“A few years ago, when we jointly addressed a gathering in New York, he [Anderson] startled me by announcing that he thought the Confederacy should have been allowed to secede. His reasoning was elegant enough — slavery was historically doomed in any case; two semi-continental states would have been more natural; American expansionism would have been checked; Lincoln was a bloodthirsty Bismarckian étatiste and megalomaniac..."
I haven’t found a full discussion of the matter in Anderson’s work, but what there is suggests that Hitchens’ account is substantially correct. And it seems to me that the view ascribed to Anderson is correct.
As far as I can tell, one of the few recent discussions of the notion appears in Civil War historian William Marvel's “Mr. Lincoln Goes to War” (2006). Marvel carefully sets out Lincoln’s policies as “destructive and unimaginative.”
It looks to me as though a consistent anti-war movement 150 years ago would have opposed Lincoln – a point that may have some importance because of his mythic position in the American social imaginary. --CGE
On 4/7/10 11:42 PM, Sean Andrews wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 20:22, Sandy Harris<sandyinchina at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> There's a monument to the Confederacy in Austin with fascinating text on
>> the plaque.
>> http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/North_America/United_States
>> _of_America/Texas/Austin-875823/General_Tips-Austin-Capitol-BR-1.html
>>
>> DIED FOR STATES RIGHTS GUARANTEED UNDER THE CONSTITUTION THE PEOPLE OF THE
>> SOUTH, ANIMATED BY THE SPIRIT OF 1776, TO PRESERVE THEIR RIGHTS, WITHDREW
>> FROM THE FEDERAL COMPACT IN 1861. THE NORTH RESORTED TO COERCION. THE
>> SOUTH, AGAINST OVERWHELMING NUMBERS AND RESOURCES, FOUGHT UNTIL EXHAUSTED.
>
> It is a bit unorthodox, but there are several rather leftish historians who
> discuss the Civil War in similar terms. For instance, William Appleman
> Williams cites it as yet another example of US imperial aggression (though
> it was internal) in "Empire as a Way of Life" and Barrington Moore sees it
> as the true revolution in American history--calling it the "last capitalist
> revolution." You don't have to be sympathetic to the Confederacy to see
> the actions of the Union as a resort to coercion. I don't know enough about
> the history myself to say how I'd characterize the actions of the North, but
> calling it coercion isn't necessarily a completely retrograde impulse
> (though being from TX myself, I have no doubt this example is--and having
> lived for some time in Virginia, have no doubt the gov. there is working from
> the same playbook. The Civil War era cannons in front of the Fairfax County
> Courthouse still point north.)