The Treasury of Counterfeit Virtue
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!”
—Robert Burns
A few years ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public was not morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the September 11 attacks, unlike it was in its heroic response to Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor.
Wait a minute. Pearl Harbor and September 11 were massive sneak attacks by foreign enemies. The reduction of Fort Sumter was preceded by a gentlemanly warning, was bloodless, and the garrison was allowed to depart with honor. It would not have happened at all if Abraham Lincoln had not maneuvered to bring it about. Think about this. Why should Southerners (free Americans) permit a fort that had been built with their tax money for their protection to be used as a base to conquer and extort taxes from them, when every other federal post in the South had already been peacefully transferred pending a political settlement of the issues raised by secession? One can become outraged at Fort Sumter only by placing a higher value on the will of the political party controlling the machinery of government than on the core purpose of a free regime to protect the people.
Nor did Lincoln’s call after Fort Sumter for 75,000 troops to suppress “the rebellion” evoke unity and determination. The (illegal) call was either a deliberate deception or the most terrible miscalculation in American history, since over a million men would be required to complete the conquest of the Southern people and the destruction of their self-government. The immediate effect of Lincoln’s mobilization was to drive four more states out of the Union and to put the border states into bloody play. The long-range effects were military rule in much of the North, a staggering cost in blood, and systematic terrorism against Southern noncombatants.
It is true that Lincoln got a temporary boost of morale from having forced the Confederacy to “fire on the flag,” but that did not last. The number of Northern men who evaded service in Mr. Lincoln’s war in one way or another was in the hundreds of thousands. Others signed up for the minimal time allowed: There were examples of whole regiments going home on the eve of battle. Compared with complete mobilization in the South, no affluent or connected Northerner ever saw service unless he wanted to. A recent study suggests that Lincoln could not have raised his armies if it had not been for widespread industrial unemployment at the beginning of the war, an immense expenditure on enlistment bounties, and unlimited access to foreign recruits who made up a fourth of the military manpower. More Northerners voted against Lincoln in 1864 than had in 1860, even though the army was dispatched to control the polls. Lincoln and his friends never put complete trust in the Northern public and saw conspiracies under every bed. They behaved with the ruthlessness of a revolutionary cadre. After victory history was edited to portray a unified righteous North.
It is a wonder that the historian mentioned above would even allow Southerners to fight beside real Americans in later wars, since he equates Lee and Jackson with Tojo and Bin Laden. Perhaps it has always been this way in Boston, which happens to be the location of the scholar referred to. But in general it has not always been so. Franklin Roosevelt had no objection to being photographed with Confederate flags. Harry Truman chose a romantic equestrian portrait of Lee and Jackson for the lobby of his presidential library. Dwight Eisenhower went out of his way to correct someone who called Lee a “traitor,” and John Kennedy chose Calhoun as one of the five greatest senators.
For a long time Americans North and South observed a truce. It was agreed that the war was a great tragedy with good and bad on both sides, from which a stronger and better country had emerged. In this scenario, Lincoln is the great martyred Peacemaker who would have “bound up the nation’s wounds” and avoided the evils that followed the war. This is a dubious estimate of Lincoln, but one in which it was useful for all parties to believe.
Things have changed in the last few years. There is a concerted effort to banish the South into one dark little corner of American history labeled “slavery” and “treason.” Here in the Lincoln bicentennial, we can note that there has been an accompanying literature that celebrates Lincoln not as the Peacemaker but as the great Hero of Democracy who was justified in using any means necessary to destroy evil (i.e., kill recalcitrant Americans). This accompanies and justifies America’s turn toward a mission to impose “global democracy” by unlimited force and preemptive war. Even General Sherman is once more being celebrated as a great military hero for his ruthless campaigns against civilians. (There has been a countertrend, exemplified by Thomas DiLorenzo’s and Ronald and Donald Kennedy’s best-selling books as well as a number of solid monographs exploring the uglier aspects of Northern motives and actions in the war. If my e-mail correspondence from above the Potomac and the Ohio is any measure, a great many non-Southern Americans now regard Lincoln as the fount of the excessive centralization and imperial war-making under which we now live.)
During the Civil War centennial, Robert Penn Warren wrote a little book called The Legacy of the Civil War. He had some critical things to say about the tendency of his fellow Southerners to use the war as an excuse for their shortcomings. But for our purposes, what he had to say about the American majority is more pertinent. The éclat of having “saved the Union” and freed the slaves had left Northerners with “a Treasury of Virtue.” This is the basis of a kind of plenary indulgence that automatically prejustifies the motives of American wars and the goodness inherent in America’s acts to force the world into conformity with America’s ideal version of herself.
The Treasury of Virtue renders Americans immune to simple truth. The war was one of conquest against other Americans. It was not a righteous crusade or a family spat. “Government of the people” would not have suffered if a war of coercion had not been launched against the Southern people. The opposite is true. The fundamental purpose of the war was to protect the prosperity of the ruling elements of the Northern states by keeping the South captive as a market and a source of raw materials and exports. The philanthropic Boston abolitionist Theodore Parker announced that war was being waged for the supremacy of “Northern industry.” European observers took this for granted. The primary goal of the Republican Party was permanent installment of Hamilton’s “blessings”—a national debt, a protected market for industrialists, and a collusion between bankers and politicians. Many Northerners said plainly that they wanted emancipation because “free labor” was cheaper and more disposable than “slave labor.”
Orestes Brownson, a strong supporter of the Union, lamented that the war had been sustained not by patriotism but by patronage, profit, and a trumped-up hatred of Southerners. The last was exemplified by the bigotry and blasphemy of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and more than a few New England clergymen calling for the extermination of wicked Southerners. The Republican Party’s war was accompanied and sustained by immense corruption. Americans seem to have persuaded themselves that the postwar corruption of “the Great Barbecue” somehow mysteriously erupted after Lincoln. No, it was a creation of the war for the “Union.” At least one major military expedition was mounted to steal cotton to enrich Union commanders. Plunder of the government and the South made many of Lincoln’s supporters wealthy. Lincoln himself encouraged various acts of corruption for political purposes if not for personal profit.
The Lincoln hagiography that is an essential part of the Treasury was a post-assassination creation. As one Southern wag put it, Lincoln had so many admirers when he was dead because he had none when he was living. When looked at coldly, the man Lincoln and his career contains much that is tawdry. The strongest supporters of his cause regarded him as incompetent and temporizing. The possibility cannot ever be dismissed that they were implicit in his assassination. One would think that the event would have received exhaustive investigation. Instead, the alleged conspirators were quickly and secretly seized and murdered by the Army. Confederates were not angels. Unlike their conquerors, they never claimed to be. But by comparison they shine with honor bright, something much of the world has sensed.
In the history books and in popular imagination Americans are in denial. They cling to their Treasury of Virtue—the belief that the war was waged with righteousness and philanthropic motives and in defense of “government of the people.” Realities do not register. In the North, on the whim of an Army officer, people were dragged from their homes and held incommunicado in military prisons, without any formal charges or right of counsel, and with no set duration. Sometimes these people were guilty of nothing more than a “disloyal” word in private conversation, being the object of some anonymous spite, or even whistling the wrong tune. Overwhelmingly, the arrests were not for acts but for opinions. In the case of newspaper editors, they were held until they agreed either to dispose of their presses or refrain from further criticisms of the Lincoln administration. This “American Bastille” was more oppressive and unprecedented at the time than it seems now. Republican mobs were also active in punishing dissenters.
In Kentucky and Missouri and the early seized regions of Tennessee and Louisiana, occupation involved executing innocent civilian hostages, uprooting the population of extended regions, and imprisoning women wholesale. From the first step of the federal army across the Potomac, the people of the South were seen as fair game for looting and vandalism. (One Northern critic of the war wondered what law gave federal soldiers the right to steal Southern pianos, watches, and silver tableware.) This soon became systematic policy. Houses, barns, tools, livestock, stored food, standing crops, children’s pets, schools, churches, convents, libraries—these were systematically destroyed, the houses usually being looted first. A Georgia lady recalled how Union officers’ wives went through her home and divided up her furniture for shipment north. This policy was not directed just at wealthy planters, as some recent apologists have claimed, but at the entire population, white and black. Old men and blacks were tortured, and fresh graves, of which there were many in the South, despoiled to reveal the location of valuables. “Historians” on public television recently claimed that Sherman’s depredations were limited to “military necessity”—despite his announced desire to make the women and children of the South howl in misery. Not to mention the bombardment of cities and the deliberate destruction of undefended cities that had already surrendered. As General Lee wrote, “These people delight to destroy the weak and those who can make no defense; it suits them.”
Since the mid-20th century Americans have been obsessed with race, and it has become de rigueur to declare that the war was about slavery and nothing but slavery. Earlier generations knew better. Emancipation was a byproduct of the conquest of the South. The mass of the Northern public and army was far more antiblack than antislavery, and the destruction of the South was as hard on the black population as on the white. The notion that soldiers in blue and emancipated slaves rushed into each other’s arms with shouts of Glory Hallelujah is pure fantasy. Ambrose Bierce, who fought for the Union the entire war, said the only emancipated slaves he saw were the concubines and servants of Union officers. He respected Southerners but had only contempt for the foreigners in his army.
Nor was slavery (domestic servitude) in 1860 at all the horror that it is now imagined to be. In 1860 in New York City there were women and children working 16-hour days for starvation wages; 150,000 unemployed; 40,000 homeless; 600 brothels (some with girls as young as 10); and 9,000 grog shops where the poor could temporarily drown their sorrows. Half of the children did not live past the age of five. Further, half of the free black people in the country were in the South and generally lived better than the despised free blacks of the North. One Southern Unionist testified to his belief that half of the black population of his state had perished in the deprivations and dislocations of invasion. In Louisiana free blacks pleaded in vain that their hard-won property not be destroyed. Federal soldiers had been told that no black people could own property in the South. New England shippers got rich in the illegal African slave trade to Cuba and Brazil right up to the war, and Bostonians owned slave sugar plantations in Cuba even after the war.
A Southern planter who reflected on the circumstances in which he had been born, observed everyday life around him, and examined his Christian conscience saw no reason to accept the hatred and abuse of strangers who claimed moral authority over him. The abuse had been going on for 30 years before the war and was a main cause of secession. A great man of the North, John Adams, had observed that the only distinction between the slaves of the South and the poorest workers of the North was in the label.
Secession should have been an occasion for constitutional negotiations such as the Confederate government sought, especially by a President whose position had the support of less than 40 percent of the people. Instead, Lincoln declared that the solemn, open, deliberative, democratic acts of the people of 11 states were merely “combinations” of criminals too numerous to be put down by the marshals. He supported his position by a false American history and the transparent lie that the “people” did not really support their states. On the day of Lincoln’s inauguration, the Constitution died as a governing document. It became a mere rule of thumb for politicians and lawyers, who continue Lincoln’s heritage of twisting it to suit their ends. After all, the Constitution defines treason against the United States as waging war against “them” (the states), not as resisting the federal government. Lincoln’s very intent to coerce required that Southerners be deprived of citizenship and their states destroyed. It was Lincoln who was engaged in a rebellion to overthrow the Union. He had to dispense with the real Constitution because it disallowed not only a war of coercion against Americans but most of the acts of central power in favor of private profit that his party was determined to make permanent.
In fact, Lincoln’s campaign to “retake the seditious states” could only rest on the tacit assumption that the Southern states, resources, and people were and always had been the property of the federal government—or more properly, of the politicians who had got control of the federal machine. And that the South existed not for herself as a self-governing part of America but for the benefit and disposition of the North. Consent of the people could only be given one time, and they were ever after bound to obey the federal machine. Thus, the primary principle of the Declaration, that governments rest on the consent of the governed, was abolished. A Northern critic of the war remarked, “If this war is right then the Revolution was wrong.” The Union could not have been preserved under such assumptions, any more than a marriage can be properly preserved by battery.
Lincoln’s pretty words in the Gettysburg Address managed to have it both ways—he was, he claimed, preserving the sacred old Union and at the same time promulgating a “new birth of freedom” that was somehow necessary to save government of the people. But these were not the arguments normally used by the spokesmen of his party to justify their war. They spoke instead of conquest and authority, of empire and punishment of disobedience, of the removal of obstructions to their designs. This is not a Southern accusation; it is the overwhelming evidence of their own words, both public and private, evidence refused by the American consciousness. Lincoln’s icing has been mistaken for the cake. Karl Marx agreed enthusiastically with Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the war to be a rebellion of “slave drivers” against the “one great democratic republic whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued.” Marx, like many other supporters of Lincoln’s war, also regarded it as a rebellion against progressive German immigrants who somehow were better Americans than the Southern sons of patriots and founders.
It is unlikely, but if Americans could ever come to recognize and admit how much counterfeit is contained in their Treasury of Virtue, they could have a more realistic view of themselves and play a more humble and responsible role in the world. They would realize that they are not above history or immune to sin.
This article first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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We (native) North Carolinians are even tempered folk. As one can see with the good Dr. Wilson above, such even tempers have been put aside rightfully when dealing with vermin.
I had the honor to see Dr Wilson some years ago at the capitol building in Raleigh and hear a fine speech.
A fine treasure we have before us gentilemen (yes, gentilemen)
McCallum
Evil is at its worst when it in mockery apes the Good. Nationalism elbows out patriotism. And for we Southerners patriotism for America is no longer even a possibility. To love a country that hates you isn't patriotism. It's servility.
"New England shippers got rich in the illegal African slave trade to Cuba and Brazil right up to the war"
Not to mention the fact that New England did most of the slave trading in our nation's history, from start to finish, and the North earned much of the profits from southern slavery.
Hear! Hear! Dr. Wilson's usual excellent article. A great read on Lincoln's birthday and one that should be forwarded to as many people as possible. Thank you Dr. Wilson.
A few comments:
1. The secessionists wanted to fight and did what they could to force Lincoln's (reluctant) hand in order to prod the wavering Southern states to join them. Lincoln believed (correctly) that there was considerable Union sentiment in the South and that if he managed to hold onto control of the ports that this sentiment would provoke second thoughts about secession. Unfortunately, South Carolina was the HQ of militant secessionism and the Ft. Sumter attack was designed to short-circuit any such process
2. Opposition to secession was widespread in the South, both in the so-called border states and in the Confederacy itself. This opposition was militant (as opposed to the lily-livered Northern Copperheads). An estimated 300,000 Southern whites served in the forces of the United States. Combined with the 200,000 blacks who served they amounted to 25% of all US military forces. Those who did not serve int he US forces formed guerilla groups that made much of the rural South no-go areas for the CS authorities.
3. Those who owned at least 20 slaves were exempt from the military draft in the CSA. This act was a crushing blow to military morale and gave rise to the frequent complaint of the Confederate enlisted man that it was a rich man's war but a poor man's fight.
4. Desertion was an immense problem for both armies but much worse in the CSA. By 1864 , approximately 75% of the surviving Confederate soldiers had deserted. In recognizing the futility of further fighting, they were wiser than their leaders, who were willing to fight until the South was completely destroyed.
5. Union soldiers were indeed plunderers (a common characteristic of soldiers at all times) but the Confederate authorities were an even greater danger. Because they had allowed plantation owners to continue to grow commodity crops like cotton and tobacco (traded to Europe and the North for luxury goods and weapons), the agricultural South and her armies faced chronic food shortages. These shortages were made up by expropriating the produce of small farmers in return for worthless Confederate money. The result was an epidemic of hunger and food riots in the South, with women breaking into government warehouses to seize food for their starving families. Starvation also motivated many soldiers to desert their units.
6. Prof. Wilson and others like to conflate Lincoln with the Radical Republicans and their fire-and-brimstone denunciations of slaveholders and Southerners. In fact, Lincoln eschewed and deplored such rhetoric. He maintained that Southerners were not demons (he was after all, married to a Southern belle from a prominent slave-holding Kentucky family),that their peculiar institution arose historically and was not anyone's particular fault and was in fact a national problem to be dealt with nationally. He in particular disliked radical abolitionists and their poisonous rhetoric, citing the proverb that one attracts more flies with honey than with gall. He was also not interested in punishing the defeated South - he advocated a rapid re-admission to the union of the seceded states. This position was sure to have put him in conflict with the radicals who wanted military occupation and "reconstruction".
I see Mr Van Oosbree is putting forth his a-historical, Lincolnite garbage again.
Dr.Wilson,The disconnect from reality in America today is just dumbfounding! What hope can there be for a republic that worships a man that destroyed the same republic! I don't care much what happens to the federal branch,but I weep for Tennessee.It's so sad.
What Lincoln said and what he did were frequently two entirely different things. I remember one fellow having hissy-fits about some quotes of Lincoln about blacks that I provided to a ACW list. This person said stoutly that Lincoln had said other things to other audiences and that I had taken his words out of context. To begin with, the words were such that the context was unnecessary; one simply could NOT "misunderstand" what he meant. Secondly, if he said different things to different audiences, that was an admission that he was a two-faced liar rather than being a defense of his virtue!
If Lincoln had lived after the war and at some point had determined that his agenda would be better served by sending all Southerners except the "loyalists" into exile or death (providing the matter could be kept secret, of course), he would have done so without turning a hair. His desire to "let the South down easy" had more to do with what he thought expedient at the time than with what he considered moral. After all, had he threatened dire punishment as the result of defeat, Lee and Johnston would not have surrendered but would have ordered the remaining men able to fight to the hills and woods to wage a bloody guerrilla war. Remember, there were still men like John Mosby and his command which was stronger at the end of the war than at any time. If Lee had ordered him to fight on, Mosby would have done so. To avoid that contingency, Lincoln wanted the appearance of a forgiving and magnanimous Union welcoming back beloved if prodigal brethren into the fold.
In truth, Lincoln is indeed a good mascot for our present Fraud-in-Chief. They are birds of the same amoral, leftist and tyrannous feather.
#5
Once again Mr. Van Oosbree betrays a lack of comprehension concerning the complexities of the matters on which he opines:
http://www.etymonline.com/cw/desert.htm
Harold ,What a telling statement!What is required now for Southerners to be good Americans is for them to hate their ancestors,hate their history and to cling lovingly to what they once gave their lives to escape.
"Opposition to secession was widespread in the South, both in the so-called border states and in the Confederacy itself. This opposition was militant (as opposed to the lily-livered Northern Copperheads). An estimated 300,000 Southern whites served in the forces of the United States. Combined with the 200,000 blacks who served they amounted to 25% of all US military forces."
I don't see what this is meant to prove. The fact is, it proves nothing. It is merely another Yankee red herring. One could site similar if not greater numbers of northerners who took the southern side, had great sympathy for the south and fought for the south.
The fact is, absolute unity concerning any cause or movement is historically unheard of. One can always point to objectors. The revolutionary war of 1776 was begun and carried out by a minority of colonists and there was tremendous resistance from Tory sympathizers. Had the British won these colonists would have raised the fist and cheered as the likes of Washington and Franklin and Henry were publicly hanged as traitors.
This kind of nonsense injected as "argument" or "proof" is mere historical sleight of hand to take one's eyes off the true question: once the primary principle of self-rule outlined in Jefferson's declaration triumphed in 1776 was it then rendered forever inoperative by the state's ratification of the constitution of 1789?
The southern answer to that question was unequivocal, as demonstrated by their response to sustained abuse by northern interests. (Their secession was not for "light and transient causes"––conditions Jefferson proscribed as valid justification). Their response was further punctuated by the Confederate Constitution, which shored up many of the loop holes in the Federal constitution that had permitted the abuses of the Federal authority on individual liberty and state sovereignty––loop holes that Patrick Henry had so vociferously and presciently complained about in his great anti-federalist speeches of June 1788.
Lincoln's answer was equally unequivocal: once in the union always in the union, no matter what happens and no matter how subsequent generations are abused by the government they created to serve them. (Yankees fought for their and their children's own enslavement by the illegitimate and unconstitutional power they served. How stupid can you get?)
Clearly with the death of the right and duty to self-rule comes the death of the principle of liberty and the subsequent birthing of the tyranny of a thoroughgoing, all pervasive and all invasive forced equality.
The 1776 rhetoric of liberty remains to this day, though its' substance was eviscerated with the constitutional abuses of this monster, LIncoln, and utterly obscured from the American mind (such as it is) by the vacuous smoke and mirrors of his Gettysburg rhetoric: a document lacking a single statement that can hold up under even the slightest logical and historical examination.
A whole boat load of red herrings like this cannot hide the truth from the fair-minded and impartial examiner of this tragedy we call American history: the South was right, and with her collapse came the official end of liberty and self-rule and the beginning of the usurping Consolidated Power's reign of Terror using the principle of equality like a crow bar to systematically deconstruct the Constitution.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln.
Still the best book on this subject that I know of is "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" by Jefferson Davis, which is today badly neglected even in the South. He lays out with the overwhelming intellectual force that only a nineteenth century statesman could summon the legal and profoundly moral case for secession. Also very good is Shelby Foote, who distills the argument with a novelist's flair.
John, indeed. These days for a Southroner to be accepted as a full American he must bastardise himself by renouncing his forefathers. The bastard's share of the American birthright doesn't interest me. The way things are going fewer and fewer Southroners will be interested in that pig in a poke.
While I have nothing substantial to contribute to the already masterful treatment of Lincoln's fraud on this blog, I would like to say that, lest anyone think otherwise, some of us in California actually do understand the history of our country and its principles. The principle of self-government absolutely trumps Unionist drivel like "territorial integrity" and other phoney-baloney terms.
Thank you, Dr. Wilson, for your fervent vindications of the Confederate cause. The sacrifice of our ancestors on the field speaks volumes for itself.
Go Trans-Mississippi rebels! They were the ones that sent General Banks packing, which was the cotton plundering expedition (Red River) I believe the article was harkening to. General Taylor sure was a great leader.
Theodore Van Oosbree @ 5
Re: point 3. To bring up the draft exception seems to be a red herring considering that men of all classes of the South served in the War, while the draft was barely enforced upon Massachusetts and New England. My Virginia ancestors, the Maxwells of Albemarle County, owned around 25 slaves. This did not however stop the father from volunteering along with all 5 of his military age sons (including my great-great-great grandfather). His cousin in Indiana did the same with his 4 sons, for the Union. This was common throughout the South.
It is interesting that Mr. Wilson conveniently shifts the Southern states into America and also into a seperate and distinct entity, impliedly one of truer virture. Further, it is odd that the hard-line of Linclon seems to appeal to Soutern voters in modern presidential elections.
I have been told that Theodore Van Oosbree is a role played for the SPLC.
"Evil is at its worst when it in mockery apes the Good. Nationalism elbows out patriotism. And for we Southerners patriotism for America is no longer even a possibility. To love a country that hates you isn’t patriotism. It’s servility."
Brilliant! How this sentiment turns back to Robert Burns' quote. How much better the world would be if we could see ourselves as others see us–––especially our enemies, and most especially those who deeply hate us. It would save us the embarrassment of so much silly behavior.
Those who hate us for who we are are always going to hate us, because who we are is the one thing we can't change.
Bush catered to those who hated him and behold, contempt was added to their hatred, which also grew. He ended up being hated and disrespected by virtually everyone.
Liberal whites, eaten up by misplaced and misguided guilt, do and say all they can to forward the agenda of non-whites in the hope they can avoid the awful label of "bigot". Their whole lives are taken up with constantly trying to show themselves innocent of the presumed sin of their race. There is no end to their penance nor can there be, for they can never rise completely above suspicion. Their only choice is to live in perpetual penance. Their acts have long ceased to be those of free men.
In the present social atmosphere in America we are all tempted to do likewise––to bow under the yoke of our detractors contempt; to define ourselves as those who hate us do.
Southerners are hated, a fortiori. We are lied about and slandered by the entire nation. In response we are expected to hang our heads in shame and bow down under the weight of our Federal accusers.
We can never be forgiven. We can only play the role our enemies have written for us the best way we know how. To live a life accordingly is not to live at all.
There is only one fitting phrase for the attitude of non-southerners for us: bigotry driven by self-willed ignorance.
The sooner we see that the sooner we can begin living a human life––a life of self-respect and pride in our heritage; a pride not based upon false values, fabricated history and the fantasy of propaganda, but on those timeless values embodied in Southern life and culture. Those values are the best America has ever had to offer, and the lack of them is causing the rootless, anti-culture (I reject the notion that money and power constitute a 'culture') of the American Empire to crumble from within. It will collapse in chaos, from the top down, without its foreign enemies having to lift a finger.
@16 John
I think you're right, that name and style of sophistry shows up on Takimag, too. I have had my own run-ins with the SPLC, and when the real revolution comes you'll find this peasant and his pitchfork in Montgomery AL.
Simple thinkers trying to sound so intelligent. I don't pretend to know the hearts and minds of OUR ancestors, but I do know that a fight was on, choices were made. Statistics on desertion, opposition, whom sided with whom...... and those decisions per individual were based on ????? What they heard on CNN? or what they were told to believe???? Show me a man that would not fight for his families safety!? The point is being missed! BOTH governments used the worst and most horrific tool of diplomicy, the violent force of death, destruction and war. A by-product of man's greed and at times a necessary evil. Will we ever actually be able to call ourselves CIVILized? I doubt it, but we must continue the journey in search of it. Abe-oma as he has tried to place himself, has yet to prove anything, BUT I do think he is of the right intention and I believe he truly wants what he states. Ultimate power corrupts, times reveals and history will be judged.
to Todd @ 20
Some things do not need to wait for the hindsight of historians to understand rightly., especially when those "historians" use the trappings of academic authority to disguise what is merely state propaganda. Some principles are always clear and some causes always have the same effect, whether intended by its active agents and protagonists or not. For example, growth of government always means loss of individual liberty––the battle between the two is history's quintessential zero sum game.
The Founders all knew this. Abeoma seems to be oblivious of it––tragically so. Whatever his intentions, as he grows government to achieve them, the result will be loss of individual and societal liberty (as well as personal wealth––for the many). Logic decrees it and consistent experience confirms it. It is more certain than tomorrow's sunrise.
Give his intentions the shadow of a doubt if you feel the need, but concerning his policies and their consequences you need not linger under the shadow of doubt anxiously awaiting the judgment of the "professionals"; of his policies and their consequences you can have absolute certitude in the present moment. If you are a sane man (a man who love's liberty) you will oppose them.
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar."
These words of Shakespeare through the mouth of Mark Anthony could have been said of Lincoln, both the good and the bad. No matter how good his intentions or motives - subjective dependent upon your ideology as the posts above attest - the evil of his actions are not debatable and have lived on for 150 years in the form of 'democratic holy wars' seen today as a justification for neo-con crusades in the Middle East; condoning death by the military of innocent civilians seen in Iraq, Vietnam and WWII as 'collateral damage'; the suspension of civil liberties in the form of GWB's Patriot Act and other innumerable government invasions of citizen's privacy over the past 150 years; and finally the mass importation of poor and illiterate foreigners as 'slave' labor for the war machine and as cannon fodder for foreign wars.
There is no moral calculus that justifies over 600,000 killed and 400,000 wounded in the War between the States based upon a novel interpretation of the founding documents since state secession was a right understood by all the founders. We can lay all of the above at the feet of Lincoln as his everlasting Machiavellian legacy to the USA and mankind.
This is the basis of a kind of plenary indulgence that automatically prejustifies the motives of American wars and the goodness inherent in America’s acts to force the world into conformity with America’s ideal version of herself.
Dr. Wilson. I love your thinking and your writing so I will cut you a long length of slack re. that most common protestant misunderstanding.
What is an indulgence?
"An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints."
"An indulgence is partial or plenary according as it removes either part or all of the temporal punishment due to sin."82 The faithful can gain indulgences for themselves or apply them to the dead.
I rate Lincoln as the worst president in AMERICAN HISTORY or at least tied with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and the younger, imbecilic Bush. A black flag of mourning should be hoisted on their birthdays. My criteria: who did most harm to America. Lincoln and Bush acted as if someone hired them to deliberately destroy their country.Lincoln destroyed the Republic and the smirking, strutting Bush junior did away with what was left of the twitching corpse.
It is a sad day when one finds out just about everything that they were taught in the public school system, even up to a private institution of higher learning(graduate school)is either just a half truth or outright lie. In tha annals of history I have never seen such half turths or lies being spewed out as gospel truth as with the cases of the Confederacy and Germany(2nd and 3rd Reichs).
The southern politicians at the Montgomery Convention and Provisional Congress were just as money grubbing as any Northern politician you condemn, only they were grossly incompetent as compared to their Northern Counter parts. You would would happily prefer that the South prefer to be a satellite of the British or German Empire than be with the Union. Curse all of you! Since you believe that slavery was OK, then you got a taste of your own medicine so stop your belly aching. Since you believe that it was OK for Blacks to be slave through conquest, kidnapping and not protected by the law, then, after reading your morally diseased scrawlings, you make me rejoice that the South got a tast of its own medicine.
Matt,
Prefer being an ally of the British or German Empires of the mid- to late-19th century rather than the Yankee-ruled American Empire born at the beginning of the War for Southern Independence? Yes I would. The British and the Germans at least ran their empires competently, whereas today's Yankee-run American Empire . . . well, I needn't say any more unless I'm talking to an idiot.
As for slavery, I for one do not look upon the methods used for acquiring our black slave labor force with any fondness. That is, I would not have allowed the kidnapping of Africans from their home and shipping them in brutal conditions over the oceans. But a couple of hundred years later, when they had been Americanized and immersed in our culture and grown up with their master families for several generations, most of them considered themselves integral parts of their masters' families. And they hated Yankees as much as white Southerners. Does it bother your Marxist sentiments, Matt, to see old battlefield illustrations of black Confederates marching alongside white counterparts?
And I do not use the word Marxist lightly. There is certainly nothing in the U.S. Constitution about people of other races being required by the federal government to be treated the same as whites, or to be allowed to rise to the same socio-economic status as whites. This is a page right out of Marx and Engels's playbook - you should read their writings. Serve your imperialist left-wing false gods, Matt, like Lincoln and MLK Jr. As for us at Chronicles and our house, we will serve the Lord.
26. Matt demonstrates in his style and content the venom that these people always have. They do not argue real issues, they vent their spleen. They hate Southerners. We don't hate them. In fact, we never even notice them unless they attack us. There is something deeply wrong inside the minds and souls of people like this. Their identity seems to depend upon hatred of others.
Dr Wilson has hit the nail on the head. I know from personal experience that his words are true. It is pure and simple bigotry, supported by wilful ignorance and refusal to see reality. They choose to believe in propaganda and refuse to question it lest they lose their excuse for hatred. What slaves they are.
Here's one vote from the North in support of Dr. Wilson's excellent article. My German father lived in a German settlement in Ukraine during Stalin's rule. He passed on to me a healthy skepticism of socio-political sophistry (and, in fact, sophistry of any kind). Much of the "history" of the Lincoln era has the same air of sophistry that my father knew first-hand. I remember asking some "naive" questions in high school and my first level US History course at college; I questioned the constitutionality of some of Lincoln and Congress's actions. (At the time my questions were naive and honest.) I was quickly informed that the slavery and union issues transcended a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, or frankly that I misunderstood the Constitution. I admit that for a time I fell under that spell, but good sense, inherited skepticism and Chronicles helped me break the spell.
(In case you notice the apparent disjoint between the surname and my father's ethnic heritage, the US immigration officials inadvertently [or sloppily] converted the original Germanic "ske" into the Polish "ski" in the family name. My great-great-grandfather was from Berlin.)
The anti-South bombs that are dropped here every month or so illustrate what I got in public school : all abstractions; no particularities. This view is not monopolized by Northern people, but is more broadly characteristic of people who don't/can't/won't acknowledge a man's connection with his past. I keep The Morality of Everyday Life close at hand these days; reading it for the third time. One cannot get enough inoculation.
most of them considered themselves integral parts of their masters’ families. And they hated Yankees as much as white Southerners
Is that why blacks across the former Confederacy celebrated as Juneteenth the arrival of Union forces and their emancipation?
I'm usually the first one to say that we've largely forgotten, in this country, how much the North profited from slavery and was complicit in it. The demonization of the South does no one any good. But do you honestly want to suggest that Southern slaves didn't mind their captivity, or that they cared much about Yankees, except that Yankees meant their freedom from bondage?