I'm not really a Civil War buff. I lived nearly a decade in the Baltimore suburbs, maybe an hour-plus drive away, and I never went once to Gettysburg (or to any battlefield memorial). I did live in South Carolina during my sixth and seventh grade years, and the family did go out to Fort Sumter. I was taught the usual account of the Civil War story: how it was a necessary but costly war to eliminate the unquestionably evil institution of slavery.
So why have I shifted my point of view? I am not in a state of denial that the 15% or so of Southerners who owned slaves were vested in protecting the institution. I am well-aware of the historical divisiveness of the issue between states, and politicians on both sides were political whores. But here are some of my thoughts?
First, I've never been comfortable with this idea that secession was treasonous, that one generation of ancestors forged a perpetual bond, no voice, no matter whether the other party did, whether they acted in good faith. Certainly when men are courting women, they are on best behavior. What do we make of an innocent young woman, say, who isn't aware that her boyfriend is a closet pedophile or sexually promiscuous--or has an anger problem, prone to physical violence, especially at the expense of women and children? Maybe the young woman was naive enough to believe she could change a bad boy.
But just as the First Amendment guarantees our right to assemble, it also necessarily upholds our right to separate, otherwise this is not freedom but compulsion. with one side using force to enforce an unequal bargain which amounts to involuntary occupation and annexation. This is just as much a contradiction to the founding principles of liberty as chattel slavery.
It's, of course, clear the Union didn't have an issue with secession when West Virginia split from Virginia or Maine from Massachusetts. Any argument that it's okay for some subset of a state but not to states themselves is arbitrary and unprincipled.
Second, one could argue that secession really implied the eventual death of slavery in the South. Why? Well, for one thing, freed of pro-slavery Southern Democrats, the remaining Union would have surely repealed the Fugitive Slave Laws, prohibited slavery, etc. The Confederacy would have a long border with the Union. The risk of losing slaves would have dropped their market value. As I have mentioned in past posts, the lack of a diversified economy in the South, the difficulty of competing for fair wages give slave labor not only meant political resentment for subsidizing the escalating costs of slave recovery but an incentive to seek better wages and opportunities in the north.
Third, no matter how many (including libertarians) furiously dispute otherwise, the war was not about slavery. Lincoln said in his first inaugural address that he was willing to write slave-holding permanence into the Union. He also said that he will not tolerate the loss of protective tariff revenues in the South (and he did not like the idea of a long border with the low-tariff Confederacy where merchants could arbitrage the tariff rate differences). The South was less populous and prosperous, had no professional standing military. The South was fighting an overwhelmingly defensive war; it had no ambitions to conquer the North. It simply wanted to live apart peacefully. Slavery was more of a tactical issue during the campaign; the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the remaining slave slaves in the Union/North. Lincoln hoped to break the struggling Southern economy by encouraging a slave rebellion. The progressives can yell all day it was about slavery. Maybe the Confederate states didn't believe in a man who was elected with no Southern electoral votes. But the proof is in the pudding: Lincoln invaded the South, even after saying that he believed that he had no constitutional authority to interfere with the institution of slavery. He only delivered the Emancipation Proclamation after the war had become difficult and it itself was a double standard, not a principled stand. Furthermore, it was blatantly unconstitutional because as Lincoln himself conceded in his inaugural address, he lacked authority to do so; it was done without due process.
There is something inherently unholy and hypocritical about a government born out of secession from the British empire using force to hold onto the South. The government was designed as a check on tyranny of the majority. It's like a wife-beater insisting that his real purpose in regaining his unwilling spouse is maintaining the sanctity of the marital bond. It is disingenuous to use terms like "rebellion", "insurrection" or "treason"; the secession was peaceful, and the balance between the federal government and the states is explicitly recognized in the 10th Amendment.
I've said all or parts of this in prior posts; so what triggered this rant? Well, the presentist bias and attempts to expunge any and all symbols of the South or Confederacy have continued. Even our Founding Fathers have come under scrutiny, with Washington's own parish church removing a commemorative plaque so "visitors would feel more comfortable" (censorship so as to placate some manipulative trouble-making anonymous politically correct "progressive") John Kelly called Robert E. Lee an "honorable man" (whose own plaque was also removed from said church) and argued that more compromise would have averted the bloody Civil War--which promptly drew outrage from the "progressive" elite, like some HuffPo piece declaring "I'm done with Kelly!" Then there was the Twitter troll I stumbled across who claimed to be a descendant of Robert E. Lee (which he seems to use as a preemptive right to express a relevant opinion) and promptly labeled him a traitor. Not to mention one of my alma maters (University of Texas) relocated some Confederate statues; now I never even saw said statues during my two years in Austin, but it was sad to see a former college mindlessly surrendering to the intolerant Left; universities should accommodate the free exchange of ideas.
I do not know why these politically correct elites seem obsessed with re-fighting the Civil War, maligning the reputation of great men who are being judged, not by their historical context, norms and values, but some presumptuous, intolerant multicultural ideology aiming to scrub away history that embarrasses and outrages them. This is fundamentally anti-liberty with no sense of tolerance and national reconciliation, which simplistically reduces men (admittedly flawed) into a proxy for some cause. Lee, for instance, opposed secession (but would not take up arms against his home state) and in an infamous letter to his wife in 1856 said "slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country". Not just that, but Lee actually opposed Confederate memorials, considering them a divisive element in national reconciliation.
As for me, memorials serve a moral purpose; in the case of the Civil War, we see a historical tragedy, where advocates considered over 640,000 war dead a necessary sacrifice to abolish the dying institution of slavery, never mind the fact it would have been cheaper to buy out slaveholders. Like the remaining concentration camps post WWII serving to remind people of the tragedy of European wars and political fanaticism, Civil War memorials remind us of the evil consequences of unchecked federal power.
