Perhaps better than most on the American left today, the old advocates of the antebellum system of slavery understood the ideological connections between abolitionism and socialism. They were what one could call “intersectionalists of the Right,” since they sought to demonstrate how abolitionism, socialism, women’s emancipation, and other progressive struggles were all linked to attacks on the rights of property.

Those who fought for the preservation of slavery knew that their war was not only a domestic struggle, but an international one against the same tendencies manifested in European socialism. Their remarks anticipate by a generation the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, when he describes abolitionism, feminism, and the workers’ movement as part of a single cultural logic of modernity, unleashed by the Jacobin energies of the French Revolution.

Even now, neo-confederate and revisionist historians cast Lincoln as an “American Robespierre,” or even as the “American Lenin.”