This article was used as expert testimony presented in several federal court cases:

Scholars in every field in the humanities and social sciences have long recognized that Southerners have formed a distinct people within the body of Americans from the earliest colonial times to the present. Authorities in history, political science, economics, sociology, folklore, literature, geography, speech, and music, have recognized and studied the significance of this distinctiveness. The distinct identity of Southerners has also, of course, been a commonplace of everyday life in the United States, and distinctive Southern manners, customs, attitudes and behavior have been material for our greatest creative artists in song, story and movie-making.
Nearly every college in the United States and many in Europe (as well as Japan and Australia) offer courses in Southern history, literature, and other subjects. A number of universities have special institutes devoted to study of the South. (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of South Carolina, the University of Mississippi, John Hopkins University, and Cambridge University are a few examples.) Thousands of scholars around the world are studying Southernness. Thousands of books and dozens of popular and academic journals and websites are available today that are devoted specifically and exclusively to the South. It cannot be credited that this activity would be devoted to something unless it was real and significant.


Many explanations and descriptions have been offered in scholarly literature as to the origins and nature of a distinctive Southern people, beginning with the ethnic origins of the American colonial population and coming up to recent date in studies of public opinion and voting behavior.


An important, recent and authoritative study is Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer, prize-winning Professor of History at Brandeis University, Boston (New York: Oxford University Press. 1989). From exhaustive study in Britain and America, Fischer has identified four different cultural groups from the British Isles that formed differentiated cores of cultural development in what has become the United States. These groups came from different regions of Britain and were separated by religious denomination, economic activity, dialect, manners, and customs.


1) Puritan settlers of New England who came from the East Anglia region of England and formed an identifiable religious and cultural group, which spread to other parts of the Northern states.


2) Settlers from the English Midlands and Wales who settled the Delaware River Valley, belonged to a variety of dissenting religions such as Quakers and Baptists, and pursued economic activities and goals different from those of New England and the South.


3) Gentry and servants from the English southern counties who settled Virginia and the Carolinas in the 17th century, largely Anglican, engaged in plantation agriculture, and displaying manners, customs and attitudes very distinct from groups 1 and 2.


4) Borderers, sometimes loosely described as Celtic, who came from Ireland, Scotland, and the Scots-English border region. They were largely Presbyterian and their ways of living and making a living were markedly different from those of the ordinary English. They settled the Piedmont regions of the Southern colonies and spread across the Appalachians in the late 18th century.


Fischer piles up convincing data that these groups formed different cultural centers in the evolution of America. Groups 3 and 4 merged in the early 19th century, to become the Southern people. The distinctiveness of a Southern people was well recognized by everyone by that time—by Southerners, by Northerners, and by foreign travelers. The famous English writer Charles Dickens observed after a trip to America that the Americans formed two distinct peoples. Fischer also provides extensive and convincing evidence that these distinct American cultures persist to this day, a distinctiveness, which can be seen in attitudes, political behavior, and daily life. An interesting example he provides is the startlingly different actions and methods of leadership of two American generals in the Pacific theatre during World War II, both named Smith, one from the North and one a Southerner. Countless other examples can be cited showing such differences in recent history.


Historians have also identified as keys to Southernness climate and a historical experience that differs markedly from the general American. The South was warmer than the North and the regions of Europe from which settlers of America came, giving it a different kind of agriculture and crops (cotton, rice, tobacco, sugar), and thus a different kind of economic activity and a different relation to the marketplace than the rest of the United States. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided in the 1920s to commission a definitive history of American agriculture, it found that it required two distinct studies to cover the subject: Percy W. Bidwell, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (Washington: 1925), and Lewis Cecil Gray, Historyof Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington: 1933). Southerners have, unlike other Americans, more than 350 years of living in a biracial society, in which whites and African-Americans have reciprocally influenced each other’s development. It should never be forgotten that the number of African-Americans outside the states of the South was statistically insignificant throughout American history up to World War I. In evidence of a distinct Southern culture, it should be pointed out that Southern African-Americans share with Southern whites nearly every aspect of Southern culture except ethnic origin and political behavior, and differ from general American attitudes in the same direction as do white Southerners.


Undoubtedly the most decisive historical event in firmly establishing a Southern people was the failed War of Independence of 1861-1865. Unlike all other Americans, Southerners have suffered military defeat and occupation and massive destruction by invading armies on their soil. The Confederate States of America was characterized by a mobilization and casualties far beyond that ever experienced by any other Americans at any time in their history. (Gary Gallagher of the University of Virginia, The Confederate War, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.) It is estimated that 85 percent of the eligible male population was mobilized in the War of Independence and one of every four Southern white men was dead at the end of the War. (Comparison: Northern losses were 1 in 10; and the loss was simultaneously made up by immigrants. American losses in later years are trivial percentages in comparison.) The experience of total war, invasion, conquest and defeat had effects, both tangible and psychological, that have lasted for generations and that mark Southerners now living. War is the single greatest solidifier of a nationality, and it is hardly credible that Southerners would have fought to such an extremity for independence if they had not been conscious of being a separate people.


C. Vann Woodward, Pulitzer Prize historian of Yale University in his famous study The Burden of Southern History (Louisiana State University Press, 1960), has emphasized this distinctive experience as giving Southerners a heritage of defeat and sorrow. Coupled with longstanding guilt and frustration from the difficulty of race relations, this burden of history has made Southerners a sadder, less optimistic, but perhaps wise and more realistic people than other Americans whose history has been one of uninterrupted success.


Woodward points also to another consequence of the War. In contrast to America in general, which has been a land of opportunity, progress, and prosperity, Southerners, both white and African-American, have a long experience of poverty. The most prosperous region of the United States in 1860, the South was from 1866 to at least World War II the most impoverished. An estimated 60 percent of the region’s capital was destroyed by the War, leaving it economically helpless and subject to exploitation of its resources and peoples as a colony of the United States. In 1860 nearly all white Southern families were independent landowners. In 1900, forty percent of white Southerners were tenants or sharecroppers. And 60 percent of African-American Southerners were in this position, though in absolute numbers there were more white sharecroppers than black. In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously referred to the South as “the nation’s No. 1 Economic Problem,” and public discussions were full of references to the South’s colonial economic status.


The South has long been known as a source of cheap labor. As well as African-Americans, hundreds of thousands of white Southerners have moved to the North and West in the 20th century, as industrial labor. In the North and West they were treated as and understood themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, referred to negatively as “hillbillies” and “Okies.” Evidences of this can still be seen (like “Little Dixie” neighborhoods in Chicago and country music in Bakersfield, California). It is impossible to over-estimate the effects of generations of poverty within a prosperous country in forming a distinct Southern identity. Even in currently prosperous and growing areas of the South today, the better jobs are largely occupied by newcomers from other parts of the country and the blue-collar jobs by native Southerners.


Southern differences in manners, speech, recreations, religious beliefs, cuisine, and music are commonplace observations in everyday life in the United States. These differences do not have to be absolute. Scots and some Irish and Welsh speak English and are like Englishmen in various was, but they are still obviously distinct nationalities, as are the French-descended Canadians. Speech, religion, music, manners, and cuisine are the universal markers of ethnic distinction. The proof of distinctive Southern characteristics in these areas is easily established by the well-known negative (and sometimes positive) reactions that Southerners receive from other groups.


Contemporary markers distinguishing Southerners as a distinct group have been given systematic scientific study, in the works of John Shelton Reed, Kenan Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, especially The Enduring South.


Besides differences in lesser matters such as names of children, places, and businesses, Reed demonstrates that public opinion surveys have consistently shown statistically significant differentiation from the American average, especially in three areas:


1) Southerners are the most consistent believers in basic orthodox Christianity as measured by their belief in the Bible, a future state of rewards and punishments, and the reality of Evil, as well as in their church attendance. They even outscore Roman Catholics in other parts of the country on these factors.


2) Southerners are more local and family oriented, less interested in distant events and celebrities than Americans in general.


3) Southerners, for better or worse, live by a different definition of the line between private and public. They are more conscious of giving and receiving offense and tend to deal with such things in person rather than call in public authorities. For instance, in the South murders most commonly occur between persons who are acquainted. In the North there are more commonly attacks by strangers.


Reed has also demonstrated through scientific attitude surveys that Northern and Southern students at the cosmopolitan University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recognize themselves as having different thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The distinctions discovered by Reed are not absolute—there is some overlap—but they are statistically significant (as well as readily confirmed by empirical observation). See the article by Reed from the Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups.


Another relevant work is The South and the Sectional Conflict by David M. Potter of Stanford University, generally recognized as one of the outstanding historians in the United States in the 20th century (Louisiana State University Press, 1968). Potter affirms the separateness of the Southern people and describes how that difference has been created by distinct folkways (thinking, feeling, behaving in ways common to members of the same social group) and separate political experiences.


The hallmarks of a living national culture are its production of arts both at the folk level (arising spontaneously from the people) and at the level of high culture. Southerners have produced several original styles of music and it is hardly to be doubted that Southern writers have produced a distinct (and highly regarded by the world) literature. The acclaimed novelist George Garrett has demonstrated that distinctive Southernness persists in the most recent generation of outstanding writers. And he has interestingly related Southern literary prowess to the distinctive manners of the region. George Garrett, “Southern Literature Here and Now,” in Fifteen Southerners, Why the South Will Survive (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1981).


The history of a distinctive Southern speech has been examined by the world famous literary scholar and critic Cleanth Brooks (Yale University) in The Language of the American South (University of Georgia Press, 1985). Brooks has demonstrated how distinctive Southern speech has contributed to the success of Southern literary efforts. The distinctiveness of Southern accents was part of the lifelong study of the greatest American scholar of English dialects, Raven I. McDavid of the University of Chicago, author of Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (Chicago, 1980 and later editions) and Sociolinguistics and Historical Linguistics (University of Odense, Denmark).


That Southerners can be distinguished by differing voting behavior is a commonplace calculation of politicians and news media and is the subject of much continuing study by political scientists.


Establishing the reality of the Southerner is akin to proving that Iowa grows corn or that Hollywood is located in California. When the term “Southern” is used, there is not a mind in America that does not immediately reference impressions, favorable or unfavorable, of particular history, literature, music, cuisine, manners, and political and religious tendencies.


I would like to conclude my expert testimony with a personal statement derived from a speech I made at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in New Orleans in 1995, parts of which were published in the journal Southern Cultures (University of North Carolina). It refers not to the “Civil War” but to Southern identity today:


The Confederate Battle Flag: A Symbol of Southern Heritage and Identity


I remember my own father and uncles returning from World War II with stories of how Southerners, particularly rural and working class ones, were denigrated and ridiculed by urbanites for their speech, manners, and attitudes. There was a general cultural attack at the time on “hillbillies.” This was the beginning of my consciousness of belonging to a separate people from other Americans. It was at that time that we began to display the Confederate battle flag at times from the front porch and to observe Lee’s birthday and Confederate Memorial Day. It is relevant, too, that my grandmother was the daughter of a Confederate soldier and had a fund of stories of the family in the War. Our identification with the Confederate battle flag was nearly a decade before Brown vs. Board of Education and it had nothing to do with segregation, the Dixiecrat movement of 1948, or football, contrary to what has been stated by several scholars who have claimed to study the matter impartially.


My Southern identity had thus been brought to my attention before I entered school, and the battle flag was the obvious symbol of that identity, and a beautiful and hallowed object as well. Time, and the success of the civil rights movement and other great changes in the South, have done nothing to diminish this. Rather, to the contrary. The fact that the United States is increasingly a multicultural empire rather than a federal republic, will make ethnic identities, including the Southern, even sharper in the future, which bodes well to see symbolic struggles among Northerners, Latin Americans, African-Americans and Asians. Southerners, the oldest and largest minority in America, have a right to claim their heritage and its symbols. The South is larger in territory, population, economic strength, and history and more distinct in culture than many of the separate nations of the earth.


In recent years, I have spoken often to meetings of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Civil War Roundtables, local historical societies, and other groups. These groups of good citizens are full of defenders and displayers of the battle flag. For most of these good Americans the flag is not a symbol of white supremacy, but an identification with their own ancestors and heritage and an affirmation of then own identity.
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Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of 1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of history as a quest for the understanding of human action.


Two generations ago, the most perceptive historians, much more learned than the current crop, said that the war was “about” economics and was “caused by” economic rivalry. The war has not changed one bit since then. The perspective has changed. It can change again as long as people have the freedom to think about the past. History is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.


I was much struck by Barbara Marthal’s insistence in her Stone Mountain talk on the importance of stories in understanding history. I entirely concur. History is the experience of human beings. History is a story and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are. History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.” Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.


Let’s consider the war and slavery. Again and again I encounter people who say that the South Carolina secession ordinance mentions the defense of slavery and that one fact proves beyond argument that the war was caused by slavery. The first States to secede did mention a threat to slavery as a motive for secession. They also mentioned decades of economic exploitation and the seizure of the common government for the first time ever by a sectional party declaredly hostile to the Southern States. Were they to be a permanently exploited minority, they asked? This was significant to people who knew that their fathers and grandfathers had founded the Union for the protection and benefit of ALL the States.


It is no surprise that they mentioned potential interference with slavery as a threat to their everyday life and their social structure. Only a few months before, John Brown and his followers had attempted just that. They murdered a number of people including a free black man who was a respected member of the Harpers Ferry community and a grand-nephew of George Washington because Brown wanted Washington’s sword as a talisman. In Brown’s baggage was a constitution making him dictator of a new black nation and a supply of pikes to be used to stab to death the slave-owner and his wife and children.


It is significant that not one single slave joined Brown’s attempted blow against slavery. It was entirely an affair of outsiders. Significant also is that six Northern rich men financed Brown and that some elements of the North celebrated him as a saint, an agent of God, ringing the church bells at his execution. Even more significantly, Brown was merely acting out the venomous hatred of Southerners that had characterized some parts of Northern society for many years previously.


Could this relentless barrage of hatred directed by Northerners against their Southern fellow citizens have perhaps had something to do with the secession impulse? That was the opinion of Horatio Seymour, Democratic governor of New York. In a public address he pointed to the enormity of making war on Southern fellow citizens who had always been exceptionally loyal Americans, but who had been driven to secession by New England fanaticism.


Secessionists were well aware that slavery was under no immediate threat within the Union. Indeed, some anti-secessionists, especially those with the largest investment in slave property, argued that slavery was safer under the Union than in a new experiment in government.


Advocates of the “slavery and nothing but slavery” interpretation also like to mention a speech in which Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens is supposed to have said that white supremacy was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. The speech was ad hoc and badly reported, but so what? White supremacy was also the cornerstone of the United States. A law of the first Congress established that only white people could be naturalized as citizens. Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois forbade black people to enter the State and deprived those who were there of citizenship rights.


Instead of quoting two cherry-picked quotations, serious historians will look into more of the vast documentation of the time. For instance, in determining what the war was “about,” why not consider Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address, the resolutions of the Confederate Congress, numerous speeches by Southern spokesmen of the time as they explained their departure from the U.S. Congress and spoke to their constituents about the necessity of secession. Or for that matter look at the entire texts of the secession documents.


Our advocates of slavery causation practice the same superficial and deceitful tactics in viewing their side of the fight. They rely mostly on a few pretty phrases from a few of Lincoln’s prettier speeches to account for the winning side in the Great Civil War. But what were Northerners really saying?


I am going to do something radical. I am going to review what Northerners had to say about the war. Not a single Southern source, Southern opinion, or Southern accusation will I present. Just the words of Northerners (and a few foreign observers) on what the war was “about.”


Abraham Lincoln was at pains to assure the South that he intended no threat to slavery. He said he understood Southerners and that Northerners would be exactly like them living in the same circumstances. He said that while slavery was not a good thing (which most Southerners agreed with) he had no power to interfere with slavery and would not know what to do if he had the power. He acquiesced in a proposed 13th Amendment that would have guaranteed slavery into the 20th century. Later, he famously told Horace Greeley that his purpose was to save the Union, for which he would free all the slaves, some of the slaves, or none of the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself promised a continuance of slavery to States that would lay down their arms.


All Lincoln wanted was to prevent slavery in any territories, future States, which then might become Southern and vote against Northern control of the Treasury and federal legislation. From the anti-slavery perspective this is a highly immoral position. At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison said that restricting the spread of slavery was a false, politically motivated position. The best thing for the welfare of African Americans and their eventual emancipation was to allow them to spread as thinly as possible.


Delegation after delegation came to Lincoln in early days to beg him to do something to avoid war. Remember that 61% of the American people had voted against this great hero of democracy, which ought to have led him to a conciliatory frame of mind. He invariably replied that he could not do without “his revenue.” He said nary a word about slavery. Most of “his revenue” was collected at the Southern ports because of the tariff to protect Northern industry and most of it was spent in the North. Lincoln could not do without that revenue and vowed his determination to collect it without interruption by secession. He knew that his political backing rested largely on New England/New York money men and the rising power of the new industrialists of Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago who were aggressively demanding that the federal government sponsor and support them. The revenue also provided the patronage of offices and contracts for his hungry supporters, without which his party would dwindle away.


Discussing the reaction to secession, the New York Times editorialized: “The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North. We were divided and confused until our pockets were touched.” A Manchester, N.H., paper was one of hundreds of others that agreed, saying: “It is very clear that the South gains by this process and we lose. No, we must not let the South go.”


Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress officially declared that the war WAS NOT AGAINST SLAVERY but to preserve the Union. (By preserving the Union, of course, they actually meant not preserving the real Union but ensuring their control of the federal machinery.)


At the Hampton Roads peace conference a few months before Appomattox, Lincoln suggested to the Confederate representatives that if they ceased fighting then the Emancipation Proclamation could be left to the courts to survive or fall. Alexander Stephens, unlike Lincoln, really cared about the fate of the black people and asked Lincoln what was to become of them if freed in their present unlettered and propertyless condition. Lincoln’s reply: “Root, hog, or die.” A line from a minstrel song suggesting that they should survive as best they could. Lincoln routinely used the N-word all his life, as did most Northerners.


A statement in which Lincoln is said to favour voting rights for black men who were educated or had been soldiers has been shown to be fraudulent. Within a few days of his death he was still speaking of colonization outside the U.S.


The South, supposedly fighting for slavery, did not respond to any of these offers for the continuance of slavery. In fact, wise Southerners like Jefferson Davis realized that if war came it would likely disrupt slavery as it had during the first war of independence. That did not in the least alter his desire for the independence and self-government that was the birthright of Americans. Late in the war he sent a special emissary to offer emancipation if European powers would break the illegal blockade.


Saying that the South was fighting only to defend the evils of slavery is a deceitful back-handed way to suggest that, therefore the North was fighting to rid America of the evils of slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, secession did not necessarily require war against the South. That was a choice. Slavery had existed for over two hundred years and there was no Northern majority in favour of emancipation. Emancipation was not the result of a moral crusade against evil but a byproduct of a ruthless war of invasion and conquest. Not one single act of Lincoln and the North in the war was motivated by moral considerations in regard to slavery.


Even if slavery was a reason for secession, it does not explain why the North made a war of invasion and conquest on a people who only wanted to be let alone to live as they had always lived. The question of why the North made war is not even asked by our current historians. They assume without examination that the North is always right and the South is always evil. They do not look at the abundant Northern evidence that might shed light on the matter.


When we speak about the causes of war should we not pay some attention to the motives of the attacker and not blame everything on the people who were attacked and conquered? To say that the war was “caused” by the South’s defense of slavery is logically comparable to the assertion that World War II was caused by Poland resisting attack by Germany. People who think this way harbor an unacknowledged assumption: Southerners are not fellow citizens deserving of tolerance but bad people and deserve to be conquered. The South and its people are the property of the North to do with as they wish. Therefore no other justification is needed. That Leninist attitude is very much still alive judging by the abuse I receive in print and by e-mail. The abuse never discusses evidence, only denounces what is called “Neo-Confederate” and “Lost Cause” mythology. These are both political terms of abuse that have no real meaning and are designed to silence your enemy unheard.


Let us look at the U.S. Senate in February 1863. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, one of the most prominent of the Republican supporters of war against the South, has the floor. He is arguing in favour of a bill to establish a system of national banks and national bank currency. He declared that this bill was the most important business pending before the country. It was so important, he said, that he would see all the slaves remain slaves if it could be passed. Let me repeat this. He would rather leave all the slaves in bondage rather than lose the national bank bill. This was a few weeks after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.


What about this bill? Don’t be deceived by the terminology. So-called National Banks were to be the property of favoured groups of private capitalists. They were to have as capital interest-bearing government bonds at a 50% discount. The bank notes that they were to issue were to be the national currency. The banks, not the government, had control of this currency. That is, these favoured capitalists had the immense power and profit of controlling the money and credit of the country. Crony capitalism that has been the main feature of the American regime up to this very moment.


Senator Sherman’s brother, General Sherman, had recently been working his way across Mississippi, not fighting armed enemies but destroying the infrastructure and the food and housing of white women and children and black people. When the houses are burned, the livestock taken away or killed, the barns with tools and seed crops destroyed, fences torn down, stored food and standing crops destroyed, the black people will starve as well as the whites. General Sherman was heard to say: “Damn the niggers! I wish they were anywhere but here and could be kept at work.”
General Sherman was not fighting for the emancipation of black people. He was a proto-fascist who wanted to crush citizens who had the gall to disobey the government.

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The gracious Mrs. General Sherman agreed. She wrote her husband thus:

Not a word about the slaves.


As the war began, the famous abolitionist Theodore Weld declared that the South had to be wiped out because it is “the foe to Northern industry—to our mines, our manufactures, our commerce.” Nothing said about benefit to the slaves. The famous abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher enjoyed a European tour while the rivers of blood were flowing in America. Asked by a British audience why the North did not simply let the South go, Beecher replied, “Why not let the South go? O that the South would go! But then they must leave us their lands.”

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Then there is the Massachusetts Colonel who wrote his governor from the South in January 1862:

Seizing Southern resources was a common theme among advocates of the Union. Southerners were not fellow citizens of a nation. They were obstacles to be disposed of so Yankees could use their resources to suit themselves. The imperialist impulse was nakedly and unashamedly expressed before, during, and after the war.

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Charles Dickens, who had spent much time in the U.S. a few years before the war, told readers of his monthly magazine in 1862: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

Another British observer, John Stuart Mill, hoped the war would be against slavery and was disappointed. “The North, it seems,” Mill wrote, “have no more objections to slavery than the South have.”


Another European thinker to comment was Karl Marx. Like many later Lincoln worshippers, Marx believed that the French Revolution was a continuation of the American Revolution and Lincoln’s revolution in America a continuation of the French. He thought, wrongly, that Lincoln was defending the “labour of the emigrant against the aggressions of the slave driver.” The war, then, is in behalf of the German immigrants who had flooded the Midwest after the 1848 revolutions. Not a word about the slaves themselves. Indeed, it was the numbers and ardent support of these German immigrants that turned the Midwest from Democrat to Republican and elected Lincoln. It would seem that Marx, like Lincoln, wanted the land for WHITE workers.


Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey, a reluctant Democratic supporter of the war, knew what it was all about: “Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery,” he said. Like all Northern opponents and reluctant supporters of Lincoln, he knew the war was about economic domination. As one “Copperhead” editor put it: the war was simply “a murderous crusade for plunder and party power.” “Dealing in confiscated cotton seems to be the prime activity of the army,” he added.

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Wall Street agreed and approved. Here is a private circular passed among bankers and brokers in late 1861:

It is not clear whether this is authentic or a satire, but it tells the truth whichever.

The libertarian Lysander Spooner, an abolitionist, called the Lincoln rule “usurpation and tyranny” that had nothing to do with a moral opposition to slavery. “It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty.”


Here is Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American of the 19th century:

What better testimony is needed that emancipation was a by-product, not a goal, of a war of conquest. Let me repeat: emancipation was a by-product of the war, never a goal.


How about these curiosities from the greatest of Northern intellectuals, Emerson. He records in his journals: “But the secret, the esoteric of abolition—a secret, too, from the abolitionist—is, that the negro and the negro-holder are really of one party.” And again, “The abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man.” Emerson had previously predicted that African Americans were like the Dodo, incapable of surviving without care and doomed to disappear. Another abolitionist, James G. Birney, says: “The negroes are part of the enemy.”


Indeed a staple of Northern discourse was that black people would and should disappear, leaving the field to righteous New England Anglo-Saxons. My friend Howard White remarks: “Whatever his faults regarding slavery, the Southerner never found the existence of Africans in his world per se a scandal. That particular foolishness had its roots in the regions further North.”


In 1866, Boston had a meeting of abolitionists and strong Unionists. The speaker, a clergyman, compared the South to a sewer. It was to be drained of its present inhabitants and “to be filled up with Yankee immigration . . . and upon that foundation would be constructed a new order of things. To be reconstructed, the South must be Northernized, and until that was done, the work of reconstruction could not be accomplished.” Not a word about a role for African Americans in this program.


One of the most important aspects of the elimination of slavery is seldom mentioned. The absence of any care or planning for the future of black Americans. The Russian Czar pointed this out to an American visitor as a flaw that invalidated the fruits of emancipation. We could fill ten books with evidence of Northern mistreatment of black people during and after the war. Emancipation as it occurred was not a happy experience. To borrow Kirkpatrick Sale’s term, it was a Hell. I recommend Kirk’s book Emancipation Hell and Paul Graham’s work When the Yankees Come, which are available here.


I suspect many Americans imagine emancipation as soldiers in blue and freed people rushing into one another’s arms to celebrate the day of Jubilee. As may be proved from thousands of Northern sources, the Union solders’ encounter with the black people of the South was overwhelmingly hate-filled, abusive, and exploitive. This subject is just beginning to be explored seriously. Wrote one Northerner of Sherman’s men, they “are impatient of darkies, and annoyed to see them pampered, petted and spoiled.” Ambrose Bierce, a hard-fighting Union soldier for the entire war, said that the black people he saw were virtual slaves as the concubines and servants of Union officers.


Many black people took to the roads not because of an intangible emancipation but because their homes and living had been destroyed. They collected in camps which had catastrophic rates or mortality. The army asked some Northern governors to take some of these people, at least temporarily. The governors of Massachusetts and Illinois, Lincoln’s most fervid supporters, went ballistic. This was unacceptable. The black people would be uncomfortable in the North and much happier in the South, said the longtime abolitionist Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. Happier in the South than in Massachusetts?


What about those black soldiers in the Northern army, used mainly for labour and forlorn hopes like the Crater? A historian quotes a Northern observer of U.S. Army activities in occupied coastal Carolina in 1864. Generals declared their intention to recruit “every able-bodied male in the department.” Writes the Northern observer: “The atrocious impressments of boys of fourteen and responsible men with large dependent families, and the shooting down of negroes who resisted, were common occurrences.”


The greater number of Southern black people remained at home. They received official notice of freedom not from the U.S. Army but from the master who, when he got home from the Confederate army, gathered the people, told them they were free, and that they must work out a new way of surviving together.


Advocates of the war was “caused by slavery” say that the question has been settled and that any disagreement is from evil and misguided Neo-Confederates deceived by a “Lost Cause” myth.


In fact, no great historical question can ever be closed off by a slogan as long as we are free to think. Howard White and I recently put out a book about the war. Careful, well-supported essays, by 16 serious people. Immediately it appeared on Amazon, someone wrote in: “I’m so tired of the Lost Cause writing. Don’t believe the bullshit in this useless pamphlet.” He could not have had time to actually read the book. It can be dismissed unread because he has the righteous cause and we do not. This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.


But if you insist on a short answer solution as to what caused the war I will venture one. The cause of the greatest bloodletting in American history was Yankee greed and hatred. This is infinitely documented before, during, and after the war.

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Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!