Civil War History You Aren’t Supposed To Know

Many American’s have been falsely led to believe that the Civil War was all about freeing the slaves.  This fallacy must be put to an end.  I will allow the historical actors to tell you exactly what this war was about in their own words.

Abraham Lincoln had this to say about blacks:



Confederate General Robert E. Lee had this to say about blacks:

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. — [Freeman, Douglas S. (1934). R. E. Lee, A Biography]

The fact that Lincoln was an ardent racist, as were his slave owning Union Generals, should tip you off to the fact that the institution of slavery wasn’t the root cause of the violent conflict.  The U.S. is the only country in the world where a civil war occurred prior to the abolition of slavery.  The notion that the abolition of slavery required some kind of war is absurd.  In fact, the institution of slavery was on its way out the door prior to the Civil War, and it would have ended all on its own thanks to jury nullification and state nullification of federal laws.

How could this be so?

Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston explains:

 …the division of the country would give the slaves of the border Southern States so near and safe a refuge that those states would soon cease to have slaves and be compelled … to abandon the Confederacy.’ — [Craig L. Symonds, Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography, p. 93]

You see, when a slave state is bordered by a free state, the slaves now have somewhere to run.  Just as we saw in East Germany, and countless other socialist wastelands throughout history, people will run to where they are free if they are violently oppressed.  My own father escaped from communist Hungary by hopping a fence and running through a minefield into Austria.

In the articles of secession, the South is quite explicit about why they sought to leave the union.  South Carolina stated its reason for leaving the union as:


This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made….


You see, the Southern states viewed the Constitution as a voluntary contract.  The South believed that since the feds weren’t holding up their end of the contract, they had every right to void it.  As far as the South was concerned, their union with the Northern states was entirely voluntary and dependent upon the North abiding by the Constitution they agreed to.

Slavery as an institution is impossible without the State imposing it.  If the State took no position on slavery, for or against it, the free market could not impose it on its own.  There were no electric fences around the plantations in the South.  The slaves could have walked off any time they wanted to.  What kept them there was the fact that they had no where to run to.  Government agents would have set about capturing them if they tried to flee, and anyone who harbored them would have been thrown into prison.  Without the State, the cost of keeping a slave tied to a plantation through force would have exceeded the revenues that slave would have generated.  Prisons are money losing propositions by nature.  They make money only because the state funds them with stolen tax money.

The North aggressed against the South in order to keep the flow of Southern tax money flowing into its coffers.  If the North had simply let the South walk away from the union, slavery would have collapsed on its own, just as it did everywhere else around the world.  While it is true that the South fired the first shots of the Civil War, they only did so because of threats made by the North leading them to conclude that an invasion was imminent.

The Civil War didn’t need to happen.  It was caused by the pure greed of Northern bureaucrats.  The Civil War may have brought about a quicker end to slavery, but it was at the cost of untold misery and hundreds of thousands of lives lost.  Further, the war destroyed the concept of a voluntary union of states.  Now the states are nothing more than puppet governments which are ruled by the high throne in Washington to the determent of all.


For more information on this subject, by historians who aren’t a bunch of communist sympathizers, listen to these lectures:

  • Sfplamen

    Szia Mihály!

  • JimPatrickLeahy
