One of the most tiresome aspects of writing about the Civil War and Reconstruction period is encountering people who insist that the “real name” of the war is “The War of Northern Aggression.” If you spend any time on Civil War social media you will get “schooled” by people telling you that for the last 150 years the conflict has been called by that long name in the South. This, of course, is nonsense.
One way to assess when a word or phrase made it into general usage in books is to consult Google’s Ngram Viewer. If you are not familiar with Ngram, it is a tool that tells you how many books published in a given year contain a specific word or term. You can find the tool here. Here is an explanation of how it works.
While the Ngram viewer has some flaws, it is a great way to see when a word or term enjoyed popularity in published books. As you can see from the Ngram below, “War of Northern Aggression” was hardly used at all during the first eight decades after Fort Sumter was fired on. It only became popular in the 1950s when the Civil Rights Movement began to take hold. Southern segregationists used this distorting term for the Civil War because it bolstered their arguments that the effort to enforce the Civil Rights of Blacks in the 1950s and 1960s was a continuation of the war of 1861-1865. In this view, African Americans did not want Civil Rights, it was Northerners stirring up trouble, just as in 1865 the Yankees had imposed freedom on the slaves!
If you want to see the original Ngram for “War of Northern Aggression, here it is.
One thing is clear, the term “War of Northern Aggression” was not really used in books before 1950. The first time I saw it used in newspapers was in 1954, the year the Supreme Court issued its desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. People may truthfully claim to have heard the phrase in their childhoods, as long as those “wonder years” were after “Massive Resistance” to Civil Rights had begun.
So what terms were used during and soon after the Civil War? Obviously, “The Civil War,” or variations thereof were the most common. What was the next most popular of these alternatives? You might think it was “The War Between the States.” The Ngram viewer tells a different story. For decades, the most popular name (after “Civil War”) was “The War of the Rebellion.” You can see a comparative Ngram of “War of the Rebellion,” “War Between the States,” and “War of Northern Aggression” below.
The green line is for “War of the Rebellion,” the most popular alternative name. You can see that the red line for “War Between the States” only rises above “War of the Rebellion” in the 1920s, during the emergence of the Second Ku Klux Klan. By the way, “War of Northern Aggression” is the laughingly flaccid line right along the bottom. You can view this Ngram here.
So, when someone demands that you use the term “War of Northern Aggression,” rest assured that they are parroting the segregationist historical revisionists of the 1950s, not their Confederate ancestors. Even real Confederate knew that was a dumb name!
A more historically accurate term than “War of Northern Aggression is “The Slaveholders’ War.” This was a somewhat popular name for the war until the 1890s, when Blacks were increasingly written out of histories of the period.
Addendum
I did a search of newspaper databases as well and found that The War of Northern Aggression begins to be used in 1954, the same year as the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1955 it gets wider attention when a press release from the State of South Carolina uses that phrase. Here is an article from the Richmond Times Dispatch published on March 25, 1955 on page 18 that originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post which clearly identifies The War of Northern Aggression as a neologism, or new phrase.
As the writer makes clear, the Civil War had many names before 1955, but The War of Northern Aggression was not one of them.
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Well, our family kept a pretty detailed history in the form of journals, news clippings, etc.
While that term was not in any of the journals as far as I know, that “term” was used by my Great Grandmother, and was told to me to have been used by members of her family which actually went all the way back to a great, great, uncle Chastain, who lead a band of Confederate “Irregulars.”
Now maybe it was no so widely used until you stated,because there isn’t a whole lot left to support that it was used all that time back.
I wasn’t there of course, but, like I said, I come from a family who cherished and protected its history. They even went back as far as when they were smuggling persecuted Christians out of France. So, things Can and Do get lost for a time.
One of the apparent flaws of the Ngram device is that it seemingly considers the evidence in inadequate fashion.
I’ve no use for the term, ‘War of Northern Aggression’. There is little debate that ‘civil war’ was the most-commonly cited description title for an/the American conflict in history and historiography. One of my interests in studying the war, however, is the manner in the term, ‘War Between the States’, (WBTS), has been wrongly maligned in recent times in a lot of writing.
The earliest useage of the term WBTS that I have located is also one of the very earliest in which was written that there would be a military conflict involving American political structure/s, at all. Alexander Hamilton seems to have coined the phrase in his 1789, ‘Federalist Paper No. 8’. He also used ‘civil war’ in his Federalist Paper No. 16.
In the May 2018 issue of ‘America’s Civil War’, John Coski argued that WBTS as a name for the Great American Conflict of 1861-65 ought be discounted, in essence.
The September 2018 copy of same journal pointed out that the term WBTS was in use during the war and in such a manner that it can not be stated to have originated essentially after the war in the Lost Cause historiography, (with a single exception Coski noted in the Official Records just prior to the conflict’s end in 1865). That said Sept., ’18 copy noted that synonymous language of WBTS was used in several dispatches between the Governor of the colony of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and the British Colonial Office in London, in 1862, (‘…the hostilities now occurring between the states of North America…’). These were not marks of opinion between the individual writers, (which would have been significant enough), but were outlines of official British imperial policy to be adhered to for the duration of the conflict.
More to the point, a search through foreign sources from the time of the conflict, or soon after, provide a very different outlook of the use of the term ‘WBTS’. An example selection of these include:
From New Zealand:
-Daily Southern Cross, 12 April 1861, (cites the London Times, UK).
-Hawke’s Bay Herald, 16 May 1865.
-Wairarapa Standard, 1 June 1872, contains a lengthy article written by a former Union soldier, whom uses both the terms ‘WBTS’ and ‘Civil War’.
From Australia:
-South Australian Advertiser, 21 March 1861 (colony of South Australia). This combines the terms civil war and WBTS into one term and also cites the London Times, (UK).
From Canada:
-Father of Canadian Confederation and former-Irish Fenian rebel, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, in his 1865 booklet on federalism and government, ‘Notes on Federal Governments, Past & Present’, Montreal: Published by Dawson Brothers, on page 40, gave the intriguing description to the conflict, “…the original cause of controversy implanted in the Constitution, suddenly burst forth in an armed struggle between a portion of the States and the Federal power…”
-Canadian Illustrated News, 23 January 1875, cites the conflict as ‘the war in the states’.
Does Ngram include foreign sources? It may very well; I could not tell by reading the description in the link provided above. But to simply provide a ‘tally’ of the number of the uses and time spots in which a term was used is but one useful means to critically reflect on a historical issue. This provides an implication that what is uncommonly used is insignificant, which is not necessarily at all a categorical truth.
In James I. Robertson’s massive biography, ‘Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend’, an often cited contemporaneous title for the conflict was ‘Second War of Independence’.
To denigrate the term WBTS from historical writing is to ignore its significant placement in the historical evidence and historiographies.
Correction: Hamilton wrote Federalist Paper No. 8 in 1787.
Actually, further checks reveal that Hamilton uses the terms, ‘Hostility/Dissension Between the States’ in Federalist Paper No. 6, not to mention that he makes plan that a civil war/war between the states may someday quite possibly occur by citing such examples as Mass., Penn., NC, etc, and in citing the words and writings of a European historian, prophesizes that American states, like European nations, may one day band themselves together into “a Confederate Republic”.
Also very interesting text in Federalist Papers No’s. 7 & 8.
Man…unreal…