Such inquirers might question whether "state's rights" were an end in themselves or a dogma, or whether they were a means which might advance or retard, preserve or frustrate individual rights and personal liberty. Perhaps they'd question whether the unlimited and absolute right of some group to break away from their nation or larger society necessarily promotes greater liberty. I'd imagine such people -- if they exist -- also wouldn't telescope history and project twentieth or twenty-first century characteristics back on the opposing sides of the American Civil War. They might even be able to understand the 14th Amendment as an addition or completion or correction of the Constitution, not simply as a betrayal.
While some specialists may respect his accomplishments, I really doubt Lincoln has much of a reputation on Ivy League campuses. If he escapes specific condemnation as a racist, Lincoln is simply lumped in with the other Dead White Males. Nor would I imagine Wall Street has much use for him. So much of their time is taken up with financing China's industrialization that they have little time for American history or specifically American concerns.
When I wrote that Lincoln would have been equally reviled had he gone soft and wobbly, Southerners were one important group I was thinking of. Southern Blacks and hill country unionists would have hated him for his weakness which delivered them to their oppressors. I even suppose that some of you who attack him now, would think differently when Confederate or South Carolina tax day came around. On election day, when you had to choose between this or that set of local oligarchs, demagogues, bureaucrats or oppressors you might well wonder if things would have been better had the union been maintained. Being natural grumblers looking for a single Point At Which Everything Went Wrong, you might well have made the broken union the focus of a Lost Cause mythology -- though in this case, you might be on more solid ground, since much would have been lost had the Confederates won.
So much of what gets tossed around in these discussions is dogma or mythology. The idea seems to be that if states had been allowed to secede in 1860 or had seized their independence by force of arms, history would have stopped and the twentieth century wouldn't have happened. I don't think one can tear oneself out of the surrounding context of history. One can't wall oneself off from technological development yet enjoy its benefits. One has to choose between ending slavery or tyranny and defending the local right to enslave and tyrannize -- sooner or later one has to choose.
It sounds fine to talk of Jefferson's vision of the tree of liberty being watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, but I suspect that breaking up the union in the 1860 would have meant many more years of such waterings with no greater liberty in sight. It would have made our history even more a story of force and repression reminiscent of Balkan or South American or African or Middle Eastern history than it was. Perhaps I'm wrong, but that at least was what many Americans feared, and they had reason to do so.
Wow! Your modest confession of incapacity before the beetling wall of my prejudice isn't such a modest confession after all, is it? Quite a slam, you're to be congratulated on the subtlety of your flame.
But since it is an argument ad hominem, there is really no defense I can offer, except to redirect people to the substance of my argument, and of your reply, which I notice you essayed anyway.
They'll recognize that the rebellion can't simply be identified with liberty or opposition to tyranny: things were far more complicated than that, and the Confederacy had its own tyrannical aspects.
May I point out, with modesty equal to your own, that secession is not rebellion, particularly under the political theories under which the United States was founded?
But let me agree with your main point, that issues are often joined in conjunction with others, and that the history of the Civil War, and the claims of the antagonists on the loyalties of their own States, and on sympathies in other States, can hardly have been made in vacuo on a single principle, or on a few principles, without the admixture of many other issues and interests. Nobody on theses boards has made that claim, but rather, several of us have offered arguments on this or that issue or principle. I've been interested mostly in issues of political theory, legal theory, constitutional law, and the authority claimed by the antagonists to compel or to resist. I've concluded that the South had better arguments, however the war came out, and that Lincoln's triumph accelerated several trends already in evidence in American life which have been deleterious to the liberty and dignity of the average American citizen. That is not to say that Lincoln desired to enslave or to indenture U.S. citizens, but only to say that the political theory he promoted and fought a war to advance, has been net-net deleterious to the only thing -- I confess my prejudice -- I care about, which is the freedom of the American citizen, which in turn requires the independence of the country where he lives. That is my bias, my prejudice, my blot on impartiality.
No, I don't think anyone is saying that. I have noticed only that certain developments of the Civil War era fed the excesses of the Gilded Age, which without the enabling of the Millocracy would nevertheless have occurred, but without the intensity of regional concentration of the benefits, and indeed without, perhaps, the particular distribution of gain and loss that in fact occurred. There would have been no Billion-Dollar Congress, no octopoidal railroad land-grants, perhaps no such abusive trusts as grew up under the war-fed grasping of John D. Rockefeller I and the railroading tycoonery of J.J. Hill, Pierpont Morgan, and Jay Gould.
I don't think one can tear oneself out of the surrounding context of history. One can't wall oneself off from technological development yet enjoy its benefits. One has to choose between ending slavery or tyranny and defending the local right to enslave and tyrannize -- sooner or later one has to choose.
False dichotomy. Misery or slavery, name your poison! You might concede that some good might have come of an agrarian victory in the Civil War, and that there might have been some substantial restraint, in at least part of the country, of the economic concentration and accelerating growth of social, economic, and political inequality that defined the Gilded Age. Timeclocks and the ignominious punching-in ceremony of worker debasement might have occurred in the deracinated parts of the country anyway, but mightn't Southern workers have happily escaped those deliberate humiliations?