themselves, while they received very little in return. One possible response was political Socialism, which some embraced but which most of American society, including Randall, saw as too radical. Christian Socialism, a more moderate and widely accepted alternative, began to spread throughout the country, especially in urban communities where poverty was much more abject and demoralizing.22

Whereas the church maintained that individual sins must be dealt with, church leaders also believed, in the descriptive phrase of Sweet, that “something must be done about the sins of society.” In 1907, the church formed the Methodist Federation for Social Service. A year later, as a result this group’s efforts, the church presented the Social Creed, which provided for a number of points which the church, and its members, should follow in relation to the workingmen. The church stood for:

1. Equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life2. The principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions3. The protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, occupational

injuries, and mortality.4. The abolition of child labor.5. Regulation of the conditions of labor for women as shall safeguard the

physical and moral health of the community.6. The suppression of the “sweating system.”7. The gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest

practical point, with work for all; and for that degree of leisure for all which is the condition of the highest human life.

8. Release from employment one day in seven9. A living wage in every industry.10. The highest wage that each industry can afford, and for the most equitable

division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised.11. The recognition of the Golden Rule and the mind of Christ as the supreme law

of society and the sure remedy for all social ills.23

Randall showed his support for this with a public lecture, “The Relation of the Church to the Workingman,” probably delivered around 1910. Recognizing that the church services held earlier in the day were led by the laymen of the church, Randall called that practice “very appropriate” given that “the real life of the church, the real thing which makes the church go[,] is the lay membership.” He equated that practice with the role of the workingman, whose labor helped to make the business community go forward.24

That Randall focused early on business gives us a succinct picture of his background and upbringing. We can imagine Horace Randall sitting with his son on their front porch, telling him what Randall later told his audience in 1910 “[I]n order to be successful in business, a man must be thoroughly awake and thoroughly alive. He must keep abreast of the times, he must watch the

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markets, and keep himself informed in regard to a multitude of facts that have a bearing upon business life. He must be ready to change his business tactics when changes in industrial organization make it necessary; and if he fails to do so, if he is foolish enough to ignore this law of the business world, he must pay for that neglect in business lost.”

Randall urged his listeners, especially those who split their times between the business and religious worlds to take action on the issues facing the church. “We need more men of sound business sense to do some good hard thinking upon these religious problems and help solve them.” And what in Randall’s view was the biggest problem facing the church? It was, Randall said, the relation of the church to the workingman: “Why is it that the workingman stands aloof from our churches today? Why is it that he is indifferent, not to say, hostile to the Christian religion?” Randall declared that one-fourth of the nation’s population consisted of the laboring class, but he doubted that one-fourth of the church’s rolls, especially in the church where he grew up, was so populated.

Although Randall did not want to make his speech into a call for battle between classes, he clearly showed his own position in society when he contrasted it with the position of the man who was not hearing the word of God. “We mean the man who works with his hands, the man of the shop and the factory—the day laborer. Now these are the very men who need the church the most and that is what makes the fact of their indifference that much more serious.” Randall said.

It was the duty of those current servants of the Christian religion to do their missionary duty by bringing the word of God to their employees. “The Christian religion will give the workman a clearer look, a steadier hand, and a quicker step,” Randall said. “It will make him more efficiently care for his family, more successful as a workman [and] more faithful in fulfilling his trust as a citizen.”

In searching for the reason why the workingman had forsaken revealed religion, Randall made it clear that the blame lay not with the Methodist Church, but rather in the nature of the relationship between the workingman and management, the very people Randall was addressing. As he drafted his remarks, Randall wrote: “If we stop and ask the question as to the position of our great army of workmen in the present industrial system, I think we can see something of a reason for the bitterness of feeling and the jealousy which…” Randall stopped at this point, then crossed out what he had written. Instead, he wrote and later said ‘Whatever we may say about the desirability of industrial peace, industrial peace does not exist. There is a misunderstanding between employers and laborers which often amounts to warfare.”

Randall threw down the gauntlet—albeit softly—to the employers. “Too often the men who occupy the position of employers are men who utterly disregard the rights and liberties of their workmen as human beings, too often they are men who deliberately exploit the workingman for private gain, and strive to keep him degraded purposely in order that he may be more easily managed.” But, Randall said, temptation from the devil led the manager and the corporate leader astray, not their own greed. “[T]he devil approaches him with the same temptation which he offered to Christ in the wilderness,” Randall said, “and too many such men yield, and fall down and worship the devil for the promise of material gain and financial success, deluding themselves with the thought that that is the way to secure such gain and such success.”

The workingman often fell prey to the labor agitator and the political socialist, for whom Randall had especial scorn. “Too many workmen listen to the preaching of the socialist, and socialism is, to say the least, a poor substitute for religion,” he told his listeners. In 1907, in a lecture on the financial situation and the American government that he delivered at Illinois

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College in Jacksonville, Randall derisively said the socialist often took advantage of the workingman “with his profuse promises of the equalization of the product of rich and poor.”25

As he closed his address, Randall pointed to one issue that above all, hurt the workingman and that required intervention by the church—temperance. It was not enough for the church simply to preach the message of the abhorrent nature of drink, it required “aggressive temperance work. The work of putting a saloon out of business is a very direct means of helping the workingman.”26

In that regard, Randall practiced what he preached. He put his Methodist upbringing and teachings, which he learned at the Indianapolis churches, into action while he was a professor at Salem College in Roanoke, Virginia. In 1917, while teaching at Salem, he took over the presidency of the Virginia chapter of the Intercollegiate Prohibition Association. He spent much of his tenure, though, trying to raise money for the organization, including a comical attempt to get $25 from one donor as prize money for an essay contest, rather than in direct, active crusading against the evils of drink.27

Randall’s writings show his deep attachment to Methodism and its calls for social justice.

However, in many cases, he held a conservative moral position. Only through the civilizing influences of capitalism or Christianity does the American get ahead in life, Randall argued. With a clearer picture of Randall’s moral and religious views, what, if any effect, did those views have on his developing thoughts concerning the Civil War, its causation, and its purposes?

Randall’s lecture notes from 1907, when he taught Civil War history at Illinois College in Jacksonville, survive. What gives these interest to the historian is that in some instances they contradict the arguments for which Randall later became famous. In one especially cogent comment, the Randall of 1907 told his students that the main cause of the war was slavery. Also, even though Democrats believed in 1862 that the war should end and an adjustment negotiated to preserve the Union, Randall said, “The fact was that then the Union could not be saved without war.”28

As Randall saw himself as a constitutional historian, his early work dealt mainly with constitutional issues, so much so that in his 1911 doctoral dissertation, The Confiscation of

Property During the Civil War, (published in 1913) he noted “A unique class of ‘property’, namely slaves, is excluded from consideration here, because the study of this topic constitutes a substantial problem in itself, and its connection with the policy of general confiscation was only incidental.”29

In the chapters dealing with slavery in his first major book, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, Randall told his reader that he was not writing about “the general bearings of the oft- discussed subject of emancipation as a matter of policy, but rather those questions of governmental power and authority which the subject involves.” Where war itself was concerned, we can get a clearer picture of Randall’s developing views from a letter Randall wrote in 1928 to University of Pennsylvania historian E.P. Cheyney, concerning Ella Lonn’s Desertion During the Civil War. “There is perhaps too much a tendency to glorify the Civil War which was, in reality, an ugly thing, in many respects a discreditable thing in American life, and a thing which loses its glamour in detail.”30

The major influence guiding Randall throughout his life with regard to the way he answered the question whether it was necessary to fight a war to end slavery came from his Methodist

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upbringing. Although we cannot conclude that Randall accepted every tenet of the Methodist faith without question, when it came to the social ills that the church addressed, Randall saw the salvation of the people through the power, as he saw it, of a merciful God and its representative on earth, the institutional church.

“It is of the first importance for us to fully realize that the abolition movement was, in fact, an utter moral failure,” wrote the Rev. Daniel Denison Whedon, editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review, in his introduction to the Rev. L.C. Matlack’s 1881 book The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Triumph in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Oddly, the introduction appears almost to rebut the substance of Matlack’s book. The church had once denied Matlack installation as a preacher because of his strong anti-slavery views. He was, Whedon observed, an original abolitionist, about which Whedon mused, “It is a signal, popular illusion that original abolitionism was a great, successful moral reform.” In a sentence that Randall could have written, Whedon suggested “All Mr. Garrison did was madden the slave-holders and bring on a war.” 31

Although we do not know whether Randall ever read Whedon, Whedon certainly represented the tensions pervading the Methodist Church’s history regarding slavery and race. Although, as Richard M. Cameron reported, in the early Methodist church blacks worshipped with whites in the same building, they were segregated within the building and relegated to a defined space. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was established in 1816 and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church started in 1820 in part to allow blacks to worship with their own leaders in their own churches rather than being beholden to whites. The Methodists thus established a pattern of segregation that Randall saw as a young man in Indianapolis. It is hard to imagine that he could have escaped that pattern’s influence.32

Although the General Conference of the church never wavered in its view that slavery was wrong, at the same time the church believed itself powerless to do anything significant to bring slavery to an end. Although the church did keep its members from participating in the slave trade, they failed to keep lay members from owning slaves. Ministers, especially those who were itinerant, however, were prohibited from holding slaves.33

Up to 1844, the church remained united, holding Northern and Southern congregations together under the same denominational umbrella. However, in 1845, a convention of Southern Conferences organized what became known as the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The split’s main cause was slavery. According to Cameron’s account “It is clear that moral revulsion against slavery in the Northern section of the church, together with the conviction that it was the church’s business to speak out on the matter, was at the bottom of the matter. The South took the other side of the question.”34

After the Civil War and the end of slavery, the Northern Methodist church took it upon itself to help rebuild the South and to help bring the black man into the family of man. “Our glorious victory is only the signal for the initiation of a great moral regeneration,” as one Methodist editor proclaimed. In their drive to educate the freedman, which they saw as a key component of their quest for moral regeneration, the Northern church met stiff resistance from Southern whites, whereas blacks almost overwhelmed those missionaries who traveled South to open schools.

Church policy dictated, “The slave, freed and clothed with the elective franchise, is to be educated and made a useful Christian citizen. Here is one of the broadest and most promising fields for humane and Christian labor…opened to His Church.”35

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Because of the large number of blacks who needed education, and the paucity of resources available, the church decided that it would focus on educating a few black leaders, who then would return to their communities and teach their brethren. Cameron states that by 1895, there were forty-four schools under Methodist supervision. No student was ever excluded from these schools because of color, although as the years passed, and segregation in the South became the accepted norm, such issues of inclusion and exclusion arose. Although the church emphasized a policy of non-segregation, it also began tacitly to allow local communities to follow the social dictates of an increasingly segregated South. Eventually, even the Methodist Church bowed to social pressures, creating a General Conference exclusively for blacks.36

Methodism in Indianapolis faced the same issues that confronted the church as a whole. Randall’s father, Horace, was a charter member of two different Methodist congregations. He came to Indianapolis in 1870 to become foreman of the composition department of the Indiana Farmer newspaper. In 1877, his name appeared on the membership rolls when the Central Avenue Methodist Church was formed from two existing congregations. Horace Randall began his ascent up the middle-class ladder, opening his own print shop in the 1880s. Central Avenue Methodist Church, whose membership grew to over 1,000 in the early 1900s, was considered by its members to be one of the most “fashionable” churches in the city. It built a new building in 1893; several years later a member testified that the new building had “five fireplaces…a gorgeous panoply of gaslights to emblazon the ceilings, symbolic and expensive stained-glass windows, five kinds of wood at the altar, and the finest preacher congregational money could buy.”37

This same member recalled that during her childhood in the 1940s, there was something missing in the pictures of earlier generations as well as her own: “[N]o one of a different race or culture played in the gym; no black faces graced the chicken and noodle church suppers or raised their voices in the fellowship hall in a chorus of “The Happy Wanderer.”38

By 1886, Horace Randall had transferred his family to the newly-built Hall Place Methodist Episcopal Church in the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood northwest of the center of Indianapolis, near to where he moved his family. His printing partner, Frank A. Fish, had died in the early 1880s, so the firm of Randall and Fish was shuttered. In 1884, Horace Randall began working as a traveling salesman for the paper concern Bradner, Smith and Co. He worked there until his death in 1913.39

Meridian Street, the main thoroughfare in Butler-Tarkington, was “the address of choice” for many of the city’s elites at the turn of the century. Although Horace Randall was not able to build on Meridian, he did have a home on North Pennsylvania Street, located to the east and running parallel to Meridian. The homes, both familial and religious, where James G. Randall grew up were definitely middle class, and from a racial point of view, overwhelmingly white. Randall spent his formative years in a middle class neighborhood in a church espousing social reform along clearly delineated conservative lines.40

Randall would have had limited contact with the black residents of Indianapolis, who by 1900 made up about nine percent of the city’s population of 169,164. Many of the early black residents settled along Indiana Avenue, just a short distance from North Pennsylvania Street, although in many ways the other side of the world. As Emma Lou Thornbrough pointed out, from 1900 to World War I, the number of blacks coming from the South to Indianapolis, though not large, was large enough to cause the older residents some discomfort because they worried

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that the growth of the city’s black population might spark white prejudice. It was better, they believed, to remain silent and invisible.41

Indianapolis was largely segregated, although it was mainly by tradition. Indeed, the large number of white Southerners who made Indianapolis their home contributed to the existing system of racial separation. Another factor contributing to residential segregation was the city’s overwhelmingly Protestant population, of which Methodists made up the majority. A third factor was self-segregation by blacks, who realized that they never would be considered equal within white society and thus determined to live their life outside the lily-white streets of Indiana’s capital. Instead of trying to integrate with white worshipers, those likely to go to church blended in with the well-established African Methodist Episcopal congregations, which maintained their own General Conference. Not until 1968 did the all-black churches join the South Indiana Conference, but even then the majority of AME churches in Indianapolis remained largely all- black.42

As Indianapolis’s middle class (including Horace Randall) began to grow, the local Methodist Church began to represent those citizens who embodied what some called “the finer things” of society, but who also determined how much money would be put into the collection plates every week. “Churches acquired choirs, organs, and stained glass windows,” Kevin Corn writes. Congregations also demanded a more educated clergy. As Corn notes, “By the end of the Civil War the rough evangelism of frontier Methodism was giving way to a quieter, more formal religiosity. Many members dissented and tried to preserve the older traditions, dividing some local congregations between rich and poor, but the more affluent and modernist elements prevailed.”43

As Randall established himself at the University of Illinois, he made fewer visits to Indianapolis. And yet, as he began to make a name for himself as a constitutional scholar and later as the premier academic historian of Lincoln and the Civil War, those early years maintained in Randall’s mind a traditional, conservative picture of how blacks were to be studied in relation to the Civil War.

To identify just one cause for such a complex issue as the intellectual development of a historian is a fool’s errand. Although the evidence allows for little doubt that Randall’s Methodist beliefs corresponded with what his church held concerning the black man, other factors influenced him.

First, Randall was a man of his time. Given the remarkable power that William A.Dunning’s ideas had over most of the nation’s colleges at the turn of the century, it would be surprising if Randall did not share those views. Thus, in his 1907 class at Illinois College, Randall listed for his students five mistakes of Reconstruction. First on the list was universal negro suffrage under the Constitution. Second was the imposition of Reconstruction through military law and not by the consent of the governed. Third on Randall’s list was the attempt to build up the Republican party by accommodation to Southern loyalists, scalawags, carpetbaggers, and blacks. Fourth was the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that disallowed former Confederates who had originally taken an oath supporting the U.S. Constitution from holding office. The fifth mistake of Reconstruction (in Randall’s view) was Congress’s view that the Constitution never should restrict access to suffrage on account of color.44

Although, as Francis Richardson Keller has pointed out, Randall’s major concerns differed from those of the Dunning school in that Randall was more interested in constitutional questions

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than economic or social conditions, nonetheless the Dunning School historiography exerted a major influence on the developing scholar.45

A second factor in the development of Randall’s racial views was that of locality, specifically Randall’s ties to the South and to much of its cultural heritage. In the preface to Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, Randall said he “could hardly put in words the appreciation of southern character and life that my Virginia associations have brought; far less can I express the deepening of this appreciation into endearment through my southern wife.”46

Randall’s second wife, Ruth Painter Randall, was a native Virginian whose father, F.V.N. Painter was a professor at Roanoke College, where Randall taught on and off from 1912 until 1919 when he taught for a year at Richmond College. In 1952, Randall prepared a autobiographical sketch for use by the New York Herald Tribune Book Review. At one point Randall joked that although he lived for a number of years in the South “[h]is nearest approach to being Southern is that, in manner of speaking, he is a Southerner-in-law.”47

Ruth Randall recalled that her father and her husband became very close, especially after Randall’s first wife, Edith Abbott, died. Randall had thrown himself into his work to assuage his grief over Edith’s death. Randall later confided to Ruth that spending time with her parents was one thing that helped him work through that loss. F.V.N. Painter played a major role in Randall’s life both before and after Randall married his daughter.48

Painter held the racial views prevalent in his time and location. He made those views clear in a letter he wrote in 1903. “And now I sit down to the machine to drop you a few lines—a matter that might have been attended to earlier in the week if I had not been absorbed in ‘The Leopard’s Spots’.” Written in 1902 by Thomas Dixon, the novel was the first in Dixon’s “Klan Trilogy,” which included the novel The Clansman, which served as the basis for D.W. Griffith’s film “Birth of a Nation.” Painter praised the book enthusiastically. “[T]hat is about the best book I have read in a long time,” he wrote. “It is all the better for involving a serious discussion of the negro problem along with its exciting incidents.” Painter added that the only path he could see to racial harmony would be to either “get rid of them or amalgamate; and either horn of the dilemma involves awful possibilities.” Of course, caution must be used in assigning the views of one person to another. Just because the two men were close, and may well have discussed racial matters, more study is needed before it can be said with certainty that Randall completely agreed with Painter. However, given Randall’s later writings on blacks and slavery, especially in Civil War and Reconstruction, it can be argued that any disagreement, if it existed, was a matter of degrees.49

A third factor shaping Randall’s development as a historian, and in particular his views of the causes of the Civil War, was his identification with the Progressives, especially Woodrow Wilson, whom he admired throughout his life. One sad irony of the Progressive Era is that it showed very little progress on the issue of race. In 1933, Randall wrote an article titled “Party Alignments” that never achieved publication. Randall’s essay really was a manifesto for liberals articulating what their hopes and ideals should be. Randall harkened back to his Social Creed days when he called for “economic freedom and social welfare in this mechanized, industrial age.” The liberal, he wrote, should fight for “[s]ecurity for the common man, child welfare, full attention to the rights of laborers; social insurance, national economic planning; placing corporate enterprises concerned with public services under stricter control; protection for the investor, the insurance policy holder, the bank depositor; elimination of the speculative

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pyramiding of corporate securities into holding companies; the progressive elimination of poverty” among several other points.

Noticeably missing from this catalogue, however, was one item that Randall listed in a far different section of his essay—that describing what his political nemesis, the socialist, would call for: the suppression of lynching. Earlier, speaking of the Socialists, Randall warned “The glib or superficial ‘liberal’ who deals in claptrap or stage effects in speaking to class prejudices must be dismissed in favor of the sound-minded liberal who has an informed philosophy and who has thought through to the point where this philosophy is in some kind of working adjustment with the realities of politics.”50

To be fair, in 1938 Randall wrote a piece for United States News, “What are Present-Day Definitions of ‘Liberal’ and of ‘Conservative’.” In it, Randall wrote “[I]t is fair to say that the intelligent liberal today is the man who puts human rights above profits and who uses his vote and influence to combat corporate greed, racial bigotry, intolerance, and international aggression.”51

The historian and biographer David Herbert Donald, one of Randall’s most conspicuous students, discounted Schlesinger’s charge that Randall was supposedly indifferent to the moral questions surrounding slavery. “Although a few critics, mostly from New England, attacked Randall’s work because of his alleged indifference to the moral issue of slavery, historians as a whole warmly welcomed it, as did the general public.” Donald attributed Randall’s so-called revisionist views to “Randall’s temperamental aversion to any deterministic interpretation of history—particularly the economic interpretation popularized by Charles A. Beard—and it reflected his ingrained distrust of public figures who assumed rigid ideological positions.”52

But even Donald decided that Randall needed revision. In 1961, Donald brought out a new edition of Randall’s 1937 classic text Civil War and Reconstruction. As Thomas J. Pressley noted in a review of the work “Some of the major substantive differences which result from these additions and deletions are summarized in the statement that the 1961 edition is, in Professor Donald’s words, ‘less pro-Southern than the 1937 book’— to which Pressley added “‘less pro- Southern white’, or ‘less pro-Southern conservative white,’ are other phrases which come to mind.” That Donald brought new scholarship to bear cannot be denied. But he also made the book more acceptable to a new generation less likely to accept a stereotypical view of blacks.53

The historian, with an insight borne of past study, is often called upon to make judgments on vital issues of the day. Randall’s duty, as he saw it, was to keep the country from making the mistakes of previous generations, whether it was of the 1850s or that of 1918. He subrogated all other issues to that of peace. In the “Blundering Generation” address, Randall didn’t believe slavery to be unimportant, but rather not important enough for people to slaughter one another, just as he believed his generation’s participation in the carnage of the Somme or Verdun could, and should have, been avoided. He believed the Civil War and World War I were failures of mankind’s supreme weapon—logic and reason.

Schlesinger was correct in his view that Randall maintained an optimism that society could do better. That came standard with Randall’s religious views. Mankind, Randall believed, is not irredeemable as long as one embraces what he believed to be the healing power of Jesus. An undeniable tension existed, however, between a society bypassing carnage and allowing a part of that society to remain in bondage. Randall resolved that tension with his argument that had war not come the issue of slavery would have eventually been resolved through rationality and logic.

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Randall’s critics, however, questioned this sentimentalism by asking why it had not been accomplished in the years leading up to the Civil War? Their answer was that mankind could, and often did, stray from rationality and logic, especially evidenced in Schlesinger’s time by the actions of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

It is a historical truism, if not a cliché, that a person is a hostage to his or her times, and in the case of James G. Randall that it true. However, before one can paint Randall as being “racist” pains must be taken to examine Randall through the lens of his past. For example, it’s true that in 1931 Randall wrote to Ulrich B. Phillips praising Phillips’s Life and Labor in the Old South: “The excellence of the book made up for the inadequacy of the teacher.” He even asked Phillips for a copy of “the famous Negro version of the story of the Good Samaritan.” Randall also could, in a 1926 letter, tell Ruth racial jokes that he heard from Charles Ramsdell.54

But in the hundreds of letters studied for this paper, those were just two in which race was explicitly mentioned. In letters to colleagues, former graduate students and other professional contacts, it might be expected that Randall would keep his personal views hidden. But in the hundreds of letters that Randall wrote to his mother, siblings, and most importantly, to Ruth, he made no mention of race or racial matters. This pattern of silence leads to the conclusion that for the conservative mind of James G. Randall, it wasn’t that blacks were inferior; rather they were simply invisible.

1 James G. Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 27, No. 1 (June, 1940), 3-28; The amplifier issues were mentioned in a letter from F.W. Wellborn to Randall, May 5, 1940 in James G. and Ruth Painter Randall Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter referred to as James G. and Ruth Painter Randall Papers).2 Randall to William B. Hesseltine, February 22, 1940 , James G. and Ruth Painter Randall Papers3 “Debate If Abolitionists Were Idealists or ‘Nuts’,” Omaha Evening World-Herald, May 2, 1940. Clipping located in James G. and Ruth Painter Randall Papers.4 For discussions and criticisms of the revisionist school, see Thomas N. Bonner, “Civil War Historians and the ‘Needless War’ Doctrine,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 17, No. 2 (April, 1956), pp. 193-216; Bernard De Voto, “The Easy Chair,” Harpers Magazine, (February, 1946), pp. 123-126; Pieter Geyl, “The American Civil War and the Problem of Inevitability,” The New England Quarterly, 24, No. 2 (June, 1951), pp. 147-168; Lee Benson and Cushing Strout, “Causation and the American Civil War: Two Appraisals,” History and Theory, 1, No. 2, (1961), pp. 163-185; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism,” Partisan Review, 16, No. 10 (October, 1949), pp. 969-981; for Hergesheimer’s literary reputation see Simpleton: Gone and Forgotten, “Far-Fetched Experimental Rose: Joseph Hergesheimer and the Future of Flowery Writing,” http://www.simpleton.com/19980309.html (accessed August 20, 2011); Randall, “Blundering Generation,” 3.5 Ibid, 6; Ibid, 7.6 Ibid, 10.7 Ibid, 14.

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8 Ibid, 20.9 Ibid, 27-8.10 Bonner, “Civil War Historians and the ‘Needless War’ Doctrine,” pp. 193-4;11 Ibid, 196.12 Ibid, 199; Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942) 2.13 Schlesinger Jr., “The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism,” 972. For a history of Schlesinger’s decision to challenge the revisionists see A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000) 444-451.14 Schlesinger Jr., “The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism” 972.15 Ibid, 973-5.16 Ibid, 976.17 Ibid, 977.18 Ibid. 97819 Ibid, 980.20 For biographical sketches of Randall, see Wayne C. Temple, “J.G. Randall: Dean of the Lincoln Scholars,” Illinois Libraries, 67, no. 6 (June 1986); Robert Johannsen, “Lincoln, the Civil War and Professor James G. Randall” in No Boundaries: University of Illinois Vignettes, ed. Lillian Hoddeson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004): 102-112; and Harry E. Pratt and Temple, “James Garfield Randall, 1881-1953,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 46 (Summer 1953), 119-131. Sadly, no full-scale biography of Randall is available.; William Warren Sweet, Methodism in American History (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1933) 336.21 Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, s.v. “Methodists.”22 Sweet, Methodism in American History, 355-70; Richard M. Cameron, Methodism and Society in Historical Perspective, (New York: Abingdon Press, 1961) especially 216-325.23 Sweet, Methodism in American History, 360.24 James G. Randall, “The Relation of the Church to the Workingman,” [n.d.], Box 1, Folder 8, James G. Randall Papers, University of Illinois Archives. (hereafter referred to as James G. Randall Papers).25Ibid; James G. Randall, “The Financial Situation and the Government,” lecture delivered November 26, 1907 at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, Box 1, Folder 6, James G. Randall Papers.26 Randall, “The Relation of the Church to the Workingman.” James G. Randall Papers.27 Material relating to Randall’s presidency can be found in Box 1, Folder 28, James G. Randall Papers.

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28 James G. Randall, “Civil War and Reconstruction” Lecture Notes, 1907, Box 1, Folder 7, James G. Randall Papers.29 James G. Randall, The Confiscation of Property During the Civil War (Indianapolis: Mutual Printing and Lithographing Co., 1913) iii.

30 James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1926) 342; Randall to E.P. Cheyney, April 9, 1928, James G. Randall Papers.31 Daniel Denison Whedon, Introduction to The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Triumph in the Methodist Episcopal Church, by L.C. Matlack (New York: Phipps & Hunt, 1881) 11.32 Richard M. Cameron, Methodism and Society in Historical Perspective, (New York: Abingdon Press, 1961) 151-2.33 Ibid, 154.34 Ibid, 178.35 Ralph E. Morrow, “Northern Methodism in the South During Reconstruction,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 41, No. 2 (September 1954) 198; Cameron, Methodism and Society in Historical Perspective, 201.36 Ibid, 203.37 Horace Randall Obituary, Indianapolis Star, December 26, 1913; Nancy Niblack Baxter, “The Fashionable Church,” in Falling Toward Grace: Images of Religion and Culture from the Heartland, eds., J. Kent Calder and Susan Neville (Indianapolis: The Polis Center, 1998) 61-2. 38 Ibid, 62.39 Horace Randall Obituary, Indianapolis Star.40 “A Timeline of Faith and Community: Butler-Tarkington 1821-1996”, The Polis Center, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, http://www.polis.iupui.edu/RUC/Neighborhoods/ButlerTarkington/BTTimeline.htm (accessed August 20, 2011).41 Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, s.v. “African-Americans.” See also Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 5.

42 Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, s.v. “Methodists.” Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, s.v. “Religion and Race.”43 Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, s.v. “Methodists.”44 Randall, “Civil War and Reconstruction Lecture Notes, 1907”, James G. Randall Papers.45 Frances Richardson Keller, Fictions of U.S. History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) 63.46 Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, xi.

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47 Randall, Notes for an autobiography, 1952, James G. and Ruth Painter Randall Papers. 48 Ruth Painter Randall, I Ruth: Autobiography of a Marriage (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1968) 52-54.49 F.V.N. Painter to “Mes Chers,” January 31, 1903, James G. and Ruth Painter Randall Papers. The identity of “my dear’ is not evident from the letter.50 James G. Randall “Party Alignments,” Unpublished MSS, 1933, James G. Randall Papers.51 James G. Randall, “What are Present-Day Definitions of ‘Liberal’ and of ‘Conservative’,” United States News, July 5, 1938, pg. 4. The quotation is taken from Randall’s MSS copy in the James G. Randall Papers.52 David Herbert Donald, “James Garfield Randall,” Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 5: 1951-1955, American Council of Learned Societies, 1977.53 Thomas J. Pressley, review of Civil War and Reconstruction, by J.G. Randall and David Herbert Donald, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49, No. 1 (June 1962) 148-150.54 Randall to U.B. Phillips, February 21, 1931, James G. Randall Papers; Randall to Ruth Painter Randall, July 4, 1926, James G. Randall Papers.