Walter Williams properly points out that in logic the American Revolution was as treasonous and rebellious as was The War between the States. Indeed, the Confederates generally regarded their war as a 2nd American Revolution. The Confederates lost the war of definitions because they lost the war.
Interestingly, the union faced a dilemma after their victory in that if they charged Robert E Lee with treason, which consists of rendering aid and comfort to an enemy state, the union would thus be admitting the Confederacy had established a sovereign state and that would be a conception contrary to a war defined as a Civil War rather than a war between nationstates. In the event, Lee was not hanged for treason and his children won an award of compensation from the federal government for the union's expropriation of the Lee mansion on Arlington Heights overlooking our national Cemetery.
When the revolution against Britain was fought, it was not thought that slaves were entitled to the same rights as whites, indeed so bereft of rights were they that they could be actually enslaved as chattel. Lincoln brilliantly redeemed our "Original Sin" skirted or even papered over by the Declaration of Independence in his Emancipation Proclamation and in his Gettysburg Address. Lincoln's brilliance was not universally acknowledged, certainly not in the rebellious South and not in many places in the North where race riots raged in New York City. Nevertheless, Lincoln's stroke converted a war which might have been regarded to be a conflict between sovereign nations into a moral crusade against slavery. Even Lincoln himself would acknowledge that he got a bit of help from Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin profoundly change the culture and that ignited a Civil War which profoundly changed the Constitution.
Note: that part of the union that was ambivalent about making war to restore the union or paying the costs to emancipate slaves, was ultimately overcome because the idea of slavery became so repugnant that any constitutional question about the right of states to withdraw from a compact they themselves had made, became immoral if not indecent. Thus, was Lincoln able to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery and later the 14th amendment redefining Blacks as citizens and guaranteeing them certain human or, if one prefers, constitutional rights.
The postbellum career of Robert E Lee is one which finds him to be admonishing the students under his care at Washington College (later to be named Washington and Lee-and now to be denuded of the part of the name attached to Robert E Lee) to be good and faithful citizens of the union. Even Nathan Bedford Forrest who lent his name to the clan later worked to disband it and, remarkably, made his peace with the "Black Race" and worked for some degree of integration for them. At the end of his life, he could well be said to have reconciled himself to the result of the Civil War, the emancipation, and his God. More, he focused his efforts to advance the cause of racial harmony and was acknowledged to have done so by African-Americans at the time of his death.
Even as the acceptance that slavery at the time of the Civil War became repugnant enough to set aside constitutional issues of the right of succession, so in the aftermath of the war and up until the civil rights movement there was no moral crusade to set aside what was believed to be the constitutional reality of Jim Crow and segregation. One might observe that there was for a great portion of that time no imperative to grant women their civil rights or the vote etc.
With the civil rights movement gathering momentum in the 1960s, wholesale legislation was introduced to grant African-Americans full civil rights. In order to accomplish this cultural as well as legal revolution, a century old interpretation of the Constitution had to be discarded. For example, the idea of separate but equal could not be declared unconstitutional until Brown vs. The Board of Education in 1954. The understanding of the Constitution was changed because our understanding of segregation changed. One might observe that it was changed on television as well is in the courts and legislatures.
Many argue that the civil rights movement, as necessary and successful as it was, has virtually rewritten the United States Constitution to the point where anything which can be associated with race will justify empowering the federal government. Certainly, we see today in the movement for reparations, in Black Lives Matter, and the tearing down of monuments, of riots with officials looking the other way, a culture change in all this that demands a rewriting of the Constitution, without bothering to observe the formalities of our constitutionally ordained process for changing the Constitution.
Even Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had to be ratified by a constitutional amendment but that was century and half ago. Today, who could have confidence that our Constitution will not be torn asunder by those waving the banner of "institutional racism?"
Sadly, it is not just the rubric of institutional racism which threatens our Constitution, the left has learned the potency of this stratagem and seeks to upend the Constitution with panic over global warming by way of just another example.
We conservatives tend to fight these wars as isolated skirmishes in which we must defend the statue of Robert E Lee or protect the Lincoln Memorial from graffiti but these battles are isolated erruptions of a greater cultural war grounded in new cultural realities that have tremendous power. History tells us they have the power to sweep away the Constitution.
But we have lost smaller wars and so we have no allies against these new cultural realities. We have lost the media, the churches, the bar associations and the medical associations, education from K through postgraduate, the deep state and, God help us, even the military. Donald Trump, supported by a few stalwart voices like Mark Levine or Tucker Carlson can hardly be enough to win the upcoming daunting political battles like the next election and, worse, unless President Trump can deliver a new Gettysburg address, we face cultural extinction.
Politics is downstream from culture and we have seen the Constitution is also downstream from culture.
