October 19, 2021
Lincoln’s Total War
By Valerie Protopapas
Let us look at what we have learned. The need to have a proper understanding of what is commonly, but erroneously referred to as the Civil War has a direct relationship to critical issues facing us today. Americans are used to thinking that upon the ratification of the Constitution, our Republic was established and has remained inviolate since that time; that it was “saved” by Abraham Lincoln in a victorious war waged by the noble and patriotic Union over the traitorous and wicked slave-masters of the South. But we must remember that the war not only ended the South’s attempt at secession—a right guaranteed under that same Constitution—but also in large part, ended the Republic as it was set up under that Constitution by the Founders. For the Republic of 1789 was, for all intents and purposes, the first of many American nations. In 1865, the victory of the national government over the States—and not just the Southern States!—in the Civil War initiated a series of subsequent “virtual nations,” each with a central government more powerful than the one that preceded it. Let us trace this evolutionary path:
1779: The power of the Sovereign States is supreme; these are individual nations as admitted in the Treaty of Paris; the new nation governs through the Articles, first of Association and then of Confederation indicating a growing desire to work towards a perfection of their not yet completed union.
1789: The power of the States dominates but a Federal Government outside of the States is created by the Constitution, a compact that replaces the Articles. This government has enumerated and limited powers in order to address those situations beyond the scope of individual States even acting in concert.
1861: With the States (and culture) of the South confined within its original geographic borders, the power of the rest of the Union has grown to the point at which these States are able to force their will on the Southern States, using the income generated in those States to succor and support the rest. American manufacturing is supported by monies raised by high tariffs that hurt most of all the agricultural South without any compensation to those States. This situation was defined by Missouri Senator Thomas H. Benton in 1828—three decades before the Cotton States acted to escape political and financial servitude. Speaking on the floor of the Senate Benton stated:
“Before the (American) revolution [the South] was the seat of wealth … Wealth has fled from the South and settled in regions north of the Potomac: and this in the face of the fact, that the South … has exported produce, since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? … Under Federal legislation, the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue …Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. That expenditure flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this!”
1865: The Federal Government triumphs in war over those States wishing to exercise what had been recognized as their rights under the Constitution to leave the original union and form a new one of their own choosing. This military victory carried forth in the name of that government – Lincoln never spoke of the Union, but of the “government” – overturns the Constitution of 1789 and replaces it with a “constitutional understanding” in which the Federal Government is dominant over all the States and not just those it had defeated in war. This situation reflects the new reality begun decades before the War involving an alliance of commerce with the expanded coercive power of the central government in order to facilitate their respective agendas: profit and power.
1933: The power of the Central Government is now invulnerable; the States serve as mere counties able to exercise power only at the local level. The “emergencies” of World War I, the Great Depression and the Second World War further strengthen its power, permitting programs such as the New Deal and other direct intrusions into the lives of the People over which the States have neither control nor influence.
1965: The power of the National Government is now absolute; what little power remains to the States is further marginalized. Federal affiliation with the civil rights movement and social programs such as the Great Society solidify central power while further reducing what small powers had remained in the States. More and more formerly state matters—such as crime—are removed from local and State purview to federal control. Less than ten years later, the Supreme Court strikes down all State legislation rulings on abortion by declaring the killing of children in the womb a “constitutional right.” All efforts to affect this finding by the States or the People are dismissed out of hand. Also at this point, large lobbying groups in both the public and private sectors wield more power at the federal level than do the formerly sovereign States much less the People.
2008: The Federal System, long existing in name only is finally abandoned. Both the States and the People are powerless in the grip of a government that no longer recognizes even a remnant of the Constitution and the Founding Principles. Still, many Americans continue to believe that the Republic still exists and in the name of Washington, Jefferson and the Constitution they work to influence a situation that has deteriorated to the point at which the establishment of an actual police state seems not a question of “if,” but of “when.”
2021: Today there is an ongoing powerful and ubiquitous effort to finally, once and for all, consign to oblivion the ideas and ideals that drove the People of the South to secede from a union they considered antithetical to the well-being of their people—ideas and ideals which they continue to boldly declare through the use of Confederate symbols, monuments and memorials. The fact that their cause is all but lost can be seen in the ongoing successful war against those same monuments and symbols.
Supporters of this crusade against the South—for this remains a religious war—declare that the killing of hundreds of thousands—perhaps as many as a million—Americans and the destruction of a people in the so-called Civil War was justified to end slavery, a claim that is demonstrably false. But even those who care nothing about the war, its origins or its meaning, revere Lincoln as a hero and a Savior of the nation. He was, we are endlessly told, America’s greatest President. Indeed, Lincoln’s monument is a temple fit for worship rather than a mere memorial. But those who justify Lincoln and what was done in the War of Secession with the plea that “it was necessary”—for whatever reason—justify every tyrant in history who has raped, pillaged, enslaved and slaughtered his way into power as well as every one who will rise in the future.
Embracing the motive for tyranny neither changes its moral dynamics nor its consequences. If we permit the final extermination of Southern heritage and the memory of those boys in gray who fought and died for their homes and their God-given liberties, we consign not just the South, but America, that great experiment, to oblivion.
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