I really don't like being put on the defensive by aggressive progressives, especially those who reflexively charge "racist" to anyone who does not agree with them. Although my surname is quite common in French Canada (my great-grandparents emigrated late in the nineteenth century), it is rare in the US, especially outside New England. It's like if and when others run into a Guillemette, they ask if I'm related to them, like do I know this family in Florida. (I think my Dad did have a cousin there, but I never met them.) No, I never encountered the kind of discrimination my black, Latino or Asian friends did, but I understood what it was like to be different; my first language was French, which became a problem when I attended public school kindergarten; I was left-handed and there were other things. I grew up as a military brat in the fully integrated USAF. I had black and Latino friends and schoolmates. I attended a high school in the suburbs of a Texas border city and a Catholic college in the southwest barrio of San Antonio. One of my doctoral officemates was an immigrant from Taiwan. As I recently tweeted, I applied for a faculty position at Grambling State in 1994 and was made a good offer. I've had black, Latino, and female supervisors, a Native American client manager. I've worked with people from Bangladesh, India, and other countries, even on project teams with project members from different countries. I've dated women from different countries, races/ethnicities. I have nephews and nieces who have married blacks or Latinas. I, a Roman Catholic, have been best friends with a Baptist, a Jew and a Hindu; I had a Muslim client manager. I didn't need diversity training; I have lived a life with diversity.
A few weeks back I rebuked an anti-Confederate meme on Twitter and gently scolded the Twitter user for s rather superficial view of Southern history and culture. Now, to be honest, I'm not really surprised that I would get pushback in a politically correct world where woke progressive young people consider it a rite of passage to demonstrate their outrage against the history of slavery by the abolition of Southern history, monuments, etc. Explaining why I feel a need to respond to this rubbish would require some length; I have a contrarian streak, I also loathe presentist bias and one-sided, oversimplified portrayals, including of historical events. Like almost everyone else, I grew up in a school system which reinforced Lincolnian mythology; my Dad had been assigned to Shaw AFB, SC during my early junior high years, and I recall a family trip to Ft. Sumter, arguably the scene that triggered the Civil War. My Mom had talked about the Underground Railroad. I didn't have to be taught how slavery was an abominable institution; it was intuitively obvious.
I don't recall exactly when I started to question the Lincoln mythology. I recall having stumbled upon and being impressed by an essay on economic fascism by libertarian economist Tom DiLorenzo. I eventually discovered that he had written a couple of contrarian books on Lincoln. I don't think, to this day, I've ever read them and never bought them, but I've probably read several articles and watched multiple videos on them and related topics (debates, speeches, etc.) (Now I would expect pushback from professional historians with a vested interest in Lincoln mythology resenting this interdisciplinary interloper who has not been trained in the methods of their discipline, intellectual cherrypicking of facts, etc.; you'll see some of that, for instance, in the Wikipedia review of DiLorenzo. No doubt some of it is professional jealousy that an economist has achieved sales most will never achieve in their lifetime. As someone who has done interdisciplinary research (technical communication and applied psychology), I'm not surprised.) I do know DiLorenzo is or was affiliated with Abbeville Institute.
I had also taken an interest in the writings of contrarian historian Tom Woods, who had penned a popular politically incorrect US history, the free market and Catholicism, etc., Brion McClanahan, a Southern historian and Wilson's last PhD student, also penned a politically incorrect guide. (Woods, in s recent podcast I clipped in my daily blog, gave a blistering quiz on Lincoln.) McClanahan is an affiliate in Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom and a frequent guest on Woods' daily podcast; Woods and DiLorenzo are also affiliated with Mises Institute.)
I am naturally intellectually curious and an interdisciplinary scholar by nature; what DiLorenzo did was to prick holes in the dogma of the Church of Saint Lincoln, the War of Good vs. Evil. .These were indisputable historical facts, including Lincoln's unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus, his executive order cracking down on his critics in the free press, etc. His holy war on slavery is contradicted by his very own first inauguration address. the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to Union slave states, his own racial views have been called into question, including his advocacy of free black emigration. There were some hints that the Confederacy had put slavery on the diplomatic table and implied promises of emancipation for slaves enlisted in the war effort, although critics may point out the (late) timing and desperate (losing) contexts.
[I remain an independent thinker. To give an example, Clyde Wilson cited in a post supporting DiLorenzo against pro-Lincoln historians a pro-secession southern Presbyterian minister who argued for the eventual emancipation of slaves. I did find a reference on that minister that he had a more nuanced, limited view of slaveowner rights.]
I know at least earlier in the nineteenth century there were at least over 100 anti-slavery societies in the South, The South was also losing free labor, who had to compete against slave labor. to the more prosperous North; .The South shared a long. porous border with the North, which likely would have been more reluctant to recognize slaveowner rights; the costs of holding/keeping slaves would have grown, and the majority of non-slaveholding households would have resented their tax dollars subsidizing slaveholder interests.. Without Southern votes, the North didn't have opposition to block amendments to the Constitution or to add free states to the Union. The South lacked the diversified, more prosperous Northern economy. Foreign consumers would likely show a preference for cotton and other exports produced with free labor. So slavery was on the losing side of history and its end was inevitable; it had ended in other nations and states without killing or injuring over 600K people, just like it did in Brazil a generation later.
So a lot of us libertarians are critics of Lincoln's bloody invasion of the South. It has nothing to do with the abomination of slavery, which we regard as a cardinal sin against the unalienable right of liberty. It has more to do with the principle of non-aggression and the idea of voluntary association, which did not expire with application to the Union; in fact, some had supported secession of the North from a morally corrupt union with the slaveholding south::
Many antislavery leaders initially supported the right of southern states to secede from the Union. For decades William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips had advocated “disunionism,” calling for the North to secede from the South. But even less radical antislavery types believed that the right of peaceful secession was embodied in the Declaration of Independence and should be respected. In early 1861, for example, the antislavery minister James Freeman Clarke wrote that the right to secede was in accordance with “the principles of self‐government, which are asserted in the Declaration of Independence.” Similarly, Horace Greeley, the influential antislavery editor of the New York Tribune, wrote that the southern states that had left the Union were merely applying the “great principle” enunciated in the Declaration, according which “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” If this “justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776,” then Greeley asked why the same reasoning “would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.”
Proto-libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner was a persistent critic of Lincoln's War, arguing the cited rationale was a two-faced sham hypocritical rationalization on behalf of corrupt Northern business interests seeking economic domination of the South.
Foe many Southerners, including Robert E. Lee, the issue of resisting Lincoln's unjustifiable invasion had nothing to do with protecting the abomination of the institution of slavery but of protecting one's homeland from a morally unjustifiable invasion. Most Confederate soldiers were not vested in slave ownership; they came from non-slaveholding households. They were defending their homes and their way of life. So when you see things like monuments slowly emerging in the conquered South, as it took the region nearly 5 decades to recover from the war, saved up from the pennies of war widows and their children, it has nothing to do with nostalgia for evil days of slavery, but in recognizing the sacrifices of their loved ones.
I personally loathe the attacks on Southern symbols. I've never owned a Confederate battle flag or even visited a Confederate memorial (that I can remember). I remember the hoopla some time back over UT/Austin pulling up Confederate statues on campus and putting them in some museum. I'm like, "Dude, I lived on or just off that campus for 2.5 years, and I didn't even realize they were there.. Maybe I had walked past them and never knew. But how pathetic do you have to be to try to control what other people can see? I don't need politically correct censors imposing themselves over the rights of others. As a native Texas, I don't take pride that it had joined the Confederacy or supported the evil institution of slavery. But defining people by what they did/didn't do during 4 years in American history? That's not a justifiable summary of one's life and net worth. Lee, for instance, had a military career with the US military before he declined Lincoln's offer to lead in the Union war effort against the South.
So, getting back to my tweet critical of the anti-Confederate meme, I had suggested that the OP learn something about Southern culture and tradition, e.g., by checking with Brion McClanahan and the Abbeville Institute. Twitter doesn't always notify me when I get a hostile response. It's only when I checked my Twitter summary page which I do only every so often, when I found my top mention was a progressive who responded (with high-fives by maybe 7 other Twitter morons). loosely paraphrased, "Read revisionist white-supremacist historians? Get the hell out of here..."
I've seen or watched a lot of content from McClanahan and the Abbeville Institute. I've never heard anything remotely racist from any one of them; of course, they oppose the presentist jihad on Confederate symbols and monuments. I've never heard them say anything remotely supportive of slavery or racist policies. It's just sad that people who have probably never heard of them can libel them as such. It does not speak well of "progressive tolerance".
