What's so civil about war, anyway?

I apologize for quoting a bad Guns n' Roses song, but sometimes I have no other choice.

As you're all aware, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is upon us, and once again the tubes are alive with the smell of bullshit as various halfwits attempt the reason-defying feat of defending the Southern rebellion whilst simultaneously claiming to abhor slavery. Rob Williams, who cannot feed himself, posts an article by Kirkpatrick Sale calling the Southern attempt to preserve slavery part of "a grand old American tradition," while over at LewRockwell.com, Lincoln-bashing is practically a full time occupation. We aren't supposed to notice that it's a bunch of white people doing all this bashing, as Tom Woods reminds us, even if they are founding members of the League of the South with nothing but nice things to say about the Confederacy and the slave-owning elites that ran it.

But Tom Woods ain't nothing but a damn Yankee, and an ignorant one to boot. I might be a dumb hick from a small town in south Louisiana who didn't go to Harvard or Columbia, but I know horseshit when I smell it. Let's conduct a little thought experiment, folks. Imagine with me that a letter is found, tucked away somewhere in some musty archive or secreted in a crevice in the White House. Lo and behold, it is in Lincoln's own hand, dated just after his inauguration, and in it he declares it his unalterable aim to eradicate slavery utterly, and explains that for political reasons he must keep this goal secret. Do you imagine that the eructations bellowing forth from these troglodytes would cease? Would they reverse course and start singing the praises of a man who smashed such a wicked system? Would Lew Rockwell start calling him the Liberator, and would Thomas DiLorenzo put out a new edition of his book with a new afterword praising the man?

Eat shit and die, scumbags

Yeah, exactly. I might be a largely self-educated dumb hick who went to a clutch of public universities, but I seem to recall that primary sources are basically the trump cards of history, and as Bryan pointed out below, the Confederates weren't in the least bit shy about telling anyone why they were rebelling- to hang on to their slaves. For this, they deserved worse than they got. Every last slave-owner should have been hung by the neck until dead, and his lands and property portioned out to his victims. What's more, this outcome would have been just at any previous time in history. If George Washington's slaves had revolted and hung him, he would have deserved it. The only figures who come away from this period smelling of roses are the ones we are told are "radicals," like John Brown. What do you call a man who devotes his entire life to freeing his fellow men from bondage? A saint. The only just answer to the question of slavery, at any point in our history from the founding of this country to the passage of the 13th Amendment, was the immediate emancipation of all slaves and the distribution of slave-owners' property to their victims.

But our Lincoln-hating friends never seem to lament the fact that Lincoln was not an abolitionist. They point it out gleefully enough, but not as if it were a moral failing on his part. And hey, maybe he wasn't an abolitionist, but at least he didn't own any slaves. Whatever iniquities were committed by Lincoln, his government and his armies, their enemies were worse. Why? Because they did all the same wicked things, but in the name of a wicked cause. And the Southern cause was undeniably wicked, and defending or even just sympathizing with it is contemptible. Yes Virginia, buying and selling black people really is bad, and the Confederacy really was established to preserve just that. Don't believe me? Just ask the Confederates themselves.  I'm not sure what kind of historical telepathy our modern-day Confederates are using, but my poor dumb self is limited to what was actually said at the time.

And if these devotees of the Lost Cause aren't really racists, and they really do believe slavery was wicked, then why no paeans to John Brown? He knew what to do with faced with something as monstrous as slavery. Pity these moral midgets don't.