The Real Civil War Was the Rich Against Everyone Else, Just Like Now
The True War
At his trial in Nuremberg, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring is recorded as saying, “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein,” In common speech, this is often misquoted as, “History is written by the victor.” The actual words are, “The victor is always the judge and the loser is the accused.” Truer words he probably never spoke.
To this I would add that the judge always positions himself as the moral superior. After all, might makes right, sine qua non?
America is convulsing because its history is a bedtime story told to itself to hide the painful truth. On all sides of the current mess there, folks are asking, or rather stating that Civil War 2.0 is underway. In a profound sense, it is just a continuation of the original, much like World War 2 was inevitable because the wrongs of World War 1 where never settled.
After orgies of violence we humans call wars, the winners – and losers – are in a rush to turn away from the horrors that were committed on all sides, and in that rush a convenient narrative is concocted to ease the vivid nightmares. The winners absolve themselves of the crimes by heaping guilt on the shoulders of the losers, regardless of right or wrong, or the truth.
As any good lawyer will tell you, there are three sides to every story – your side, my side and the truth.
When it comes to the American Civil War of 1860-63, the soothing narrative the winners concocted was that the evil South wanted slavery, and the bright shiny North wanted to abolish it. Since the North won, their side of the story has dominated the narrative, but that makes it neither right nor the truth. The real story is much more complex with plenty of guilt to go ’round. As we proper Southerners know it, it was the War of Northern Aggression.
As the great Greek tragedian Aeschyius reminds us, “The first casualty of war is the Truth.”
The issue of slavery began simmering in the Union before the ink was dry on the Constitution. Abolitionists wanted to end slavery primarily because it was a vestige of British colonialism, but also because it was antithetical to the ideals of the new nation.
Many abolitionists advocated sending slaves back to Africa, which eventually happened when a US colonial group created the western African nation of Liberia and offered passage to any slaves wanting to emigrate there. Abraham Lincoln recognized Liberian independence in 1862, and liked the idea of repatriating slaves, as he was not a fan of racial integration.
In 1824, the Democratic Republican Party split into two factions – the Democrats and Republicans – over support for John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Among the issues at the core of the split was slavery and abolition. The Democrats were willing to compromise on slavery, as demonstrated by The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought the free state of Maine and the slave state of Missouri into the Union.
While the compromise placated both sides for atime by maintaining the balance between free and slave states, it was undone by the Kanas-Nebraska Act of 1858.
Aside from all the idealistic rhetoric, the underlying tensions were primarily economic. The northern states were dominated by industrial and financial interests, while the southern states were agricultural. The balance that the politicians sought to maintain was between the suppliers of raw materials and food in the south, and the factories and banks in the north. This tension was exacerbated by the apportionment of representation using population. This one fact is the seed from which the Civil War and two centuries of social unrest have sprung.
The north benefitted from cheap raw materials that made its finished products highly competitive in global markets. This made the industrialists and financiers grossly wealthy. But they also faced increasing pressure to raise wages and offer benefits to labor, an issue that didn’t affect the slave states. Furthermore, it was in the best interests of the northern parties to maintain the supply of cheap raw materials.
The south, on the other hand, found that they could fetch much better prices for their goods in Europe, and could buy manufactured goods cheaper than from the north. More and more of the south’s output was shipping overseas. The southern plantation owners were also hiking the prices for northern buyers, while buying fewer and fewer finished goods from the north, and their wealth was beginning to rival that of the industrial-financial interests. Thanks to slavery, the plantation owners didn’t have an expanding middle class to deal with.
The United States enacted Protective Tariffs almost as fast as the nation came into being. While they were initially intended to be temporary to help fill up the Treasury, they were never lifted and became a tool of northern interests to maintain control over the south. By making southern goods more expensive overseas, they forced the flow of raw materials to their factories. Import tariffs were levied to force the south to buy finished goods from the north.
This made the industrial-financial interests happy, and the expanding middle class enjoyed rising wages, who thus threw their support behind the tariffs, as well. In the election of 1860, the Morill Tariff was a major plank in the Republican party’s platform, and James Buchanan ended up signing the Morill Tariff into law before Abraham Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861.
In November of 1860, frustrated by tariffs, economic shenanigans and the northern dominance of Congress, the southern senators walked out and secession soon followed on 12 April 1861. The northern bankers and financiers, fearing a middle class uprising and shrinking profits, persuaded Lincoln to set up a blockade.
The blockade was a blatant act of war against sovereign states who were exercising their Ninth Amendment and Tenth Amendment rights. The blockade covered 3,500 miles of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, cutting off the newly formed Confederacy from their trading partners in Europe. The same act today is still considered an act of war against a sovereign nation, though the US still uses it as a routine sanction against nations it doesn’t like (i.e. the banking and financial interests disapprove of).
There was and is no law preventing secession from the Union and every foundational document of the united States recognizes this fundamental right. Thomas Jefferson himself wrote in the Declaration of Independence that a people had the right to sever ties with another when the government of the latter was abusive to their interests and liberty.
We must pause here to note that the abolutionist argument at the time was not about ending slavery, but whether new territories conquered by the federal government in its war on the native population would expand slavery into those regions or not. We must also note that not a single slave ship ever flew the Confederate flag. They were either British of Union flagged ships.
Having undermined the Confederate economy and brutally invaded a sovereign state (a common practice of the US), the Union forces decimated the South, which produced raw materials and not the finished goods of the north. So the north cut off the South’s livelihood, while protecting their interests by purchasing raw materials from colonial powers abroad.
Note well that the Confederate states were exercising their rights, as recognized and memorialized in the US Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Also note that the Union invaded the Confederacy, and not the other way around.
The north clearly profited from slavery on all sides and had no intention to end its practice. On the other side, the cost of purchasing and maintaining slavery was becoming a burden on the southern producers and would have ended one way or another before the end of the century.
On 1 January 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Contrary to the legend propagated by the victors, this document did not “free” any slaves. It promised escaped slaves that made it past the Mason-Dixon line that they would not be returned to the Confederacy. It did not grant equal rights or suffrage or even freedom – just that they would not be returned to their owners. In other words, it was yet another act of deception by the Union, which it was quite adept at even then.
In fact, slavery in the north did not end for several years after the Civil War and emancipation proclamation. There was a slave market right where Wall Street is today into the 1870s.
The Dred Scott decision, which affirmed the right of property to a human being, was not overturned until the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, a full three years after the end of the Civil War, and even then the practice of slavery in the north tapered off slowly.
That the Fourteenth Amendment destroyed God-given rights in favor of “privileges and immunities” is the topic of many a long and dry essay. Suffice it to say that the bankers and financiers did not free any slaves, but rather made slaves of every citizen of the “United States,” itself a corporate entity created by the Act of 1871. (note “united States” versus United States)
It may seem like legal hair-splitting, but there is a profound difference between a “right” and “privilege”. In Enlightenment philosophy, a right is the sacred property of an individual by virtue of birth. A privilege is granted by an authority and requires a license or permission to exercise. Go back and read the Fourteenth Amendment again. As Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence, rights are “unalienable” or incapable of having a lien placed on them. In other words, no authority may claim possession of those rights.
The American Civil War was not about slavery as we commonly think of it. It was in point of fact about expanding slavery to everyone, not ending it for some. It was a key expansion of the banking and financial interests in the US, and by means of two world wars, expanding that error to the entire world.
Until we recognize the truth of the Civil War, and acknowledge that we are all slaves to the banking class, we will never be truly free. In many ways, this one Great Lie has caused so much death and destruction in our modern world. Because we labor under a profound deception, we can never cure the ills that afflict us at this very moment.
Think about how many times you have heard or said, “The Constitution grants us the right to…” It does no such thing, nor does the government grant rights. We are born with them as a gift of Nature and Nature’s Creator.
The American Civil War never ended, it only became a global conflict with vile banksters pulling the strings. We need only look a bit closer at where groups like Black Lives Matter or Antifa get their funding to see the subversive hand of banking and finance.
It is not just American blacks who are owed reparations, it is every human being on this planet born since the banksters took over.
New York Slave Market
Dred Scott decision
Franklin Pierce
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