Just as it
did in 1865, Appomattox Day (the day when the South became a conquered colony
of DC, a day that should be remembered by Southerners with mourning and fasting
and prayer each year) will fall on Palm
Sunday in 2023 – April 9th (following the Orthodox Church’s
dating; the Protestants and Roman Catholics will be celebrating the Resurrection
of the Lord Jesus Christ on that day).
Because of this conjunction of the days, it is fitting to reflect once
again on the narrative surrounding this War – its causes, its effects, the
people and issues involved.
Unfortunately,
prominent conservatives continue to extol President Lincoln as the embodiment
of a just and far-sighted political leader.
Sohrab Ahmari, for instance, is
in agreement with a new documentary ‘that Lincoln is the ideal
thinker-practitioner of the American constitutional tradition’. The tradition in Mr. Ahmari’s and his
fellow-travelers’ view is that the federal government is justified in trampling
the sovereignty of the States to eradicate what it views as moral evils,
constitutional limits and other niceties notwithstanding.
The Southern
historian Rod O’Barr, who has written some excellent essays
at the Abbeville Institute lately, sees lots of problems in the Lincoln-as-crusading-anti-slavery-hero
narrative. In reviewing the work of Dr.
James McPherson, he writes,
An example of this suppression of evidence
in McPherson’s work is his discussion of Lincoln’s 1862 offer of compensated
emancipation to the slave States. He mentions the July 12 meeting Lincoln held
with the border slave State representatives where Lincoln attempted to convince
them to accept his offer. It serves his “crusade against oppression” narrative.
But McPherson conveniently omits in the discussion where Lincoln says it is a
strategy to win the war and not a crusade to free slaves. And McPherson omits
where those representatives tell Lincoln that the seceded States did NOT secede
over slavery, and as a “fact, now become history,” were offering to end slavery
if European powers would aid in the war to gain Southern independence. This is
an obvious intentional sin of omission on the part of McPherson to spin a false
narrative.
Such
revelations make it possible to discern the real cause behind the North’s war
against the South:
McPherson has to spin the narrative in this
fashion to somehow make palatable a war that was in reality a crime against
humanity. For if ending slavery was not the ultimate justification for the war,
then all that is left is a war to “preserve the Union,” which certainly has no
redeeming moral value. How could it, in a Union whose founding organic law was
based on a Declaration of Independence that asserted the fundamental human
right to a “government by consent of the governed?” Preserving the Union did
not necessitate forcing the Southern States to remain in it. The Union could
have continued minus those States. But the Northern section would have been
economically famished without those Southern States. Preserving the Union” was
nothing more than a euphemism for forcing the Southern people to remain under a
government to which they no longer consented, and for what? So that the North
could economically exploit the revenue generated by “King Cotton.”
The conquest
of the South by the Yankees stripped the limited government façade from DC,
destroyed the decentralizing inertia left from the era of the Articles of
Confederation, with the devastating consequences still unfolding and
compounding today:
“The South’s concept of republicanism had not
changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had. With complete
sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the
Founding Fathers–a government of limited powers.” Professor James M. McPherson,
Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism.
. .
.
McPherson, while
admitting the North was the section that abandoned the Founders, is a
nationalist who approves of the Lincoln led revolution against the Founders. Of
the war he applauds that Lincoln forced,
“the several
states bound loosely in a federal union under a weak central government into a
new nation forged by the fires of war…
…. the old
decentralized federal republic became a new national polity that taxed the
people directly, created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes,
expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, established a national currency
and a national banking structure. The United States went to war in 1861 to
preserve the Union; it emerged from war in 1865 having created a nation. Before
1861 the two words “United States” were generally used as a plural noun: “The
United States are a republic.” After 1865 the United States became a singular
noun. The loose union of states became a nation.” James McPherson Battle cry of Freedom
Oxford U Press.
What those like
McPherson with nationalist sentiments cannot grasp is the loss of freedom and
the creation of crony capitalist corruption that the Lincoln led North imposed
on all Americans by force of bayonets. The Founders had carefully constructed a
confederation in which power was intentionally decentralized and dispersed
among the States as a means of avoiding centralized tyranny. Lincoln’s war
created the very monster the Founders so rightly opposed.
Mr. O’Barr’s
work here and elsewhere is generally beyond reproach, but he is wrong in one
particular: It was not ‘Lincoln’s war
[that] created the very monster the Founders so rightly opposed.’ That monster was birthed in 1787 during the
constitutional convention in Philadelphia.
The Anti-Federalist writer Federal Farmer explains (via TJ
Martinell):
. . .
The rest is
at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/philadelphia-is-where-the-problems-started.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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