I’ve had some discussion of late about the War for Southern Independence, AKA the War of Northern Aggression, and its true causes. As i have said, i completely sympathize with those who wished to abolish slavery in the United States for moral reasons. However, as i have also repeatedly stated, that’s not the issue that was of primary importance in the so-called “Civil War.” Of course, the issues were always political, not moral; they were economic, with the economics of taxes and labor in general (and with slavery as only one small aspect of those) being the main driving force.

In Thomas DiLorenzo’s book, Lincoln Unmasked, the veil is pulled back on Lincoln as the driving force behind the push for war back in the 1860s. The book shows that his push for war could never have been a principled opposition to the Southern people who just wouldn’t give up their slaves, but rather his threat to invade and attack states in the Union (and their citizens) was in order to retain control over revenues from Southern states who protested exorbitant import and export duties that Washington was trying to foist upon them. Here’s a review and summary of the book that gives some tid-bits.

Truth is, when you lay it all out, from the suspension of habeas corpus to the warmongering for deceitful motives, George Bush is, as many Neo-Cons have claimed, indeed following in Lincoln’s footsteps.

Some of you may be familiar with the term “The War of Northern Aggression” to refer to the so-called “Civil War.” Those of Southron heritage have long used that term to describe what they saw as over-extended Federalist power to strong-arm the sovereign states into bowing before the assumed authority of the Federal Government. (This eerily shadows the growth and ascendency of the power of a centralized Western Church under the authority of a single monarch in the person of the Bishop of Rome, who claimed to be the head of the Church on earth in Christ’s place, displacing and undermining all of the rights and claims of all other regional church governments through local bishops and elders.)

Democrat Thomas Jefferson had much to say against that kind of Federalism, but even the Democrat Andrew Jackson was corrupted by its enticements to think that he could control the fortunes of all of the states in the Union by sheer force of power from the Federal government—and his great political move was to convince the great majority of the populace that he was actually protecting and standing for the people instead of stealing away their liberties, which is precisely what he did. His progeny are seen in the Democrat Party of the modern day, who claim to stand for individual liberties and freedoms for the people, but who steal away that liberty more and more every year by government control, oversight, and regulation. Of course, the freedoms that Jefferson advocated, which he referred to as “republican” virtues, aren’t well protected by the vast majority of modern day Republicans either; they don’t seem to have any kind of warriness toward governmnetal power, but are happy, like Jackson, to advocate just as much that kind of centralized power, just for a different political purpose (it was not without cause that the Republican Party became associated in the popular psyche with rich and powerful business interests).

Gene Healy wrote an article a while back that i had never read until i saw it linked on the Borg Blog. It was a great piece showing how the traditional “republican” (with a small “R”) or classical liberal view of states’ rights was, at one time, a check on Federalist aggrandizement of power. He reminds us of what traditional Southron folks have long sought to emphasize: that the War of Northern Aggression was called that, not because the North wanted to “force” the South to free all its slaves (a relatively minor, but still important, cause of the War for Southern Independence—but only one that came into the fore of the national mind when Lincoln, capitalizing on the abolitionist tendencies of New England, made it a political hot-button), but because the North had its mind to force the South, with its “nullification” mindset, to bow to the Federal will and be the cash-cow for Yankee industrialists bent on using the Federal power to grow the industry of the North and Mid-Atlantic by breaking the backs of the Southern citizenry with immensely burdensome and inequitable taxation.

In our day, we have no less that kind of Federalist grab for power. (Maybe “grab” is a bad word, since it implies that they don’t have it and are trying to get it; “lust” may be a better word, because, acknowledging our Federal Government today does indeed have that power to wield as it wills, they still seek to place more of the rights of the several states and of the people under the ginormous thumb of the hand of an Old-Glory-clad Uncle Sam pointing to us and telling us that he wants us.) However, in our day there is no check against that Federalist hunger for greater power. Since the stamping out of independence-seeking Southerners, Federal power has grown almost unchecked over the last 150 years. No longer does that monster of political power need explicit Constitutional authority to act (cf., the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the US Constitution), it can act with full authority to do anything, by any means, to ensure what it alone sees as a benefit of the people, even over against the protestations of the states that make up our Union (cf., the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution). A couple of symptoms of this kind of Federalism are also seen in Amendments to the US Constitution: the Sixteenth Amendment, giving the Federal Government ownership over all income of its citizens (because if the government can tell you how much of your income you can keep, that means that they own it all); and the Seventeenth Amendment, which circumvents a check on Federal authority that the framers saw fit to include in the original Constitution, namely the appointment by the State or Commonwealth Legislatures of the Senators in the upper house of the Federal Legislature, replacing it with direct election of Senators by the people, completely cutting states out of any check on Federalist assumption of power. Now that the “Civil War” has shown that the states actually have no right to question Federal claims, what can we do but submit to the continued interposition of government regulation and intervention into our everyday lives? What option do we have? The War of Northern Aggression succeeded; the greatest fears of all our ancestors that fought and died to secure liberty against centralized governmental power that thought that it could impose its will upon all people, regardless of what say they had in the matter (i.e., King George III, against whom we fought for our original independence), has now come true.

Most of you know that, theologically, Thornwell and i aren’t exactly on the same page. However, in this case, i couldn’t agree with him more. He preached in a sermon entited “Our Danger and Our Duty“:

We are fully persuaded that the triumph of the North in the present conflict will be as disastrous to the hopes of mankind as to our own fortunes. They are now fighting the battle of despotism. They have put their Constitution under their feet; they have annulled its most sacred provisions; and in defiance of its solemn guaranties they are now engaged, in the halls of Congress, in discussing and maturing bills which make Northern notions of necessity the paramount laws of the land. The avowed end of the present war is, to make the Government a government of force. It is to settle the principle, that whatever may be its corruptions and abuses, however unjust and tyrannical its legislation, there is no redress, except in vain petition or empty remonstrance. It was as a protest against this principle, which sweeps away the last security for liberty, that Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri seceded, and if the Government should be reëstablished, it must be reëstablished with this feature of remorseless despotism firmly and indelibly fixed. The future fortunes of our children, and of this continent, would then be determined by a tyranny which has no parallel in history.

We have that kind of despotism and tyranny today in the United States Government. It is a government that will do anything, attack anyone, demand any money, punish any citizen, and invade any nation to establish its own notion of well-being—and not even the well-being of its citizens as a whole, but the well-being of a certain sub-set of the population that the Federal Governmend deems favored for whatever reason. The only answer to this kind of absolute abuse of power is for the people to rise up and stand against it. We must not allow ourselves to be allured by the promise of some small benefit over some small hardship—a hardship which, most likely, the government herself caused by her own abuses—, but we should be willing to stand together, and to stand against government abuse. The whole point of having a written document that charters our government is to have set limits and protections against the power granted to it. Why ignore it? Why not demand that our government conform to the supreme law of the land? Why not elect a president, senators, and representatives who will return to us the freedom and liberty that the Constitution itself guarantees to us? Until we do that, we will continue to have a monster at the helm of our national ship. We will go where that monster drives us and we will have no say in it one way or the other, except to bow to that monstrous King, who has, like Napoleon and like all of the Bishops of Rome, crowned himself with usurped power that belongs to someone else.

My prayer is that my children and grandchildren will be freer than i am today because i and all of my fellow Americans throughout the several states will stand up against the tyranny of the warmongering taxmasters on the dole of all the special interests so that our government will, once again, be a government for the people and by the people.