Tom Guarriello considers what would have happened if the Confederacy won the Civil War. He explores how a Confederate victory might have shifted federal power to the states, possibly ended slavery faster through economic pressure than moral conviction, and created a divided nation resembling modern Iraq. He argues that who tells history's story shapes how we understand it today.
Today is Presidents' Day, and, um, you know, I guess as I get older, I start to think more about what these things mean than I did before. I don't know why, but, you know, thinking about Presidents' Day, Washington's birthday and Lincoln's birthday that became the focus of this holiday, and when you think about When I think about Washington and Lincoln, you know, their two presidencies really highlight the two— two of the foundational conflicts that made the United States the United States. I mean, the Revolutionary War, of course, Washington being the military leader and then the political leader after the war was over, and then Lincoln being the president, of course, during the Civil War. And, you know, Civil War, the Civil War in the United States, 145 years ago, and that's not a very long time in the passage of history. My friends in the UK will back up that 150 years is nothing for a national history. And many of us probably don't think about the Civil War very much today, but on President's Day today, I found myself thinking about the Civil War. And what I found myself wondering was What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War? I'm from the North. I grew up in New York, of course, as I've talked about many times. And growing up in the North, there was never any question in our mind that the Union, fighting for the Union, the North, was the noble thing. The right thing to do, and that the rebels, the secessionists from the South, you know, they were the ones who had to be defeated. We had to go down there and defeat them. Now, the way you frame up the Civil War says an awful lot about your beliefs, right? Because first of all, in the South, my understanding is, and I hope any of you who are from the South will get into this conversation if you choose to, but in the South, you know, the Civil War isn't called the Civil War, at least the way I've heard it. It was called the War Between the States. And, you know, in many ways, I think the War Between the States might be a more accurate way of describing what happened. Because while we in the North were taught, you know, remember the victors always write the history, right? So we in the North were taught kind of a Northern version of history, which— and my ignorance will show all over the place on this, and— but that's what it is, it's ignorance. It's just my way of— it's what I have in my mind about the Civil War, that, you know, slavery and the abolition of slavery was the main feature for, uh, that caused the Civil War, and that that's what the, uh, Northern soldiers were fighting for, to free the slaves. Lincoln freed the slaves, you know, the Emancipation Proclamation, all the things that we, at least we in the North, were taught about the Civil War. But when you look deeper into the history of the Civil War, you know, you also find that there was a fundamental difference in the way in which the, the North and the South thought about the nature of the country. And this is a difference that's, that still in some ways holds true today, and that is the tension between the centralized the federal government and how much authority the federal government has, and the authority or autonomy of the states and how much the states retain as authority. When I was an adolescent in the '60s, you know, we heard a lot about states' rights up north, and states' rights for us in the North was always a code for the rights of the Southern states to continue to pass legislation that kept African Americans in some position of subservience, an unequal, you know, separate but equal, was the law of the land that eventually was overcome, not until 1954 in education, right, with Brown v. the Board of Education, 1954, and not until the Civil Rights Act in 1966, I think, that Johnson got passed, ironically, a Southern president who himself had some history of being what was called then a Dixiecrat when he came in as a senator. But nevertheless, with the Public Accommodations Act and the Civil Rights Act, the right to vote and the right to equal protection of the law and the illegality of segregating public accommodations, all of which was kind of, for us in the North again, was sort of part of what states' rights was all about. But states' rights was really about a lot more than that. And so when I think of now, and I guess part of what's getting me to think about this now is also that, you know, we see in Iraq a country that if it isn't in a civil war, it certainly is close to a civil war as anything we see today. And you wonder, you know, what would happen if that country were to be divided into 3 countries based upon, you know, Kurds, Shia, and Sunni divisions. And that again led me to think more about what might have happened if the South had won the civil war what might America have been like? Not from a racial point of view, because Karen made a point earlier, I thought that was a really good point, that maybe we'd have achieved integration, racial integration, faster had the South won the Civil War, because there might have been an economic rationale for abolishing slavery rather than a social rationale, which is what happened in the in the wake of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and all of the horrors that happened there. So, um, but from a, but from a civil standpoint, what might this country, or what might these countries have been like had the South won the Civil War? What might the relationships have been like between the former Northern states and the former Southern states had they divided into different countries. So anyway, that's the thing that I'm thinking about today on Presidents' Day is what would this country, what would it have been like had the South won the Civil War? And of course, as always, I'm interested in your thoughts about what you would think about that. So thanks a lot and see you guys again soon. Bye.
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