Want to see history come alive? Try starting an argument about the Civil War with an unreconstructed States Right advocate.
When he, or, in more cases than you’d imagine, she, insists that The War wasn’t about slavery, quote this February 1864 excerpt from the Charleston (South Carolina) Mercury: “South Carolina entered into this struggle for no other purpose than to maintain the institution of slavery. Southern independence has no other object or meaning… Independence and slavery must stand or fall together.”
It’s a cheap tactic, using this quote from a firebrand editorial writer out to inflame passions. Your adversary, by now royally steamed, will counter that the North (excepting New England) was never a hotbed of abolitionism; that Lincoln was at heart a unionist, not an abolitionist. Your opponent may even cite historian Bruce Catton on the tangential nature of slavery to the overall conflict: “To save the Union, the North had to destroy the Confederacy, and to destroy the Confederacy it had to destroy slavery.”
This forces you to apply the coup de grace: “Do you really wish the South had won? Because if it had, the United States as we know it today wouldn’t exist.”
Basically, you’ve got your opponent checkmated. There is, of course, a cost. You’ll lose a friend, open an old sore, not get invited to any parties at the partisan’s country club.
A possible point of agreement: From Appomattox to Pearl Harbor was only 76 years. To fight Hitler and Tojo, we had to stop fighting each other. The reconciliation wasn’t total and it wasn’t smooth. But when the time came for Americans to reach beyond sectionalism and pull together, we did the job.
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