The Confederacy 

So: the United States was founded upon the premise that all men are created equal. But this is wrong, Southern science has discovered. The new principle, upon which they intended to found their new civilization, is that all white men are created equal, all black folk are created inferior. Could the author make it any clearer? The South seceded from the Union, and fought the Civil War, to ensure the continuation of slavery, and the continued debasement of the African in favor of the white citizen. These institutions were perceived to be under siege in a larger nation which had just elected Abraham Lincoln, not an abolitionist by any means but 'anti-slavery' in a sense, because the new Republican Party had inherited from the old 'Free-Soilers' the conviction that slavery should not be allowed to spread. The Southerners felt these institutions were worth defending, to the death. So they said; why will no one take their word on it?

Not only did slavery remain legal in the Confederate States of America, but it was expressly forbidden to pass any law against it: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed." (Article I, Constitution of the Confederate States, March 11, 1861).

There are people nowadays, the Neoconfederates, Southern nationalists, and self-described "Paleo-Confederate" Douglas Wilson, who claim that the American Civil War was a content between Christian civilization, as represented by the South, and militant atheism (that would be the North). Do we find any confirmation for this claim in Stephens' eloquent and blindingly clear defense of the new republic? Was his racist paradigm Christian in the slightest particular?:

The oft-repeated Neoconfederate claim that the South was on the verge of freeing its slaves is premised on the existence of secret plans. Some in the North had heard of these secret plans; war is always a time when rumors are rife. Their existence cannot be verified because, you see, they are secret.

His followers, who are legion, insist that Wilson is no white supremacist, because he says he is not. Meanwhile, he says that his 'followers' are feds:

“You can also ascertain that CN is becoming a real thing because of all those FBI and DOJ bro-bots—you know, fake-account feds in MAGA hats doing things like the antisemitic jag. You may not know this, but this is a real sign of having arrived. You know the kind of thing I am talking about . . . 'I  Doug Wilson, and Hitler had his good points.' The only real thing worth debating is which federal agency it was. And on those occasions when it really is an alt-right goober, we should learn to think of those guys as the volunteer militia for the federal agencies, helping them in their mission to discredit all responsible resistance.” (Doug Wilson, Blog & Mablog, 'Live Not by Lies. . .At Least Not Lots of Them,' September 4, 2023).

Doug Wilson's "Confederacy" is a Shangri-La, a place that never was nor could be, a fervently Christian community stoutly defended by 40,000 Black soldiers, every one of them committed to the cause...which was what, again, exactly? Because, by the power of his world-making imagination, he has simply erased the white supremacy which was the actual founding principle of secession, those who inconveniently remember the testimony of actual history become slanderers.

But can you make a whole world out of your own imagination in this way? Does reality have its own claims to make on people? Some years back in Maine, a lunatic named Marc Bechard bludgeoned several elderly nuns to death with a religious statuette among other weapons. One of the survivors led a twilight existence for some time after that in a local nursing home. When the psychiatrists asked him why he had done this, he explained that there were "beings" imprisoned in the convent, plus that the nuns were in possession of an "oil" which could save the world, if it were not being greedily hoarded by the nuns. In his own mind, his concerns were rational, even public-spirited. But only in his own mind.

Mr. Bechard was held in a mental institution for some time, but was subsequently released and has since died of Lou Gehrig's disease. If you look at it his way, his actions were civic-minded and public-spirited, were they not? Should not these "beings" be set free? Was it fair to imprison them? Certainly if the nuns were unlawfully detaining some identifiable party, that could have been made an issue, the authorities might have been notified; but suppose, had the Waterville police been called to the scene, they'd been unable to locate these "beings"? What if it's just lunacy?

In a similar vein, Mr. Wilson has no right to invent a racially harmonious Confederacy and demand that other people pretend they also believe in his invention. The actual, real-life Confederacy was racist to the bone, and those who champion its memory must be evaluated accordingly. Mr. Wilson himself does not think persons who wish to identify as various genders have any moral or legal right to expect other people to buy into their delusions or be compelled to use their preferred terminology; yet the public at large is obligated to buy into his delusions, if they are to talk about him at all? Not going to happen.

Darkness and Light

American history is not a quotidian recitation of the interaction between groups with differing interests, as is the history of many nations. It is a Manichaean interplay between darkness and light. Those who knowingly and wittingly choose the darkness deserve condemnation. This spiritual dimension of American history gets lost by erosion from several directions, not just from an ill-timed tolerance that tries to 'understand' the South. Nowadays, 'woke' historians like Jemar Tisby start from the premise that white folks are constitutionally incapable of doing any good deed. If any action completed by a white actor appears good, the historian must discover the self-interested motive behind this false front of seeming good. Look at William Wilberforce. Was his persistent push to outlaw the slave trade and slavery itself from the British empire admirable, even altruistic? Not in the least. He was making the world safe for capitalism: "Yet abolitionism did not arise from purely altruistic motives. The decline of slavery in Britain coincided with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. The factory became the urban farm that produced most British goods. The poet William Blake called factories 'dark Satanic mills.'" (Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise, p. 41). Never mind that the people hired to work in British factories had not previously been slaves. Never mind that Wilberforce and his circle did not own factories. This principle is called 'interest convergence.' It means white folks are ever and inherently evil, and only appear to do good. It is indistinguishable from anti-white racism, which is the premise that white folks are ever and inherently evil. Black folk are still allowed to be virtuous in Tisby-world; indeed they all must be, because their status as victims demands it, as does the blatant racism of the entire conception. Thus even riots are virtuous, if the rioters should happen to be black. But once they start explaining to the public how the slaves liberated themselves, the star of this school of history will set behind the mountains of absurdity.

A better name for 'interest convergence' might be 'North and South convergence,' because a consequence of this premise is that, however bad the slave-owning South may have been, the slave-freeing North must also have been equally bad. After all, both populations are predominantly white, right? So how could one be in the right, the other wrong? If you want advance notice of where the 'woke' historians will go, you can head them off at the pass by reading the writings of white racists of the past. Doing so, you will be able to predict what they are going to say before they say it. For example, Justice Roger B. Taney, in his Dred Scott decision, explained that the U.S. Constitution supports, indeed establishes, slavery. In fact if it had been taken literally, the Dred Scott decision would have invalidated existing law in the Northern states which forbade slavery! To justify his argument, he pointed out that the U.S. Constitution mentions slavery, kind of. Northern abolitionists found this reasoning absurd. The 'woke' squad of the present day, on the contrary, say, isn't it obvious he was right? White racism, turned inside out, equals anti-white racism, i.e., 'wokeness.' White racism directed against blacks should not be replaced by black racism directed against whites; this is not progress, just more of the same.

In the history taught in schools, the contrast between light and dark fades out of American history. Not that it fades into an equipotent gray, but once steering 'woke' principle is established, that white people cannot act for any other than sordid and self-interested motives, it all fades to darkness, because, after all, the majority of the population is, and was, white. True, the Union freed the slaves, but only accidentally, while they were trying to do something else. This is as wrong as the Neoconfederates' celebrating the darkness. The Northern states of the United States eliminated slavery within their borders, a nearly universal human curse, decades before any jurisdiction in Africa ever thought of doing so. It was eliminated throughout the country by the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They refuse to see this as anything positive, as light conquering darkness. When we look at the history of most nations, we realize they invariably portray themselves as 100% in the right, and everybody else as 100% in the wrong. There is no way to reconcile the differing viewpoints on World War I found among the participants. In fact no one wanted that war, since it came anyway they all were both in the wrong and in the right. Shaving the difference seems like the rational, equitably-minded thing to do. Not in American history. There really is a right and a wrong; the Union and the Confederacy were not moral equivalents. The kind of Northern triumphalism still in vogue when I went to school, in the North at least, needs to make a comeback, if this country ever hopes to understand itself. Otherwise, the Neo-Confederates and Jemar Tisby will keep right on marching hand-in-hand, spreading misinformation and slandering the posthumous reputation of honorable, even heroic, men.

Many of these 'woke' ideas originate from the long-prevalent, in the South, evasions of the 'Lost Cause' mythology. These die-hards tried to hold onto the notion that the South was, after all, in the right, or at any rate the cause of the North was no improvement, by inventing creative reasons for the Civil War other than slavery, for instance, it was a dispute about tariffs. But the Civil War really was all about slavery, as the participants at the time were not shy to proclaim. One side was, in general and taking a long view, right; the majority Northern electorate who voted for Abraham Lincoln were opposed to slavery in principle, though they had no intention of abolishing it by force in the South. Seeing the hand-writing on the wall, the Southern slave-owners, who controlled the political institutions of their states by depriving not only blacks but also poor whites of the franchise, realized the only way to secure a future for slavery was to bail out. The rest of what happened, happened. Certainly the mass of humanity in the North were frail sinners, as are we all, but this bedrock fact of all human history does not detract from the fact that they were in the right.

To demand that all participants in history be morally impeccable leaves us with no actors upon the stage; in human history as it is, you will not do much better than to watch Union armies sweeping the South and freeing the slaves as they go. To Jemar Tisby, they can't be in the right, because they're white. If they seem to be doing right, the goal-posts must be moved, the standards shifted, until they are doing wrong. It may be they were entirely in the right on slavery, but wait: there is evidence they believed in something like the bell curve! If no such dirty laundry can be uncovered, then arbitrary, unworthy motives must be assigned to them. This is 'interest convergence:' for white actors, none but sordid and self-interested motives may be assigned. To Jemar Tisby and those who think like him, it is self-evident that, why yes, black folk are morally impeccable, because they are victims of oppression. The outside observer mumbles, 'Um, your morally impeccable people have a disproportionately high crime rate, plus they are prone to riot,' inciting the response, 'Racist!' If you want to insist there is a morally impeccable ethnic group, could you maybe give in to plausibility a little and give us the Chinese, who pay taxes and are hard-working? The only way he can get the inner-city population to be perceived as morally impeccable is to redefine what is wrong as right, good, and wholesome, like rioting for instance.

Objective scrutiny of history can confirm no such hypothesis as that one human group is uniquely virtuous and valuable, so much so that other groups must be evaluated solely on the basis of their standing with the truly human, truly worthwhile people. White racists want it understood that the uniquely valuable ones are their own selves, black racists want it understood that, no, it's themselves. There is a difference here? For the past sixty years in the United States a bureaucratic structure has been in place safeguarding equal opportunity. This is the inverse of systemic racism. The system, insofar as it is a system, not only does not condone racial discrimination but has rendered it illegal. Anyone who thinks these legal strictures are routinely flouted has never worked in a human resources department. If these extraordinary measures have failed to secure equality of outcome, then the cause does not lie in defects in the system, whether accidental or the intended, but elsewhere. They should stop demanding that people pretend to believe in Tinker-belle, or the Tooth fairy, or other things that are manifestly not real. Like 'white privilege.' Neo-confederates and their allies should stop stoking the historical misconceptions that make these fantasies seem real. If they would stop saying that the evil North invaded the South to spread its economic system (capitalism), then the race-baiters would be left alone saying these things.

The people of the South want it understood that they are a most patriotic of all Americans. If so, why do they not take pride in their army, the American army, sweeping through the South to liberate the slaves? Our history should be their history, too, whether a seditious conventicle of traitors thought otherwise or not. We expect the citizens of the foreign nation of Iraq to welcome our troops as liberators, but then we think it only natural that our own relatives down south perceived the Union troops who restored constitutional government to the South as foreign invaders. Isn't it time to retire the 'Lost Cause' mythology, which can only be defended by lies? The government of the planters, by the planters, and for the planters that plotted treason and secession deserves no gratitude nor nostalgia, from anyone. Personally I'd like nothing better than if all the little children of America joined hands and danced in a circle singing, 'Babylon is Fallen, Babylon is Fallen.' May it happen, though it hasn't happened yet. The Civil War continues to divide Americans. Healing that division would be the best cure and preventative against 'wokeness.' An America that believes in itself is immune to 'wokeness.' A country that does not believe in itself has no future. Less than all other countries, does America have valid reason not to believe in itself. Our history is a history of light overcoming the darkness.

Does the Bible contain any hint or suggestion that black folk are inferior to white folk, as Alexander Stephens believed the South had discovered, or does this cornerstone of the Confederacy come altogether from outside the Bible? And if the idea that blacks are inferior finds no Biblical support, can the converse proposition, that whites are inferior, find any support either?:

In Their Own Words

Just as the best corrective to the Neoconfederates' nostalgic fabrications about the Confederacy is to read the actual words of committed Confederates, so the best response to their slurs against the abolitionists is to read what these people had to say for themselves. Were they really admirers of the Jacobins, as alleged? Or did they love the Bible and the God who authored it?:

According to self-described "Paleo-Confederate" Douglas Wilson, a preference for violence is the essence of abolitionism. So he states in a Canon Press video intended to walk back some of his more abhorrent assertions in 'Black and Tan:' "Well, see that's the whole point. The abolitionist, you know, the person who wants bloodshed, you know, slavery ended, and good riddance — this is the important part — slavery ended in the west, and good riddance, in the western world, everywhere else, peaceably. Here it was, we killed six hundred thousand people in order to do it and established a pattern of racial animosity that lasted well over a century." (Doug Wilson, Southern Slavery, Canon Press YouTube, 7:16-7:59). Is it true, that the abolitionists wanted violence? Was it was they who started the Civil War rather than the Southerner defenders of slavery who fired on Fort Sumter? Is it true, that "the abolitionist" is "the person who wants bloodshed"? Or is this a big lie of a magnitude that would make Himmler and Goebbels blush?

Evidence in favor of the proposition is one man, John Brown, executed for treason by hanging by Robert E. Lee, while he was still wearing the blue uniform. Evidence against is the entire record of success of American abolitionism, which had eliminated slavery by law, non-violently, through the democratic political process, in the entire Northern part of the country prior to the Civil War. This was the methodology they preferred: peaceful persuasion followed by legislative action, within the normal, lawful political process. They had high hopes of working the same magic for the entire country, beginning with protecting the unincorporated territories, which Southern secession derailed. If the horrific violence brought on by the Civil War contributed to waning belief in the moral basis for American abolitionism, namely the Bible, on the part of Colonel Ingersoll and those to whom he spoke, then that certainly does show the superiority of non-violence as a means of political change. Battlefield tactics had not kept pace with the improving lethality of weaponry; it shocks the conscience to think that commanders still thought it possible, in events like Pickett's charge, to send unarmored men out for a stroll through the farm fields in the face of withering artillery fire. Seeing scenes like that probably did undermine the Northern soldier's belief in the righteousness of his own cause; but how much worse for the Southerner, fighting in what was from the outset an evil cause, namely the subjugation of the black race, as outlined by Alexander Stephens.

Reparations

You often hear nowadays, from proponents of slavery reparations, the idea that the federal government should transfer wealth from the tax-payers to the African-American population, because all of America's vast wealth rests on the foundation of slavery. Yes, all of it. One must ask, why then did the North win the Civil War? Shut off from access to the South's cotton exports, shouldn't the North have lost if it was the dependent part of the country? Great wealth did indeed come from the cotton fields. But while the South was growing cotton, the North was manufacturing locomotives. As William Tecumseh Sherman explained in a letter to a Southern acquaintance:

"The North can make a steam engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth, or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared." (William Tecumseh Sherman, quoted p. 79, Capitalism in America, Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge).

It is not correct that all of our nation's great wealth came from Southern cotton fields, tended by slaves. There isn't any one product upon which American prosperity rested. Not to mention that the North's wheat fields, tended by independent family farmers, yielded quite a bumper crop as well, not one dime of it resting upon Southern slavery. Given that the gross domestic product of the entire country in the years leading up to the Civil War was a tiny fraction of what it now is, it is extravagant to claim our prosperity today was stolen from the slaves.

Since there is no community of perfect people walking upon this earth, few would think to idolize the North, who won the Civil War and freed the slaves.  Still and all, this is a war that the good guys won. Some people find that this disrupts their preferred narrative: "It is easy to imagine a facile narrative that develops around Juneteenth in which people essentially tell themselves, 'Slavery was bad. The 'good guys' won the Civil War. And now racism is over.' It would be a sacrilege to the memories of those who suffered to achieve freedom and the celebration of Juneteenth if people adopted a simplistic understanding of the history behind it." (Jemar Tisby, The Boston Globe, June 17, 2021, The Unintended Consequences of Making Juneteenth a National Holiday.) 'Good guys' is in scare quotes for a reason. If your preferred narrative is that all white people are evil all the time, and that the slaves freed themselves, thank you very much, the Civil War can prove as difficult as it does to any Neo-Confederate. Thus Black Lives Matter demonstrators are as happy to vandalize the statue of Abraham Lincoln as they are that of Jefferson Davis. Americans should celebrate the history of the Civil War not because they will have Black allies in their celebration; they may have none. They should celebrate it because it is theirs, North and South, and it is worth celebrating. Has there ever, in human history, been an army that marched through slave lands, as General Sherman did in his march to the sea, setting free the slaves as they went? It happened, and if that is not worth celebrating, what is?

Founding Fathers

America's third president, Thomas Jefferson, gave valuable service to his country in penning the Declaration of Independence. Was there ever a document that came out of government that was so well written? The country owes him a debt of gratitude for his clarity of expression, if not of conception. He is both the favored founding father to appear on Neoconfederate websites, but is also favored by the other side. Was Thomas Jefferson anti-slavery? The peculiar institution made him uncomfortable, to be sure. But his preferred solution to the dilemma was to liberate the slaves,— and then send them far, far away:

Some of his colleagues might make a better and more edifying study for young people than this morally compromised figure.

Once you bring to the attention of the Neoconfederates what the original secessionists themselves said about the goals and principles of their new republic, you will find a curious reluctance on their part to discuss the matter. Some ideas are best shared in whispers, it would appear. There often turns out to be an element of prevarication in their support for the Confederacy. The Civil War was not about slavery, they insist; but then when you point out that it was, it turns out that they knew that all along.

Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll

Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll was a famous spokesman for atheism in the era after the Civil War in America. His argumentation against Christianity is far from exquisite however. One favored argument is that the Bible says the earth is flat, and the early church believed the earth was flat, therefore Christianity is false. Neither assertion is true. Another favored argument is that the Confederacy was evil, therefore the Bible is false. This is a non sequitur: the Confederacy was very wicked indeed, but these fallen men's seditious plotting against America and against human rights says nothing against the Bible, which does not countenance such wickedness. Both sides claimed divine guidance in the American Civil War, one far more plausibly than the other. No doubt many an idealistic young man, eager to strike a blow against slavery, recoiled when he wandered onto the blood-drenched killing fields of the Civil War; still, one side was right, the other wrong.

Basing an argument against theism on the premise that the wrong side, and the losing side, of the American Civil War, was the Biblical one, when it never was, is wasted effort. For that matter, Christendom has not historically thought that the earth was flat. Why resort to bad arguments, i.e., arguments based on fraudulent and fictitious premises, if there are good ones available?:

The Forty Thousand

One of the myths propounded by the Neoconfederates in the present day is that there were tens of thousands of African-American soldiers who fought in the cause of the Confederacy. Self-described "Paleo-Confederate" Douglas Wilson puts it this way:

"The second insult, worse because it has been far more successful as a slander, consists of withholding from blacks an important part of their genuine heritage, one in which they can and should take deep satisfaction and pride.

"The Confederate States of America lasted as long as it did, against overwhelming odds, in part because of the great contribution made by many loyal Confederate blacks to her war effort. This contribution is probably one of the greatest untold stories in the annals of our nation's history. Not only was it a 'finest hour,' to use Churchill's phrase, it was an hour which white America generally refuses to acknowledge — to this day." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 885-889).

An untold story to be sure. Just like the Revolution was never televised, but only because it never happened, this inspiring tale isn't part of canonical Civil War history. This author's prior published pamphlet explains that Southern blacks overwhelmingly supported the Confederate war effort: "Given this testimony, it is not surprising that most southern blacks (both free and slave) supported the Southern war effort." (Southern Slavery As It Was, Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson, p. 12).

According to Wilson, these rifle-toting back Confederates were fired by patriotism to their beloved Confederacy, not by enticements such as the promise of freedom: "But the king of all such oddities is the great untold oddity — the ardent support by the Confederacy by thousands of blacks, both free and slave. . .The wave of patriotic fervor which swept the South clearly included the black population." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 898-903). How many of these young lions arrived ready for battle? Forty thousand: "One estimate places the number of black Confederate combatants at around 40,000." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 920). Hey, it's an estimate. And an absurd one at that.

The issue came to a head with the Union deploying increasing numbers of Black soldiers in the field. By the end of the Civil War, approximately 10% of the Union forces were African-Americans. What was the status of these combatants, in the eyes of the Confederacy? Unfortunately, they were not considered lawful enemy combatants, but rather persons engaged in servile insurrection. This led to atrocities, for instance at Fort Pillow, where white Union soldiers at the encircled fort were allowed to surrender and made prisoners of war, but the Black soldiers were simply slaughtered. This is a a war crime, on a par with the execution of Polish officers at the Katyn forest by the Red Army in World War II. It was not a case of indiscipline, of lower-ranking personnel not fully grasping the war aims of the higher-ups. At My Lai, for instance, American soldiers slaughtered Vietnamese civilians, in defiance of the Geneva Convention; but the politicians back home directing the war effort had not commanded targeting civilians. By contrast, it was the official policy of the Confederate States of America to offer 'no quarter' to, for instance, the white officers leading Black troops into battle:

"That every white person, being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who, during the present war, shall command negroes or multattoes in arms against the Confederate States, or who shall arm, train, organize or prepare negroes or mulattoes for military service against the Confederate States, or who shall voluntarily aid negroes or mulattoes in any military enterprise, attack or conflict in such service, shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, be put to death, or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the court." (Joint Resolution on the Subject of Retaliation, May 1, 1863, Section 4, quoted at deadconfederates.com)

The Black soldiers who had tried to surrender at Fort Pillow died with the cry of "No quarter! No quarter!" ringing in their ears. Not so coincidentally, "paleoConfederate" Doug Wilson celebrates "No quarter November," in which he sets fire to the furniture, perhaps in memory of this event, perhaps not. It is strange that the Neoconfederates cannot stop talking about how chivalrous and honorable the Confederate military were, when staring right back in their face are atrocities like the starving prisoners at Andersonville and outright slaughter of disarmed men at Fort Pillow.

Not that the dying Confederacy didn't themselves make the effort to recruit black soldiers, overcoming considerable political resistance. Toward the end, the rising tide of deaths due to battle and illness, plus waves of desertion, left the Confederate ranks in tatters. Something had to be done, as the generals realized even if the politicians did not:

"Since slavery was already crumbling in many parts of the South, such as the Shenandoah Valley, why not enlist these slaves as soldiers, instead of losing them to the Union? Patrick Cleburne prepared such a proposal in January 1864 and sent it to Richmond, hoping that swift action would bring thousands of African Americans into the field in Confederate gray, and help stem the tide of Union victories. In return, all of the slaves would receive their freedom. . .Cleburne presented his scheme to the high ranking commanders of the Army of Tennessee on January 2, 1864. Generals Anderson, Walker, Bate, J. E. Johnston, Stewart and Stevenson all rejected the idea, but Generals Hardee and Hindman agreed with it. President Davis received the petition and quickly took action. He gave instructions to ensure that the document’s existence did not become common knowledge and the public journals did not learn of the idea." (Religious Rebels: The Religious Views and Motivations of Confederate Generals, Robert H. Croskery, pp. 171-172).

After all, wasn't the founding principle of the Confederacy that Africans were better off slaves than free? Wasn't this new state founded on the novel principle, that some men are less than others, by nature? But where were fresh recruits to be found? After the slaughter of the Battle of Cannae, the Romans reversed their usual policy of relying on a free citizen army, and enlisted slaves. So many men were gone, what else were they to do? It's a course of desperation, adopted in desperate circumstances. And in spite of its political impossibility, it was ultimately adopted by the Confederacy: "Other Confederate generals became convinced of the proposal’s merit by early 1865. One historian argues, however, that without Robert E. Lee’s support the idea would not have been seriously considered. Lee was convinced by January 1865 that the slaves should be enlisted and trained immediately. The slaves who served as soldiers would become automatically free, and the remaining slaves would be gradually emancipated. . .The response of the Confederate authorities to their most renowned general publicly endorsing and acknowledging the need for African American soldiers bears witness to the charges made by historians that the war was fought for slavery. Instead of taking immediate action, Davis hesitated, and on March 10 Lee pressed his president to get the slaves trained as soon as possible. By this time, of course, it was too late, since less than a month later Grant received Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House." (Religious Rebels: The Religious Views and Motivations of Confederate Generals Robert H. Croskery, pp. 172-173). Who knows whether recruiting these men sooner might have breathed new life into the Confederacy? It would have been prudent, though, to make sure they never found out what happened to the black Union soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow. Their growing realization that their own side did not believe the laws of war applied to them might have cooled the patriotic fervor Wilson is sure they felt.

In making his extravagant claim that Black slaves were the loyal sons of the Confederacy, and that thus to insult the Confederacy is to insult them, Douglas Wilson parts company with the Southern apologists he usually lionizes, like Richard Lewis Dabney, who accuses his Black neighbors of treason:

"If you trust any portion of power over your Church to black hands, you will rue it. Have they not done enough recently, to teach us how thoroughly they are untrustworthy? They have, in a body, deserted their true friends, and natural allies, and native land, to follow the beck of the most unmasked and unprincipled set of demagogues on earth, to the most atrocious ends." (Robert Lewis Dabney, The Ecclesiastical Equality of Negro Preachers in Our Church and Their Right to Rule over White Christians, p. 6).

The "native land" against which Dabney hurls the accusation of disloyalty at his Black neighbors is not the United States. Southern Blacks had many occasions to show their loyalty toward their native land, while others around them lapsed into treason and sedition. Rather, he is angry that Black residents were glad to see the blue-coated troops, emissaries from the government of their own native land, bearing in their hands the Emancipation Proclamation. Dabney knows nothing of the 40,000.

Jefferson Davis's response to the Emancipation Proclamation was positively unhinged. He declared all the free Black residents of the South to be slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, approximately 10% of the African-American population were free, in some cases in spite of legal and governmental barriers to manumission. So, to compensate for any slaves freed by Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, with a stroke of a pen, he reduced those free people to slavery:

Will someone please tell me again about how the Confederacy is supposed to have had something to do with limited government? What is limited about a government that imagines it has the power to reduce formerly free citizens to slavery?

Douglas Wilson has never recanted nor retracted his ludicrous suggestion of 40,000 Black Confederate soldiers. He didn't invent it, it has sometimes been part of the 'Lost Cause' mythology; but he defends the plausibility of this wildly inflated number. Like other made-up historical circumstances, it should long ago have been retired. History ought to be recitation of what actually happened, not a liars' contest of tall tales. Neoconfederacy is a recitation of fables, not history.

The Civil War is not over, because it has not yet achieved its objectives: "'Never until we welcome the Negro, the foreigner, all races as equals, and melted together in a common nationality, hurl them all at despotism, will the North deserve triumph or earn it at the hands of a just God.'" (Wendell Phillips, quoted in Glory Road, Bruce Catton, Kindle location 4135). Hopefully some of this detritus blocking the path, history that never happened and the like evasions, will be cleared away, allowing victory at last.

Lerone Bennett, Jr.

An editor of Ebony Magazine some years ago attracted attention by claiming that Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist. According to Mr. Bennett,

"If Lincoln had had his way, Oprah Winfrey, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson Sr., Lena Horne, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks...and even Clarence Thomas would have been born in slavery." (Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced Into Glory, quoted in the Independent, "Lerone Bennett Jr.: Ebony magazine journalist and historian who claimed Lincoln was a white supremacist.")

Where have we heard this before? It is one the linchpins of the Lost Cause mythology developed by embittered Confederates. There are two sides to their perspective: the South was noble and the North was evil. Mr. Bennett, without I'm sure embracing the nobility of the South's cause, did adopt wholesale the notion of the evil and duplicitous North. But we usually give credit to the first to publish, which in this case were without question the apologists for the Confederacy, who still to this day are repeating their old mantra:

"So I will content myself with condemning a quotation from the most famous white supremacist (to use our current phrase for this) of the nineteenth century, a gentleman named Abraham Lincoln. He said, 'I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. . .inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary." (Douglas Wilson, Black & Tan, Kindle location 1057).

No, according to the Neoconfederates, the North cared nothing for the slaves and did not want to see them liberated. It was for other reasons the North invaded the South; it was to garner tariff revenues, or corner the cotton market. . .or something.

In fairness, this view is partly the testimony of history: Mr. Lincoln's Republicans were not an abolitionist party, but rather anti-slavery in the same sense as the old Free Soil party. They wanted to stop the spread of slavery, not eliminate it where already established. It is one of the ironies of history that a man who was not even an abolitionist in the theoretical sense became the greatest practical abolitionist in the history of mankind, freeing far more slaves than Solon the Athenian ever did. It is not ultimately fair history either; sustaining Mr. Bennett's thesis requires arbitrarily classifying most of what Mr. Lincoln said on this topic as duplicity. Certainly politicians can be duplicitous; it is also possible his views matured. And since the Emancipation Proclamation was in fact followed up by the 13th Amendment barring slavery and the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal rights, there is little point in the end arguing that they didn't really mean it.

Almost immediately upon the Confederacy's defeat, the bitter Confederates began crafting a 'Lost Cause' mythology, which  portrayed the cause of the Confederacy as noble in concept and gallant in execution, but ultimately doomed by the North's greater numbers and industrial prowess. This idea: that the Northerners were racists, who had no real interest in freeing any slaves but just happened to end up doing that, was part of the 'Lost Cause' mythos from the start, which nowadays just happens to be curated mostly by Black practitioners. There never has been any corporate effort in the history of mankind where absolutely everybody was on board, and there were, no doubt, Northern soldiers who were racists. But evidence against this thesis includes the political record of the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic, a voluntary veteran's organization made up of Union soldiers. They never ceased to champion Black civil rights throughout the Reconstruction period. In ending slavery, in the main, the Union Army was doing what they believed in and believed in what they were doing.

When did the anti-slavery movement start, in the Christian church? Way back; not here, but long ago. Here is one outbreak of the sentiment, in the fourth century:

What If?

What would the future have held for slavery had the Confederate states been able to make good their escape from the Union? Would slaves yet still remain in chains, or would the slaves have freed themselves through a bloody slave rebellion, as happened in Haiti? What is certain, to the reader of the statements the Southern legislatures made accompanying secession, is that the seceding states had no intention of doing away with slavery, not then, not in the future. So fond hopes that the Southern slaves could have been freed peacefully, saving 600,000 lives, are not realistic.

The ancient world had the steam engine, but didn't do anything with it. Heron of Alexandria described the mechanism. But the widespread practice of slavery meant that labor was cheap. Labor-saving did not offer any immediate payoff. And so they did nothing with it. First labor must become dear, then the labor-saving can begin.

But the tractor would have been invented anyway, in free states. At the time of the Civil War, most of the American labor force, both free and slave, worked in agriculture. That is no longer the case; now only a small percentage work in the fields. But agricultural production has not collapsed, far from it. Instead of mobilizing an army of men, women, and children to pluck the cotton by hand and place it in a bag, a man in an air-conditioned cab can run down the rows and do in an afternoon what would have taken a troop to do by hand. What would they have said to the slaves then?

'Congratulations, you're free! You've been rendered redundant by the tractor, so good luck and good riddance. Find something to do with yourselves.' Or would they have set them to making bricks, like the Hebrew children in Egypt? I don't know, but I do know the Confederates had no plans to liberate any slave if they could help it. The laws in many Southern states discouraged manumission; slavery was never going to fade out quietly and peacefully.

State's Rights

When you talk to Neoconfederates, you will often be informed that slavery was in no sense the cause of the Civil War. Reading the statements of the causes for secession published by the Confederate States at the time of their secession brings back a sense of reality. Here is one example:

According to the states that seceded from the Union, there was no other stated cause for secession but a desire to preserve the institution of slavery on into the future. Another interesting instance is the state of Georgia:

You can agree with the Neoconfederates on the causes of secession, or you can agree with the seceding states themselves. While in a sense this conflict concerned 'States' Rights,' the only enumerated states' right the South sought to preserve by secession was the right to hold other human beings as property. The Civil War really was all about slavery. In fact it was about nothing else.

Some Neoconfederates react with righteous indignation when they are accused of racism, as often happens. This they vehemently deny. In fact they will go so far as to condemn racism in all its forms, wherever it appears, even in their beloved Confederacy. The thing is, when you study the founding documents of the Confederacy, you must realize that racism isn't something that crops up far downstream, a deviation from a basically sound plan. It's baked into the entire project, from the beginning. Secession was all about preserving slavery,— so they said, not me. When it comes to enslaving white folks, the Confederates were abolitionists as total and absolute as any in New England or Ohio. How about Black folks? well, that's different. Why is it different? Only non-racist answers accepted, please. When you delete the racism from the secessionist project, it turns to powder and collapses. You are removing, not something adventitious, but the entire rationale, the pillars supporting the argument.

War Drums

The claim is made, by Douglas Wilson along with other Neoconfederates, that in the years leading up to the war, the Northern abolitionists beat the war drums, agitating for Civil War and against peace:

"It is simply the recognition that on the slavery issue the drums of war were being beaten by the abolitionists, who were in turn driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 601).

He and his co-author Steve Wilkins had made the same claim in their earlier amphlet, 'Southern Slavery as it Was,' withdrawn due to issue of plagiarism. He got his head handed to him by the professional historians on this issue, because it seems as if he erroneously wishes to portray the Civil War as a crusade to eradicate slavery instigated by Northern abolitionists. This is wrong on several counts. It is in fact the type of ahistorical myth-making that these two authors specialize in. Ending slavery did not even become one of the Union's war aims until midway into the Civil War. For the first half of the war, the federal government's sole objective was restoration of the Union. This would have done what for the abolitionists?

The idea that the abolitionists either wanted war or agitated for it is wrong from the start. They had successfully eliminated slavery in the North, without a shot being fired. Many held political or religious views leaving war as an option of last resort. If any had wanted war, by what means could they have brought it about? The idea that the abolitionists represented a cabal secretly controlling the U.S. government is laughable. They were not running the show. They had not just won an electoral victory. Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party, which had just won a popular election, was anti-slavery in the sense that they wished to prevent slavery from expanding into the territories. Eradicating slavery in states where it already existed was not any part of their platform. They were anti-slavery, but not abolitionists. If the South had not panicked and seceded, Abraham Lincoln would likely have been a one-term President who accomplished very little, as he certainly did not aspire to accomplish much.

While they certainly understood that slavery was a moral wrong, they did not believe there was any legal means by which the federal government could eradicate it. If the South had not panicked upon his election, the most the Republicans ever would have done about slavery is to chip away on the edges. History met Abraham Lincoln standing at the crossroads, though. In historical fact, Lincoln freed those slaves in areas under Union military occupation with a stroke of the pen, in the Emancipation Proclamation, when his legal advisors told him he had the legal authority to do so. So was the expectation of that day the reason why the North started the war?

The North did not start the war! Although you'll hear in the South about 'The War of Northern Aggression,' started by the evil tyrant Abraham Lincoln, in actual history President Lincoln, who was not an abolitionist, responded to Southern secession with a Neville Chamberlain-style, 'Peace at any Price' stance. What aggressor has ever promised the country he invaded that, if they laid down their arms, the status quo ante would be restored? It was the South who wanted war, and they got what they wanted when they fired on Fort Sumter, though once they got it, it turned out they didn't really want it after all.

Certainly it is true there is one abolitionist who wanted war, or at least thought it was inevitable.When John Brown and his little band seized the armory at Harper's Ferry, not only did the slaves of Virginia fail to rise up in servile insurrection, his fellow abolitionists, who preferred non-violence, failed to back him up with moral support. Looking back later, once hostilities had commenced, many people saw John Brown as something like a prophet, who had seen this coming while everyone else was assuring one another, "Peace, peace."

The Civil War, in the end, really was all about slavery. It was not about anything else. Yet the reason why this is so is not because the Civil War was a Northern crusade to eradicate slavery in the South. It did not become anything recognizable as such until it was halfway over; certainly it did not start like that. It's a paradox that a President who was not a theoretical abolitionist wound up the biggest practical abolitionist in history, freeing millions of human beings from bondage with the stroke of his pen. But then once it got into gear, what a glorious sight: Sherman's troops sweeping through Georgia, breaking the captives' chains, liberating slaves as they went, a movable Jubilee, covered in the red, white, and blue flag. Imperfectly carried out by imperfect men, the perfect ones being found unavailable, this is an achievement for which all Americans can be proud.

When we see a clear-cut case of military aggression, we do not ask the innocent, aggrieved and injured victims to explain themselves. No one asks the Poles of 1938, 'Why did you people pick a fight with Adolf Hitler? What were you thinking?' They wanted peace, they wanted to be left alone. So if you start with the unwarranted assumption that the Civil War was the 'War of Northern Aggression,' when a belligerant North disrupted the peace and tranquility of a bucolic, slumbering South, the explanation of the war must lie in the North. Combine that with the oft-heard reminder that this war was about slavery, as indeed it was, and you arrive at this ahistorical conclusion: that the Northern invasion was a crusade to end slavery; it must have been, how else could the war be an act of Northern aggression and also be all about slavery?

But plainly it was not; ending slavery was not one of the North's war aims until midway into the war. It's comical to watch the Neoconfederates chase their tails on this; the same people who put out the 'Northern aggression' version of events will also post memes giving Lincoln quotes that show clearly that their alternative history is not what really happened. They explain that these quotes disconfirm the 'official narrative,' though no one puts out the 'Northern anti-slavery jihad' explanation except themselves. Remove the false portrait of a bucolic, peace-loving South, and historical events can fall back into place, the whole portrait taking on again its natural colors. History should look at what did actually happen, not at what people find flattering to imagine.

But once the Civil War did become an anti-slavery crusade, midway through the carnage, did not the abolitionists jump on board the rapidly moving train and become supporters of the war effort? They did, many of them, but not all. As a dissenter, an abolitionist who did not raise a glass in toast to the Grand Army of the Republic, either during the war or thereafter, may I offer Lysander Spooner, a crank of the first order, who was an abolitionist and a resident of the State of Massachusetts, but no enthusiast for the Union:

"Notwithstanding all the proclamations we have made to mankind, within the last ninety years, that our government rests on consent, and that that was the rightful basis on which any government could rest, the late war has practically demonstrated that our government rests upon force – as much so as any government that ever existed.

"The North has thus virtually said to the world: It was all very well to prate of consent, so long as the objects to be accomplished were to liberate ourselves from our connexion with England, and also to coax a scattered and jealous people into a great national union; but now that those purposes have been accomplished, and the power of the North has become consolidated, it is sufficient for us – as for all governments – simply to say: Our power is our right.

"In proportion to her wealth and population, the North has probably expended more money and blood to maintain her power over an unwilling people, than any other government ever did. And in her estimation, it is apparently the chief glory of her success, and an adequate compensation for all her own losses, and an ample justification for all her devastation and carnage of the South, that all pretence of any necessity for consent to the perpetuity or power of government, is (as she thinks) forever expunged from the minds of the people. In short, the North exults beyond measure in the proof she has given, that a government, professedly resting on consent, will expend more life and treasure in crushing dissent, than any government, openly founded on force, has ever done.

"And she claims that she has done all this in behalf of liberty! In behalf of free government! In behalf of the principle that government should rest on consent!"

(Lysander Spooner, No Treason, Number 1).

I don't agree with him, because anarchism is a foolish political philosopher that would leave the weak as prey to the strong. The man had his own way of arguing, though. Did you know that the U.S. Constitution is null and void, the reason being, among others, that the majority of the inhabitants intended to be governed under it, never signed it? It's true, they never did, the Founders omitted this essential step, which any salesman selling encyclopedia sets would not have omitted. Personally I think we can exempt babes in the cradle, though. He reminds you of the comedy character who objected so strongly to World War II that he wrote a letter. Crackpot that he is, he does make some valid points.

It's a good thing the abolitionists did not go looking for war, because if they had, the 600,000 dead would be laid to their account. As former President Donald J. Trump pointed out, it would have been better to negotiate, really. But once the Civil War did turn into an anti-slavery crusade, what a marvellous sight it was, to see the armies of a great world power sweeping through territory, freeing the slaves as they went. There is nothing to be ashamed of in breaking the chains of those unjustly held in bondage. What these scoundrels want to do is make us ashamed of our country's finest hour. They want to make us ashamed to be Americans. Tell the devil, not today.