The New York Times published an essay that urges us to rename the Civil War.
I know. I rolled my eyes too.
A recent New York Times guest essay by Anthony Conwright argues that the conflict of 1861–65 should be known by an older and less housebroken name: the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
My first thought was that this sounded like the sort of argument history graduate students begin after six shots at their favorite off-campus dive bar, when everyone is brilliant, nobody is listening, and the person who has recently discovered Foucault is becoming a problem.
I expected to finish the article, recognize that several intelligent points had been made, and go on calling the Civil War the Civil War.
Instead, the damned thing followed me home.
The conflict is more than 160 years in the rearview mirror, and we are still arguing about what to call it. Perhaps that is only fair. It left more than 600,000 Americans dead, destroyed slavery, preserved the Union, and began the country’s long, slow, torturous climb toward making good on its claim that everyone deserves a seat at the American table.
Black Americans initially received little more than freedom itself—freedom without land, safety, or durable political power. Reconstruction briefly opened the door. White terrorism slammed it shut. Nearly another century passed before the country made a sustained effort to recover rights promised after Appomattox and then abandoned. Even now, the seat at the table remains an approximation: real, hard-won, and never entirely secure.
So perhaps this is not merely an argument about the label pasted onto an old war. The conflict determined whether the United States would survive and raised a question we have spent the years since failing, fitfully, and occasionally heroically trying to answer: Who gets to be fully American?
Conwright’s argument is that “Civil War,” while accurate, has become too clean. It describes the category of conflict but conceals the people who caused it and the institution they intended to save. Slaveholders lost an election, rejected the constitutional result, seized federal property, formed a rival government, and went to war rather than accept a future in which slavery might no longer enjoy unlimited national protection.
They did not leave their motives for future historians to decipher from tea leaves. They wrote them down.
That was when the argument stopped feeling like graduate-school barroom sport. If a historical name should identify not only what happened but who did it and why, then “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” was not liberal wordplay. It was more informative than the bloodless compromise we inherited.
And somewhere in the middle of thinking about 1861, another name arrived with the force of an unwelcome bar tab.
January 6.
We call it by a date, which is a peculiar way to name an attempt to overturn an American election. A date tells us when something happened. It does not tell us who did it, what was attempted, or why.
The better name came to me with irritating clarity: Trump’s failed election coup.
Not because January 6 and the Civil War are comparable in scale. They are not. But the same rule of historical naming applies to both: a useful name should identify the action, the responsible actor, and the purpose.
That is why “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” is stronger than “Civil War.” The conventional name tells us what kind of conflict followed. The older name tells us who broke the country and what they were trying to save.
The evasion came later, when national reconciliation required cleaner language and softer memory. “War Between the States” was the Confederate version, laundering rebellion into a dignified quarrel among sovereign equals. It turns treason into federalism with artillery.
“Civil War” became the compromise version: technically correct, emotionally survivable, and quiet about cause.
Compromise found its compromise language.
The Lost Cause offered the former Confederacy a heroic version of defeat. National reconciliation offered the North a sentimental version of victory. Both pushed slavery toward the edge of the frame. American memory filled with gallant officers, fluttering flags, and aging veterans shaking hands at Gettysburg, while four million emancipated people were treated almost like extras who had wandered onto the wrong movie set.
Names direct our attention. “Civil War” points toward battles, generals, and divided loyalties. “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” points toward agency, causation, and the society the Confederacy was created to defend. The first invites us to admire the struggle. The second makes us explain it.
Calling the conflict the Slaveholders’ Rebellion is not a modern effort to rewrite history. It takes the secessionists at their word. The rewriting came later, when “states’ rights” was detached from the right being demanded, Confederate nationalism was dressed up as regional loyalty, and reunion among white Americans became more important than Black citizenship.
Putting slavery back into the name is closer to restoration.
There is a danger in this reasoning. Once we decide inherited names conceal uncomfortable truths, it becomes tempting to attach the hottest available moral label to every historical wrong. That can clarify history, but it can also flatten it.
Consider “Native American genocide.” The term fits particular massacres, forced removals, bounties, and policies backed by evidence of genocidal intent. It is less useful as one explanation for the catastrophic Indigenous population decline across two continents and several centuries, much of it caused early on by diseases carried into populations with no acquired immunity.
The result was apocalyptic, but catastrophe and genocide are not synonyms. Genocide requires intention.
Then there are the smallpox blankets. At Fort Pitt in 1763, British officers gave Indigenous representatives articles taken from a smallpox hospital in an apparent effort to spread the disease. Whether it worked remains uncertain; the moral distinction does not. Disease can travel without intention. A blanket taken from a smallpox ward and handed to an enemy cannot.
That is the test. A better name restores information the inherited term conceals: the actor, the purpose, the nature of the act, or the people erased from the conventional account.
The point is not to make the past sound uglier. The point is to stop making it sound cleaner than it was.
That returns me to January 6.
The riot was real, but it was not the whole event. It was the violent climax of a larger effort by a defeated president to remain in office: pressure on election officials, fake electors, attempts to enlist the Justice Department in invented fraud claims, demands placed upon the vice president, and a final effort to stop Congress from certifying the lawful winner.
Calling all of that “January 6” is like naming a bank robbery for the Tuesday on which the gunmen arrived.
“Trump’s failed election coup” is uglier. It is also more useful. It identifies the central actor, the objective, and the outcome. Trump attempted to overturn an election he lost and retain the presidency. He failed.
History may settle on another name. It rarely reaches a final vocabulary while witnesses, participants, and apologists are still fighting over what occurred. But notice what happens when we retreat into the safety of a date. The coup becomes a riot. The riot becomes an unfortunate day. The attempt to overturn an election disappears behind the spectacle of the crowd.
Faulkner wrote that the past is never dead; it is not even past. He might have added that the past survives under assumed names. Some are chosen by the people who make history. Others are negotiated afterward by people who need to live together. Still others are manufactured by those who lost the struggle but won the campaign over how it would be remembered.
The Times essay began as an argument about a war 160 years in the rearview mirror. It left me wondering whether we have already begun softening the history through which we are still living.
The Slaveholders’ Rebellion caused the Civil War.
Trump’s failed election coup culminated on January 6.
A date tells us when to remember. A name should tell us what we are remembering. -- Eric Gubelman via Facebook
