Politics & Power Quote by L. Neil Smith

Smith’s phrasing is a deliberate provocation: it collapses the moral and political distance between the Confederacy and the Revolution by calling the Civil War a “war of secession” and then sharpening it into “a war of independence.” That second label isn’t neutral description; it’s a bid to launder the Confederacy in the glow of 1776, to make disunion sound like liberty rather than rebellion.

The mechanics are simple and savvy. “What happened” pretends to be a calm historical gloss, but the sentence is engineered as an argument about legitimacy. “No different in principle” is the fulcrum: it invites readers to treat “principle” as the only relevant category, stripping away the inconvenient particulars - slavery, the Confederacy’s explicit constitutional commitments to it, and the way “independence” functioned to preserve a racial labor regime. It’s not just revisionism; it’s reframing, asking you to grade history on an abstract curve where motives don’t matter, only the act of breaking away.

Context matters because Smith is a libertarian-leaning speculative writer who often elevates individual sovereignty and distrust of centralized power. In that worldview, secession becomes the purest political escape hatch, and the Civil War becomes a cautionary tale about the state’s monopoly on force. The subtext is contemporary: if 1861 is morally equivalent to 1776, then modern separatist or anti-federal impulses can borrow the Revolution’s prestige. The line works by exploiting America’s civic religion - it weaponizes the Founding as a brand.