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Posted December 3, 2005
re: secession
The American Civil War is ill-named. Its present name is something close to a lie.
A civil war can be loosely defined as war between citizens of the same country. But, technically, that's not what the Civil War was. The South had chosen to leave the union, and so its citizens had ceased to share a state (and thus citizenship
with the warring northerners. A better definition for civil war has it that it is two (or more) groups of a population openly fighting to control one government. This is certainly not what America's so-called Civil War was. It was one side (the North) trying to destroy the government of the South and force the re-accession of seceded states. It was a war to end independence.
So, arguably, the War Against Southern Independence is a better term for the war. Compare it to The Civil War or The War Between the States — it's far more accurate. Tom DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln, a book I've not read, offers (in an email) several other alternatives:
War for Southern IndependenceandWar to Prevent Southern Independenceare the most accurate, in my opinion.Second American War for Independenceis also good.
I tend to name wars from the perspective of the victor. So I prefer mine, with against rather than prevent in the name. But I do like the idea of tying the 1860s war to the American Revolution. What's the best way to do that?
Both the Revolution and the South's secession were moves of subordinate bodies for independence. So it seems to me that the most natural terms for the wars must be
The colonies, in declaring their independence, were in effect seceding from the British Empire. The war was fought because Britain resisted its colonies' right of secession, and sought to force the states into accession with the Empire again.
The parallel with the South is clear. The South seceded from the union and acceded to a new union, the Confederate States of America. The northern states, the remaining so-called United States of America, resisted the South's secession just as did the British Empire, and warred against the states in similar fashion — only a lot more ruthlessly, with a lot more determination. The northern states won, the Confederacy was abolished, and the southern states were — with no small amount of tyranny and trickery — brought back into the union.
Obviously, I think the southern states had every right to secede, just as did the colonies, earlier.
But that doesn't mean I'm in some sense for
the Confederacy. The Confederacy was designed to preserve slavery, an institution so vile that revolution by the slaves against their masters had been long justified, and a bloody one would have been just what the South deserved. The North should have allowed the secession, and said good riddance.
And then what should it have done?
The United States should have ensured that escaping slaves would have been received and not returned. Further, a case could be made that the United States should have declared the acts of freeing slaves and of fomenting rebellion in the South — crimes in the Confederacy — would not be crimes in the north, and no exchange of suspects or criminals on those charges would continue. An embargo of a limited kind might also have been in order: Perhaps the U.S. should have prohibited trade with the Confederacy unless the private businesses trading could openly and honestly demonstrate that no slave labor went into making or bringing the traded good to market. Further, slave owners who travelled to the United States with their slaves would be divested of their ill-gained human property, and held until all their slaves in the South were freed.
With policies like these, the United States could have defeated slavery in the South with a comparative minimum of bloodshed, and a minimum of centralization and political tyranny. The idea of freedom would have been defended, and its scope increased without a diminution of freedom in other spheres of life. Justice would have prevailed. And without a civil, er, without a War Against Southern Secession.
The northern states did not, of course, take the route that I, in hindsight, suggest (though there were northerners who suggested it at the time; James Buchanan of course believed, as did most presidents before him, that any state had a right to secede for pretty near any reason, and was prepared to just let the South go). The North did not do this because they were obsessed with Union. Well, so what? Union at what cost? Any semblance of decentralization, that's what. A lot of blood, and a lot of freedom. Why was the North so obsessed with Union? Why did the states go along with their amazing and daring and perhaps criminal president, Abe Lincoln? Because the power structure of the North was firmly committed to protectionism, the movers and shakers gained a lot of their wealth at the expense of the common folk, especially the common folk of the South. So, to continue their big-business, protectionist con game, they fought a horrible, horrible war, to prevent a huge set of marks from leaving their grifting reach.
Some people just love reading about the so-called Civil War. I'm not quite the enthusiast, perhaps because I find both sides despicable. Where others see heroes, I see villains and victims. And the people, now, who still play encomiast to Lincoln's shade? They, too, strike me as taking up the old despicable causes.
American history is an embarrassment of crimes. Those who look upon the past with patriotic fervor strike me as fools playing acolyte to knaves. The unthinking usage of ill-conceived names for past wars suggests that it is the fools and knaves who dominate. They've won and named the wars. And they carry on, even unto the present day.
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