Oliver Wendell Holmes' Addition to the National Anthem During the Civil War

wisconsinmaritime.org ^ | unk | Holmes

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Anyone who believes the Union sought to preserve ANYTHING other than POWER for Washington, DC has bought into the EXACT thing that BROUGHT us the plague of Progressivism.

Thinking your way is one place the mania starts. A lot of people who weren't progressive or socialist in any way valued union. They opposed weakening the country through division, which would give foreign powers the upper hand in American affairs. Even people who favored self-determination found a lot that was questionable about the panicked and forced unilateral secession of the 1860s. So no, you didn't have to be a progressive or a socialist to oppose the Confederacy.

Did the Civil wAR “END SLAVERY?” Sure — it ended “chattel slavery” on the agrarian plantations of the South, and I as a Southerner would have joined BOTH Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (neither of whom owned slaves and both who opposed slavery) in saying good riddance.

Lee and Jackson certainly had owned slaves. Lee freed the slaves his father-in-law left in his will in accordance with that will. Both Lee and Jackson may have had qualms about one person owning another but neither opposed slavery in the sense of favoring any action against it. For them it was an unfortunate necessity, something that God might take care of in time, but that one had to accept. If you really believe that slavery was wrong you might join the abolitionists in truly wishing good riddance to it.

But the Union REPLACED the slavery they claimed to hate in the South with the slavery of ALL men to a tyrannical government in Washington, DC that is only now coming into its full potential as the threat to the liberties it was created to protect and defend.

That would have more to do with the income tax and withholding than with the Civil War. So long as the federal government's resources were limited it had to give the states a wide leeway. Once it became possible for the federal government to impose taxes directly on the people, Washington, DC's power increased far beyond what could have been foreseen.

The Framers didn't want what we have now, but they did favor a government that was stronger than what Jefferson had in mind or than what Calhoun later claimed was acceptable. In the eyes of Southern radicals, the Founders themselves were already on the slippery slope away from state sovereignty. Or that would be the case, if Dixiecrats didn't habitually lie about the Constitution. Things were always more complex than state's righters let on.

The idea that the price of opposing socialism or centralization was supporting slavery, White supremacy, secession, and segregation, won't fly with most people today and rightly so. The funny thing was that a lot of progressives in the Wilson era were White supremacists and segregationists. You could be a limited government Jeffersonian Southern Democrat, a supporter of racial segregation, and a forward-looking, centralizing Wilsonian progressive all at the same. History is strange that way.

[patriot preacher]

Mania? LOL I’m hardly manic — although I am strident in my belief that what we have in Washington, DC is NOT what the Founders intended, and is EXACTLY what the South fought trying to prevent.

Your observations and opinions do speak to the reality that the Civil War and the players in it were complex. The Confederacy could not be reduced to simply “created to preserve and extend slavery.” Nor could the Union be lauded as “having been out solely to end slavery and free all men.” There were many other dynamics involved — economic, political, ideological, social, religious, racial, etc...

Again, centralization can be said to have prevailed as a result of the outcome of the war — regardless of the motivations of those who perpetrated it upon the States that wish to seceded and determine for themselves their own destiny.