Jared Emry

Many historians of today make the absurd claim the Civil War was about the institution of slavery.  However, they are wrong.  The true reasons behind the illegal war concerned fiscal policies and the very concepts of the original American Revolution.  The issue of slavery was only to cover for the illegal and immoral economic reasons that were really the center of the war.  The war was a war for Freedom and the preservation of the rights of Nations and People.

Firstly, the South may have fired the first shot, but they did not start the war.  After the succession, each State had reaffirmed their positions as free nations(note they had not ceased to be sovereign States prior to the Civil War).  Upon throwing off the tyrannical General Government, the Southern States formed a New Union (which was called the Confederacy) under the original principles of the Revolution.  Upon the succession, the Union troops in the South’s territory were stationed illegally on another State’s soil.  When Lincoln refused to withdraw his troops from Southern land, he committed an act of war.  The South responded with a show of force by firing on Fort Sumter.  It would be no different if France told the European Union France was succeeding from the Union and all EU troops and officials must get off French territory.  If the EU refused to get out, France would have the right to use lethal force to remove the EU.  The South’s secession was entirely legal in the same way.  The General Government (and Lincoln) were committing an illegal act in attempting to force the Southern Nations to stay in the Union through force.  Secession was a right ensured to the states by the Constitution and reaffirmed by the Kentucky Resolve of 1798.  The Kentucky Resolve was penned by Thomas Jefferson and goes as follows:

Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government; but by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each state to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self Government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each state acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming as to itself, the other party:  That the government created by the compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that as in all cases of compact among parties having no common Judge, each party has an right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

As can be seen by the Kentucky Resolve, the General Government was a union, or alliance, of Sovereign Nations designed to give the several Republics more leverage in international diplomacy and to settle disputes between the Nations in peaceful manners.  Each State of the Union had the right to decide for itself whether or not the General Government had infringed upon the delegated powers.  Prior to the Civil War, each State had the ability to nullify anything the General Government did if the State decided the General Government had overstepped their bounds.

The Southern secession was entirely legal, but was the war about slavery?  No.  The war had nothing to do with slavery and was not caused even by fears surrounding slavery.  The majority of the North hated blacks and the only reason why they would care about getting rid of slavery would be to deport them and create an all-white nation.  Indiana, Illinois, and Oregon even amended their State’s constitutions to make it illegal for blacks to immigrate to those States.  General Ulysses S. Grant even stated, “If the war was about slavery, I would have joined the South.”  That statement is probably the most ironic quotation from the war.  If the war really was about slavery, like how it is often thought to be, then the only general in the Union who wasn’t afraid of General Lee would have joined the South, and the war would probably have been won by the South.  Likewise, since the war wasn’t about slavery, the South lost.  Also, Charles Dickens, an extremely famous author and a supporter of abolition said,

I take the facts of the American slave quarrel to stand thus.  Slavery has in reality nothing to do with it….  Every reasonable person may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the war; it hated the abolitionists and derided them uphill and down dale.

The cause of the war obviously could not be based on slavery, because the war itself was entirely unnecessary if it was merely over freeing the slaves.  Only six percent of free Southerners even owned slaves.  And not all slave owners were Caucasian; there were some very wealthy African Americans who owned hundreds of slaves themselves.  That shows slavery had more to do with economics than race.  If the war really was entirely about white supremacy, then such wealthy African Americans would not be allowed to reach such a high social standing.  Would the remaining ninety-four percent of the free population fight and die for something that had no personal economical value to them?  The slaves could have been freed peacefully, yet Lincoln and his fellow party members decided to wage a war instead.  But maybe the war wasn’t about slavery and thus comes the need for the war.

The South could, consistently with honor, and probably would, long before this time, and without a conflict, have surrendered their slavery to the demand of the constitution (if that had been pressed upon them), and to the moral senti­ment of the world; while they could not with honor, or at least certainly would not, surrender anything to a confessedly unconstitutional demand, especially when coining from mere demagogues, who were so openly unprincipled as to profess the greatest moral abhorrence of slavery, and at time same time, for the sake of office, swear to support it., by swearing to support a constitution which they declared to be its bulwark….  You, and others like you have done more, according to your abilities, to prevent the peaceful abolition of slavery, than any other men in the nation; for while honest men were explaining the true character of the constitution, as an instrument giving freedom to all, you were continually denying it, and doing your utmost (and far more than any avowed pro slavery man could do) to defeat their efforts.  And it now appears that all this was done by you in violation of your own conviction of truth.

The truth remains it was the North who were guilty of prolonging slavery for personal gain.  Lincoln and his fellow party members were guilty of supporting slavery more than the slaveholders.  Lincoln used slavery as nothing more than as a scapegoat for his actions.  Since California had joined the Union, an imbalance had appeared in the Congress between the Southern States and the Northern States.  This imbalance was in favor of the North’s politics and directly resulted in the Morrill Tariff.  Tariffs are always economically destroying to agricultural societies.  The Morrill Tariff caused the South to pay eighty percent of the Union’s taxes and forced it to buy primarily from Northern industry.  The resulting effect on the South was a more limited market for selling their products and the available markets would be almost unprofitable to the Southerners.  The high price for selling resulted in destroying any incentive for freeing slaves because paying wages would mean no profit from any of the South’s agriculture.  The Northern States took advantage of their Congressional monopoly and spent most of the money from the tariffs on the South to their exclusive advantage.  The South realized they were being taxed without proper representation, so they legally withdrew from the Union.  When the source of the North’s spending money had stopped paying, the North could no longer maintain its spending and went into debt.  The North initiated the War of Northern Aggression.

The only reason slavery ever became an issue was Abraham Lincoln needed to use it for foreign propaganda to keep Great Britain out of the war.  Abraham Lincoln was like many of his Northern brethren by being a white supremacist.  The philosopher behind the American abolitionist movement, Lysander Spooner, said to Senator Charles Sumner in 1864,

Upon yourself, and others like you, professed friends of freedom, who, instead of promulgating what you believed to be the truth, have, for selfish purposes, denied it, and thus conceded to the slaveholders the benefit of an argument to which they had no claim, — upon your heads, more even, if possible, than upon the slaveholders themselves, (who have acted only in accordance with their associations, interests, and avowed principles as slaveholders) rests the blood of this horrible, unnecessary, and therefore guilty, war.

Note Mr. Spooner blames the war on Northern heads and says the war was one hundred percent uncalled for.  Regardless, there was not sufficient support in the North for a war on slavery.  The war wasn’t over slavery, and thus the moral support the North had for the war also falls to Hell.  Disregarding what Lincoln falsely postulated, the North had no legal basis for the war.  The war also lacked a moral support because it had nothing to do with freeing anyone.

Still some might say regardless of these arguments Lincoln still preserved the Union and that justifies the war.  As if preserving the Union was actually a moral!  The cause for preserving the Union is entirely legal, having absolutely nothing to do with morality.  Beyond that, he actually did the exact opposite of saving the Union, at least if one refers to the original Union designed by the Founding Fathers.  In his war, Lincoln tore up and disregarded the Constitution that binds the government under the governed.  Lincoln also changed the very foundations of the Republic in another very fundamental way.  Lincoln caused the voluntary Union of the several States to no longer be voluntary.  At this point, the country became a militaristic despotism forcing States to become slaves to an abusive relationship with the General Government.  By declaring war on the secessionist states, Lincoln showed the world the Union was no longer voluntary, but the States would be forced at gunpoint to stay in the Union regardless of the infractions against the Great Compact the General Government could, did, and would inflict.  It is no different than if one’s employer forced one to follow his or her work contract at gunpoint regardless of whether or not the employer was breaking his side of the contract.  Lysander Spooner stated,

Abraham Lincoln did not cause the death of so many people from a mere love of slaughter, but only to bring about a state of consent that could not otherwise be secured for the government he had undertaken to administer.  When a government has once reduced its people to a state of consent (that is, of submission to its will) it can put them to a much better use than to kill them; for it can then plunder them, enslave them, and use them as tools for plundering and enslaving others.  And these are the uses to which most governments, our own among the rest, do put their people, whenever they have once reduced them to a state of consent to its will….  The idea that, although government should rest on the consent of the governed, yet so much force may nevertheless be employed as may be necessary to produce that consent, embodies everything that was ever exhibited in the shape of usurpation and tyranny in any country on earth.  It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty.  It can have no place except as a part of a system of absolute military despotism.  And it means nothing else either in this country, or in any other.  There is no half-way house between a government depending wholly on voluntary support, and one depending wholly on military compulsion….  Such is the state of things now in this country, and in every other in which government does not depend wholly upon voluntary support.  There never was and there never will be, a more gross, self-evident, and inexcusable violation of the principle that government should rest on the consent of the governed, than was the late war, as carried on by the North.  There never was, and there never will be, a more palpable case of purely military despotism than is the government we now have.

And there is the true cause of the American Civil War.  It has the same cause as almost every other war in the history of mankind.  The origin of the Civil War was lust for power.  Lincoln wanted to seize absolute power.  This can be clearly seen as the only and most obvious cause of the war.  The only excuses ever given by the Lincolnite cultists are merely lame excuses based off of a small group of Lincoln’s speeches that ignore Lincoln’s behaviors before and during the war.  Lincoln was not the herald of liberty so often claimed by mainstream historians; he was a tyrant on par with Hitler and Stalin, because he had no qualms on waging total war on the people who he claimed were “his own citizens.”  Also, the Constitution blatantly called such a war an act of treason under Article 3, Section 3, if Lincoln were right about his idea of preserving the Union.  He fought a war on the sole purpose of forcing government and enslaving the population.

…And the government, so called, becomes their tool, their servile, slavish, villainous tool, to extort it from the labor of the enslaved people both of the North and the South.  It is to be extorted by every form of direct, and indirect, and unequal taxation.  Not only the nominal debt and interest — enormous as the latter was — are to be paid in full; but these holders of the debt are to be paid still further — and perhaps doubly, triply, or quadruply paid….  In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price….

If viewed this way, the slaves never were freed.  The entire population of America was enslaved to the holders of the debt.  The South was pillaged, raped, and plundered.  Human Rights were trampled on, and crimes against humanity committed.  The South still has not recovered from the war and is a dying nation.  General Sherman killed one out of every four male civilians of working age and permanently maimed another half, leaving a mere twenty-five percent remnant.  Beyond that, the soldiers destroyed everything and looted the valuables.  Sherman’s men went so far as to dig up graves for valuables.  The already war-weakened regions were economically destroyed and remain in poverty.  The Union fought to fill its banks even at the costs of hundreds of thousands of lives and centuries of poverty for millions.

The origins of the American Civil war are obvious and largely ignored.  Firstly, the United States Federal Government had become tyrannical.  Lincoln was a power hungry tyrant bent on enslaving all the people of America in a militaristic despotism that continues to exist to this day.  Secondly, the war was fought over the principles of the original Revolution and those principles were forever lost in a sick twist of fate.  The fundamentals of the Union were forsaken, the Constitution’s authority lost forever, and the Republic descended into an empire.  The emancipation of the slaves came at the price of enslaving entire nations and a million deaths.  The once free peoples of America became property to be profited from.  The moral reason behind the preservation of the Union as a reason for war is unreal, because the preservation of the Union is not a moral.  It is instead a legal argument warped by ignorance.  The legal reason behind the preservation of the Union is also lacking on a dilemma: either the secession was legal, which would mean the Union had no legal right to wage a war against the South, or it was illegal which means the North waging the war would have been high treason against the Constitution.  And finally, the war was never about the peculiar institution of slavery, and thus had no moral basis either.  The North could have had the entire population of slaves freed in an entirely peaceful manner, but chose not to.  The North was to be blamed for war and the blood of the millions who died in the war is on their hands.  The war was started by the North out of the sickest and most perverted form of greed.

References

The Constitution of the United States of America.

Dickens, Charles. “Letter to W.F. De Cerjat.” 1 Oct. 1850. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. 183-84.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Section One of the Kentucky Resolve of 1798.” The Kentucky Resolve of 1798. 10 Nov. 1798.

Spooner, Lysander. “Letter to Senator Charles Sumner.” 1864.

—. “No Consent.” December 1873.

—. “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.” 1870.