The Civil War Isn't Tragic: Interview with Eric Foner

Ta-Neishi Coates is a blogger for The Atlantic.

What follows is an excerpt of my interview with Eric Foner for my Civil War essay. I ended up not quoting Professor Foner, but as will become obvious, his work and his thoughts, were deeply influential on my own writing. Professor Foner is the Dewitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University and the author of (among others) Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery which won the Pulitzer last year.

The Fiery Trial and Free Soil, Free Labor have been especially important to my thinking about the Civil War and about the interaction between radical activists and electoral politics. (Reconstructionis next up after Middlemarch.) On a personal note, Professor Foner has been extremely gracious with his time. I feel indebted to him for that and, frankly, the larger community of academic historians the lot of whom have been more than happy to share their thinking. For those looking to begin their research into the period, I highly recommend Foner's work. Not only is it deeply informed and full of insight, it's extremely well written and clear.See the escalation of this long argument here, here, her, here, here, and here. See the conclusion for the magazine here. We'll have an interview with David Blight up in the next few days. 

I wanted to first begin with this basic question I've been hashing over in some of my writing at the Atlantic. Is the Civil War tragic?

On the one hand you can say any war is tragic. But it's kind of metaphysical and that has nothing to do with a historic situation. When people today say "the Civil War was tragic" what we're getting [now] is an odd combination of two things. One, there's a  long standing conservative view that the war was unnecessary, that slavery would have died out anyway, and therefore the Civil War is tragic because people died for no reason....