Thanks for this. And I didn't mean to suggest that you were trying to defend Unionist war aims. I just think it's important to stress the worst-of-both-worlds character of the motives on each side of the war -- partly because it's indicative of something pretty generally true about wars between governments, but also because of the concerns I have about how the usual mirror-image models of what the war was or wasn't "about" tend to feed off each other, and actually strengthen Nationalist, neo-Confederate and reconciliationist accounts, at the expense of the truth (and of accounts that might get a glance at the war through more marginalized eyes). I am on the whole an old Garrisonian about the whole thing, and think that peaceful disunion would have greatly aided the cause of emancipation by substantially destabilizing the Confederate states' ability to go on enforcing slavery; but meanwhile the collapse of the system from within would have laid the material and political groundwork for a much more positive post-emancipation outcome (both for former slaves who would be in a much stronger position to claim their due, and also for the poor whites who were fairly mercilessly in the cross-fire throughout the war).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2013-03-24 10:38 am (UTC)Thanks for this. And I didn't mean to suggest that you were trying to defend Unionist war aims. I just think it's important to stress the worst-of-both-worlds character of the motives on each side of the war -- partly because it's indicative of something pretty generally true about wars between governments, but also because of the concerns I have about how the usual mirror-image models of what the war was or wasn't "about" tend to feed off each other, and actually strengthen Nationalist, neo-Confederate and reconciliationist accounts, at the expense of the truth (and of accounts that might get a glance at the war through more marginalized eyes). I am on the whole an old Garrisonian about the whole thing, and think that peaceful disunion would have greatly aided the cause of emancipation by substantially destabilizing the Confederate states' ability to go on enforcing slavery; but meanwhile the collapse of the system from within would have laid the material and political groundwork for a much more positive post-emancipation outcome (both for former slaves who would be in a much stronger position to claim their due, and also for the poor whites who were fairly mercilessly in the cross-fire throughout the war).