Unamicable Split

Visual memories, especially those of boyish vintage, tend to be inexact but I am pretty confident of this one: Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton was a short, gnomish, balding figure, longtime chairman of the history department at the University of North Carolina, and founder of the great Southern Historical Collection there. And more to the present point, a valued friend and mentor to my father and his older brother, who had studied under him in the 1920s.

Inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy, 1861

The occasion I recall here was one of a succession of visits at his house when my uncle, a West Coast academic, visited in North Carolina. He and my father would call upon their revered teacher, taking me along. I would sit patiently on the berm overlooking the front porch as the three of them, in their rocking chairs, talked into the warm summer night. I was too boyishly in-curious to listen carefully, but one topic was surely a shared interest in Southern history—as to which Dr. Hamilton, as will be seen, entertained emphatic views. He had done his doctorate at Columbia under William Dunning, eponymous founder of the dominant “school” of Reconstruction history, which tended to charge the South’s postbellum woes to vengeful Yankee intruders.

The scene might have faded from memory long since but for a personal sequel. In the mid-1960s, I took leave from newspapering to teach American history at the Woman’s College of UNC. As I prepared lectures on the “causes” and outbreak of the Unpleasantness whose sesquicentennial we are presently observing, I chanced with mild indignation on a noted talk the very same Hamilton had given in the early 1930s. He roundly accused Abraham Lincoln, by virtue of his mere election, of having been “an immediate menace to slavery in the states,” thus provoking and justifying secession. This was not an uncommon theme then, in view of the sectional nature of the new-minted Republican party. But it was always controversial.