Why the South Was Right, the North Wrong

The Foundations of the American State

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

"Americans are forever proclaiming our boastful aspersions to the world . . . that our government was based on the consent of the people," though in fact "it rests upon force, as much as any government that ever existed." ~ Letter from Robert E. Lee to E.G.W. Butler, Oct. 11, 1867

"[H]ad the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified . . . in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants." ~ Lee Kennett, Marching through Georgia: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, p. 286

In his book Battle Cry for Freedom: The Civil War Era (p. 619), Lincoln cultist James McPherson wrote that some 50,000 Southern civilians perished during the War to Prevent Southern Independence. Others have made estimates that are much higher. The only way this could be possible is that if thousands were murdered in cold blood by the U.S. Army. This is a shocking claim, and it will be shocking to most because such statistics say little about the actual horror of mass murder at the hands of the state. Moreover, the state always has its court historians and paid propagandists who put such statistics "in proper perspective," so that they will not alarm us. (Thomas Sowell comes to mind as a contemporary commentator who has repeatedly belittled the number of Americans killed in Iraq in the past four years by comparing it to the number of deaths in World War II.)

The state funding and control of higher education that have produced the totalitarian regime of political correctness has all but guaranteed that there will be few (if any) publications that illuminate, rather than obfuscate, some of the more devious deeds of the American state throughout its history. But historian Walter Brian Cisco, who is not an academic and is not on any state payroll, has recently written a book – War Crimes Against Southern Civilians – that blows the lid off the conspiracy of silence about the violent, mass-murdering origins of the American Leviathan state (or "The New Birth of Freedom," as both left-wing and right-wing statists put it).

In the name of "restoring the union" the U.S. Army, under the micromanagement of Abraham Lincoln, waged war on its own people, shelling and burning entire cities populated only by civilians and engaging in acts of plunder, forced evacuation, and mass murder. It is all documented in gory detail by Mr. Cisco, who quotes conservative icon Richard M. Weaver in his introductory chapter as having remarked that "from the military policies of Sherman and Sheridan there lies but an easy step to total war of the Nazis, the greatest affront to Western civilization since its founding."

Lincoln cultists are fond of dismissing all of this by reciting Sherman’s "war is hell" slogan. But as Cisco points out, murders, rapes, and robberies are also inevitable in human society, and are likely to happen much more often if we cease to regard them as reprehensible. Those who idolize General Sherman in this way are not "hearing the totalitarian echo in their words."

Lincoln was always aware of what was going on; waging war on civilians – his own citizens – was his own policy from the very beginning, as Cisco proves. In May of 1861, for example, Captain Nathaniel Lyon recruited some seven thousand new German immigrants (mostly without uniforms) to eliminate suspected secessionists in St. Louis. They rounded up some six hundred men and paraded them through the streets playing the Star Spangled Banner (which must have been completely foreign to the mostly non-English speaking Germans). When the citizens of St. Louis protested, the recruits fired on them, killing twenty-eight civilians and wounding seventy-five. Lyon was promoted to brigadier general a week later, while some ten thousand civilians fled St. Louis.

By 1863 Missouri, under U.S. Army occupation, was a place were "arson, theft, and murder became so common that vast sections of the state were uninhabited." Cisco quotes Union General James H. Lane as saying, "We believe in a war of extermination. I want to see every foot of ground in Jackson, Cass and Bates counties burned over – everything laid waste."

Another practice of the Union Army that is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century was forced relocation of suspected dissenters. Cisco gives chapter and verse of how this occurred in Missouri, Tennessee, and elsewhere, as thousands of civilians were forced to leave their homes. This even included Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham.

Plunder and pillage was also the Official Policy of the Lincoln regime from the start of the war, as Cisco shows. Before being defeated in the Battle of Fredericksburg the Union Army occupied the town for a short while. Cisco quotes a Union Army officer as saying that "the men had emptied every house and store of its contents, and the streets, as a matter of course, were filled with chairs and sofas, pianos, books, and everything imaginable. . . ."

An entire chapter is devoted to the sacking of Athens, Alabama, in 1862. Every store and shop in the town was looted, along with most private homes, where U.S. troops went about "stealing what they wanted and destroying the rest."

The commanding officer in charge, a Russian immigrant named Col. John Turchin, told his soldiers that he would shut his eyes while they went about plundering the town. That was the way of the Russian Cossacks, he said. One of Turchin’s superior officers, General Don Carlos Buell, relieved Turchin of his brigade command for committing such crimes against civilians. But he was overruled by the Lincoln regime, which promoted him to the rank of brigadier general instead.

Cisco also describes the shelling of civilian-occupied cities like Charleston, South Carolina by the Federal Army. "[D]uring one nine-day period in January no fewer than 1,500 shells fell on the city. Later, a single gun nearby threw 4,253 missiles into Charleston. . ." (Much of Cisco’s information comes from the U.S. Government publication, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.) This is how many of those 50,000 Southern civilians were killed.

Atlanta was shelled by Sherman for days after the Confederates evacuated the city and left it defenseless. Cisco describes how a Mr. Warner had a shell crash "into his home . . . . Both his legs were severed by the missile and he died within two hours. Warner’s six-year-old daughter was cut in two by the same shot." Sherman ordered more and more artillery to be shipped to Atlanta, "with which we can pick out almost any house in the town," he said. After the shelling stopped Sherman ordered the remaining surviving civilians to evacuate their homes just as winter approached and the land all around had been stripped of food by the army. The city was then burned. An "ocean of fire" covered the city, according to one Union officer, "leaving nothing but the smoldering ruins of this once beautiful city."

Cisco also details the war on civilians in the Shenandoah Valley, conducted by such cowardly murderers of women and children as Sheridan and Custer. "Unable to vanquish Robert E. Lee on the battlefield," wrote the editor of the Staunton, Virginia newspaper, "Grant has turned his arms against the women and children of our land."

War Crimes Against Southern Civilians is a must-read for anyone who wants to educate themselves about Sherman’s "March to the Sea." (For the cartoonish version, see the History Channel rendition.) The true story is a story of the continued plunder and rape of the civilian population, along with the gang rape of mostly black women by Federal soldiers under Sherman’s command. "Female servants were taken and violated without mercy" by Federal soldiers, wrote a war correspondent.

South Carolinians were so hated by Lincoln’s army that they even killed every dog in sight upon reaching the state on the "march." "The dogs were easily killed. All we had to do was to bayonet them," boasted one brave Union soldier.

Cisco also proves what delusional liars such Lincoln (and Sherman) cultists as Victor Davis Hanson are. Hanson has claimed in print that Sherman was some kind of egalitarian who was motivated by indignation over the degree of racial inequality in the South. The truth, of course, is that Sherman was every bit as much a racist and white supremacist as were virtually all other white Northerners, including Lincoln. He was also an anti-Semite, and of course hated red-skinned people almost as much as he hated South Carolinians – and would later kill them in even greater numbers.

Cisco documents "Abuse of African-Americans" by Sherman’s army in his final, stomach-turning chapter. Slaves were raped, pillaged, and murdered indiscriminately along with the white population of the South, and Sherman did nothing to stop it.

A favorite pastime of Sherman’s "bummers" was to tie a black man up by his thumbs until he told them where any valuables might be hidden. Sometimes they were hung by the neck instead, and quite often killed in that way. "They tied me up by my two thumbs and try to make me tell where I hid the money and gold watch and silver, but I swore I didn’t know," said a former slave, quoted by Cisco from The Slave Narratives.

There is nothing truly consensual about government. It is always and everywhere based on force, intimidation, and violence. When the founding generation formed a confederacy with the Articles of Confederation, and later the Constitution, it was at least a voluntary union of the states. The citizens of each state understood that their state, and all others, was free and independent and sovereign. They were free to participate in the union, or not.

The union of the founders was destroyed in 1865. War Crimes Against Southern Civilians explains in great detail how, in addition to killing some 300,000 dissenters to rule by Washington, D.C. on the battlefield, the U.S. Army, under the micromanagement of Abe Lincoln, also murdered tens of thousands of Southern civilians, including thousands of slaves and free blacks, while stealing tens of millions of dollars of their private possessions as well. None of it was necessary, of course, for the purpose of ending slavery; all other countries on earth ended slavery peacefully during the nineteenth century. This included the British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies, where 96 percent of all the slaves in the Western Hemisphere once existed. The purpose of the war was to finally realize the Hamiltonian dream of a consolidated, monopolistic government that would pursue what Hamilton himself called "national greatness" and "imperial glory." The purpose of the war, in other words, was a New Birth of Empire, one that would hopefully rival the Europeans in the exploitation of their own citizens in the name of the glory of the state.

War of Northern Aggression

THE VICTORS WRITE history books, and the dominant accounts of the Civil War reflect the victorious perspective: misguided Southerners sought to destroy democratic governance and preserve slavery. Led by the heroic Abraham Lincoln, Northerners responded by saving the Union and emancipating the slaves. And for leading his moral crusade, Lincoln is America’s greatest president, martyred in his hour of triumph.

Charles Adams, best known for his books on taxation, takes aim at this history. His analysis of what more accurately would be called the War of Northern Aggression is a bit different:

With the passing of time, all wars seem pointless. The American Civil War certainly looks that way at this time in history. Heroes begin to look like fools. The glorious dead, the young soldiers who suffered and died, need to be pitied, and the leaders who led them to early graves need to be lynched. In that war, as in so many wars, the wrong people died.

When in the Course of Human Events offers a sustained challenge to much of the conventional wisdom about the conflict. Indeed, the book’s title is a bit misleading. Adams doesn’t so much develop a comprehensive argument for secession as puncture the worst hypocrisies surrounding the North’s decision to initiate war.

Observes Adams: “Lincoln’s concern that government ‘of the people’ would perish from the earth if the North lost may have been the biggest absurdity of all.”

Particularly valuable is Adams’s critique of Lincoln. The victors’ history books tend to glide by Lincoln’s constitutional usurpations and violations. Adams does not. Even those familiar with the 16th president’s unconstitutional militia call, suspension of habeas corpus, and other lawless acts may not know that Lincoln ordered the arrest of U.S. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for ruling that Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus without congressional approval violated the law. Only the failure of a U.S. marshal to carry out the order “saved the president from what would have been his worst crime against the constitutional scheme of government,” the author writes.

The Tariff and the War

Adams’s most detailed argument, with interesting citations to domestic and foreign opinion of the time, is that the federal tariff was more responsible than slavery for the war. Certainly the tariff was a factor in the North’s decision to use force to prevent the South from leaving. Abolition was not particularly important: as Adams details, most Northern states shared the racism of the South, and several refused to allow free blacks to enter. Concern over the effects of lost revenue — the tariff was the federal government’s most important tax — and creation of a veritable free-trade zone in the South stoked Northern opposition to secession.

Still, protectionism alone might not have been enough to justify a Northern invasion. Raw nationalism and anger over the South’s decision to pick up its marbles and go home also were important. Taken together, the combination proved irresistible, especially when most war hawks thought that little fighting would be necessary to reunite the states. This fatal underestimation of the costs of war, by both sides, might have been the decisive factor in leading the Southern states to secede and the Northern states to try to stop them.

Adams’s emphasis on the tariff is less satisfactory when applied to the departing states. Although the protective tariffs passed at the behest of Northern manufacturing interests rankled Southerners, Lincoln’s election did not dramatically impact that issue. The rush out of the Union by the seven Deep South states reflected anger over the triumph of someone viewed as hostile to the South and fundamental fears about the security of the “peculiar institution.”

Adams argues that the institution of slavery had never been more secure — but sometimes even otherwise rational people act irrationally. Indeed, the slave states could fear the continuing effectiveness of paper guarantees, especially if Lincoln used federal institutions to campaign against slavery.

Not one to shy from controversy, Adams charges Northern generals with barbarism and war crimes. He contends that the actions of the Ku Klux Klan after the war — before its later lawless campaign against helpless blacks — could be understood in the context of defending Southern society from “the Yankee invaders” during Reconstruction.

Finally, Adams offers a wonderfully vicious parsing of Lincoln’s celebrated Gettysburg Address. It might be “good poetry,” Adams writes, but that didn’t make it “good thinking,” based as it was on “a number of errors and falsehoods.”

Standard histories of the War between the States make an inviting target for debunking. Adams joyously shoots away. Most of his criticisms hit home, but you don’t have to agree with all of them to recognize that he is right in calling the Civil War “a great national tragedy in every conceivable way,” including “a botched emancipation; the extermination of a whole generation of young men, including hundreds of thousands of teenage boys; the destruction of the constitutional scheme of limited federal power.” It is a war that should never have been fought.