skip to main |
skip to sidebar
How the Civil War represents the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution. To quote:
The great irony of the Civil War is that all that changed at the very moment that abolition triumphed. As the last, great coercive blight on the American landscape, black chattel slavery, was finally extirpated—a triumph that cannot be overrated—the American polity did an about-face....
The common refrain, voiced by Abraham Lincoln himself, that peaceful secession would have constituted a failure for the great American experiment in liberty, was just plain nonsense. “If Northerners . . . had peaceably allowed the seceders to depart,” the conservative London Times correctly replied, “the result might fairly have been quoted as illustrating the advantages of Democracy; but when Republicans put empire above liberty, and resorted to political oppression and war rather than suffer any abatement of national power, it was clear that nature at Washington was precisely the same as nature at St. Petersburg. . . . Democracy broke down, not when the Union ceased to be agreeable to all its constituent States, but when it was upheld, like any other Empire, by force of arms.”
Share
5 comments:
secession undoubtedly contravened the framers’ original intent
I know it's a quote, madam, but this is debatable at best.
You are absolutely correct. I don't think it is debatable at all. It has to be read in context of the entire article. :-)
I changed the quote so as not to mislead......
Does it not seem odd that at that period only the United States had to fight a war to free the slaves. It will never be resolved.
Yes, because freeing the slaves was not the main agenda.
Post a Comment