Anti-Climacus

A really excellent article on the Civil War from Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I'm sure you've already seen it:

For the portion of the country that still honors, or traces its ancestry to, the men who fired on Fort Sumter, and thus brought war, the truthful story of the Civil War tells of a defeat richly deserved, garnered in a pursuit now condemned. For the blameless North, it throws up the failed legacy of appeasement of slaveholders, the craven willingness to bargain on the backs of black people, and the unwillingness, in the Reconstruction years, to finish what the war started.

For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil. For radicals, the wave of white terrorism that followed the war offers lessons on the price of revolutionary change. White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil-rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudi­ments of their freedom through the killing of whites.

The unfortunate tendency of paleoconservatives to cotton onto the antebellum south as the source of all moral virtue in this country (and libertarians' periodic inability to recognize the evil of slavery) is not just politically troubling but morally reprehensible. There is no part of the south before the Civil War that is conceivable without slavery, nothing that it did not taint; the fact that there were white people who did not directly participate in or benefit from the slave system is no excuse, not in the face of obvious and unforgivable moral wrong (I don't think we'd be prepared to excuse a white person living under Apartheid, either, whether or not he consciously participated in it). This is not to say I believe in the collective responsibility or guilt of all white antebellum southerners, either: no one can be responsible for the acts of large and impersonal forces that stretch over time. Rather, each of those people has personal responsibility for the things they did, or left undone, that could have changed the system, or the law, or someone else's attitudes and behaviors, or their own.