Judge John Roberts can rest assured that his Supreme Court confirmation will go very smoothly, judging from the weak 11th-hour attacks the left is mounting against him in the media.  A “shocking” discovery about his record appeared in an August 26 report in the Washington Post that took issue with a phrase Roberts used while drafting an article about the presidency on President Ronald Reagan’s behalf for the journal National Forum.  As the Post reported: “A fastidious editor of other people’s copy as well as his own, Roberts began with the words, ‘Until about the time of the Civil War.’  Then, the Indiana native scratched out the words ‘Civil War’ and replaced them with ‘War Between the States.’”

The Post managed to squeeze blood out of this turnip, citing the comments of an emeritus history professor from Vanderbilt University, Sam McSeveney: “Many people who are sympathetic to the Confederate position are more comfortable with the idea of a ‘War Between the States.’  People opposed to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s would undoubtedly be more comfortable with the words he chose.”  For the sake of “balance,” the Post also included the remarks of John Coski, library director of the Museum of the Confederacy: “You can’t always draw the inference that someone who uses the term does so with an ideological intent, but at the same time you can’t be blind to the fact that some people do.”  As the Post would have it, “Civil War” contains no “ideological intent”; it is only those who choose not to make use of that name who are ideologically driven.

From this episode, we can discern that Judge Roberts is at least remotely literate, both historically and otherwise, and that the editors and reporters at the Post, and perhaps the historians cited above, are not.  Those who “prefer” to call the war of 1861-65 the War Between the States are at least a bit closer to the truth of the matter than are those who call it the Civil War.

A civil war is, properly speaking, an internal war fought by members of one polity for control of a state or government—a war among the citizens: The wars between Marius and Sulla or among the triumvirs that ultimately ended the Roman republic were civil wars.  Stasis in a Greek polis was a civil war.  The struggle between Roundheads and Cavaliers in England was truly a civil war.  Wars of secession (the American wars of 1861-65 and 1775-83) are wars with the objective of separating one or more polities from an existing polity.  The Dutch wars of independence against the Spanish also fall into this category.  Secession implies the denial by one (or both) sides of a common polity and a common citizenship shared between the two.  A secessionist war is as close to being the opposite of a civil war as a war can be.  None of this is a political or ideological claim; this is a matter of the correct use of the English language.

The French are more accurate in their description of our own War of Secession, which is precisely what they call it (la guerre de Sécession).  Only the adherents of the official ideology about the war find that distinction troubling.

The phrase Civil War is far more ideologically charged, because to accept that designation is to accept an understanding of the war that was deliberately constructed to advance the fiction that the Union preceded the states, so that any disruption of the Union was equivalent to the illegal division of a single polity and, therefore, seditious and treasonous.

However, calling it a War Between the States muddles the issue, since neither Northern nor Southern states as such initially started the war, and the “states” were organized into two very clear and coherent sides representing dueling visions of American politics.  Employing “War Between the States” has been a diplomatic way for students of history, such as Judge Roberts, and Southerners to express a basic truth about the war.  Nonetheless, it is more properly called the War of Secession, the War of Consolidation, or, as Dr. Clyde Wilson put it in the September issue of Chronicles, the War to Prevent Southern Independence.