Written by the Victors, no?

Difficult to Broach

The spirit of Radical Republicanism lives on among modern Democrats, it seems.

Some of them, anyway.

The tendentiously named Civil War was a war thrust upon the nation by Lincoln and the Republicans, who refused to accept either the departure from the United States of America of the states of the South and their new creation, the Confederate States of America, or the continuation of slavery in those states.

Though refusing at any time to honestly acknowledge it, Lincoln from first to last rejected both and fought a terrific war to destroy both.

Had he accepted both he would have been the man who settled for what many abolitionists had claimed to want for many decades, slavery out of the Union even at the cost of losing the slave states.

But he would not accept that outcome, from first to last.

Had he rejected secession but accepted the continuation of slavery he would have been hated and reviled as a man who spilled oceans of blood for far too little or even for nothing, since the issue that had plagued the union for so long and finally led to the secession of the South would not have been dealt with.

Had he accepted secession and the existence of the new Confederate States of America but fought a war to crush slavery in what would then have been admitted to be and allowed to continue to be a neighboring and sovereign nation he would be have been reviled as a fool and a lunatic for an undertaking that would have left the United States with a permanent and bitter enemy with a border on the Potomac.

He would not accept either of those outcomes, either.

But neither Josh Marshall’s tone nor his high horse is quite in order, truth be told.

And can that display of anger and that insistence on using "rebels," "rebellion," and even "traitors" truly be sincere?

What about Marshall's assumption that the Union dead would feel as he claims he does rather than angry at Lincoln for getting them all killed in a war they wanted no part?

Does he not recall the draft riots?

And there is no reason for us to accept the Northern story, mere wartime and even post-wartime propaganda, about what happened.

Start with Lincoln’s and the Radical Republicans’ official view that secession is disallowed by the constitution and legally null.

This claim is in fact quite groundless.

The Articles of Confederation adopted by the American English colonies that had just got their independence by revolution and war declared both the union itself and continuance of the Articles as that union’s constitution to be perpetual.

Having brushed off both quite unlawfully, its authors wisely dropped both assertions of perpetuity from the Philadelphia constitution, probably not only because they lacked the stomach for such egregious hypocrisy, the questions it would raise, and the mocking laughter it would have produced but also because they feared it might be an added obstacle to ratification of the new constitution – by a wholly illegal process – by all the states and thus to preservation of the union.

As the nationalists of the convention made clear in their writings under the name of “federalists” over the ratification period, they genuinely feared the union would be split by their initiative into two or more possibly mutually inimical mini-unions, mostly though not only because of slavery.

That was a risk they were willing to take, but at the same time they genuinely hoped to save the union from immediate collapse resulting from some or many states refusing ratification as well as from eventual collapse for lack of a sufficiently powerful general government.

Hence, not a word about either the union or the constitution being perpetual, thank you very much.

But however that may be there is even less reason to go along with Lincoln’s and the Republicans’ absurd fiction that, having been illegal, secession did not actually happen.

It most certainly did, and the Confederacy and its constitution were, while they lasted, as genuine and real as the rump union of the North left behind by the secession of the Southern states.

In actual fact, the North, the United States of America, ended slavery in the South, the Confederate States of America, but its successful war for that object did not preserve the union that had, before secession, encompassed all the states.

It restored it by bloody war and bloody occupation, though the victorious North forever refused to admit that’s what it had done.

Perhaps we should re-think our entire view of the Civil War and the subordinate question of memorials to the leaders and soldiers of the South in this light.

And why does any view have to be “our” view?

Whose view is that?

As to Marshall putting the blame for all the dead on the leadership of the South, the truth is that secession was a peaceful process and Lincoln chose war, not the Confederacy.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be OK with that.

But that's what happened.

And Marshall's veiled claim that we whites of the North ignobly obtained our ease and the peace of the renewed union by betraying, selling out, or wronging the freedmen is downright offensive.

The men of the Northern armies died to end slavery and force the states that had been the Confederacy back into second-class membership in the union, with state governments imposed upon them by the North and on terms dictated by the North.

That the whites of the North chose not to continue the bleeding for additional decades to force upon the South a degree and type of racial equality acceptable to JM was not a sellout, a betrayal, or a wrong but only a refusal to spill more of their own and their children's blood in that cause.

But JM is a true, interventionist liberal, and he is always willing to denounce on moral grounds - baloney, in itself - those who refuse to get themselves killed for the good of others on his say-so.

And that makes him every bit as bad as the Cold War liberals who demanded our boys die for the Vietnamese right alongside the Cold War conservatives who lied our boys were dying for America.

There have always been far too many people willing to arrogantly demand Americans die on their command.

What if Lincoln had allowed the South to secede?

What if neither the USA nor the CSA felt strong enough to strut the world stage?

What if neither had jumped into the European war of 1914-1918?

Would the Kaiser have been driven out and so badly beaten Hitler would rise to power?

With no Hitler (and no Stalin, maybe?) would there have been a Second World War?

Would there have been a Cold War?

Would either have involved us?

Seems like the world could have been a better place, a more peaceable place.

Maybe.

Coming on the heels of a few high-profile liberal attacks on the racist sausage-fest in the national Statuary Hall, this bit from JM indicates a new front in the culture war.

Expect to see more.