Paul Craig Roberts Explains How We Know The So-Called "Civil War" Was Not Over Slavery

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

When I read Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s article, the question that lept to mind was, “How come the South is said to have fought for slavery when the North wasn’t fighting against slavery?”

Two days before Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th President, Congress, consisting only of the Northern states, passed overwhelmingly on March 2, 1861, the Corwin Amendment that gave constitutional protection to slavery. Lincoln endorsed the amendment in his inaugural address, saying “I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.”

Quite clearly, the North was not prepared to go to war in order to end slavery when on the very eve of war the US Congress and incoming president were in the process of making it unconstitutional to abolish slavery.

Here we have absolute total proof that the North wanted the South kept in the Union far more than the North wanted to abolish slavery.

If the South’s real concern was maintaining slavery, the South would not have turned down the constitutional protection of slavery offered them on a silver platter by Congress and the President. Clearly, for the South also the issue was not slavery.

The real issue between North and South could not be reconciled on the basis of accommodating slavery. The real issue was economic as DiLorenzo, Charles Beard and other historians have documented.

The North offered to preserve slavery irrevocably, but the North did not offer to give up the high tariffs and economic policies that the South saw as inimical to its interests.

Blaming the war on slavery was the way the northern court historians used morality to cover up Lincoln’s naked aggression and the war crimes of his generals.

Demonizing the enemy with moral language works for the victor. And it is still ongoing. We see in the destruction of statues the determination to shove remaining symbols of the Confederacy down the Memory Hole.

Today the ignorant morons, thoroughly brainwashed by Identity Politics, are demanding removal of memorials to Robert E. Lee, an alleged racist toward whom they express violent hatred. This presents a massive paradox. Robert E. Lee was the first person offered command of the Union armies. How can it be that a “Southern racist” was offered command of the Union Army if the Union was going to war to free black slaves?

Virginia did not secede until April 17, 1861, two days after Lincoln called up troops for the invasion of the South.

Surely there must be some hook somewhere that the dishonest court historians can use on which to hang an explanation that the war was about slavery. It is not an easy task. Only a small minority of southerners owned slaves. Slaves were brought to the New World by Europeans as a labor force long prior to the existence of the US and the Southern states in order that the abundant land could be exploited. For the South slavery was an inherited institution that pre-dated the South. Diaries and letters of soldiers fighting for the Confederacy and those fighting for the Union provide no evidence that the soldiers were fighting for or against slavery. Princeton historian, Pulitzer Prize winner, Lincoln Prize winner, president of the American Historical Association, and member of the editorial board of Encyclopedia Britannica, James M. McPherson, in his book based on the correspondence of one thousand soldiers from both sides, What They Fought For, 1861-1865, reports that they fought for two different understandings of the Constitution.

As for the Emancipation Proclamation, on the Union side, military officers were concerned that the Union troops would desert if the Emancipation Proclamation gave them the impression that they were being killed and maimed for the sake of blacks. That is why Lincoln stressed that the proclamation was a “war measure” to provoke an internal slave rebellion that would draw Southern troops off the front lines.

If we look carefully we can find a phony hook in the South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession (December 20, 1860) as long as we ignore the reasoning of the document. Lincoln’s election caused South Carolina to secede. During his campaign for president Lincoln used rhetoric aimed at the abolitionist vote. (Abolitionists did want slavery abolished for moral reasons, though it is sometimes hard to see their morality through their hate, but they never controlled the government.)

South Carolina saw in Lincoln’s election rhetoric intent to violate the US Constitution, which was a voluntary agreement, and which recognized each state as a free and independent state. After providing a history that supported South Carolina’s position, the document says that to remove all doubt about the sovereignty of states “an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people.”

South Carolina saw slavery as the issue being used by the North to violate the sovereignty of states and to further centralize power in Washington. The secession document makes the case that the North, which controlled the US government, had broken the compact on which the Union rested and, therefore, had made the Union null and void. For example, South Carolina pointed to Article 4 of the US Constitution, which reads: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” Northern states had passed laws that nullified federal laws that upheld this article of the compact. Thus, the northern states had deliberately broken the compact on which the union was formed.

The obvious implication was that every aspect of states’ rights protected by the 10th Amendment could now be violated. And as time passed they were, so South Carolina’s reading of the situation was correct.

The secession document reads as a defense of the powers of states and not as a defense of slavery. Here is the document: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/south-carolina-declaration-of-causes-of-secession/

Read it and see what you decide.

A court historian, who is determined to focus attention away from the North’s destruction of the US Constitution and the war crimes that accompanied the Constitution’s destruction, will seize on South Carolina’s use of slavery as the example of the issue the North used to subvert the Constitution. The court historian’s reasoning is that as South Carolina makes a to-do about slavery, slavery must have been the cause of the war.

As South Carolina was the first to secede, its secession document probably was the model for other states. If so, this is the avenue by which court historians, that is, those who replace real history with fake history, turn the war into a war over slavery.

Once people become brainwashed, especially if it is by propaganda that serves power, they are more or less lost forever. It is extremely difficult to bring them to truth. Just look at the pain and suffering inflicted on historian David Irving for documenting the truth about the war crimes committed by the allies against the Germans. There is no doubt that he is correct, but the truth is unacceptable.

The same is the case with the War of Northern Aggression. Lies masquerading as history have been institutionalized for 150 years. An institutionalized lie is highly resistant to truth.

Education has so deteriorated in the US that many people can no longer tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse or justification. In the US denunciation of an orchestrated hate object is a safer path for a writer than explanation. Truth is the casualty.

That truth is so rare everywhere in the Western World is why the West is doomed. The United States, for example, has an entire population that is completely ignorant of its own history.

As George Orwell said, the best way to destroy a people is to destroy their history.

VeTeRaN'S DaY 2016...

Today is veteran"s day.

Following Tuesday"s election result, I received a thank you email from, Ray Jason, a regular Zero Hedge reader who blogs under the nom de plume, the Sea Gypsy Philosopher.

He is also a Vietnam veteran.

Ray said a few very nice things and mentioned that he had written a post on Phan Thi Kim Phuc the "Napalm Girl" for which she later thanked him.

Many of you will recall my Napalm Girl mashup with the Droner in Chief blowing up in the background. 

Naturally, this drew my immediate attention and I read the post. Although he wrote it three years ago when Obongo and the Neocon circus started banging on the Syria war drums like on MTV, it remains timely.

Timely because our newly minted President elect has held out the promise of exiling the Neocon war mongerers.

We mustn"t let him forget that many of us were initially attracted by this among other good reasons.

And we sure as hell should be asking why that Necon jackass John Bolton"s name has been showing up in reports of potential candidates for UN representative!

I asked if I could share Ray"s post here on Veteran"s Day and he was kind enough to consent. So here it is.

Thank you Ray.

And a Banzai7 hat tip to all you veterans out there, including you Dad.  

by Ray Jason 

The Sea was mild and soothing as I sailed alone in the western reaches of the Caribbean.  It had been four days since my last human contact.  Such exile does not disturb me - it comforts me.  The wind was light, and the waves were small and melodious - like the cello phrase in a string quartet.

          Although quite relaxed, I was also vigilant, because my position was near the busy shipping lanes between the Panama Canal and the Yucatan Channel.  Suddenly, I sensed a nearby hazard.  My first scan of the horizon revealed nothing.  On my second, more careful sweep, I saw her – a gray smudge of a ship, still half below the undulating cusp of the Earth.  I took my binoculars from their rack and focused them.  What I saw slammed me backwards - both physically and emotionally.   She was one of them – a gray, military transport vessel that was all too familiar to me.  I had served aboard one - a U.S. Navy ammunition ship in Vietnam.

 
          

                                    *******

I had not willingly done so.  I had been drafted just after receiving my bachelor’s degree.  My first decision was whether to flee to Canada, as my courageous college roommate had done, or to let them take me.  My next choice was between a two year Army enlistment or the four-year Navy sentence.  Wishing to neither kill nor be killed because of anyone’s insipid “domino theory,” I chose the USN.  As someone who survived higher education with my capacity for critical thinking still intact, I already knew that war was horrible and this particular one was senseless and despicable.  I was not an ideal recruit.

          The toughest part of my service was being a closet pacifist aboard a ship full of gung-ho, pseudo-warriors.  And these were the worst kind - the swaggering, macho types, who had the luxury of never facing any real combat.  I kept my secret to myself, just as I kept my self to myself.  In fact, I do not have a single friend from that chapter of my life.  When I would go ashore and meet actual soldiers, they were not gung-ho at all.  They were beaten down and regretful and frightened - and wanted only to be away from there…to be home…to be far from all that madness.

          I never talk about this with my friends.  And it rarely enters my consciousness.  But that dark ship on the horizon, transporting munitions and mutilation to who knows which target this time, just staggered me.  To ease my anguish, I tried the comfort of my favorite classical music.  It didn’t work, and neither did dousing myself with buckets of sea water.  Although I resisted, I knew that the only way out of my agony was to burrow deeper into it.  

          

                                   *******

So I brought out her picture.  I keep it protected in an envelope hidden in one of my favorite books.  I unfolded it tenderly, and gazed one more time at all the evil, meaningless terror of war captured in a single frozen instant from 40 years ago.  I spoke to her once more as I had done many other times down the decades, when I needed solace: 

“Hello again, Napalm Girl.  Keep on running!  There must be some place, somewhere, free from this horror and insanity.  You must find that place.  You deserve that place.  Never stop running!!!”

          She is crying out, “Too hot!  Too hot!” as she flees.  Grotesque flaming jelly from the sky has burned most of the little dress from her nine year old body.  The rest she ripped off herself as she kept running and screaming “I’m dying!  I’m dying!”  

When the heroic photographer got to her, she was whimpering, “Water, water.”  He emptied his canteen on her.  With ferocious determination, through insane traffic, he managed to get her to a hospital in Saigon.  They said she was so badly burned that she would never live and they would not accept her.  He flashed his Associated Press photo credentials and said, “Don’t let this child die or everyone will hear about it!”  They took her in.  And they saved her.  

That Vietnamese photographer, Nick Ut, deeply understood the ravages of war.  His older brother, who was his personal hero, had already died photographing the misery of combat.  When Nick answered the call of basic human decency, and rescued that terrified little girl, he had no idea that on the film in his camera was one of the most profound and powerful photographs of all time.  He was only 19 years old.

Even though the immortal Napalm Girl picture touches me in my core being, it is the one with her mother sitting beside her in the hospital that truly haunts me.  The woman’s quiet dignity as she comforts her innocent frightened child overwhelms me.  In her noble, image, I can see what an almost unbearable burden but blessing it is to be a Woman, and to be a Mother, in this world of torment.  And it sickens me to realize that it is almost always men that cause this needless anguish.

Decades later, I can still imagine their likely conversation as the child asks the mother, “What was that horrible fire that fell from the sky?”  

And the mom might reply, “It was some terrible new weapon - like a bomb, but different.”  

“But why did they drop it on us?” asks the little girl.  “We were just children and old people hiding in the temple from the planes.  We didn’t hurt anybody!”

My guess is that the heroic mother, overwhelmed with grief by the sight of her incinerated child, might have said something like this.  “I do not know the answer, my beautiful daughter.  But I do know that you survived this horrible thing, and your pain will go away and you will heal.  And someday, life will be sweet and sensible again.  Now, try to go to sleep, and when you awake, I will be right here beside you.”              

                               *******

Kim with one of her children.

The dark gray death ship passed a few miles ahead of me, and has now disappeared beyond the horizon.  But even though it is no longer visible, its malignancy still torments me.  I stare again at little Kim’s photo in my hands, and ask myself, “How can I best honor her suffering?”  And then I realize that what makes her pain-wracked image so universal and so immortal is that it lays bare the true nature of war.  And that the best way to repay my gratitude, is to use my power as a writer, to further expose this loathsome evil.  

                              *******

Tragically, as I type these words, the war drums are beating again.  The Deceiver-in-Chief has scheduled a national address in which he will knowingly lie about the need for this latest “regrettable but necessary action.”  Then the commentators will babble on about “sufficient justification” and “reprisals” and “surgical strikes.  But they will never discuss what war actually is.  And that is because, at its core, it is sick and perverted and senseless.  

If someone invades your home and threatens your family, it is your right and your responsibility to protect them, even if it necessitates violence.  This type of personal duty is decent, courageous and just.  But war is the killing of human beings with whom we have no personal grievance.  War is Mass Psychotic Hypnosis.  But it is never initiated by ordinary people. One morning at breakfast, a million Norwegians do not spontaneously decide that it would be a good idea to invade Ireland that afternoon.  

No, this type of insanity can only be seeded and nurtured by certifiable sociopaths.  Unfortunately, we don’t call them lunatics, and banish them to asylums.  Instead we anoint them as political and religious leaders.  These diseased power addicts use cold-blooded manipulation to convince enormous groups of people that other groups of people are their enemies…and so they must go forth…and annihilate them.    

Nick and Kim at the Vietnam Vets Memorial

.

Here is another truth about war that the self-righteous, talking heads deliberately avoid.  Those who make the wars never have to fight the wars.  The Great Deciders will never be in a night ambush, where the fear is so overpowering that their bodily control abandons them, and they shit themselves.  And the defense contractors, engorged on obscene profits, will never have to kick open a mud hut door after strafing it with automatic weapons fire, and discover a heap of dead children beneath a wounded mother, who is so traumatized that she cannot even scream.  And the media tycoons cheerleading for more carnage, will never rush to the flag-draped coffin of a dead son or daughter and wrap themselves around it in fury as the military band tries to sound heroic.

And here is yet another profound truth that the acceptable, credentialed pundits never state:  War doesn’t work!  It never makes the world a better place.  For thousands of years, humanity has waged hundreds of wars, but they never achieve their supposedly noble ideals.  They never “end all wars” or “bring everlasting peace” or “insure self-determination” or any of the dozen other excuses that are used to incite people to massacre one another.  What it does succeed at doing is bringing misery, murder, mutilation and madness to ordinary, decent people.   

So listen carefully as the highly paid military and political analysts parade across your television screens, proclaiming the need for this latest “kinetic action.”  Observe how these shrewd distorters evade the three paramount characteristics of war that I have just discussed.  None of them will address what war really is.  Nor will they mention that those who benefit from war do not suffer its horrors.  And finally, they will not admit that war never brings good into the world and is actually a plague that sickens the human project.

                              *******

                   

Recognizing that war is Mass Psychotic Hypnosis, how do we overcome those who mesmerize us?   How do we break free from their spell?  Certainly our liberation will not come from those at the top.  War rewards them too handsomely.  

We must rely on our numbers.  We are many, they are few.  When the chant from the anti-Vietnam protests, “Hell, no…we won’t go!” became a reality and not just a slogan, the war machine sputtered and died.  Refusal is our best strategy.  We must refuse to serve in their militaries or in their terror cells.  We must refuse to resolve disputes through violence.  And if they incarcerate us for our resistance, that is a better fate than killing someone who is not an enemy.  And when enough of us refuse, their prisons are not large enough to hold us.  

I am perfectly mindful that such thinking is idealistic and foolhardy, but perhaps it will inspire others to come forth with better options for ending war.  Yet, even if such ideals are useless, we must try - if for no other reason than to honor Kim Phuc, the Napalm Girl.  We must sculpt a world where an innocent little girl does not have to race down a road with the flesh peeling off her body, trying to outrun her own death! 

I urge you to visit www.kimfoundation.com.  Dedicated to helping other children who are victims of war.

Almost every day something utterly insipid "goes viral" on the World Wide Web.  Perhaps we can help spread this little essay at this critical time when the war drums are again thundering Inside the Beltway.  By doing so, we can all honor the Napalm Girl.