The Meaning of the Gettysburg Address

[Thomas Thorne]

You guys are too beardian-Charles Beard-for me. I don't think regular people in 1861 were conscious that this was a struggle between old agrarian and new industrial elites. If they thought so,recruiting offices would have been empty.

South and North both shared the same idea that Blacks were inferior and needed to be in a subordinate condition. The South could not imagine how that subordination could be maintained without slavery. The peaceful alternative of miscegenation was mixed with the awful specter of race war,slave insurrection and John Browns.

The Beardian thesis would be more plausible if the Northern reaction to Ft Sumter had been good riddance. People could have reasoned that without the South they could get all the economic goodies blocked by the South:homesteads,railroads,tariffs and land grant colleges.

But the northern reaction to Sumter was not cool and calculating. It was hot and expressed a fear very different than the fear expressed by their Southern brethren. Northerners had taken the Union for granted and did not realize its value until faced by the threat of its dissolution. In their hearts they contemplated that once the genie of secession was out of the bottle there would be no end to the process and the United States would wind up like the European state system with its eternal conflicts and despotisms.
Tom