structural:scholar_edition, structural:summarization
American Civil War

This employment exempted Peirce from having to take part in the American Civil War; it would have been very awkward for him to do so, as the Boston Brahmin Peirces sympathized with the Confederacy. No members of the Peirce family volunteered or enlisted. Peirce grew up in a home where white supremacy was taken for granted, and slavery was considered natural. Peirce's father had described himself as a secessionist until the outbreak of the war, after which he became a Union partisan, providing donations to the Sanitary Commission, the leading Northern war charity.

Peirce liked to use the following syllogism to illustrate the unreliability of traditional forms of logic (for the first premise arguably assumes the conclusion):

All Men are equal in their political rights. Negroes are Men. Therefore, negroes are equal in political rights to whites.