Faust and Confederate Historiography

I cannot resist connecting Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust’s wonderfully evocative literary surname with the first several pages of her book The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South in which she briefly surveys the strengths and (mostly) weaknesses of the extant research and outlines her own methodology. She writes: “We cannot break out of the circularity and sterility of most historical discussions of Confederate nationalism until we set aside this emphasis on hindsight; interpretation must precede evaluation (Faust 6).” Dr. Gilpin Faust proposes, in place of the biased “hindsight” studies of Confederate nationalism which have proliferated until then, a sophisticated, ideologically attuned, iteration of the fact-value distinction; that is, to postpone judgment and evaluation – and, dare I say it, morality in the pursuit of knowledge?

I suppose I am going out of my way here to connect Faust and Faust, but my concern is this: Is maintaining a strict fact-value distinction with respect to something as morally repugnant as the Antebellum South’s practice of slavery desirable? How can even the historian remain neutral in the face of such awful suffering? I fully realize that I am bringing to bear my own, contemporary ideology in the preceding questions. With that said, I’m still left to wonder what exactly the function of the would-be historiographer in society is; does knowledge really precede all other considerations?