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Will S.
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5/25/2003
04:41:03
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 Subject: CSA and USA - battling conservatisms?
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In the Restoration or Conquest II thread, Peter Forrester brought up the issue I'd previously raised of the Confederacy's ideals versus the Union's ideals.
I hadn't thought about it before, but actually, wouldn't the difference in philosophy of the two parties boil down to: the Confederacy's institutional conservatism (both in terms of considering themselves holding to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, even still honouring their memories, and of course keeping republican government, AND in maintaining the status quo with respect to slavery) versus the Union's (i.e. Lincoln's) focus on "We behold these truths to be self-evident; all men are created equal", and that the U.S. was set up as an incarnation of the ideal that man should be free and self-governing, and thus the Union taking the position that so long as slavery remained, the nation wasn't living up to its founding ideals?
Thus, while America's founding ideals were unquestionably liberal, can we not think of both the Confederate and Union sides as dueling conservatisms, between institutional conservatism on the one hand (the Confederacy), and idealistic, principle-based conservatism on the other (the Union, in pointing back to the original ideal of freedom, as had been expressed in the founding documents, and by the American revolutionaries)...?
Of course, Lincoln said he was preserving the Union; yet many have held that the nature of the Union itself changed with the Civil War, what with the federal government power increasing greatly and the state governments' powers decreasing greatly, ever since. (It has been pointed out that prior to the Civil War, Americans referred to the U.S. in the plural, "the United States are", whereas afterward, Americans began referring to the U.S. more as a nation and less as a federation, and thus referring to the U.S. in the singular, "the United States is"...)
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John
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5/28/2003
00:32:13
| RE: CSA and USA - battling conservatisms?
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Well, one way to look at the civil war is to see it as a fight between wage-slavery and serfdom-slavery. Bound up in a mixture of conservative and liberal sentiments. Both wanted to preserve what they thought was the basis of the United States. Both appealed to religion (abolitionists v.s. pro-slavery churches) and liberal arguments (self-determination of the states and of the political/personal freedom of individuals).
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Will S.
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5/28/2003
01:43:15
| RE: CSA and USA - battling conservatisms?
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"Well, one way to look at the civil war is to see it as a fight between wage-slavery and serfdom-slavery. Bound up in a mixture of conservative and liberal sentiments."
Yes; one thing I find interesting is the southern agrarian conservative tradition that came out of the South, which, because of its identification with the South's quasi-aristocratic ideals, ended up becoming rather critical of capitalism, seeing the North's industrialization as having a dehumanizing effect on all, black and white. Thus, for reasons that were quasi-feudalist, they nevertheless ended up arriving at some very Marx-like positions.
"Both wanted to preserve what they thought was the basis of the United States."
The irony, of course, is that the South felt it had to secede to do so, while the North felt radical change had to occur, to do so.
As an outsider (Canadian), I can't help but look at the U.S. Civil War as an unfortunate tragedy in which both sides had some legitmate points, but both sides also were wrong in some ways, and that either outcome - what did happen, and what may have happened instead - was going to be a mixed blessing on many levels.
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