The Needless War

As I read Peter Turchin’s book Ages of Discord and follow current events, it couldn’t be more clear to me that Avery Craven and James G. Randall were correct in their interpretation of the War Between the States. More recently, David Goldfield has resurrected the Blundering Generation thesis.

Slavery was not the cause of the War Between the States. The Second Great Awakening which injected religious fanaticism into American politics was the cause. It was this religious fanaticism that led to abolitionism which migrated into politics and polarized and dissolved the Union. Interestingly, Goldfield explains how the spirit of religious fanaticism quelled after Antietam and through the Reconstruction period. Materialist values became ascendant in the North and led to the Gilded Age.

Note: It is easier to see today now that we are living through a similar period in the historical cycle. Slavery doesn’t exist anymore, but look where we are now. Look how similar our times are to the 1850s.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

7 Comments

  1. Maybe the shift of cheap cotton production to colonized India had something to do with dumping the South, and the centre of Jewry in the U.S. relocating from Charleston to New York.

  2. Much of Abolitionism opposed slavery because they did not want slavery in the Western territories because with slavery comes blacks. Anybody could see even in those days slavery was terminal and hence what to do with freed blacks? So Liberal Modernity has magically transformed all Abolitions into rabid egalitarians and modern day liberals which many were but many were not. Think of Hinton Rowan Helper who today would be called a National Populist who wrote about the negative consequences slavery had on free white labor in the South. The Planter Aristocracy hated him!

    • This is correct as they actually wanted to send them out of America, so too Lincoln, https://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n5p-4_Morgan.html ; but the usury cartel and the corporations around it knew exactly what they were doing to secure power until the ponzi collapses and also as a future tool to destroy the nation and the evidence of their monetary crime as they sis Ancient Egypt…

  3. “Slavery was not the cause of the War Between the States. The Second Great Awakening which injected religious fanaticism into American politics was the cause..”

    HW- So, are you saying that the breakdown of honest, virile Calvinism (Augustinianism/Luther- Cranmerian/BCP orthodox Anglicanism) via the preaching of the godless John Wesley and his pagan Arminian ‘Pelagianism lite’ theology, and the “Methodist Circuit Riders,” women leading ‘conventicles’ and Wesley’s feminized Christianity [Douglas ‘ “Feminization of American Culture”]

    http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam982/wolpert.html

    is THE reason for the Civil War that followed?

    https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-feminization-of-christianity/

    And theJeffersonian ‘All Men are created equal’ was the wedge in the door of Christendom, that led to women thinking themselves the equal of men, Commoners the equal of Kings, Sodomites the equal of Heterosexuals?

    And that the Emancipation/Egalitarization of a slave class, women as a class, sodomites as a class, JEWS AS AN EQUAL CLASS, all is to be laid at the feet of Wesley, and his disdain for Hierarchy, Order, Patriarchy, Biblical predestination and the clear ordering of some to salvation and others to a perpetual state of subservience to the Elect?

    I’m down with that.

  4. @Brad

    Craven saw the breakup of the union as a long slow process.

    If I were going to do a thesis, one that couldn’t be written today, it would be that the White people in the North had for the most part never even seen a Negro, let alone have had any practical experience living with them in close proximity.

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