And Then There was Slavery.

We have come to the final component in the list of reasons that are proffered defending the necessity for Lincoln and his Federal army to invade the Southern states.  I hope you have enjoyed this foray into un-sanitized history.  I also hope that along with the Michael Medved piece from 2007, this serves to enlighten you.  I further hope that it will explain why it is not necessary to ban inanimate objects that belong in our history.  History is the story of our past, and it should remain complete whether good or bad.  Once again, I thank my late friend David for his extensive research in this area. I still have David's thoughts and research on the conduct of the war and the period of Reconstruction after the war.  Maybe we can post that at some later date.

"And then there was slavery.  Slavery was definitely an issue in the war, but it was never THE issue except for a tiny minority of Southern whites and Northern abolitionists.  Lincoln himself said that he would not interfere with slavery if that was what it took to preserve the Union.  He did not mention slavery in his call to war.  At the beginning of the war, slavery was legal in Washington, D.C.  As already noted Grant's wife and Father-in-law owned many slaves and refused to free them the entire time Grant was a Union general.  Lincoln's wife's family owned slaves.

It was not until the North appeared to be losing the war that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  However, humanitarianism had nothing to do with his declaration.  It did not free the slaves in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, or Missouri.  Nor did it free the slaves in those parts of the South occupied by Union forces.  It only freed the slaves in those areas over which Lincoln had no control.  It was intended to cause insurrection among slaves in the South and to disrupt the Confederacy on its home front.

It didn't work except to establish a moral purpose for some individuals in the North for an immoral and illegal war.

We can safely say that economic tyranny imposed upon Southern states by politicians subservient to northern industrialists, the invasion of Southern states by U. S. forces, and for some few, slavery were the three primary causes of the war.

Four Southern states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas did not secede until after
Fort Sumter.  People in those times, in all of the states, considered themselves citizens of their state first and their nation second.  When they were invaded by Northern armies they fought back...as illustrated by the young Confederate soldier quoted earlier.

All of that said, I believe the single greatest cause of the war was Abraham Lincoln.  He could have ended slavery with compensated emancipation as was done in England, Brazil, and numerous other countries. But, he did not attempt to avail himself of this option except in the Border States where he was rebuffed.

Interestingly, Lincoln lobbied Congress during his entire term for the funds to round up every single black in the U. S. at the end of the war and ship them to Africa or the Caribbean.  He did not intend to allow a single black to stay in this country.  As part of the above mentioned compensated emancipation offered to the Border States, he added the provisos that the emancipation would be gradual and that the freed slaves would be deported.  He had voiced and written his opinion that blacks were not generally the social or intellectual equal to whites many times, and apparently wished to rid the country of the freed blacks.

For those of you who may doubt this little known fact of Lincoln's intention to deport all blacks, you can find his efforts in this area documented in great detail in Carl Sandburg's six volume biography of the man.  Sandburg, from Illinois, was hardly a Southern sympathizer.

Lincoln's agenda was to institute a centralized government which held total power over the states. Secondly, he wished to destroy free trade, thereby enriching his Northern businessmen supporters. As a result, he could not allow a state to secede, even though it was and is constitutional for one to do so, because this was the ultimate challenge to a powerful central government.  He succeeded in these goals and was perfectly willing to sacrifice 600,000 Americans to achieve them."

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelmedved/2007/09/26/six_inconvenient_truths_about_the_us_and_slavery/page/full  This is the Michael Medved link on slavery mentioned in the introduction.

Abraham Lincoln

These photos are alleged to be Abraham Lincoln before and after the Civil War.  Who was Mr. Lincoln and, was he a noble hero, or an opportunistic politician?  As always, I ask you to decide for yourself.  We cannot judge using our paradigm.  We have been exposed to so much more information, and we have the luxury of hindsight.  I think he, like all men, was a combination of both. Perhaps the South would have been spared some cruel and unjust treatment had he lived.  We will never know.  However, we do have a reasonable account of his politics.  David continues his account based on his own research into the matter.  What were the reasons for war and were they noble?

"In the very early 1800's the Whig Party, of which Lincoln was a very active member until it imploded, was fighting to force U. S. capitalism to abandon free trade for mercantilism.  Mercantilism is defined by one economist as follows:

'A system of statism which employs economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state.'

This system relied on protectionism, which is legal protection from international competition through high tariffs and quotas.  Nationalized banking and tax funded subsidies to politically connected businesses and industry are also key elements.

So, what does any of this have to do with the war?  For one thing, Lincoln had always, from the beginning of his political career, been a zealot for mercantilism.  He gave speeches in which he said no product which could be made in the U. S. should be imported.  The general concept of mercantilism is in direct contrast to the economic views of almost all of the Founders, including Jefferson and Madison.

Lincoln's main objective was always protectionism for Northern manufacturers; buying votes with cheap federal land sales; and the purchase of even more votes and campaign contributions through a massive spoils system created by government subsidies to the railroad system.

Mercantilism, and all of its aspects, was vehemently opposed by the South, and the South had good reason.  Almost 80% of the burden to the economy caused by the tariffs fell on the Southern States. The South imported and exported far more than the North from 1840 to 1860. The tariffs protected the northern industrialists and punished the Southern agrarian and shipping society.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln stated that he would invade and militarily enforce the tariffs on any state which did not collect them on imports.  He meant it and the South knew it.

Keep in mind that at this time in our history, the government of this country was organized and run as the Founders intended.  All powers not specifically granted to the federal government, and they were few, were reserved exclusively to the states.  The states considered themselves independent, sovereign entities which were voluntarily bound together by the Constitution which granted certain, limited powers to a federal, not a national government.

Lincoln believed none of this as I will illustrate later.  Her believed in a powerful national government to which the states were subservient in all things.  That's where we are today and it was Lincoln who began the transformation...but he had to do it by force of arms.

At that time in our history, succession was recognized by most citizens as a right of any state. Madison, the author of much of the Constitution confirmed this right.  Three states, New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island, specifically reserved this right in writing when they joined the original Union.  Lincoln himself apparently believed in secession when it suited him as he broke part of Virginia off and created West Virginia without observing any of the constitutional requirements for doing so.  On the other hand, he proclaimed all secessionists as traitors when it suited him to do so.

Lincoln forgot Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence stating that '...governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; [and] that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.'

Secession was not really an issue in the North until Lincoln made it so.  This was not a civil war.  No seceding state, nor the Confederate government, wished to overthrow the U. S. government.  They merely wanted to go their own way and be left alone.

The idea that these states could secede was recognized by most legal scholars, jurists, and the media in the North even as secession occurred.  However, Lincoln declared it illegal and enforced his opinion with the military."

Let's Talk

We are now in a serious situation in regards to our freedom of speech and expression in this country.  If you are not an ardent supporter of the unsupported liberal bias on any given subject, you may be told that you cannot air your differences without recompense.  My good friend David, who was featured from time to time on this blog, was a serious historian.  I say "was" because he passed away last year.  I am using some of his well researched commentary on the subject of what we have been told was a Civil War.  I think he would have wanted me to remind you amidst this controversy over one of our country's historical symbols.  Wars are fought for a variety of reasons, some noble, some not.  In efforts to rally the citizens around a cause, our politicians proffer noble reasons for engaging in armed conflict.  We the citizens may not be aware of the ignoble reasons that are the real reasons for the conflict.  History has a way of sanitizing the facts to support the actions of those who claim victory.  I am parsing David's work for brevity.

David writes: "As we are observing the commemoration of the War for Southern Independence, referred to in the North as the Civil War, or the War of the Rebellion (neither of which it actually was), I offer these thoughts and observations."

Causes of the War:  Contrary to what you may have been taught, the war had less to do with slavery and more to do with economics and states' rights.

When Lincoln called for war, he did not mention slavery, but gave as his reason for attacking the states which had seceded as being the noble cause of preserving the Union...ignoring the fact that the Union would have been perfectly preserved, just smaller, if the seceding states had been left alone.

Nonetheless, "preserving the union" was what most of the Union soldiers fought for.  I have personally read over 100 letters and diaries of both Confederate and Union troops, and not one of them mentioned preserving slavery or abolishing slavery as the reason they were fighting.  In fact, there was a great deal of animosity toward slaves in general and blacks in particular in the Union boys' diaries.

The Confederates felt that they were being invaded by forces which had been causing them economic misery through high tariffs for almost 60 years.  After all, it is estimated that 92% of the Confederate soldiers did not own a slave and were not interested in owning a slave.  The vast majority were small farmers and they darn sure wouldn't fight and die for someone else's slaves.  State' rights and the resistance of tyranny were the reasons given almost exclusively by the Confederates.

Shelby Foote writes about the long, tall Confederate private captured during the war.  A Union officer asked him, "Why are you fighting? You are not rich.  You don't own any slaves.  You are just a small farmer."

The young Confederate looked the Union officer up and down, turned his head and spat out some tobacco juice, looked back at the officer and responded, "Because y'all are here."

As an aside, it is interesting to note that General U. S. Grant was the slave overseer on his Father-in-Law's plantation prior to the war and Grant's wife refused to free her slaves until she was forced to after the war by the 13th Amendment."

I will cover Lincoln and his reasons for declaring war in subsequent posts.  I hope you will follow this series and learn some things that aren't taught by those who only teach from the book of "Historical Liberal Talking Points".