Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Late in 1862, readers of the Confederacy’s most prestigious literary magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, found a nine-page account of the history of racial strife that had plunged the nation into civil war. Disunion had been inevitable, according to the author, in a country where a supposedly superior race had joined with one it considered inferior, and with whom co-existence on terms of political equality was impossible. “Never capable, in their best days, of self-government,” the writer mused over that allegedly lesser race, “it is frightful to think of the doom awaiting” them “at the end of this war.”

The racial imbalance that had undermined the Republic had nothing to do with the institution of slavery, however; the anonymous writer for The Messenger was not rehearsing common arguments concerning allegedly impermeable biological boundaries separating whites from blacks. Rather, the racial differences that had driven the war were those distinguishing white inhabitants of the Northern and Southern United States.

According to the writer in The Messenger, whites of the North were simply not of the same race as whites of the South, and it was this biological difference — and all the differences in temperament and capability that came with it — that had propelled sectional dissolution since the founding of the nation.

Such arguments alleging a racial distinction between Northerners and Southerners were voiced in other outlets both before and after the article in the Messenger. It was one way in which Southerners explained secession: between June 1860 and August 1863, a number of prominent Southern magazines ran articles by a series of writers similarly describing the political divisions of North and South as the product of a more profound biological antagonism, what one writer, William Archer Cocke, described as “the radical and irreconcilable difference” dividing North from South. Another anonymous writer in The Messenger argued, also in 1863, “that the race which colonized the blooming South varied very distinctly from that which fixed its home in the bleak regions destined for Yankee expansion.”

Indeed, such attempts to root Northerners, particularly those from the Northeast, and Southerners in antagonistic bloodlines went back at least as far as 1837, when another anonymous writer in The Messenger wrote, “We, too, of the South, and especially we of Virginia, are descendants, for the most part, of the old cavaliers — the enemies and persecutors of those old puritans — and entertain, perhaps, unwittingly something of an hereditary and historical antipathy against the children, for the fathers’ sake.”

For most Southern proponents, the argument went something like this. In 1066, William the Conqueror subdued the Saxons — a barbarous, uncivilized race — not only providing England with cultural refinement but also imposing upon the island a class of gentry who were genetically equipped to rule. The enduring features of the subdued Saxon race — which because of medieval sociopolitical reality did not tend to intermarry with their Norman overseers — were a resentment of just authority, a tendency toward fanaticism and a reflexive valorization of liberty for its own sake. The Puritan settlers of Massachusetts were the descendants of those vanquished Saxons, separatist fanatics who burned witches until deciding to dump tea into Boston harbor instead.

The Alabama novelist William Falconer, writing in 1860, characterized New Englanders as having been historically unable to govern themselves. Latter-day Puritans born of Saxon stock, they “exhibit those severe traits of fanaticism which had ever marked their history,” he wrote, “squabbling, fighting, singing psalms, burning witches, and talking about liberty — until George III lost the brightest jewel of his colonial diadem.”

The colonies of the South, on the other hand (Jamestown, but also later colonies in the Carolinas), were established by members of Elizabeth’s and James’s courts, descendants of the Norman conquerors, the ruling class of England. Though the federal union that followed the Revolution sufficed, for a time, to assuage the centuries-old enmity between representatives of these bloodlines, the writer for that 1863 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger insisted that “none of the circumstances which blended the interests of both people … none of the alliances and intimate associations of Society itself — have availed to obliterate any of the decided marks of this innate, fixed, enduring difference.”

So in essence, the enduring conflict of the Norman and Saxon races had been transported across the Atlantic, where it would bear the bitter fruit of sectional division. Hence the author of an 1861 essay in De Bow’s Review entitled “The Conflict of the Northern and Southern Races” cited “an original antagonism existing between the North and the South, as a necessary sequence of their radical difference in race, ever active and growing, and which has resulted in the complete disruption of every tie which has bound them together.”

Northerners spun their own renditions of the argument. Yes, in 1066 the Norman Conquest divided Britain racially. Descendants of Saxon serfs and Norman conquerors eventually emigrated, respectively, to Massachusetts and Virginia. But Northeastern racial theorists argued that the true cause of the sectional conflict — Southern slavery — was itself the outgrowth of that English racial conflict, because the Normans had been congenital tyrants. That the descendants of an imperious race who had imposed serfdom upon their Saxon underlings would push the Union toward secession over an insistence upon holding slaves was unsurprising, given what one writer, H. D. Kitchell, had called, in 1850, “The Norman pride, his scorn of labor, his high blood, despotic temper, and aristocratic temper.” Much like his Southern counterparts, Kitchell explained that Northerners and Southerners “were not of the same race.”

Related Disunion Highlights Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive. See the Highlights »

This insistence upon a racial incompatibility between Northerners and Southerners was hardly some obscure line of thinking. Resonating across mainstream antebellum culture, it provided for many an account of why the Union had failed, or would. In his 1852 address at the opening of the Athenaeum in Richmond, Va., the Rev. John Robertson spoke of “the piratical Saxons” as “mere barbarians” whose “ignorance” had made the Norman Conquest all but inevitable. And Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1854 travelogue “English Traits,” described the Normans as “greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates” who “took every thing they could carry,” who “burned, harried, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin.” For that matter, in 1843 Emerson had described a “New England race” whose Anglo-Saxon bloodline conditioned “the more ideal character” prevalent in the New England states.

After 1863 — after Gettysburg turned the tide of the war, but, more importantly, after Lincoln defined the conflict as a contest over human rights — such racialist accounts of the Civil War more or less dissipated to a vague mythology of Southern cavaliers and New England Puritans. But we might recognize in its essential logic a certain tendency to transform political conflicts into matters of biological hostility. It is by such a logic that struggles in places such as Iraq or Bosnia have sometimes appeared to American onlookers as if rooted in “age-old” antagonisms, after all. By a similar way of thinking, sectional disputes over the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision once appeared to many Americans as a merely topical pretenses, under the cover of which latter-day Normans and Saxons exercised their congenital antipathies, ancient conflicts carried over the Atlantic.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

Sources: “The Philosophy of Secession,” The Southern Literary Messenger, September-October 1862; William Archer Cocke, “The Puritan and the Cavalier,” De Bow’s Review, September 1861; “The Conflict of Northern and Southern Races.” De Bow’s Review October-November 1861; William Falconer, “The Differences of Race Between the Northern and Southern People,” The Southern Literary Messenger, June 1860; John Robertson, “Introductory Address, on Opening the Richmond Athenaeum,” The Southern Literary Messenger, April 1852; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson” and “The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

Christopher Hanlon is a professor of American literature at Eastern Illinois University and the author of “America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism.”