[Peace-discuss] Presidents Day

[C. G. Estabrook]

In an article in the Atlantic four years ago, Christopher Hitchens tells the 
following story about the excellent historian Perry Anderson:

      "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 
a book by William Marvel, an academic Civil War historian, "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

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