“A few years ago, when we jointly addressed a gathering in New York, he [Anderson] startled me by announcing that he thought the Confederacy should have been allowed to secede. His reasoning was elegant enough — slavery was historically doomed in any case; two semi-continental states would have been more natural; American expansionism would have been checked; Lincoln was a bloodthirsty Bismarckian étatiste and megalomaniac…”

I haven’t found a full discussion of the matter in Anderson’s work, but what there is suggests that Hitchens’ account is substantially correct. And it seems to me that the view ascribed to Anderson is correct.

As far as I can tell, one of the few recent discussions of the notion appears in a book by William Marvel, an academic Civil War historian, “Mr. Lincoln Goes to War” (2006). Marvel carefully sets out Lincoln’s policies as “destructive and unimaginative.”

It looks to me as though a consistent anti-war movement 150 years ago would have opposed Lincoln – a point that may have some importance because of his mythic position in the American social imaginary.