The Civil War in real-time

This is neat. The New York Times is starting to run a weekly news roundup and analysis set 150 years ago. After the first, these Disunion articles on their Opinionator blog will be appearing every Monday.

The first, "Will Lincoln Prevail?" (registration required, though it's free), is set Oct. 31, 1860. With just seven days to go before the presidential election, the focus is on New York. If Abraham Lincoln can win New York, he can win the presidency without taking a single Southern state. If not, the election will be thrown into the House of Representatives, where two pro-slavery candidates, Senator John Bell of Tennessee and Vice-President John Breckenridge of Kentucky, would be odds-on favorites.

We're used to thinking of the past as being fixed, and so it is. But the events of history were not inevitable. Reading it in "real-time" like this just emphasizes that. How different would our history have been if Stephen Douglas had won New York? (These questions fascinate me. I guess that's why I enjoy alternate history so much.)

It's also interesting to see how much has changed - and how much hasn't. In 1860, it was the Democrats - pro-slavery Democrats, of course - who were strongest in the South. Republicans were strong in the North. This was pretty much still the case a century later, until the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At that point, the Republican Party saw an opportunity to woo southern white racists, and while that worked extremely well, they thereby lost their long-time New England stronghold. Today, we have the same political parties, but they've exchanged strongholds. (Yes, these days, Lincoln would be a Democrat.)

Of course, some things have stayed the same. This article describes the Democrats as "squabbling" and "suicidally splintered." Heh, heh. OK, that might have been the case as late as the 1960s, but it's not quite that bad these days. Democrats just don't march in lockstep very well, and with members ranging from liberal to conservative - even after losing the Dixiecrats to the GOP - they rarely agree on everything. But their racially and religiously diverse membership - very different from the Republicans - works together quite well these days.

This series, which expects to tell the "story of the Civil War," should be quite interesting, don't you think? The second installment, "The Last Ordinary Day" - Nov. 1, 1860 - has also been posted. And here's the link to the entire Disunion series. Again, there will be a new installment every Monday.

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PS. This reminds me of the Orwell Diaries, which I posted about in June. That's set not quite so long ago - 70 years ago, rather than 150 - and the format uses George Orwell's diary entries as blog posts. But both of these give us something of a real-time look at history.

Note that Orwell's comments can be uncomfortable for modern readers. For example, the latest post seems quite antisemitic. Well, people are complex, and even the best of us are products of our times. In this case, the readers' comments are quite helpful in understanding the man.

Ah, so much great stuff online and such limited time!