Do the abolitionists have anything left to say to us? Did the antislavery movement leave us with any enduring legacy — any precedents or precepts that can shed some light on the creeping barbarism of our neoliberal age? Do those bourgeois revolutionaries have anything to tell us about the structures of inequality in a capitalist system they did so much to bring about? Or was their failure so complete — their legacy so tainted — that we are better advised to condemn than embrace it?

All revolutions are unfinished. All triumphs are partial. Successful movements, if they do nothing else, expose the fault lines along which the next set of struggles will play themselves out. History is frustrating in that way. When a revolution fails to usher in the millennium it’s all too tempting to turn against the revolution itself. We often end up condemning the revolutionaries for their defective vision and decrying the violence and the bloodshed that seems to have given us so little in return. So it is with the great revolution that destroyed slavery in the United States, the event we call the Civil War.

And so it is with the historians who write about the Civil War. They’ve turned against it. Horrified by the brutal realities of black life in the New South — sharecropping, Jim Crow, disfranchisement, not to mention chain gangs and lynch mobs — historians on the Left have begun to say things that were once the commonplaces of conservative white southerners. The Civil War wasn’t worth it. Instead of freedom it brought misery and repression to the former slaves. Instead of a better life, emancipation brought sickness and death to hundreds of thousands of freed people.