Starting in the 1980s, Civil War historians Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald pioneered the “Celtic thesis,” which argued on the basis of remedial research that more than half of white Southerners, prior to the Civil War, were of Celtic stock. Because of this, the thesis suggests, the Civil War might be best understood not as a rejection of slavery, but as a clash of white ethnicities as Anglo-Saxon elites in the North attempted to forcibly impose their worldview on a largely Celtic South.
