THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 2

The Lies and Hypocrisy of the Civil War

The Lies and Hypocrisy of the Civil War

By Jacob G. Hornberger on Jan 24, 2018

More than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said to be racists. The feelings run so deep on both sides of the controversy that one would think that the Civil War ended just yesterday.

As a libertarian, I question why government should erect statues in the first place, to anyone. That's simply not a legitimate role of government. Moreover, why should people be taxed to fund a statue of someone whose beliefs or behavior they dislike or oppose?

Private entities, of course, should be free to erect any statues they want, so long as they aren't subsidized by the state and the statues are on privately owned property. In fact, in 2003 a group spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to establish the Confederate Memorial Park in Lookout Point, Maryland, which features a statue and battle flags that celebrate the Confederacy. It is privately funded and people are free to boycott it or even protest it. It is an example of how things operate in a private-property system.

The statue controversy exposes lies and hypocrisy that characterize the popular depiction of the Civil War.

The most popular lie is the one that says that Abraham Lincoln waged the war to free the slaves. That's just a plain lie. Ending slavery was the result at the end of the war but it was clearly not Lincoln's goal at the beginning of the war.

Lincoln had one reason and one reason alone for initiating war against the Confederacy: to keep the nation intact by suppressing the South's secession. That was it. That was Lincoln's sole aim. Prior to the war, he had made it clear that slavery was legal under the U.S. Constitution. Thus, he believed, the only way to end it legally would have been by constitutional amendment.

Indeed, further proof of Lincoln's aim is seen in his Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves only in certain areas. If he were waging the war to end slavery, wouldn't he have proclaimed the freedom of all slaves, not just some of them?

Let's assume that there was no slavery in the South and that the South had seceded for some other reason, say, tariffs, or simply because Southerners had decided that they no longer wanted to associate with the North. Even without slavery, there is no doubt that Lincoln would have initiated the war to prevent the South from seceding.

What if the Confederate States seceded today and declared their independence? Does anyone doubt that federal forces would be sent into the South again to suppress the secession? Obviously, their aim would not be to end slavery but to keep the nation intact, the same aim that Lincoln had when he ordered federal forces to invade the South.

So why the lie? Why not teach American children the truth — that the Civil War was waged to prevent secession and that ending slavery was simply a byproduct of the war?

I suggest that the reason for the lie is that proponents of the Civil War know that suppressing secession might not be considered by many to be a noble cause for a war that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed half the country, not to mention that it damaged the freedom and democratic processes of the country.

Not so with ending slavery. That's something noble. That's something that many people would say was worth the tremendous sacrifices in life, limb, freedom, and prosperity.

Thus, the lie comes into existence: The Civil War was waged to end slavery, it is said, which is a noble cause, one worth sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of half the country.