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National NewsConservative News
Decatur (AL) Paper Combines Ignorance and Arrogance (Part II)
By Mike Scruggs
Posted on: November 23, 2005
Part II of II
The slavery issue in the “Civil War” is widely misunderstood. Union armies did not invade the South to free the slaves. Like Lincoln, the vast majority of Northern whites did not have very sympathetic attitudes towards blacks. Lincoln and most Northerners, like most Southerners, thought emancipation should be gradual. Only a tiny minority of radical abolitionists wanted an immediate end to slavery regardless of the economic consequences to the South or freed slaves. Northerners actually feared that emancipated Southern slaves might emigrate to the North.
Only about 20 percent of Confederate soldiers owned slaves, and only about one-third came from slave-holding families. So far as slavery was concerned they only wanted the right to deal with it in their own way in their own time state by state, just as the Northern states, all of which had slavery in 1776, had done. When Union Armies invaded the South in 1861, they had no intention of freeing the slaves. They invaded the South to enforce political unity and Northern economic and legislative dominance by bayonets.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863, came after more than 19 months of war and did not actually free any slaves in the Union or Union held areas of the Confederacy. It was a complete fraud that has been turned into a modern civil rights icon. The Proclamation was, according to Lincoln himself, done as a “war measure” in hopes of causing disorder in the South. Only later was the slavery issue used in an attempt to give tyranny a pious justification.
A major cause of the war was the tariff system that exploited the South unmercifully for the benefit of Northern commercial and industrial interests. The final blow was the Morrill Tariff that Lincoln signed into law shortly after his inauguration. Only one Southern Congressman had voted for this enormous tariff increase that would benefit Northern interests and impoverish the South. The Morrill Tariff was so disparate in its generous benefits for the North and severe burdens for the South that it left no recourse but secession to the cotton-producing Gulf States. Other Southern states joined them when Lincoln revealed his plans to subjugate the South by armed force. The Morrill Tariff was notable for its shameless regional partisanship and greed. Its egregious disregard for the welfare of Southern states is a very important historical issue that has been suppressed by those who wish to present the Northern cause as a glorious crusade for human rights and national unity.
Writing in December of 1861 in a London weekly publication, the famous English author, Charles Dickens, who was a strong opponent of slavery, said these things about the war going on in America:
The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.
Karl Marx, like most European socialists of the time favored the North. In an 1861 article published in England, he articulated very well what the major British newspapers, the Times, the Economist, and Saturday Review, had been saying: :
The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for power.
Numerous historical facts demolish the propagandistic morality play that a virtuous North invaded the evil South to free the slaves. Five years after the end of the war, prominent Northern abolitionist, attorney and legal scholar, Lysander Spooner, put it this way: :
All these cries of having “abolished slavery,” of having “saved the country,” of having “preserved the Union,” of establishing a “government of consent,” and of “maintaining the national honor” are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats—so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.
The Reverend James Power Smith, the last surviving member of Stonewall Jackson’s staff had this to say in 1907: :
No cowardice on any battlefield could be as base and shameful as the silent acquiescence in the scheme which was teaching the children in their homes and schools that the commercial value of slavery was the cause of the war, that prisoners of war held in the South were starved and treated with barbarous inhumanity, that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors to their country and false to their oaths, that the young men who left everything to resist invasion, and climbed the slopes of Gettysburg and died willingly on a hundred fields were rebels against a righteous government.
Preserving the Union was the principal purpose of the war stated by the North. That might be called noble; if forcing states to bear an exploited status in an unwanted and to them unprofitable Union by gunpoint can be called noble. Was Germany’s annexation of Austria just before the Second World War noble? Was the Soviet Union’s totalitarian grip on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania noble? Should the American Colonies in 1776 have submitted gladly to continued exploitation and unjust taxation by the British? The North had more than just territory in mind when preserving the Union. Loss of the Southern States would mean loss of most tax revenues, of which over 90 percent were from the tariff that so burdened the South. They would also have to compete with the South’s proposed free trade policies, which would have wreaked economic havoc in the North, just as the tariff had wreaked economic havoc in the South. A unity of territories can be accomplished by might. But might does not make right. Union enforced by bayonets is despotic hypocrisy. Such a coerced union is tyranny and the enemy of liberty.
The “Civil War” was not really a civil war. For the North it was a War to Prevent Southern Independence. It was not a glorious crusade to free slaves. Unfortunately, most Americans today including the arrogant and misinformed editors of The Decatur Daily accept the pious fraud that the “Civil War” was all about ending slavery and “preserving” the Union. Lincoln’s own words, the records of Congress, and a multitude of other data provide shattering documentary evidence disproving that cherished humbug.
I applaud the Lawrence County Commission in their desire to honor the heroes of the Confederacy.
South Carolina journalist and poet, Henry Timrod (1829-1867) in his moving Ode at Magnolia Cemetery should move our hearts to resolve: :
Stoop, angels, thither from the skies! There is no holier ground
Than where defeated valor lies, by mourning beauty crowned.
My prayer is that honorable men everywhere, North and South, and even the
Editors of The Decatur Daily would break the chains of politically correct ignorance and tyranny. Truth crushed to the ground is still the truth. It must inevitably rise again victorious.
Mike Scruggs is a retired financial consultant and corporate business executive. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BS from the University of Georgia. He is a USAF combat veteran of the Vietnam War, holding a Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart. He was recently Chairman of the Board of a Classical Christian School and is a former Republican County Chairman. He writes and lives in Hendersonville, NC.
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