Recent surveys clearly demonstrate why “Civil War” history is so skewed to support Leftist ideology. Leftist ideologues dominate the modern history discipline by a 33:1 margin. Gone is any semblance of balance so necessary to the free exchange of ideas. Gone is the opportunity for reasoned evaluation of all viewpoints regarding secession and war. Gone is the very opportunity for truth to win the day as a product of critical evaluation. The Southern half of that evidence can never even see the light of day in any semblance of fair consideration.
That the “Civil War” is now made a convenient poster war with a singular focus on the interminable “oppression” of “white supremacy” is no surprise. This attendant issue that existed on the periphery of the 19th century conflict is now made the central theme because it is fashionable as a politically expedient exercise of crass presentism.
History students are no longer taught how to think. They are taught what to think. Much evidence is spun, suppressed or dismissed as “lost cause myth” – the catch phrase employed to avoid any serious consideration of what the South said and demonstrated was its motive in secession and war. The Confederacy is villainized, creating a rallying focal point by which students are more easily manipulated to become, not scholarly historians, but rather social justice warriors. Naïve young minds are manipulated into narrowly viewing human history through a neo-Marxist lens as a great struggle between “oppressors and oppressed.” Generations of history students have, for the past sixty years, been craftily molded into a constituency for the advancement of a political agenda. How successful the powerful in academia have been in herding students into universities that are now, for the most part, no more than Leftist ideological echo chambers. A place where propaganda that’s custom-made for ideological preferences can be craftily administered through a fanciful manipulation of history.
However, the Left should not bear all the blame. Before they overran the academic history discipline beginning in the 1960’s, it was the Republicans who, before the “Civil War” was even over, began carefully spinning the war to be what it was not, a humanitarian crusade to “free slaves,” instead of a reprehensible war of political and economic control that had long been disguised by the euphemism of “preserving the Union.” In reality, it never ceased to be a war of economic control. That control was made possible BY “preserving the Union.” America’s founding principle of “government by consent of the governed,” the essence of freedom, was supplanted by forcing States to remain in a Union against the consent of their polities, which is the opposite of freedom. All done for the goal of preserving revenue while simultaneously preventing economic competition from a Confederation of free trade States forming on the Union’s Southern border.
When the absurdity of this abandonment of true freedom was realized and began being exposed around the civilized world, a crafty shift was made to cover the North’s inhumane and hypocritical bloody tracks with the ruse that the war was to “free slaves.” It was the perfect moral ruse to cover an immoral war. And it held a convenient political motive for the Republican Party as well in realizing that the freed slaves could be manipulated into a political constituency thinking the Party had their true interest at heart. The reality was that Republicans sought to use freed slaves to punish hated Southerners and maintain political control in the South. It was a strategy based upon creating racial animosity in the South where it had not previously existed. This eventually led to Southern appropriation of the North’s “Black Codes” in the form of segregational Jim Crow laws as a means of pushing back against political scheming. For the first time, a strong anti-black sentiment evolved, and segregation was introduced in the South. It was a direct result of a Republican political strategy that turned the descendants of former masters against the descendants of former slaves and vice versa.
The push-back against Northern intrusion in Southern affairs tired the North. As soon as the Republican Party realized it had enough new Northern allied States created in the West to maintain political power without the South, it abandoned the Southern blacks to the racial animosity it had created. It then turned all its so-claimed “egalitarian ideals” on the Plains Indians in a crusade that stopped just short of extermination.
Yet the new ruse was firmly established among Republicans – that they had led a great moral crusade against slavery, and Lincoln was made into “the Great Emancipator.” It was all a fabrication. And though historians of the first half of the twentieth century knew better, Northern politicians continued to chest thump and play the “slavery emancipation card” as an integral part of their imaginary American identity. Still today, Republican “neocons” champion Lincoln, and the ideal of an “American Exceptionalism” based on this fantastical claim. The claim, even if it were true, would certainly be an “exception” in human history rather than anything “exceptional.” Even if it were true, America would be the only developed nation that had to resort to a bloody war to end slavery. Hardly something to champion as exceptional!
Had Yankee cupidity not ruled the day in the Lincoln administration, there would have been no war, no divisive Reconstruction, and slavery could have been ended in a manner that held a genuine humane concern for the freed slaves. Instead, racial animosities were engineered by scheming politicians that led to another 100+ years of black oppression in America.
A few years ago, I spoke with a person who had traveled to Americana, Brazil to conduct research regarding the history and society of this small municipality. Americana was founded by former Confederates who had fled, along with their slaves (at the slave’s request), to Brazil rather than live under Yankee rule. It was noticed that there was no history of racial animosity in Americana like there was in America. Black and white descendants celebrated together the founding of their city. When the citizens were asked why there was no racial animosity the response was “because we did not have Reconstruction.”
Don’t look for a discussion of all this in the modern Leftist dominated history discipline. It doesn’t fit the historiographical method.
If Jefferson Davis’ first act as President of the CSA was to free the slaves, would the north still have invaded the South?
It WAS called the “union” Army for a reason.
Thanks.
I had a dedicated class on the Civil War back in college. It was exactly what you’d expect: North good, South bad. Southern perspectives were rarely considered unless they were particularly odious examples – similarly odious Northern perspectives were quietly ignored.
.At a point before the California primary, political operative Stuart Spencer called on Rockefeller to “summon that fabled nexus of money, influence, and condescension known as the Eastern Establishment”. Rockefeller replied, “You are looking at it, buddy, I am all that is left”.[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Republican
Outstanding. You presented this perfectly!
As the old saying goes….it is easier to fool someone than convince them they’ve been fooled.
The Lincoln lie and the myth of the glorious union fighting a moral war is a stain on this country. The northern lies told non-stop about the causes and reasons for the war is a real injustice. The reason people choose to ignore the facts about Lincoln and his tyranny (if they are ever fortunate enough to hear it) is because it would challenge them to think critically and possibly change their mind on the subject. The education system has not created people who can think critically.
They have created obedient, miserable sheep that are more likely to become violent or irrational (IQ issue?) than to consider another opinion. More often than not, they will dismiss any evidence because it upsets their understanding of their fake world – then they’ll just smugly shut the conversation down by saying well at least it (the war and the killing of 100’s of thousands of our people) freed the slaves. Another lie.
As Jack Nicholson once said in the movie, A Few Good Men; “You can’t handle the truth!”.
My thoughts exactly for the modern, historically ignorant American.
I agree.
A very good summation.
I have given thought to this now for years, having lived in both sections of the country.
I find the bias against Southerners to be far, far deeper than economic.
One’s subconscious. Anything not accepted, in one’s surface character, is then repressed into this deep mind. *Then* this disturbing thought is then projected into the outer world.
A reviewer of the movie “DELIVERANCE” set me to realize that these Southern mountain men were acting out the repressed and hidden inner life of those CEO boaters. The CEOs were experiencing their own inner life from outside of them!
When I lived “up North”, I often heard the expression, from men; “oh…my wife does all of my feelings for me”!
Also, the South has something that angers many liberal people. Religion is included in one’s life, here. Oh yes, churchgoers sin and even ministers sin sometimes. The Bible says clearly, that no one is free of sin. The presence of God, in one’s life, though, is supposed to raise people up to elevate each person to rise above their animal nature. Living only in animal nature is a Sin. Power, control, sex of any kind, and materialism. The standard culprits.
The South also has family.
The South also has a culture consisting of the first two ideas.
This is how a child is supposed to be raised! Many liberals wish to remove *ALL* of these three things!
Also!
I have read now for years that if a man with a Southern accent were to move to a large northern city, this person is very often asked to remove his Southern accent and talk just like everyone else.
However… I do not ever hear about a Northern person moving to the South and when he gets a good job, he is asked to remove his Northern accent!
A Colony country, the South. There are many reasons why the Southern people are asked, then Told, to come around to the Mother country’s way of life.
I have covered only a few reasons.
I once sat in a donut shop. I was talking with the new owners. A nice couple from the rural North. One day, suddenly three black-suited men walked into the shop. They announced that they were from corporate headquarters, the district headquarters for these franchises.
Did they welcome the new owners? Did they ask if the owners had any questions or concerns?
NO!!
They *very* pushed tried to convince them to buy a $300,000 conversion package.
“Quick! In. Out. take the counter out. Take out most of the tables. Fast quick in out, is the future.”
They must have had black ink for their blood!
These CEOs were from the urban North.
I muttered to myself. “damyankees”!
Freestone Wilson
Mr. Wilson,
Very well said. I believe you are correct in your suspicion that bias against Southerners goes further than economics. I’ve heard it argued that discrimination against Southerners is the last socially acceptable form of bigotry. Growing up in the North, this assertion reflects my experience with the more elite (or those that fancy themselves “elite”) in Northern society. Common folk may share in these sentiments, but not necessarily.
There is something else to remember here. As with all wars, the War AGAINST the States was an economic as well as a cultural and even a RELIGIOUS war. Certain things were in effect as the war drew near. First, the spirit of New England ~ anti-traditional Christian, big government, collectivist and very much anti~Southern ~ had spread across the country. It was no longer limited to New England!
Second, the “North” ~ that is, the rest of the country! ~ HATED blacks. There were in place in a number of States, anti-black codes refusing entry of FREE blacks into those States. Southern whites were despised because they were considered to have been “soiled” by their relationship with blacks, a relationship that was amicable if, indeed, hierarchical in nature. It was for this reason that Northern newspapers said of Thomas Jefferson at his election as President that he was the country’s “first black President.” That had nothing to do with Jefferson owning slaves or what, if any, relationship he may have had with Sally Hemmings but because he was a Southerner. Nobody would have dared insult Washington, of course, and Adams who followed was from Massachusetts so neither of those were “in play” so to speak.
The next problem was that many in the North had no problems with the South leaving the Union. Indeed, when a Southerner stopped federal spending on some Northern commercial interests in order to pay the nation’s debt, he was approached by Northerners SUGGESTING THAT THE SOUTH SECEDE so that the nation could “grow” according to their idea of “growth.” Indeed, many Northern newspapers supported secession pointing out that it was a right under the Constitution. It wasn’t until those same people who wanted the South (and the blacks GONE) understood that a sovereign nation, “the CSA,” on the same continent with “the USA” but with a 15% tariff as opposed the the North’s 45% tariff would financially RUIN the USA that you started to get a demand that the South be kept in the Union by force! Read history and you will find out how quickly the support by many in the North for the departure of the South changed when this economic reality became known!
There was so much more in the entire matter than what we are permitted to believe and especially espouse!
If I had research assistants, I’d assign them the task to read every newspaper printed from 1861 through 1865 for a Northern state(s) and record when and in what context “slavery” and “union” are reported as causus belli and justification thereof. I bet the results would be interesting.