Reply #18: No. I had just scanned it very briefly. Too briefly, obviously. I've read it now, [View All]

and wonder if you're saying that the Federalists weren't asking for a war. If so, why would the North accept an attack on its capital as little more than a one-off battle? Surely, it was asking for full-scale war. Anyway, I've perhaps misunderstood it entirely. Tell me.

This did fascinate me though. I'll try and dig up the cutting of the review:

"The slaveholding elites were never and could never have stopped at simple secession of their own states. They were determined to expand the system to new territories, and, as Marx ably explains, that system required expansion to forestall its own inevitable declikne. By any means, including violence and war, they were out to force slavery on the territories, and even on the North (the latter as illustrated by the Dred Scott decision and the forced inclusion of northern states in the South's system of policing escaped slaves)."

Actually, this seems to be a blueprint for the Nazis' Triumph of the Book-keeper's Will, as a Guardian book-reviewer once put it. They were obliged to keep conquering.

I don't know what truth there is in this, but I also read on the Internet that white people were getting caught up in the slavery, as slaves, too. Of course, that, too, would have been a major concern in the North for all but the far right.