The Civil War caused a huge schism in the American libertarian movement from which it wouldn’t recover for decades. Inner conflicts between abolitionists who favored the war and the invasion of the South, ones who saw the war as inevitable and required to end slavery, and those who thought the war was an egregious moral wrong in and of itself and unnecessary to end slavery caused the libertarian movement to faction off into other radical social movements, such as freethought, free love, and the labor movement. After 1865, the individualist tradition lived on, not in a distinct libertarian...
Benjamin Tucker, Boston Anarchist
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