Albion's Seeds

"After 1863—after Gettysburg turned the tide of the war, but, more importantly, after Lincoln defined the conflict as a contest over human rights—such racialist accounts of the Civil War more or less dissipated to a vague mythology of Southern cavaliers and New England Puritans. But we might recognize in its essential logic a certain tendency to transform political conflicts into matters of biological hostility. It is by such a logic that struggles in places such as Iraq or Bosnia have sometimes appeared to American onlookers as if rooted in “age-old” antagonisms, after all. By a similar way of thinking, sectional disputes over the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision once appeared to many Americans as a merely topical pretenses, under the cover of which latter-day Normans and Saxons exercised their congenital antipathies, ancient conflicts carried over the Atlantic."

Christopher Hanlon in The New York Times explains nineteenth-century descriptions of the Civil War as brought about by irreconcilable white racial groups.