I mailed the below essay to Governor Bill Lee. Way too many folks seek to burnish their morality and political careers by attacking those who lived into and through important periods in history. A special thank you to FLT-bird for your posts
The Constitution and the Confederacy
The tragedy of the Civil War highlighted the consequences of ignoring the central principles that established the unique character of our nation. In the Constitutional Convention, our Founding Fathers displayed an unparalleled ability for principled actions rather than domination by the typical cynical avarice and duplicity expected of a political class. The Convention to write the Constitution was formed on May 25, 1787. It completed a draft on August 6. On September 15, 1787 a completed Constitution was engrossed. Therefore, in just over two months they completed a draft, and just over one month was then required for deliberations producing a document they could forward to the Continental Congress and colonies for ratification.
The outcome represented an extraordinarily perilous experiment placing primary faith in the inherent natural liberties of imperfect individuals judiciously constrained by a limited government; a government requiring members to recognize the dilemma of their own imperfection. Since the founding of the colonies and for all time Americans would be defined as sovereign individuals who found their identity in exercising pre-existing intangible liberties accompanied by the hazards and uncertainties of these personal freedoms. Their ethnicity, gender, class, and race would always be secondary expressions of humanity. The limited nature of federal government was emphasized by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution which says, “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution or prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”.
Here was a perfection of human wisdom seldom, if ever, equaled. However, the Constitution would not have been ratified if James Madison had not emphasized states retained sufficient sovereignty to secede. Slavery was retained, but as a dying institution when the Constitution was approved it seemed a not intractable issue to settle. The philosophical doctrines consulted for founding this country already placed master and slave on the same metaphysical plain. Following the Declaration of Independence, the country had already seen five of thirteen colonies abolish slavery. However, it would await future debates because settlement was encumbered by Northern economic interests, as well as the supposed profits of Southern planters.
After the Convention, the invention of the cotton gin in 1794 revived slavery and made it appear genuinely lucrative. Only appearance was possible, because the basic needs for all slaves were provided for even though only about half labored on a plantation and they without incentive to be productive. Slavery disappeared from the Northern states because indentured servitude and European hardships, such as the Irish Potato Famine, provided a cheap source of labor for factories and farms.
Faced with the same exigencies, the persistence of William Wilberforce caused the most ordinary men of Britain to find positions needed to abolish slavery in 1833. Here was a roadmap to follow. By selecting the best reasoned arguments and proposals, politicians could have arrived at an antebellum equivalent of a Nash equilibrium and final settlement.
For five decades politicians ignored these precedents. Instead they focused on policies accommodating commercial motives and succumbed to the infallibility and intransigence of abolitionists and planters who forced an estrangement between North and South. The manifest imperatives created by the Declaration of Independence saying, “all men are created equal” and a Constitution formed by “the people” found little support in deliberations. Latter politicians never achieved the nobility to deal effectively with secession and state’s rights as they applied to slavery. Through their dereliction of duty these fire-eating miscreants of both persuasions stumbled us into the Civil War. They forced the establishment of armies, that through the application of brutal power, resolved these issues, but without resort to reason, contemplation, or mutual understanding.
If the issues had been settled politically, the outcome would have been a foundation agreed to by all parties; a peaceful transition not requiring Lincoln’s vision for a “new birth of freedom”. The application of military force, as the supreme recognized authority, caused the parties to arrive at a destination, and the stronger imposed its will on the weaker. The Constitution was amended to abolish slavery, but the issues of states’ rights and secession were never addressed beyond the dictates imposed by a faction of the victors. Therefore, the mutuality of a settlement was never achieved. We live with an impoverished understanding of the last two issues. The United States lost the Civil War and much of the destiny envisioned by our Founding Fathers remains unrealized.
Our Civil War, which should never have occurred, became the bloodiest conflict our country ever endured. What began as a war to preserve the Union, regardless of slavery, was fought to the last ounce of human endurance and abolished slavery. Great men like Grant, Lee, Meade, Sherman, Johnston, Gordon, and Chamberlain, and their soldiers and sailors should always be honored for having resolved what should have been political issues. Monuments North and South testify to the sincerity and suffering of those Americans who endured the catastrophe of this needless struggle.
A most relevant summation of that tragedy and what should be honored comes to us from Ulysses Grant and Joshua Chamberlain. Grant said of Appomattox, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us”.
When Joshua Chamberlain received the Confederate surrender he said, “Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;—was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?”
These sentiments align with the direction Lincoln provided Grant and Sherman at City Point. Petersburg was under siege and Sherman had marched through Georgia to the sea and into the Carolinas. As the Civil War reached its concluding phase, Lincoln directed the soldiers of the South be given the most liberal and honorable terms. He intended them to go home with their horses to plow and with their guns to shoot crows. Lincoln would approach Reconstruction by looking for orderly state governments formed after the pattern of Arkansas and Louisiana with coexisting military districts, and without interference by the radicals of his own party. He was determined to thwart malicious designs and implement a general amnesty. He would establish lasting value to this terrible conflict through policies of mutual conciliation commensurate with the agony all Americans had just endured.
Grant, remembering Lincoln’s encouragement before his assassination, had seen enough of this disastrous suffering. He would not abide the morally and intellectually bankrupt to reinsert themselves for reprisals overturning the terms of Appomattox. The Confederate officers would not be tried for treason so long as they observed the terms of their parole. Later when Andrew Johnson rebuked William Sherman for including political terms in the surrender document offered Joseph Johnston, he left intact the military provisions Grant offered Lee. Grant later told Johnson that his amicus curiae brief would be accepted, or he would resign as General of the Army. As a result, all who served, both Confederate and Union, have been defined as American veterans by sentiment and federal law.
After Lincoln’s assassination the governments of Arkansas and Louisiana were abolished as the Radical Republications gave full vent to vindictiveness emboldened by a military victory leaving the South prostrate and bankrupt. Viewing a totally broken Confederacy, these harpies imposed a limitless, repressive Reconstruction. Those severe provisions allowed KKK terrorists and their supporters a prominent place in the post war South. As there was for Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, there would be no Marshall Plan for the South with its 4,000,000 freed blacks whose freedom proved a precious talisman lacking instructions.
The clearest example in the twentieth century of the consequence for such actions is the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which Germany embraced in asking for an armistice, were disregarded in development of the treaty. France and Britain were shattered by the war and imposed a crushing retribution on a prostrate Germany that gave rise to National Socialism and WW II.
How different was the outcome of the Confederate surrender from the vision Lincoln gave in his second inaugural address proclaiming “malice toward none and charity to all”. At the war’s end there were important constituencies ready to embrace his offer. Had Lincoln lived Robert E. Lee, as the most revered man in the former Confederacy, would have been a consummate ally by setting an example for renewed citizenship. His submission to the Union could have spread a good infection of moral courage to an extensive following as Lincoln sought to implement his vision. The Reconstruction actually imposed disregarded Lincoln and crushed Lee’s and similar influences.
I found two quotes exampling Lee’s attitude. “I have heard the indictment and made up my mind to let the authorities take their course. I have no wish to avoid the trial the government may order”. In discussion with a pastor he said, “Doctor there is a good old book which I read, and you preach from, which says, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you’. Do you think that your remarks this evening were quite in the spirit of that teaching? I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings and have never seen the day when I did not pray for them.”
Note these dearest rights did not include slavery which Lee opposed, because Lincoln had already said at his first inauguration, “the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service”. Lee’s determination, and that of most Southerners, was to resist the northern states if they attempted the to use the federal government to impose their political aspirations through military occupation of the South.
Fewer than one in a hundred would be motivated to defend slavery. But all believed even a most restrictive meaning for states’ rights would preclude the federal government from military conquest. When the Cotton States formed a Confederacy, Virginia initially rejected the session ordinance but passed it when Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers and assigned a quota to Virginia. The other Border States followed similar decision processes. Only when Lincoln ordered the Emancipation Proclamation after Antietam to prevent intervention by Great Britain and France did it become a war to abolish slavery.
For 1,500 days, Americans killed Americans until over 700,000 had died in battles, hospitals, and prisons. The men in blue and grey uniforms created an environment for winning the war, but then moral and intellectual dwarfs in suits blundered away the opportunity to secure the lasting peace. There was no one in authority to say, “Oh my God. What have we done to ourselves?” Mao Tse-tung, echoing Sun Tzu, stated “It can therefore be said that politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed”. After the years of bloodshed and Lincoln’s assassination, there would be no ‘new birth of freedom” as the political war was lost for the United States.
The Stars and Stripes and Stars and Bars decorating the graves of those who gave their lives would not elicit inspired statesmanship. This national catastrophe would not prompt consideration of first principles and the vision members of the Constitutional Convention saw for continually unfolding promises of individual freedom. Instead blacks were freed, women remained encumbered and disenfranchised, Jim Crow and segregation prospered, and state and local governments lost strength as bulwarks protecting individual liberties.
The juvenile outbursts we currently suffer seek to refute the gifted scholarship of historians such as Douglas Southhall Freeman, Bruce Catton, and Shelby Foote who are among the most revered writers enlightening us to the Civil War. This reincarnation of the Radical Republicans from 150 years ago would ignore first principles and rewrite history to force subservience to a newly popular morality banishing the Confederate battle flag and the Americans who served under it fighting the Northern invasion. Here a multitude of Facebook and Twitter posts form a tapestry of celebrated rhetoric without anchor to analysis derived from legitimate spiritual beliefs or moral philosophies.
These people construct a pretense of morality in opposition to the classic liberal principles which formed the basis for our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. This fashionable consensus encompasses those deciding the existence of Americans who served the Confederacy inflicts emotional damage on them, and those who adjust their beliefs to validate these dilutional perceptions of wounded virtue. The instigators reside as fragments of a swarm trading away adulthood and dignity for prestige without accomplishments. The subservient parties receive effortless addictive compassion as the drug of choice. This novel moral superiority only requires fabricating disgust for themselves and for a country that has reverenced all who served. Buttressed by premeditated ignorance, both ideologically possessed factions shelter within a joyous cacophony of mutually supportive orations validating the oppressions of their own making.
This theater of dilutional relationships proves not only personally futile but provides the opportunity for politicians become patricians to accumulate a useful constituency. As a swarm of acolytes and petty bureaucrats tear at our national heritage, a political class at all levels of government stands ready to offer responsive administrative laws and rules. These creations supposedly provide supportive emotional and physical security, but actually become putrescent encumbrances. A person’s liberty then relies upon ascribing to membership within race, ethnicity, class, and gender groups and allowing elected and self-appointed leaders to define rights.
These policies, cherished by sinister and credulous alike, inject patricians and their mandarins with ever greater powers to compel a subservience of citizens never intended by our Constitution. They not only compel, but often entice people into thankful acceptance of membership within a Gulag of dependency.
Political power then resides with individuals occupying the throne of their own lives and giving pronouncements they consider good and true; pronouncements emerging from their catalogue of enchanting insights. These people, self-proclaiming their mental/moral excellence, validate an implicit fiduciary relationship in which they are predestined to care for everyone. These people suffer a mental disorder where their reason falls in love with itself, and their insights are worshiped as absolutes. No comparison need be made to anything outside, and certainly they can never be constrained by those they rule.
Achievement of success in this political realm then confronts all people with ever narrowing boundaries for exercising inherent needs for independence and mutually agreed voluntary cooperation. True compassion, true leadership would arise from understanding how very few individuals cannot create, encourage, explore, repair, analyze, develop, build, cooperate, serve and/or teach, and become heroic as they exercise their intangible natural liberties.
The Constitution stands in the path of those embracing this fiction of an infallible direction of human activity. If the greatness of Robert E. Lee, who opposed both session and slavery and went South to share the miseries of his fellow Virginians, can be subverted into a latter-day definition of treason, then the road is open to disparage the creation of our country. The achievements of the Continental Congresses must be obscured if a political class can fully exercise their arrogance and pride.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and many more Founding Fathers were slave holders, because slavery was allowed in all thirteen colonies when the Declaration of Independence was written. The monuments in Washington D.C. do not commemorate an association with human imperfection. They testify to the extraordinary achievements in producing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Civil War monuments to Union and Confederate soldiers and sailors testify to the extraordinary sincerity, suffering, and courage of those who served. They also remind us of the enormous failures of politicians to avert the war, to properly value the sacrifices made, and then to derive so little from the ashes of destruction.
Freedom apart from the inherent individual freedoms written into our founding documents is a fraud. We should always choose the hazards and uncertainties of personal freedom over Faustian like bargains exchanging the essence of the human spirit for illusions of government benevolence.
This country needs “a new birth of freedom” if we are to keep faith with the Constitution as the embodiment of the American ideal. Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the blood stream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same”. Now it is our turn.
John Adams by David McCullough
George Washington: Patriot and President by Douglas Southhall Freeman
Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant
The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote
A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
R. E. Lee a Biography by Douglas Southhall Freeman
Selected Civil War Papers of Major General Joshua Chamberlain by Mark Nesbitt
Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee by Son Captain Robert E. Lee
A History of the English Speaking Peoples: The Great Democracies by Winston S. Churchill
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung edited by Foreign Languages Press
The Liberal Mind by Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D
. Constitutional Convention (United States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Convention_(United_States)
Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: Thursday, May 31 by James Madison http://teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/debates/0531-2/
The Federalist Papers https://www.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-Complete-Federalist-Papers.pdf
Slavery in the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States
Nash Equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
Cotton gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
William Wilberforce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce
Slavery Abolition Act 1833 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
The Confederacy is Formed (February 4, 1961) https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=imgurl%3ahttp%3a%2f%2fslideplayer.com%2f3745653%2f13%2fimages%2f22%2fThe%2bConfederacy%2bIs%2bFormed.jpg&view=detailv2&iss=sbi&rtpu=%2fsearch%3fq%3dforming+confederacy&form=IEQNAI&selectedindex=0&id=http%3A%2F%2Fslideplayer.com%2F3745653%2F13%2Fimages%2F22%2FThe%2BConfederacy%2BIs%2BFormed.jpg&mediaurl=http%3A%2F%2Fslideplayer.com%2F3745653%2F13%2Fimages%2F22%2FThe%2BConfederacy%2BIs%2BFormed.jpg&exph=0&expw=0&vt=0
Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Secession_Convention_of_1861
Grant, Lee, Parole, and Treason https://gravitron5.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/grant-lee-parole-treason/
Grant Protects Lee from Treason Trial www.civilwarprofiles.com/grant-protects-lee-from-treason-trial/
Confederate Soldiers Are Considered U.S. Veterans Under Federal Law-Truth! https://www.truthorfiction.com/confederate-soldiers-are-considered-u-s-veterans-under-federal-law/
Confederate Soldiers – American Veterans by Act of Congress https://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/04/03/confederate-soldiers-american-veterans-by-act-of-congress/ https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2011/04/14/confederate-soldiers-are-american-veterans-by-act-of-congress/
Radical Republican https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Republican
Were Confederate Generals Traitors? http://walterewilliams.com/were-confederate-generals-traitors/
Shall We Defend Our Common History? https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/shall-defend-common-history/
The Case Against Liberal Compassion https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-case-against-liberal-compassion/
America’s Cold Civil War https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/americas-cold-civil-war/
