When I
read Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s article the question
that lept to mind was, “How come the South is said to have fought for slavery
when the North wasn’t fighting against slavery?”
Two days before Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th President,
Congress, consisting only of the Northern states, passed overwhelmingly on
March 2, 1861, the Corwin Amendment that gave constitutional protection to
slavery. Lincoln endorsed the amendment in his inaugural address, saying “I
have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.”
Quite clearly, the North was not prepared to go to war in order
to end slavery when on the very eve of war the US Congress and incoming
president were in the process of making it unconstitutional to abolish slavery.
Here we have absolute total proof that the North wanted the
South kept in the Union far more than the North wanted to abolish slavery.
If the
South’s real concern was maintaining slavery, the South would not have turned
down the constitutional protection of slavery offered them on a silver platter
by Congress and the President. Clearly, for the South also the issue was not
slavery.
The real issue between North and South could not be reconciled
on the basis of accommodating slavery. The real issue was economic as
DiLorenzo, Charles Beard and other historians have documented. The North
offered to preserve slavery irrevocably, but the North did not offer to give up
the high tariffs and economic policies that the South saw as inimical to its
interests.
Blaming the war on slavery was the way the northern court
historians used morality to cover up Lincoln’s naked aggression and the war
crimes of his generals. Demonizing the enemy with moral language works for the
victor. And it is still ongoing. We see in the destruction of statues the
determination to shove remaining symbols of the Confederacy down the Memory
Hole.
Today the ignorant morons, thoroughly brainwashed by Identity
Politics, are demanding removal of memorials to Robert E. Lee, an alleged
racist toward whom they express violent hatred. This presents a massive
paradox. Robert E. Lee was the first person offered command of the Union
armies. How can it be that a “Southern racist” was offered command of the Union
Army if the Union was going to war to free black slaves?
Virginia
did not secede until April 17, 1861, two days after Lincoln
called up troops for the invasion of the South.
Surely
there must be some hook somewhere that the dishonest court historians can use
on which to hang an explanation that the war was about slavery. It is not an
easy task. Only a small minority of southerners owned slaves. Slaves were
brought to the New World by Europeans as a labor force long prior to the
existence of the US and the Southern states in order that the abundant land
could be exploited. For the South slavery was an inherited institution that
pre-dated the South. Diaries and letters of soldiers fighting for the
Confederacy and those fighting for the Union provide no evidence that the
soldiers were fighting for or against slavery. Princeton historian, Pulitzer
Prize winner, Lincoln Prize winner, president of the American Historical
Association, and member of the editorial board of Encyclopedia Britannica,
James M. McPherson, in his book based on the correspondence of one thousand
soldiers from both sides, What They Fought For, 1861-1865,
reports that they fought for two different understandings of the Constitution.
As for the Emancipation Proclamation, on the Union side,
military officers were concerned that the Union troops would desert if the
Emancipation Proclamation gave them the impression that they were being killed
and maimed for the sake of blacks. That is why Lincoln stressed that the
proclamation was a “war measure” to provoke an internal slave rebellion that
would draw Southern troops off the front lines.
If we look carefully we can find a phony hook in the South
Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession (December 20, 1860) as long as we
ignore the reasoning of the document. Lincoln’s election caused South Carolina
to secede. During his campaign for president Lincoln used rhetoric aimed at the
abolitionist vote. (Abolitionists did want slavery abolished for moral reasons,
though it is sometimes hard to see their morality through their hate, but they
never controlled the government.)
South
Carolina saw in Lincoln’s election rhetoric intent to violate the US
Constitution, which was a voluntary agreement, and which recognized each state
as a free and independent state. After providing a history that supported South
Carolina’s position, the document says that to remove all doubt about the
sovereignty of states “an amendment was added, which declared that the powers
not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to
the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people.”
South Carolina saw slavery as the issue being used by the North
to violate the sovereignty of states and to further centralize power in
Washington. The secession document makes the case that the North, which
controlled the US government, had broken the compact on which the Union rested
and, therefore, had made the Union null and void. For example, South Carolina
pointed to Article 4 of the US Constitution, which reads: “No person held to
service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another,
shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such
service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such
service or labor may be due.” Northern states had passed laws that nullified
federal laws that upheld this article of the compact. Thus, the northern states
had deliberately broken the compact on which the union was formed.
The obvious implication was that every aspect of states’ rights
protected by the 10th Amendment could now be violated. And as time passed they
were, so South Carolina’s reading of the situation was correct.
The
secession document reads as a defense of the powers of states and not as a
defense of slavery. Here is the document.
Read it and see what you decide.
A court historian, who is determined to focus attention away
from the North’s destruction of the US Constitution and the war crimes that
accompanied the Constitution’s destruction, will seize on South Carolina’s use
of slavery as the example of the issue the North used to subvert the
Constitution. The court historian’s reasoning is that as South Carolina makes a
to-do about slavery, slavery must have been the cause of the war.
As South Carolina was the first to secede, its secession
document probably was the model for other states. If so, this is the avenue by
which court historians, that is, those who replace real history with fake
history, turn the war into a war over slavery.
Once people become brainwashed, especially if it is by
propaganda that serves power, they are more or less lost forever. It is
extremely difficult to bring them to truth. Just look at the pain and suffering
inflicted on historian David Irving for documenting the truth about the war
crimes committed by the allies against the Germans. There is no doubt that he
is correct, but the truth is unacceptable.
The
same is the case with the War of Northern Aggression. Lies masquerading as
history have been institutionalized for 150 years. An institutionalized lie is
highly resistant to truth.
Education has so deteriorated in the US that many people can no
longer tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse or
justification. In the US denunciation of an orchestrated hate object is a safer
path for a writer than explanation. Truth is the casualty.
That truth is so rare everywhere in the Western World is why the
West is doomed. The United States, for example, has an entire population that
is completely ignorant of its own history.
As George Orwell said, the best way to destroy a people is to
destroy their history.
Paul Craig
Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of
prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored
with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the
protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.
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