Philadelphia Is Where the Problems Started

​Just as it did in 1865, Appomattox Day (the day when the South became a conquered colony of DC, a day that should be remembered by Southerners with mourning and fasting and prayer each year) will fall on Palm Sunday in 2023 – April 9th (following the Orthodox Church’s dating; the Protestants and Roman Catholics will be celebrating the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ on that day).  Because of this conjunction of the days, it is fitting to reflect once again on the narrative surrounding this War – its causes, its effects, the people and issues involved. ​

Unfortunately, prominent conservatives continue to extol President Lincoln as the embodiment of a just and far-sighted political leader.  Sohrab Ahmari, for instance, is in agreement with a new documentary ‘that Lincoln is the ideal thinker-practitioner of the American constitutional tradition’.  The tradition in Mr. Ahmari’s and his fellow-travelers’ view is that the federal government is justified in trampling the sovereignty of the States to eradicate what it views as moral evils, constitutional limits and other niceties notwithstanding. 

The Southern historian Rod O’Barr, who has written some excellent essays at the Abbeville Institute lately, sees lots of problems in the Lincoln-as-crusading-anti-slavery-hero narrative.  In reviewing the work of Dr. James McPherson, he writes, 

An example of this suppression of evidence in McPherson’s work is his discussion of Lincoln’s 1862 offer of compensated emancipation to the slave States. He mentions the July 12 meeting Lincoln held with the border slave State representatives where Lincoln attempted to convince them to accept his offer. It serves his “crusade against oppression” narrative. But McPherson conveniently omits in the discussion where Lincoln says it is a strategy to win the war and not a crusade to free slaves. And McPherson omits where those representatives tell Lincoln that the seceded States did NOT secede over slavery, and as a “fact, now become history,” were offering to end slavery if European powers would aid in the war to gain Southern independence. This is an obvious intentional sin of omission on the part of McPherson to spin a false narrative.

Such revelations make it possible to discern the real cause behind the North’s war against the South:

McPherson has to spin the narrative in this fashion to somehow make palatable a war that was in reality a crime against humanity. For if ending slavery was not the ultimate justification for the war, then all that is left is a war to “preserve the Union,” which certainly has no redeeming moral value. How could it, in a Union whose founding organic law was based on a Declaration of Independence that asserted the fundamental human right to a “government by consent of the governed?” Preserving the Union did not necessitate forcing the Southern States to remain in it. The Union could have continued minus those States. But the Northern section would have been economically famished without those Southern States. Preserving the Union” was nothing more than a euphemism for forcing the Southern people to remain under a government to which they no longer consented, and for what? So that the North could economically exploit the revenue generated by “King Cotton.”

The conquest of the South by the Yankees stripped the limited government façade from DC, destroyed the decentralizing inertia left from the era of the Articles of Confederation, with the devastating consequences still unfolding and compounding today:

“The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had. With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the Founding Fathers–a government of limited powers.” Professor James M. McPherson, Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism.

. . .

McPherson, while admitting the North was the section that abandoned the Founders, is a nationalist who approves of the Lincoln led revolution against the Founders. Of the war he applauds that Lincoln forced,

“the several states bound loosely in a federal union under a weak central government into a new nation forged by the fires of war…

…. the old decentralized federal republic became a new national polity that taxed the people directly, created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, established a national currency and a national banking structure. The United States went to war in 1861 to preserve the Union; it emerged from war in 1865 having created a nation. Before 1861 the two words “United States” were generally used as a plural noun: “The United States are a republic.” After 1865 the United States became a singular noun. The loose union of states became a nation.” James McPherson Battle cry of Freedom Oxford U Press.

What those like McPherson with nationalist sentiments cannot grasp is the loss of freedom and the creation of crony capitalist corruption that the Lincoln led North imposed on all Americans by force of bayonets. The Founders had carefully constructed a confederation in which power was intentionally decentralized and dispersed among the States as a means of avoiding centralized tyranny. Lincoln’s war created the very monster the Founders so rightly opposed.

Mr. O’Barr’s work here and elsewhere is generally beyond reproach, but he is wrong in one particular:  It was not ‘Lincoln’s war [that] created the very monster the Founders so rightly opposed.’  That monster was birthed in 1787 during the constitutional convention in Philadelphia.  The Anti-Federalist writer Federal Farmer explains (via TJ Martinell): 

He observed many of the changes that would occur with the potential transition from the Articles of Confederation to the proposed federal government under the Constitution. Under the former, the states retained most of their authority, and there was no confusion over what powers the Articles of Confederation delegated and those it did not. Yet, the question of enumerated and unenumerated powers was one of the many issues driving a wedge between antifederalists and federalists over the proposed Constitution.

The Federal Farmer argued that the Constitution would represent a transformation of the roles the states and central government played – particularly regarding their necessity. Under the confederation, the states largely governed themselves, but the proposed general government would have enough power to rule with or without the states. Or, it could even rule against the will of the states.

​. . .

He went on to explain the differing impacts of a federal republic and a consolidated government. (bold emphasis added)

“The first (a federal Republic) makes the existence of the state governments indispensable, and throws all the detail business of levying and collecting the taxes, &c. into the hands of those governments, and into the hands, of course, of many thousand officers solely created by, and dependent on the state. The last (consolidation) entirely excludes the agency of the respective states, and throws the whole business of levying and collecting taxes, &c. into the hands of many thousand officers solely created by, and dependent upon the union, and makes the existence of the state government of no consequence in the case.”

It is clear that what was birthed in Philadelphia and reached its maturity in the violence of Lincoln’s war is precisely a consolidated, and not a federal, government. Mr. O’Barr continues:

Politicians of the federal government along with centralized planners in agencies such as “the Fed” (our version of the old Soviet Politburo), now gainfully manipulate centralized power at the expense of the freedoms and bank accounts of the people whose States no longer defend their polities. The results of the Lincoln revolution, which McPherson spins as a revolution of social justice, was, in reality, a centralized sovereignty enabling corruption at the highest level. And that is what Lincoln and his Republican crony capitalist allies really wanted. It was all about leveraging the North’s population advantage for control of a now sovereign general government for the purpose of economic exploitation of the Union. Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham spoke in opposition to the reason for Lincolns war in 1863, and it cost him dearly because of Lincoln’s retribution:

“Overthrow the present form of Federal-republican government, and to establish a strong centralized government in its stead…national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditure, gigantic and stupendous peculation . . . No more state lines, no more state governments, but a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism.”

Vallandigham had no idea the extremes to which the corruption could reach. We now are $30 trillion in debt, and the national banking structure so opposed by Thomas Jefferson as unconstitutional and potentially corrupt, has seen banking failures as politicians in bed with centralized planners enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayers who have to fund bailouts. Today five US Banks have risk exposure that is twice the amount of the GDP of the entire world!

Knowing this, the conservative/revivalist/traditionalist political strategy vis-à-vis DC going forward must include two goals. The short-term goal would be what it always has been: Elect the most capable and virtuous conservatives for federal office that we possibly can to limit the carnage of the DC leviathan (along with a liberal use of State and local nullification). But the long-term goal must be to refashion the consolidated government created by the Philadelphia constitution into one that is truly federal, one in which the States wield the bulk of the power again. That will mean no House of Representatives; senators appointed by the governors or State legislatures; no national bank; a federal budget that is dependent at least in part on money supplied voluntarily by each State; no national army (each State raising and maintaining her own); unanimous or near unanimous consent for measures to be passed; and so forth.

And this is assuming that all the States will want to remain together in a union, an assumption that is looking less and less tenable as the cultural divide between States and regions continues to widen.

Abortion-promoting, transgender-friendly, gun-free, carbon-neutral, covid-totalitarian States like California, Oregon, and Washington and States like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama that embrace traditional Christian teachings about marriage and family, child murder, and human sexual duality, maintain some respect for human free will in health care decisions, understand that people need a way to defend themselves from attackers, and can keep a reasonable balance between scientific innovation and care for the creation – why keep States so radically opposed in their beliefs and folkways yoked together?

Maybe we are not far removed, here at the South anyway, from being able to praise our heroes once again without the disapproving scowls and howls of the Woke in DC and the Blue States, praise that they likewise garnered from foreign countries, the poet Philip Stanhope Worsley of England among them, who concluded a poem with these lines: ​

An Angel’s heart, an angel’s mouth,
Not Homer’s, could alone for me
Hymn well the great Confederate South--
Virginia first, and LEE.