In 1860, Virginia planter and slaveholder Edmund Ruffin published a work of speculative fiction titled Anticipations of the Future. An epistolary novel, it told the story of the dissolution of the United States in a civil war over slavery. Ruffin predicted that war would break out in 1868, as anti-slavery politician William Seward ran for presidential reelection. (He imagined that Seward would follow the “obscure and coarse” Lincoln in the White House.) The slave states, Ruffin suggested, would triumph after Northern cities (in particular New York) were consumed by riots touched off by their economies spiraling into a depression triggered by the loss of Southern trade. In 1865, it became apparent to him that, contrary to his prophecies, slavery would collapse, and the South would lose the war he had foreseen. In the end, unable to accept how life had departed from fiction, Ruffin committed suicide on his son’s plantation.
Today, looking at a United States in which the answers to basic questions about women’s moral and physical autonomy now vary from state to state, it is not surprising that fantasies of secession are returning. Federalism is one thing, but can one nation contain within itself essentially different legal regimes? Nevertheless, like many explanations of the rise of conservatism that emphasize the regional power of the right, and that focus on the “Southern strategy,” the emphasis on tensions between different geographical sections of the country is an oversimplification that makes it far more difficult to see where the real dangers lie.
For one thing, the acute differences between our present dilemmas and the era that led to the Civil War are greater than any surface resemblance. Then, the nature of the conflict went directly to the heart of the entire economic and social order. The question of whether Black Americans were property or people underwrote an entire way of organizing capitalism. It was a way of controlling labor, of valuing capital, of speculation and investment. It spoke to basic issues of whether the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence (under slavery, masters were granted a vast measure of control over the people they owned). And because slavery was justified in terms of a putative natural racial hierarchy, any threat to the system of enslavement could not help but point to revolution.