The most candid and compelling summary of this perspective doesn't come from a right-wing revisionist, but rather from Columbia Law School Professor George P. Fletcher, an establishment academic of an unabashedly Marxist bent.
In his valuable book The Secret Constitution, Fletcher acknowledges that the war waged by Abraham the Annihilator was not an effort to "preserve the Union," much less to restore the pre-war constitutional order. Instead, that war was intended to consolidate the united States into a unitary state governed by what Fletcher calls a "New Constitutional Order." In the New Order, writes Fletcher, the founding premise is that "the federal government, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive intervention in the lives of its citizens." (Emphasis added.)
There is nothing hypothetical about the federal aggression Fletcher correctly identifies as the central feature of the post-Lincoln Soyuz (the term "union" is inapposite here). Since, from the perspective Fletcher represents, Lincoln's war supposedly settled the question of the central government's "authority" to kill Americans in any quantity necessary to reconfigure society, there are no limits to what it can do in the interest of establishing "social justice."
"Civil rights," as the term is used today, has nothing to do with the rights of individuals apart from the role played by some members of designated classes as a pretext for federal violations of the property rights of others not granted such protected status. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor at Princeton and self-appointed watchdog of the "radical right," makes that point with the eager earnestness of someone who assumes that her political opponents aren't listening.
