The Myth of the Righteous Cause

History is the propaganda of the victorious.

– Voltaire

The ubiquitous claim that the so-called “Civil War” (which it was not), was “about” slavery (which it was not), and the “righteous” North went to war against the “traitorous” South to free the slaves (which it did not) is the most bald-faced lie of American history, and, as Thomas Carlyle stated in his Latter-day Pamphlets (IV – The New Downing Street) all lies are cursed and damned from the beginning.

“Civil Wars” are waged among factions struggling for control of the government in question. The Southern States did not want to control the United States government, they only wanted to peacefully withdraw from it and form their own – sanctioned by the Declaration of Independence, which states “[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security…” The various southern States, in their various Ordinances of Secession – ratified by the same sovereign State Conventions that had earlier ratified their respective accession to the Union – delineated their various complaints and many stated reasons for their peaceful secession from that Union. Virginia, the “Mother of States and of Statesmen,” remained firmly loyal to the Union she had sacrificed so much to create. But when Abraham Lincoln called for troops to subjugate the seceded States and drive them back into the Union, Virginia refused, and told the Lincoln government “You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and we will meet it in the same spirit that you have exhibited towards the South.” “YOU,” Abraham Lincoln, have chosen to inaugurate the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Treason? The South did not commit treason defending herself from Lincoln’s war of invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance. Abraham Lincoln committed treason for waging war against them. Abraham Lincoln did not recognize the southern States as being out of the Union, and therefore committed treason by his own definition by invading them according to Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution, which states that “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them…” Lincoln provoked the firing on Ft. Sumter in 1861 just as King George III provoked Massachusetts at Lexington and Concord in 1775, and Lincoln got the war he wanted.

Slavery? The war was not “about” slavery. Abraham Lincoln said so himself in his First Inaugural Address. He said he only wanted to “save the Union and collect the revenue” – that is, “save the Union” in order to collect the Southern tariff revenue for the benefit of the North. Furthermore, cotton was “king” in those days, but with the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and free trading with Europe, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse. Lincoln didn’t go to war to free any slaves. Lincoln went to war to drive the “Cotton Kingdom” back into the Union at the point of the bayonet. That is what the war was “about.” Slavery was just the smelly “red herring” covering his tracks in the “Myth of the Righteous Cause.”

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was strictly a desperate war measure issued to keep Europe from recognizing the Confederacy and lifting the Union blockade when the South was about to win her independence. It only claimed to free the slaves behind Confederate lines. Otherwise, it plainly stated that slavery was just fine with “The Great Emancipator” as long as one were loyal to his government, proven six months later when he admitted West Virginia, a “slave State,” into the Union – and proven by the fact that slavery was Constitutional in the United States of America until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December of 1865, after Lincoln and the Southern Confederacy both were in their graves.

The North did not “go to war to free the slaves,” for she did not even free her own until after it was over. But even then she merely replaced chattel slavery with the far more discrete and far more profitable “debt slavery,” and merely replaced “Ole Marster” with a Wall Street banker – who has enslaved us all, and all of our unborn generations of children, with the servicing of a forty trillion dollar National Debt that will never be repaid.

“The Myth of the Righteous Cause” is nothing more than pure and unadulterated “Presentism,” which is, by definition, history twisted to conform to a political agenda, and which is, by definition, a lie. Follow the Yankee dollar and know the Truth.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

H.V. Traywick, Jr.

A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, the author graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1967 with a degree in Civil Engineering and a Regular Commission in the US Army. His service included qualification as an Airborne Ranger, and command of an Engineer company in Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star. After his return, he resigned his Commission and ended by making a career as a tugboat captain. During this time he was able to earn a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of Richmond, with an international focus on war and cultural revolution. He is a member of the Jamestowne Society, the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Virginia, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Society of Independent Southern Historians. He currently lives in Richmond, where he writes, studies history, literature and cultural revolution, and occasionally commutes to Norfolk to serve as a tugboat pilot.

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