How to avoid Incorrect Thoughts about the Civil War

Well, we are always looking for opportunities to congratulate ourselves on our Moral Superiority. Now that we all worship at the double altar of Tolerance and Diversity, we must mark every opportunity to trumpet all the ways in which we are Tolerant. And all the ways in which we are Diverse.

In doing this, we must make very sure that we clean up our history to show that we have always been this way. This involves, of course, forgetting ways in which we have not really been. And this also involves telling ourselves over and over again how good we are and how good we have always been.

Now that we are approaching the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, we must remember to be very Correct in all of our recollections of what happened in that unfortunate eve ..., or, rather, that Great And Glorious Crusade. We must always remember that all northerners were morally pure and that all southerners were bad, bad people.

Already we are seeing this process in action, and we must congratulate the Associated Press for passing along the comments of Bob Sutton, chief historian for the National Park Service, who reminds us that "Slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War, period." The story appears in yesterday's Lexington Herald-Leader, where we are reminded, in no uncertain terms, that the Civil War was about slavery.

The idea is to make sure we understand that the North was categorically against slavery and that the South was categorically for it, and that this was the only important reason for the War.

To say that the cause of the Civil War was anything else is a very serious Thought Crime.

This is very important, and we should all begin a regimen leading up to the anniversary in which we repeat to ourselves every day: "The North was good, the South was bad." Just do it over and over again, and you will soon purge all doubts from your mind.

We realize that, in every other circumstance, we are reminded by the Cultural Authorities not to look at things in a "black and white" way and that history is "more complex" than we think. But it is important to remember that this rule does not apply when it comes to the Civil War and the issue of slavery.

Now, of course, in doing so, there are certain things that we must banish from our minds: things that must be put down the Memory Hole. They are thoughts based on so-called "historical facts" that, unfortunately, authorities at the Ministry of Truth (with offices at your nearest college campus) have neglected to eliminate from the historical record.

We will be listing these unfortunate historical anomalies in the coming months, so that we can, through the helpful process of Doublethink, eliminate them from our conscious mind.

Let us start with the first of these things. This is a very unfortunate historical anomaly, and it involves Abraham Lincoln. Now fortunately most popular historical accounts portray Lincoln in the proper Historically Correct way as a Crusader Against Slavery and as the man who wanted the War so he could Eliminate Slavery. But if you look hard enough, you can still find some of these "historical facts" that do not comport with this view. Until they are fully eliminated by the Diversity officials in our academic institutions, we must make sure we look the other way whenever we encounter them.

Here is Lincoln, in his inaugural address, given on March 4, 1861, 41 days prior to the beginning of the Civil War:

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed, and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that:

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this, and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them. And more than this, they placed in the platform, for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves, and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read:

"Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes."

I now reiterate these sentiments; and in doing so, I only press upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible, that the property, peace and security of no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incoming Administration. I add too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given, will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause -- as cheerfully to one section as to another.

Now I think you will agree that this is quite disturbing. It does not at all go along with Lincoln as the Crusader to Free the Slaves that we have all learned from the Cultural Authorities. So, until we have eliminated all references to this document our documentary histories, we must simply look the other way when we see such things.

If we encounter them, we must simply repeat our mantra: "The North was good, The South was bad." Repeat it however many times you must until the Incorrect Thought goes away.

There are other things in the First Inaugural Address that might undermine our feelings of Moral Superiority over those who try to point to such things, but we must deal with these one at a time so as not to cause needless doubts in our own minds about the Historically Correct opinions that we are obliged to hold as Enlightened Liberals.

We will be giving updates and news flashes, as the anniversary approaches, of other unacceptable facts and some further steps we can take to protect our Moral Superiority.

Stay tuned.

The chief cause of the Civil War was slavery, and other fairy tales

In the comments section of my post on the latest dust-up over whether slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, one commenter posts snippets from the secession declarations of the four Southern states which made them, taken from a recent article in the Atlantic. Since all of the declarations of these four states mention slavery as a factor, we are to believe, slavery was therefore the primary (perhaps, exclusive?) cause of the War.

For one thing, the commenter completely (and the author of the Atlantic article) confounds the distinction between secession and the War itself. Secession could easily have been effected without a war. Slavery was, for many states the chief aggravating factor, although that issue is oversimplified by the commenter, which you can see if you read, for example, the whole of the Texas statement, in which slavery isn't even mentioned until about two-thirds of the way into the document.

One wonders what else the authors of the statement could even talk about for all that time if their reasons for secession were exclusively over slavery.

Maybe the commenter would like to point out where slavery is mentioned in Jefferson Davis' inaugural address. Good luck.

Now I have said before that this is an oversimplification of the issue--that to say that slavery was THE cause of the Civil War is just as much of an oversimplification as to say that it wasn't a cause at all. In fact Gen. Sherman himself probably had it about right: "Slavery is not the cause but the pretext." In fact, Sherman knew that Southern states were using slavery to gain rhetorical leverage on the issue of secession. At bottom, Sherman believed, the real reason for the desire by some in the South for independence was economic:

They want free trade here – to import free, and send their goods up the Rivers free of all charges but freight & insurance – New York, Boston, Phila. & Baltimore could not afford to pay duties if New Orleans is a Free port.

This view was articulated several years later by another supporter of the Union: John Pendleton Kennedy. Kennedy, who had been a potential Republican vice presidential candidate in 1860, contended that pro-secession leaders in the South knew very well that the institution of slavery was not in danger from the North. In fact, the issue up to that point was not whether slavery could continue in the South, but whether it could be expanded beyond the states that already had slaves. They were using the perceived threat of abolition as an excuse to pry the Southern states loose from the Union for economic reasons:

It is the merest sham and make believe for any Southern man to pretend that the institution of slavery was ever brought into peril before this rebellion exposed it to the dangers that now surround it. I can hardly suppose that any man of sense in the South could believe otherwise than that a war, once provoked between the states, would be the only effective agency which could destroy or impair it against the will and without the cooperation of the Slave States themselves.

In other words, slavery was not endangered before the War. It was only endangered by the War. And note that this argument--that slavery was not the cause of the War--is a reason that reflects badly, not well on the South. Why did states like Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas say they were seceding (at least in part) because of slavery? There's your answer.

Slavery may be said to be the cause of the rebellion only in the same sense in which we affirm that cotton and sugar are the cause of it, or that Southern character, habits, climate, and social life are the sources out of which it has sprung.

The people who quote official documents like the secession declarations have apparently never been around politicians much and who uncritically take what politicians say at face value, rather than with a grain of salt.

In one sense the secessionists in the South were the analogs to the abolitionists in the North: both were radical in their methods--although the abolitionists were at least right in their aims.
And once secession was accomplished, there was the matter of war. At that point, Constitutional issues came to the fore--and issues of simple state loyalty.

Lincoln said time and again that slavery was not the reason for the Union's invasion of the South. From his First Inaugural Address, before the War:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so...

Add that to his very clear and unambiguous comments to Horace Greeley that it was Union, not slavery, that was his chief concern.

And, of course, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, it only applied to states and territories loyal to the Confederacy, not to any territories not loyal to it. It's chief objective was not the freedom of the slaves, but to excite insurrection in the South, which may be why, even after it was issues, if a state simply renounced its loyalty to the Confederacy, it could rejoin the Union--with its slaves.

In fact, if the War was about slavery, then why was slavery still common the Washington, D.C.--until the end of the War? And why was Lincoln's White House staffed by slaves? Why, at the beginning of the War, was the policy (supported by Lincoln because doing anything else would alienate the neutral slave-holding border states) to return slaves to their masters?

Oh, and the vice president of the Union, Andrew Johnson, had not only owned slaves, but advocated a state's right to allow slavery.

And then, of course, you have the matter of what the people fighting the War were actually fighting for. Were Southern officers and soldiers primarily fighting for slavery? And were Northern officers and soldiers primarily fighting against it?

If Ulysses S. Grant was fighting to free the slaves, then why did he have slaves--four his wife brought with her and one, William Jones, he himself owned and didn't free until 1859, less than two years before the start of the War? Grant himself came from an abolitionist family, but his own views on it seemed to be much more ambivalent. In fact, Grant ran a small plantation, White Haven, on which he worked with the five slaves owned by his family. The remaining slaves at White Haven, who apparently just walked off at some time during the War, weren't formally freed until 1865 by Missouri's Constitutional Convention, three years after the Confederate military leader Robert E. Lee freed the last of his slaves.

Grant even favored Stephen Douglas, who was for the expansion of slavery, against Lincoln who was against its expansion, in the election of 1860.

William Tecumseh Sherman was not an abolitionist before the war and did not believe in equal rights for Blacks. His views on Southern slavery mostly ran to thinking that it was a bad reason for a war, and he had a mild view of southern slavery:

I believe the practice of slavery in the South is the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world now or heretofore. (April 4, 1861)

Now although in his memoirs after the War, when he was hailed as a hero for freeing slaves as he marched to the sea and had this acquired reputation to keep up, he called slavery "the chief cause" of war, he was saying something very different before and during it.

From his correspondence at the time, here were Sherman's personal views on what Louisiana should do with its practice of slavery:

I would forbid the separation of families, letting the father, mother, and children, be sold together to one person, instead of each to the highest bidder. And, again, I would advise the repeal of the statute which enacted a severe penalty for even the owner to teach his slave to read and write...

Hardly a ringing endorsement of abolition.

Sherman even believed that the Constitution entitled masters to the ownership if their slaves, and one of his arguments with an old schoolboy friend who had joined the rebellion consisted of saying that his own act of separating himself from the United States and its Constitution undermined his right to own his slaves since it was the very Constitution that gave him the legal right to have them.

Again, not exactly an abolitionist position.

Then you had Southern leaders. What are we to make of the fact that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were both opposed to secession before the War, but, once it had been effected, joined the South--not because of any opinions they had about slavery--but because of their loyalty to their states.

The South did not secede primarily to maintain slavery: it could have maintained slavery easily without the War--and it knew it, as did its Northern critics like Sherman and Kennedy. And the North did not invade the South because of slavery: even after the Emancipation Proclamation, Southern states could rejoin and keep their slaves.

The basic problem with the view that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War is that those who spout it read the changed atmosphere after the War onto the time leading up to the War. They were two very different cultural environments, which is why, when quotations are given from those participating in the Northern invasion of the South that seem to support the thesis that slavery was the primary cause of the War, they are almost always originate after the War, when it had become fashionable to say such things.

The the causes of the War should be derived from those things that were said before it--with proper attention to the motives that lay behind them.

We need a Democratic History Month

Time Magazine's David Paul Kuhn, propagating not only the simplistic myth that the Civil War was primarily about slavery and that the Republican Party is somehow implicated in it:

The Confederacy cannot be divorced from its consequence. If the South won, blacks would have remained enslaved as "property." Because the Union won, blacks were liberated as people and Americans.

Kuhn's remark comes after Mississippi Governor Hailey Barbour defended Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's decision to proclaim April "Confederate History Month." The myth that slavery was somehow the efficient cause of the war goes down well with people who, in addition to being historically challenged, like to give other people moralistic lectures about, well, just about anything. And by "other people," we mean primarily Republicans.

And in what way exactly are Republicans complicit in slavery? Well, you see, when you are rewriting history, it is convenient to forget that it was Republicans primarily who opposed it. In fact, it seems to be forgotten in these discussions that Lincoln was the first Republican president and that the defenders of slavery were primarily Democrats--who continued their obstructionism well after the War in their involvement in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

One would think that if the War was about slavery that Lincoln would have a) freed the slaves in northern territories in process of emancipating southern slaves (he didn't), and b) would have said, when asked, that that's what the war was about (he didn't).

Concerning b), here is Honest Abe himself in his letter to journalist Horace Greeley, who did want the war to be about slavery, but was frustrated because Lincoln wouldn't agree:

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. [Emphasis added]

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Yours,

A. Lincoln

But it does salve the consciences of certain people to make it appear that their opponents are defending slavery when they're not and who want the rest of us to conveniently forget the complicity of Democrats in everything from slavery to segregation.