Le combat moral des Américains: la guerre de Sécession n'est pas terminée

J'aime bien l'angle retenu par le professeur de Columbia University Andrew Delbanco. La création des États-Unis repose sur un bon nombre de compromis, dont celui d'accepter l'esclavage des états du sud pour maintenir l'union des anciennes colonies. En repoussant le débat sur la moralité de l'esclavage les États-Unis ont pelleté les problèmes en avant et la guerre de Sécession n'éclatera qu'en 1860. Delbanco avance ici que le pari d'unir des positions irréconciliables fut une erreur, une erreur que ces concitoyens répète aujourd'hui. Pendant combien de temps des intérêts aussi divergents que ceux qui divisent actuellement nos voisins du sud peuvent-ils encore cohabiter pacifiquement? Je me demande parfois ce qu'Abraham Lincoln en penserait.

 "Through most of his career, Lincoln himself tried to walk the line between compliance and resistance to the fugitive slave law. Repulsed by the southern demand that “we must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure,” he nevertheless pledged to respect the law. Even after his election as president and well into the Civil War, he continued trying to reconcile his revulsion at slavery with his devotion to the Union. Accused from the right of being an antislavery radical, he was reviled from the left for dragging his feet in the struggle against slavery for the sake of the illusory dream that the Union could be preserved.

In that sense, Lincoln was the embodiment of America’s long struggle to remake itself as a morally coherent nation. Under his leadership, the Civil War finally resolved the problem of fugitive slaves by destroying the institution from which they had fled. By the time of his death, some four million black Americans were no longer at risk of forcible return to their erstwhile masters. They had entered the limbo between the privations of their past and the future promise of American life—a state of suspension in which millions of black Americans still live.

The problem of the 1850s was a political problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/the-nation-has-been-this-dividedin-the-civil-war/575587/