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The memo has gone out. Since 2011 is the 150th anniversary of
the start of the War to Prevent Southern Independence the Lincoln Cult, aided
and abetted by the many worshippers of the centralized, bureaucratic,
Leviathan state that he founded, has been hard at work since the first week
of January endlessly repeating the politically-correct version of the one
sole cause theory of the "Civil War."
Unlike all other wars in human history, the "Civil War" is said
to have one and only one cause. This was not always the case; university
courses on the war during the 1960s and ’70s frequently used as a text
Kenneth Stampps The
Causes of the Civil War. Stampp was a former president of the
American Historical Association. His scholarship has been replaced with
a-historical political correctness on todays college campuses.
Supposed "proof" of the "one sole cause" theory is
that when the Southern states seceded in 1860-61, some Southern politicians
defended the institution of slavery. Therefore, the story goes, slavery was
the sole cause of the war. The not-so-implicit assumptions behind this
assertion are the following: 1) Lincoln was about to abolish slavery
"with the stroke of a pen" as soon as he took the oath of office;
2) Southerners understood this; therefore, Southern secession amounted to
kidnapping of the slaves; and 3) Lincoln launched an invasion of the South to
free the kidnapped slaves. This is the only way in which Southern secession
could have necessitated war. Read any of Harry Jaffas books if you
want "verification" of this "official view."
Everything about this politically-correct fantasy is patently false,
regardless of how many times it is repeated in the New York Times and Washington
Post. Some Southern politicians did indeed defend slavery, but not as
strongly as Abraham Lincoln did in his first inaugural address, where he
supported the enshrinement of Southern slavery explicitly in the U.S.
Constitution (the "Corwin Amendment") for the first time ever.
Coming from the president of the United States, this was the strongest
defense of slavery ever made by an American politician.
Some Southern politicians did say that their society was based on white
supremacy, but so did Abraham Lincoln and most other Northern politicians.
"I as much as any man want the superior position to belong to the white
race," Lincoln said in a debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858. When
Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories (but
not Southern slavery), he gave the standard Northern white supremacist reason:
We want the territories to be reserved "for free white labor," he
said. The Lincoln cultists can quote Alexander Stephens
"cornerstone" speech all they want, but the truth is that Abraham
Lincoln, and most of the leaders of the Republican Party, were in total
agreement with Stephens. White supremacy was as much (if not more of) a
"cornerstone" of Northern society as it was of Southern society in
the 1860s.
The abolition societies of the North never claimed more than two percent
of the Northern adult population as members. Lincoln was never an
abolitionist, distanced himself from them politically, and even boasted in a
speech in New York City that "we have abolitionists in Illinois; we shot
one the other day." All of this makes it extremely unlikely that anyone
who voted for Lincoln in the 1860 election did so because they thought he
would end Southern slavery (which of course the Republican Party Platform of
1860 did not promise).
More importantly, secession in no way necessitates war, regardless of what
the reasons for secession are. The reasons for secession, and the reasons why
there was a war, are two entirely separate issues. When New Englanders openly
and publicly plotted to secede for fourteen years after Thomas Jeffersons
election, culminating in the 1814 secession convention in Hartford,
Connecticut, neither President Jefferson nor President Madison (or anyone
else) said one word about the appropriate response to a Northern-state
secession being "invasion," "force," and "bloodshed."
These are the words Lincoln used in his first inaugural address to describe
what would happen in any Southern state that seceded.
It is unlikely that anyone even dreamed of invading Massachusetts,
Connecticut and Rhode Island and bombing and burning Boston, Hartford and
Providence into a smoldering ruin while murdering thousands of New
Englanders, women and children included, if New England were to secede.
Indeed, when Jefferson was asked what would happen if New England seceded, he
said in a letter that New Englanders, like all other Americans "would
all be our children" and he would wish them all well. More recently, all
of the Soviet republics, and all of Eastern and Central Europe peacefully
seceded from the Soviet Union. Secession does not necessitate war.
No American president had the power in the nineteenth century to abolish
slavery "with the stroke of a pen." The slaves were slaves before
Southern secession, and they were slaves after secession. Indeed, as
Alexander Stephens once correctly remarked, slavery was more secure in the
union than out of it because of the Fugitive Slave Clause, which Lincoln
strongly supported, and because of the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court
decision.
No respectable historian would argue that Lincoln invaded the South to
free the slaves. Even his Emancipation Proclamation was only a "war
measure" that would have become defunct if the war ended the next day
and it was written so as to avoid freeing any slaves since it only applied to
"rebel territory." Both Lincoln and Congress announced publicly
that their purpose was not to disturb slavery but to "save the
union," a union that they actually destroyed philosophically by
destroying its voluntary nature, as established by the founders. All
states, North and South, became wards or appendages of the central government
in the post-1865 era.
What Lincoln did say very clearly about war in his first inaugural address
was that it was his duty "to collect the duties and imposts," but
"beyond that there will no be any invasion of any state . . ." That
is, if Southern secession made it impossible for Washington, D.C. to
"collect the duties and imposts" (i.e., tariffs on imports, which
had just been more than doubled two days earlier), then there will be
an invasion. He followed through with this threat, and that is why
there was a war that ended up killing 670,000 Americans, including some
50,000 Southern civilians, while maiming for life more than a million.
Secession does not necessitate war; nor was war necessary to end slavery.
The rest of the world (including all of the Northern states ended slavery
peacefully in the nineteenth century, as James Powell documents and describes
in his outstanding book, Greatest
Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery.
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