Below is an interesting articulation of the fallacy of the Yankee Imperialist’ argument that the War Between The States was fought over slavery.
Like all the Economic Wars the Imperialist Yankees have waged this war was cloaked in terms of a moral crusade. The War, the way it was waged and the revision of history to justify it are the most immoral acts imaginable.
The rightful culture of millions of Southern blacks has been robbed by the lies told by the historians of the victorious. Thousands of black men stood shoulder to shoulder with their White Southern countrymen and fought and died defending their homes. This is a fact that will not today be discussed, for to do so would undermine the federal governments legitimacy with those it wishes to incorporate in its’ insidious welfare state.
So you don’t believe that thousands of blacks freely served and fought to defend their country? You do not believe that the Southern Army was the first fully integrated Army, with blacks and whites serving in the same units, bearing the same load and fighting a common enemy? Then you are a product of the Yankee education system. Read Fremantle’s Diary or go to the library and search old Southern pension files. Take a look at several of the southern state soldiers monuments that depict black and white soldiers side by side. You do not believe because you are not informed.
Slavery was an evil and despicable institution, particularly from our 21st century viewpoint. Slavery was not started on the North American continent by Southerners, most Southerners never owned slaves and Southerners did not profit the most from the slave trade or slave labor. Yankee merchants profited from the trade and from the follow-on trade produced by its' labor.
Free Blacks in the North were treated generally far worse than free blacks in the South. Free blacks in the South owned property, some even owned slaves. The social register of the antebellum Charleston Mercury contains marriage and other tidbits of social information about free black families. This was unheard of in the North. Economically slavery was proving unviable all around the world, including the South. Most estimates predict that left alone the system of slavery would have ended by 1900.
And what of the South where slavery ended in a natural death? It is reasonable to assume that without the foreign occupation that accompanied Reconstruction Free Blacks in a post slavery South would have enjoyed the same status as Free Blacks in the antebellum South. Without the foreign meddlers and economic depression caused by the War the adjustment from slave to sharecropper to skilled laborer would have been a much smoother transition. If the economic base that was destroyed by the War remained intake there would have existed an ample job market. This would have avoided the circumstance of a century of poverty for Southern Blacks and the necessity for the Federal Welfare State. Jim Crow laws, a reaction to Yankee meddling, would never have existed.
It is a tough thing to admit or accept for most folks. The fact is that The War was never about freeing slaves; it was about the North’s desire to retain economic control of a tremendous resource.
Who really lost in this immoral and illegal war? Southern People, black and white.
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Slavery as the Cause of the War Between the States
by Dr. Donald Livingston
Of all the myths taught to our children about the War Between the States none is more corrupt (and corrupting) than the claim that the war was “about slavery”-- that the South seceded to protect slavery and the North invaded to abolish it. Slavery was a national enormity and not merely a southern problem. It was not the South but New England that, in the seventeenth century, opened the slave trade with Africa and grew rich selling slaves throughout the western hemisphere. The seed money for the industrial revolution came from the slave trade and from financing and shipping southern exports, largely produced by slave labor. By 1860 nearly three fourths of American exports were from the South. Hardly anyone at this time, North or South, was prepared to integrate into society an African population of 3.5 million, many of whom were only two generations from tribal existence. Northern manumission laws were designed to rid themselves of their African population. These laws freed not adults but children, born after a certain date and upon reaching adulthood. Owners were free to sell their slaves in the meantime. By 1860 less than one per cent of Massachusetts was black. Many northerners thought that blacks would eventually die off as most of the Indians had.
Lincoln’s state of Illinois prohibited the entrance of any free blacks unless a bond of $1000 each could be raised. The constitutions of Oregon and Indiana prohibited absolutely the entrance of any free blacks and nullified any contracts made with them. No political party of any significance in the North had proposed emancipation. Lincoln proposed sending free blacks abroad. The abolitionists, a tiny and despised minority, did urge emancipation, but their solution was peaceful secession of the North from the South as the best way of ending slavery. By 1861 the South had accomplished this goa1 for them. But worse, Congress, with Lincoln’s approval, passed an amendment to the Constitution making it impossible for the central government ever to interfere with slavery in the states where it was legal. The amendment would have been ratified by the states had the South stayed in the Union. Slavery could not possibly have been better protected than it was by the northern-dominated Congress of 1861.
With the exception of Haiti, slavery was peacefully abolished everywhere in the west by the 1880s. And it would have disappeared from the South by then had it been allowed to secede as the abolitionists had urged. The Confederate Constitution prohibited the slave trade and allowed for the entrance of non-slave holding states. The Confederate cabinet agreed to abolish slavery five years after the cessation of hostilities in exchange for British and French recognition. Robert E. Lee believed in gradual emancipation and freed the slaves he had inherited through marriage. He and other Confederate leaders argued early on to arm blacks as the first step in emancipation and integration. Slavery, like any other institution, had evolved over time. Theologians were urging reforms, and in the border states the institution was evolving into an apprenticeship system. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had voted to remain in the Union. They reversed themselves only after Lincoln illegally raised troops from the North to coerce the seceding states back into the Union.
It has been said that Southerners, in their defense of secession, have not confronted the evils of slavery. We have long since confronted them. What has not been confronted (and what our nationalist historians guarantee will perhaps never be confronted) is the evil of launching a war that left 1,500,000 killed, missing, and wounded merely to consolidate a northeastern industrial empire. Lincoln was not able to win the war without finally directing it against the civilian population. This shocked Europeans, as it broke the code of civilized warfare that had been in place since the early eighteenth century. In violating the Geneva Convention the Lincoln administration became the first of the modem war criminals. To dignify this unexpected ourbreak of barbarism as being “about slavery” is the deep lie in the soul of the American liberal. Indeed it has almost become a part of American self-identity. Until it is honestly faced Americans will remain in a condition of spiritual and political adolescence.
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