Mencius Moldbug argues that, in order to understand the Civil War, we need a conceptual tool that can separate our moral judgment of slavery from our critical assessment of the political acts and actions of the 1850s:
The name of our tool is temperance. Ie, prohibition of alcohol. For reasons that will be obvious to any [Unqualified Reservations] reader, the temperance and abolition movements were close bedfellows. The match is not perfect, of course, but if we replace slavery with liquor, we have a hot-button issue in the 1850s whose emotional connotations in 2009 are comical at best.So, for example: when politicians are fighting about whether “slavery shall go into Kansas,” just think of them as fighting about whether liquor shall go into Kansas. Is Kansas to be a wet state, or a dry state? Shall Congress decide? Or the settlers in Kansas? Are prohibitionists in Massachusetts organizing to dispatch teetotalers to the territories? Are all the worst sots of Missouri up in arms against them?
With this device at our disposal, we are equipped to ask: disregarding the moral connotations of slavery (which we will consider later), which side in the War of Secession was in the right?
I can’t help but think, Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?