There’s good money out there for anybody who can write a book about how Lincoln was the personification of evil. Thomas Dilorenzo has done quite well with his nonsense about Lincoln.
They(neo-yankees) would have to invent another group to make fun of, as to make their own Federal Boot Licking tendencies palpable....
There is a cultural element of the South that has been distorted by history texts since the 1870’s that warrants appreciation.
Self reliance, respect for hard work, voluntary sense of community, connectedness of family and community, genuine personal religious belief, respect for law and rightful government, and skepticism of distant central government are all factors. Most of this was learned the hard way by ancestors who experienced abuses in hard times before.
The Civil War was not about slavery, but that was a side element of the disputes. It was about conflicting economic interests.
I have stated this before and got a lot of criticism for it. I am sorry, this is how I view this event.
I do not study or read Civil War History. I do not live in the past. I have nothing but contempt for those who promoted slavery then, nor those who promote economic slavery now.
Life is about living in freedom and opposing oppression.
There is an understood concept in Texas. Leave us alone to live our lives in peace and we will get along fine, if that is not satisfactory, we will deal with it.
Lincoln was no angel. And it was about STATES RIGHTS, exactly what we’re trying to do here, today.
http://www.geocities.com/mark_willey/civlwar.html
Destruction of the Constitution
Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and 13,000 people were thrown into prison in Washington, DC, alone on charges never brought or made known. In his Proclamation of September 24, 1864, Lincoln by executive fiat ordered that all citizens who engaged in “disloyal practices” would be tried in military tribunals, with such practices decided at whim by Lincoln himself. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney informed Lincoln that he was engaged in practices that violated the Constitution he had sworn an oath to uphold. (Harold Hyman, A More Perfect Union, pp 85-86) Lincoln issued orders to arrest the octogenarian Taney but thought better of assaulting the most respected man in the country. The governor of New York reminded people that the founding fathers during the Revolution did not destroy men’s’ rights - “THEY did not say liberty was suspended, that men might be deprived of the right to trial by jury, that they might be torn from their homes by midnight intruders.”
Lincoln let his generals suspend 300 newspapers. As Encyclopedia Britannica puts it “He justified this action on the ground that he had to allow some temporary sacrifice of the Constitution in order to maintain the Union...” In other words, he destroyed the Constitution in order to save it. It is little wonder that Booth considered Lincoln a tyrant and expected Lincoln to create a monarchy. Lincoln’s model of assuming war powers and concentrating power in Washington was the precedent used by Wilson and FDR as a tool to remake America into a socialist state. Their intense desire and eagerness to grab and use this tool lead them to mistaken and harmful war-mongering. When the Constitution fails them they have only to say “this is time of war - and war gives all needed power.”
LINCOLN - 19th CENTURY HITLER
War has always been terrible, of course, and mass extermination was a regular occurrence until the development of what may be called; without irony, the rules of “civilized warfare” late in the seventeenth century. At that time Europe’s rulers, exhausted by bloody combat, came to agree on certain conventions: combat should be confined to soldiers in uniform; civilians and their property should be left alone; prisoners should be treated humanely; and defeated powers should be spared total devastation and indignity. These rules held until Lincoln violated them in the War Between the States, replacing them with the logic of annihilation that governed primitive or “primary warfare” — the unrestricted slaughter common between warring societies with no civilized principles in common.
For more than two centuries after the age of Louis XIV, European civilians were so unmolested that they often barely realized that their rulers were at war, and ordinary travel and commerce between countries usually continued during hostilities. There was courtliness between rulers and officers of opposing armies, like the jovial fraternization between common soldiers as soon as peace was restored. A sort of golden rule prevailed; each victor realized that he might be tomorrow’s loser, so everyone tried to avoid leaving a legacy of bitterness by treating the vanquished reasonably and often generously. Peace treaties politely avoided any tone of blame or recrimination.
Lincoln’s policy of waging war on civilian areas shocked European observers. Lincoln justified this on grounds that he was dealing not with a traditional war, but with a rebellion, in which the entire enemy population might be treated as criminals and traitors. The idealizers of Lincoln have blamed his policy on the generals who merely carried it out, especially Sherman and Sheridan. Of course even Lincoln was unable to apply this view consistently; to do so would have meant executing nearly every Southerner, soldier or civilian.
I say that since academic/popular consensus is firmly on Lincoln’s side, and Lincoln has been set in stone as a national hero, let the Southern apologists have their fun. They’ve got some points. Lincoln had his dark side. If people like DiLorenzo stretch the truth, not many will listen. His ilk have that whole slavery stigma to overcome, which is a losing prospect.
Right now the Constitution has gone very far out of whack and balance. Power has shifted from the balanced State-Federal equation. It is now heavily weighted toward the federal side.
To correct it, a reassertion of State's Rights is beginning to be heard. Unfortunately "States' Rights" is now a code=word meaning "no civil rights for blacks." The term has been completely co-opted, making anyone calling for States' Rights a "racist."
In the popular view, the ultimate expression of States' Rights was the founding of the Confederacy, inextricably bound up with slavery.
The only “lost cause” is a true little ‘r’ republic that we were supposed to live in before the Yankees destroyed it.
Dixie Ping
Maybe they could focus on how the glorious heroes of the north immediately went west and waged a campaign of attempted genocide against Native Americans.
I would love to be able to say that the history channel doesso much WWII programming because of people's love for Eisenhower, Patton, McArthur, Halsey and Nimitz, or our own fathers and grandfathers, but most of the shows on the channel seem to be about the other side.
I'm not comparing Confederates to Nazis, just pointing out that fascination doesn't always mean approval. Probably some of the people who subscribe to Civil War magazines do subscribe to secessionist views. Many more probably just want to honor their ancestors who fought for that side. But there's also a curiosity about anything different and about the "what might have beens" of history that goes beyond politics.