The Other Confederacy

If you identify a point of disagreement between any two demographic groups or geographical regions of this country, it is probable that its origins are in the Civil War. Our Civil War still divides us as no other thing, and it is perhaps the most profoundly misunderstood chapter of our history.

The problem is that slavery sucks all the air out of any honest assessment of the war. The issue of slavery makes northerners insufferably self-righteous, and it makes southerners despicably evasive.

But to have any honest appraisal of what happened here, we have to first study it without slavery as part of the equation. Let's look at the facts of the Civil War without mentioning slavery, which was actually quite a popular approach while these events were actually transpiring, and which involves no real factual or intellectual sacrifices, as well shall see.

In 1776, thirteen separate colonies declared that they were each independent states. Each separate colony declared itself to be an independent state. These newly-independent states (we should rather think of them as small nations like Holland, for example) then formed a wartime alliance against the British. A few years after the victory of the American states, they decided to codify a more integrated and detailed alliance. The Constitution was the result of that decision.

Here's the key: the independent states existed before the Union, as created in the Constitution. The states created the Union; the Union did NOT create the states. The states are not children of the Union. They are the parents of the Union. A monumentally important distinction, and one which is studiously ignored in the North.

When the states willingly formed and joined the Union, many of them, including my home state of Rhode Island, insisted upon making explicit the voluntary nature of the Union. The Union was formed by men who had recently revolted because they felt that they lacked adequate representation in their own government. It was founded by men who had already made clear that they were willing to separate from their rulers if they felt mistreated.

So what happened after the election of Lincoln? From the dominant point of view in my neck of the woods, the Southern states reacted like whiny little bitches after the due and legal election of a man they did not like. They then committed treason by seceding from and then waging war upon the United States.

But here's another way of looking at it: in 1860, there was a 2nd American Revolution. The Southern states felt that they were not adequately represented by their government. They then decided to declare independence from that government.

Let's not worry about why the South wanted to leave. That's not the point. The point is that each state that seceded did so according to decisions made by their elected representatives. They voted to declare independence.

They did what the 13 colonies had done 85 years earlier. No more, no less. Actually, the Revolution of 1861 was far more democratic than the Revolution of 1776 if our metric is what proportion of the population was actually consulted before declaring independence.

Defenders of the North may cry "but the government in 1860 was legal and democratic!" Well, rest assured, defenders of King George III said the same thing to the ingrate colonists of 1776.

So the southern states chose to declare their independence. They did so peacefully. The Confederates asked for no favors, no welfare. They offered to pay for federal property in the south. They offered to assume their proportion of the federal debt. They made absolutely no political or territorial demands on states that did not wish to join them.

This was a peaceful, democratic (by the standards of the time) decision. An amicable divorce, if you will. And what did Lincoln decide to do by way of response? Lincoln told the states (the parents of the federal government) that they had no right to defy their child.

Perhaps it would be better for the purposes of analogy to think of the North and South as a married couple. Neither one is perfect. They've had ups and downs. They're so close, but so different. Finally, the South decides it wants a divorce. An amicable divorce, in which property and debts are exchanged responsibly, and each partner simply walks away and wishes the other the best.

What if the other spouse responded to this offer by saying "You do not have the right to divorce me. You have no identity separate from our marriage. You do not have the right to live outside of it. I will beat and rape you without end or mercy until you agree to remain married to me".

That is what Lincoln did. That is what we celebrate him for. All the South wanted was to go its own way. And I, for one, think we should have let them.

But what about slavery? Slavery is supposed to absolve the North for burning and raping the South. This absurd charade depends on a few assumptions.

Firstly, it assumes that the war was fought to end slavery. It was not. The war was about one thing: do states have the right to choose to leave? Lincoln said no. Simple as that.

How do we know that slavery had nothing to do with the war? Because there was slavery in the North. During the entire war. When Lincoln was assassinated, their was still slavery in the Union.

So if there were slaves in the North at the beginning and the end of the Civil War, then the Civil War was not about the North's moral crusade to abolish slavery.

The North was no less racist than the South. Slavery was horrible, of course. But weren't there "freemen" in the North? Yes, there were. But here's an example of how "free" blacks were treated in Lincoln's Union.

Illinois passed a state law forbidding blacks from voting, owning property, testifying in court, sitting on a jury, or living in the state for more than 30 days. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, voted for this law. Lincoln only hated slavery because American slavery involved having black people in America.

Of course, after the war was over, and after it was clear how utterly terrible it had been for the nation(s) as a whole, the Union attempted to justify it retroactively as a moral crusade. And, to be fair, slavery was made illegal after the war ended.

But women were also given the right to vote after World War I. Does that mean that we entered that war to secure the right for our women to vote?

Slavery had to end. But the facts of the Civil War are really entirely tangential to that fact. The North had slaves, too. Northern whites were just as racist as southern whites, but because far fewer northerners lived in proximity to blacks than did their southern brethren, they indulged themselves in an obnoxious self-righteousness that served as their retroactive excuse to crush a movement so similar to the movement of 1776 that we can be sure Jefferson would have been a Confederate.

This is the danger of the dominant paradigm: slavery had to end. We didn't do it. North and South alike failed to do the right thing. But then, after the worst and most widespread acts of violence ever committed by Americans, our leaders tell us that slaughtering 600,000 of ourselves was a righteous cause.

What would've been far more righteous for the Union would have been for us to let the South go its own way and critique them by, oh, I don't know.....abolishing slavery in our own country, perhaps.

The myth of the redemptive violence of the Civil War, and of the anguishing greatness of Lincoln, led us directly into the morass of other, even more absurd and even more violent wars. Each time, of course, we were fighting to "end slavery" or to "save democracy". After all, if total war could civilize the south, why not Europe? Why not Europe again? Why not Korea? Why not Vietnam? Why not Afghanistan? Why not Iraq?

Americans have long been ignoring their own flaws by attacking others in the interest of "saving" them from the own self-evident sins. But it wasn't George W. Bush who invented this insidious charade. It was Abraham Lincoln.