ACdd2: The Case of USA

[bbcweb]

Has the USA been born for & in ACdd, Armed Citizens direct democracy?

How about the Civil War? Could that be the only American act to
destroy ACdd? The American States and the Federal Government have
been working for and controlled and managed by big corporations, since
one amendment in the US Constitution, according to one gentleman's
statement at the BookTV, the last weekend. He maintains, therefore
people should work for local rather than State rights:


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'The Official, Politically-Correct Cause of the 'Civil War'', by
Thomas J. DiLorenzo:
Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Another Big Lincoln Lie Exposed
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo206.html

"" The memo has gone out. Since 2011 is the 150th anniversary of the
start of the War to Prevent Southern Independence the Lincoln Cult,
aided and abetted by the many worshippers of the centralized,
bureaucratic, Leviathan state that he founded, has been hard at work
since the first week of January endlessly repeating the politically-
correct version of the one sole cause theory of the "Civil War."

Unlike all other wars in human history, the "Civil War" is said to
have one and only one cause. This was not always the case; university
courses on the war during the 1960s and ’70s frequently used as a text
Kenneth Stampp’s The Causes of the Civil War. Stampp was a former
president of the American Historical Association. His scholarship has
been replaced with a-historical political correctness on today’s
college campuses.

Supposed "proof" of the "one sole cause" theory is that when the
Southern states seceded in 1860-61, some Southern politicians defended
the institution of slavery. Therefore, the story goes, slavery was the
sole cause of the war. The not-so-implicit assumptions behind this
assertion are the following: 1) Lincoln was about to abolish slavery
"with the stroke of a pen" as soon as he took the oath of office; 2)
Southerners understood this; therefore, Southern secession amounted to
kidnapping of the slaves; and 3) Lincoln launched an invasion of the
South to free the kidnapped slaves. This is the only way in which
Southern secession could have necessitated war. Read any of Harry
Jaffa’s books if you want "verification" of this "official view."


Everything about this politically-correct fantasy is patently false,
regardless of how many times it is repeated in the New York Times and
Washington Post. Some Southern politicians did indeed defend slavery,
but not as strongly as Abraham Lincoln did in his first inaugural
address, where he supported the enshrinement of Southern slavery
explicitly in the U.S. Constitution (the "Corwin Amendment") for the
first time ever. Coming from the president of the United States, this
was the strongest defense of slavery ever made by an American
politician.

Some Southern politicians did say that their society was based on
white supremacy, but so did Abraham Lincoln and most other Northern
politicians. "I as much as any man want the superior position to
belong to the white race," Lincoln said in a debate with Stephen
Douglas in 1858. When Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery into
the new territories (but not Southern slavery), he gave the standard
Northern white supremacist reason: We want the territories to be
reserved "for free white labor," he said. The Lincoln cultists can
quote Alexander Stephens’ "cornerstone" speech all they want, but the
truth is that Abraham Lincoln, and most of the leaders of the
Republican Party, were in total agreement with Stephens. White
supremacy was as much (if not more of) a "cornerstone" of Northern
society as it was of Southern society in the 1860s.


The abolition societies of the North never claimed more than two
percent of the Northern adult population as members. Lincoln was never
an abolitionist, distanced himself from them politically, and even
boasted in a speech in New York City that "we have abolitionists in
Illinois; we shot one the other day." All of this makes it extremely
unlikely that anyone who voted for Lincoln in the 1860 election did so
because they thought he would end Southern slavery (which of course
the Republican Party Platform of 1860 did not promise).

More importantly, secession in no way necessitates war, regardless of
what the reasons for secession are. The reasons for secession, and the
reasons why there was a war, are two entirely separate issues. When
New Englanders openly and publicly plotted to secede for fourteen
years after Thomas Jefferson’s election, culminating in the 1814
secession convention in Hartford, Connecticut, neither President
Jefferson nor President Madison (or anyone else) said one word about
the appropriate response to a Northern-state secession being
"invasion," "force," and "bloodshed." These are the words Lincoln used
in his first inaugural address to describe what would happen in any
Southern state that seceded.


It is unlikely that anyone even dreamed of invading Massachusetts,
Connecticut and Rhode Island and bombing and burning Boston, Hartford
and Providence into a smoldering ruin while murdering thousands of New
Englanders, women and children included, if New England were to
secede. Indeed, when Jefferson was asked what would happen if New
England seceded, he said in a letter that New Englanders, like all
other Americans "would all be our children" and he would wish them all
well. More recently, all of the Soviet republics, and all of Eastern
and Central Europe peacefully seceded from the Soviet Union. Secession
does not necessitate war.

No American president had the power in the nineteenth century to
abolish slavery "with the stroke of a pen." The slaves were slaves
before Southern secession, and they were slaves after secession.
Indeed, as Alexander Stephens once correctly remarked, slavery was
more secure in the union than out of it because of the Fugitive Slave
Clause, which Lincoln strongly supported, and because of the 1857 Dred
Scott Supreme Court decision.

No respectable historian would argue that Lincoln invaded the South to
free the slaves. Even his Emancipation Proclamation was only a "war
measure" that would have become defunct if the war ended the next day
– and it was written so as to avoid freeing any slaves since it only
applied to "rebel territory." Both Lincoln and Congress announced
publicly that their purpose was not to disturb slavery but to "save
the union," a union that they actually destroyed philosophically by
destroying its voluntary nature, as established by the founders. All
states, North and South, became wards or appendages of the central
government in the post-1865 era.

What Lincoln did say very clearly about war in his first inaugural
address was that it was his duty "to collect the duties and imposts,"
but "beyond that there will no be any invasion of any state . . ."
That is, if Southern secession made it impossible for Washington, D.C.
to "collect the duties and imposts" (i.e., tariffs on imports, which
had just been more than doubled two days earlier), then there will be
an invasion. He followed through with this threat, and that is why
there was a war that ended up killing 670,000 Americans, including
some 50,000 Southern civilians, while maiming for life more than a
million.

Secession does not necessitate war; nor was war necessary to end
slavery. The rest of the world (including all of the Northern states
ended slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century, as James Powell
documents and describes in his outstanding book, Greatest
Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery.

April 12, 2011

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at
Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln
Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How
Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How
Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It
Means for America Today.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or
in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given. ""

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