Like most “whose hearts pump Confederate blood,” Chilton Williamson, Jr., in lamenting the failure of Dixie’s attempt at secession (“The Revenge of the Confederacy,” What’s Wrong With the World, January), neglects to address the elephant in the bed.  That critter is, of course, slavery, the “peculiar institution” at the core of what Williamson sees as a “traditional, religious, and deferential society, from which the gods of commercialism and progressivism had been banished.”  (I would point out that if you’re a slave, you’d damn well better be deferential!)  I assume, perhaps mistakenly, that Williamson feels that slavery should at some point have been abolished; it would be nice if he had postulated how that might have occurred—and when. 

Support of abolition was a crime in the antebellum South and would have brought down on those advocating it both legal sanctions and mob violence.  Also, in the event of a successful Southern secession, Northern abolitionists would have felt free to launch many John Brown-type raids into the CSA.  Most likely, the slaves would have eventually risen in an insurrection similar to that in Hispaniola in the 1790’s, with resulting bloodbaths of both whites and blacks.  Moreover, the notion that “commercialism” had been “banished” from the South is laughable.  Buying and selling—of cotton, sugar, rice, indigo, naval stores, and human beings—flourished there.  Industrial capitalism was also emerging in some areas and was being actively solicited in others.  Perhaps a civil war of shifting alliances might have occurred in the South, involving slaveholders, slaves, and emerging capitalists and poor whites discontented with slaveholder domination.  As for expansionism and imperialism, which Williamson sees as characteristic of the North, what about the Southern firebrands who advocated spreading slavery throughout the Caribbean and Latin America and launched “filibustering” expeditions to that end?

No, Mr. Williamson, your independent Confederacy would not have fulfilled your dream of an idyllic society.  It would, instead, have been a society of nightmarish violence and oppression.  God bless Abraham Lincoln!

        —Peter J. O’Connell
New Haven, CT

Mr. Williamson Replies:

After 45 years I continue to be astonished by the capacity of a certain type of reader to see a) what does not appear on the printed page and b) what never existed in the writer’s mind.

I am, to begin with, not one of those “whose hearts pump Confederate blood.”  My roots are not in the American South but in Great Britain and New England, and I’ve lived in the Rocky Mountain West for the past 35 years.  Mr. O’Connell has jumped at a conclusion, missed the mark, and fallen flat on his face here, as in his assumption that for me the Confederacy is “an idyllic society.”  Nowhere in the article do I state or suggest such a thing.  My argument is quite simply that the North, by conquering the South culturally as well as militarily, deprived itself of a cultural dimension it has lacked ever since, but one that is necessary to an integral civilization.  My intent was not to exalt one region above the other but to suggest that both cultures taken together might have made a proper whole, and that the North, by completely subjugating the South, forfeited the possibility of such a whole.

Much less was it my intent to suggest how an end to slavery might have been effected by a victorious Confederacy.  I have no interest in counterfactual history, and in any event the subject lies infinitely beyond the scope of the article.  It seems obligatory nowadays for a writer who dares say anything positive about the South to make a rhetorical gesture deploring the scandal of slavery.  I refuse to do any such thing, for several reasons.  One is that doing so takes up too much space.  Another is that it shouldn’t be necessary in intelligent discourse.  A third is that slavery isn’t a scandal but an institution that has always loomed large in the history of mankind, and still does.  Of course, there are people—not quite grown-up people, in my estimation—for whom history itself is a scandal, but they are none of my business.