Some ramblings on the so-called "Civil War"

About 3 or 4 comment boxes worth of a conversation in Facebook. I like to repost them here for posterity's sake:

I'll just have to chime in on the DiLorenzo bandwagon. I was never a big Lincoln fan, and I always like to remind people that the Lincoln memorial's throne is adorned with the fasces, the bundle of sticks wrapped around an axe that is the symbol of Mussolini's Fascist party, which he took from the Roman Republic. Lincoln has been posthumously elevated to godhood by the high priests of the secular religion of the state, and he was no friend to black Americans, free or slave.

He never ever freed a salve in his whole life. That's a myth that's easy to dispel, and he believed the peaceful co-existence of the races was impossible, and that miscegenation would so enervate the nation as to destroy the Union he had worked so hard to preserve (at the expense of the Constitution).

He had many schemes in mind to round up and deport all the black folks to the Carribean, or Africa or wherever they would be accepted, or meet little resistence. He was loathe to let them be free and equal citizens.

The War of Northern Aggression was won by the more ethically deplorable side, which is hard to admit, given the substantial negative moral weight of slavery. And slavery was indeed an integral part of the reasons for the war, though it was not nearly as central to the narrative as the nation's public school teachers would have your children believe.

It was a factor of economic reality in the South, and there was a substantial abolitionist component among the critics of the Confederacy. Political battles were fought in the preceding decades that turned on whether new states admitted to the union would be free or slave.

But that was about money, and power, and international trade, not about the inhumane and barbaric practice of slavery itself. It's worth noting that no other nation, save Haiti, required armed conflict to end the horrible practice of "Negro slavery."

In the conduct of the war, the comportment of the officers, the treatment of prisoners and "Copperheads," and the suspension of civil liberties like Habeus Corpus and a free press, and most importantly, in the tyrannical, illiberal and imperial justification for fighting the war in the first place, Lincoln and the Yankees demonstrated the profoundly depraved nature of their cause. Sherman's march and the wholesale slaughter of civilians and the burning of Atlanta are indefensible war crimes.

And just to bring home the point that the Union was no bastion of racial harmony, I remind you of just one incident where Sherman's troops, on his order, cut loose a pontoon bridge across a raging river, after waiting for as many of the freed slaves who'd been following them as possible to be onboard. Most, not knowing how to swim and burdened with their meager possessions, drowned.

Free people should be free to choose the nature of their government, and the Declaration of Independence makes clear that when tyranny is visited upon us, it is our right, if not a sacred duty, to throw it off.

The states of the Confederacy were being throttled by taxes and tariffs designed to benefit Northern industry at their specific expense, and these were far more burdensome and costly than anything the Crown had imposed on the colonies. They had every right and reason to secede, and up until that time, it was understood that the country was made up of sovereign states voluntarily associated for the common defense and the facilitation of trade. It was Lincoln who created the Federal Imperium, ending the Constitutional Republic founded by Washington, Adams, Jefferson and their peers, and replaced it with a vulgar and brutish facsimile of Caesar's Rome.

I'm personally confident that had the Confederacy seceded peacefully, slavery would have ended very soon thereafter. But Reconstruction and the suffering that always comes to a conquered people after war exacerbated racial tensions for many more decades, giving rise to the KKK and lynch mobs who made their black neighbors easy scapegoats.

Thus end my dissertation... LOL. Sorry about that. Some would call me racist for even writing that, but I am no racist. I oppose slavery of all kinds, not just that predicated on race. That means I necessarily oppose statism, and favor devolution to more local, and smaller units of political power, with the goal being that ultimately, each of us will be governed only by our conscience, and the knowledge that our neighbors stand ready, willing and able to defend their rights.