NOBODY has been better at the historical revisionist game than Southern historians, who have successfully pushed the ahistorical myth that the Civil War "had nothing to do about slavery."
NOBODY has been better at the historical revisionist game than Southern historians, who have successfully pushed the ahistorical myth that the Civil War “had nothing to do about slavery.”
It was Lincoln himself who said (not verbatim but close) “If I can preserve the Union with freeing the slaves, I would do it....If I can preserve the Union without freeing the slaves, I would do it” (words to that effect)
Lincoln’s main objective was to preserve the Union. Note that the Emancipation Proclamation did not take place until 1863...and did not cover all areas of the Confederacy
And, many abolishionists’ real objectives in preventing slavery was to keep blacks out of the new territories and states
This is not revisionism, this is the reality. I find most of the revisionism is done by historians with an anti-Southern bias that borders on bigotry
“NOBODY has been better at the historical revisionist game than Southern historians, who have successfully pushed the ahistorical myth that the Civil War ‘had nothing to do about slavery.’”
Read the contemporary writings on the conflict. The issue was economic freedom and states’ rights. If the war was about slavery, then why didn’t the Yankees invade Delaware, for instance? Or Maryland? Or Kentucky? Delaware, a Yankee state, still practiced slavery in the early 1860s. Maryland and Kentucky were slave states, but did not secede. If the war was about slavery, one would think the altruistic Yankees would have marched into Maryland and Kentucky to free the slaves there. But, they didn’t. If the war was fought to free the slaves then why didn’t the fraudulent Emabcipation Proclamation free anyone? Talk about revisionist history! Tell me, exactly, who was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation?
Not really. Southerners have been consistent in their view of what happened ever since Jefferson Davis wrote his first memorandum. Richard Henry Lee never, ever consented to the title of "rebel" and vituperated against the use of the word, which he correctly saw as Northern war propaganda.
The masterwork of revisionism has belonged to the Northern Federalist lawyers who "rewrote" the meaning of the Constitution and the Union it ordained, ascending ladders in the middle of the night like Orwell's little pig Squealer, to paint out and revise key articles of the Constitution.
The Jeffersonian view of the Constitution is the correct one -- the one the Bill of Rights guaranteed. No tenth amendment, no ratification, no Union -- that was the compromise the Antifederalists held out for and got.
In case you didn't remember, the Antifederalists numbered among them Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and James Monroe -- two future presidents and the first signer of the Declaration of Independence. Modern schoolboy history texts minimize the Antifederalists as they propound their triumphalist view of unbroken, victorious marches from Federalism to Lincolnism to Union victory in the Civil War; but the Antifederalists were the liberty party, and their eventual assent the true palladium of Union, the sine qua non of the Union's consummation being the Tenth Amendment.
The reserved powers are just that, reserved powers that can be resumed. If you like, I can link you to the Unionist antithesis, Lalor's 1899 Cyclopedia, that presents the polluted triumphalist view.