Destroying The Lincoln Myth!
Why Lincoln Should Be Reconsidered? Historian Eric Foner has suggested that both fans and critics of Abraham Lincoln consider the possibility that Lincoln maintained a racial attitude guided by white supremacist beliefs while he simultaneously opposed slavery on humanitarian grounds. Indeed, the efforts of historians to paint Lincoln in tones of black and white, as either a trailblazer of racial equality or as the quintessential racist, have led over a hundred years of Lincoln scholarship to an impasse. As long as the pendulum swings historians continue to miss the mark, and Lincoln's racial beliefs remain an enigma. People may be reluctant to confront an ugly truth about Lincoln, not that he was, necessarily, the ultimate racist, but that his thoughts on race were not unique, that they were in fact the thoughts shared by most Northerners at the time. In this sense he ceases to be the visionary we have thought him, and his racial beliefs reveal themselves to be nothing special...
Beheading The "Great Messiah" by Karen De Coster
Abraham Lincoln, as most of us were told in Mr. Smith's 9th-grade history class, was a God-sent savior, a brilliant, articulate, and diversity-loving individual, and the Messiah of the great "Union." Most of us were brainwashed on enchanting quotations from the "great man from the little log cabin." This week celebrates his birthday, and may he be remembered for what he truly was. So let me begin a short and biased Lincoln diatribe, and may it rattle Abe's grave and leave him forever unsettled.
Lincoln was a ruthless dictator of the most contemptible sort. A conniving and manipulative man, and a scoundrel at heart, he was nowhere near what old guard historians would have us believe.
Lincoln has been transformed into the indomitable icon of the American Union. But yet, this beast ruled the country by presidential decree, exercised dictatorial powers over a free people, and proceeded to wage war without a declaration from Congress. Lincoln blocked Southern shipping ports, justifying his actions by saying "he would enforce all laws and collect all revenues due the North." The blockades were an act of war. He set his Northern Army upon the South at Fort Sumter, and set in motion one of the most brutal attacks ever upon freedom by maneuvering the South into firing the first shot at their Northern aggressors.
However, Mr. Smith's textbook would have us believe that Lincoln was a preservationist of sorts, a man dedicated to preserving the grandeur of State ideals. Most 9th-graders don't have the intellect to ask what is so glorious about State ideals. Instead, they absorb just enough to make it into ignorant adulthood. In fact, if they had questioned these teachings, they would have discovered that Lincoln was a consummate con man, manipulator, and a State-serving miscreant.
In the march through Georgia during Lincoln's War of Northern Aggression, he and Sherman carved out a murderous campaign, maiming innocent civilians and setting a precedent for the next century's bloody genocides that followed. A fine exemplar was he, the Communists might say.
As if the pure evil of the war to subjugate the Southern states struggling for independence was not unscrupulous enough, Lincoln was hardly the watchman of the black race as portrayed by Mr. Smith's ninth-grade history text, either. Lincoln had no fondness for the black man, and in fact, often spoke with the candor of that which would make him a modern-day racist of satanic proportions.
As Lincoln scholar Tom DiLorenzo points out, Lincoln believed there was an inherent inequality between the black and white race, and held a conviction that a "superior position" should be assigned to the white man over the black man due to this political and social inequality. David Duke was forever browbeaten for muttering anything even resembling this.
Any good historian at least understands that his goal was not to free the slaves, as DiLorenzo correctly states. In 1862, Lincoln published a letter stating, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."
Lincoln was the darling candidate of the moneyed industrialists of the North. At the core of his political tenets was a government of high import taxes, and his Republican party, whom he lead, passed the Morrill tariff into law soon after taking office. To quote DiLorenzo, Lincoln "even promised in his First Inaugural Address to launch an invasion of any state that failed to collect its share of tariffs." He was committing himself to collecting customs in the South, even if that meant they would secede. The free-market economics of the South were up for assault.
Lincoln signed ten more tariff-raising bills throughout his agonizing administration. He manipulated the American public into the first income tax, he handed out huge land grants and monetary subsidies to transcontinental railroads (corporate welfare), and he took the nation off the gold standard, allowing the government to have absolute control over the monetary system. Then, he virtually nationalized the banking system under the National Currency Acts in order to establish a machine for printing new money at will and to provide cheap credit for the business elite. This mercantilist tyrant ushered in central banking, our greatest economic curse to this day.
Furthermore, his "New Army" and the slaughter effort on the South put into motion an unprecedented profusion of federal coercion against free citizens, both North and South. By way of conscription, he assembled a vast army by presidential decree, an act of flagrant misconduct which drafted individuals into slavery to the federal government. Additionally, any war dissenters or advocates of a peaceful settlement with the South were jailed, and, as even Mr. Smith knows, Habeus Corpus was abolished for the duration of the war. He then tossed into the slammer as many as 30,000 civilians WITHOUT due process of law for reasons of criticizing the Lincoln administration, and suppressed HUNDREDS of newspapers that did not support his war effort.
After his Army stopped secession in its tracks, Lincoln created provisional courts sympathetic to Northern aggression, invented the office of Military Governor, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which became a propaganda tool for historians in later years, though it did not free the slaves in Northern-controlled areas.
All said, Lincoln was a ruthless dictator and he set the precedent for what is known as the "Imperial Presidency." He was the most evil, damaging, aggressive, abominable, and destructive president ever to defy American liberty. Happy Birthday, Abe.
February 12, 2001
Karen De Coster is a politically incorrect CPA, and an MA student in economics at Walsh College in Michigan.
Copyright © 2001 Karen De Coster
Lincoln was a ruthless dictator of the most contemptible sort. A conniving and manipulative man, and a scoundrel at heart, he was nowhere near what old guard historians would have us believe.
Lincoln has been transformed into the indomitable icon of the American Union. But yet, this beast ruled the country by presidential decree, exercised dictatorial powers over a free people, and proceeded to wage war without a declaration from Congress. Lincoln blocked Southern shipping ports, justifying his actions by saying "he would enforce all laws and collect all revenues due the North." The blockades were an act of war. He set his Northern Army upon the South at Fort Sumter, and set in motion one of the most brutal attacks ever upon freedom by maneuvering the South into firing the first shot at their Northern aggressors.
However, Mr. Smith's textbook would have us believe that Lincoln was a preservationist of sorts, a man dedicated to preserving the grandeur of State ideals. Most 9th-graders don't have the intellect to ask what is so glorious about State ideals. Instead, they absorb just enough to make it into ignorant adulthood. In fact, if they had questioned these teachings, they would have discovered that Lincoln was a consummate con man, manipulator, and a State-serving miscreant.
In the march through Georgia during Lincoln's War of Northern Aggression, he and Sherman carved out a murderous campaign, maiming innocent civilians and setting a precedent for the next century's bloody genocides that followed. A fine exemplar was he, the Communists might say.
As if the pure evil of the war to subjugate the Southern states struggling for independence was not unscrupulous enough, Lincoln was hardly the watchman of the black race as portrayed by Mr. Smith's ninth-grade history text, either. Lincoln had no fondness for the black man, and in fact, often spoke with the candor of that which would make him a modern-day racist of satanic proportions.
As Lincoln scholar Tom DiLorenzo points out, Lincoln believed there was an inherent inequality between the black and white race, and held a conviction that a "superior position" should be assigned to the white man over the black man due to this political and social inequality. David Duke was forever browbeaten for muttering anything even resembling this.
Any good historian at least understands that his goal was not to free the slaves, as DiLorenzo correctly states. In 1862, Lincoln published a letter stating, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."
Lincoln was the darling candidate of the moneyed industrialists of the North. At the core of his political tenets was a government of high import taxes, and his Republican party, whom he lead, passed the Morrill tariff into law soon after taking office. To quote DiLorenzo, Lincoln "even promised in his First Inaugural Address to launch an invasion of any state that failed to collect its share of tariffs." He was committing himself to collecting customs in the South, even if that meant they would secede. The free-market economics of the South were up for assault.
Lincoln signed ten more tariff-raising bills throughout his agonizing administration. He manipulated the American public into the first income tax, he handed out huge land grants and monetary subsidies to transcontinental railroads (corporate welfare), and he took the nation off the gold standard, allowing the government to have absolute control over the monetary system. Then, he virtually nationalized the banking system under the National Currency Acts in order to establish a machine for printing new money at will and to provide cheap credit for the business elite. This mercantilist tyrant ushered in central banking, our greatest economic curse to this day.
Furthermore, his "New Army" and the slaughter effort on the South put into motion an unprecedented profusion of federal coercion against free citizens, both North and South. By way of conscription, he assembled a vast army by presidential decree, an act of flagrant misconduct which drafted individuals into slavery to the federal government. Additionally, any war dissenters or advocates of a peaceful settlement with the South were jailed, and, as even Mr. Smith knows, Habeus Corpus was abolished for the duration of the war. He then tossed into the slammer as many as 30,000 civilians WITHOUT due process of law for reasons of criticizing the Lincoln administration, and suppressed HUNDREDS of newspapers that did not support his war effort.
After his Army stopped secession in its tracks, Lincoln created provisional courts sympathetic to Northern aggression, invented the office of Military Governor, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which became a propaganda tool for historians in later years, though it did not free the slaves in Northern-controlled areas.
All said, Lincoln was a ruthless dictator and he set the precedent for what is known as the "Imperial Presidency." He was the most evil, damaging, aggressive, abominable, and destructive president ever to defy American liberty. Happy Birthday, Abe.
February 12, 2001
Karen De Coster is a politically incorrect CPA, and an MA student in economics at Walsh College in Michigan.
Copyright © 2001 Karen De Coster
LINCOLN’S WAR CRIMES
1. Lincoln waged a war that cost the lives of 620,000 Americans. Including the murder of 50,000 innocent Southern civilians.
2. He arrested several thousand Marylanders suspected of Southern sympathies, including 30 members of the State legislature, a US Congressman representing Maryland, the mayor and police commissioner of Baltimore, and most of the Baltimore city council. These political detainees were imprisoned in Fort McHenry and Point Lookout without trial, in many cases, for several years.
3. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus without the consent of Congress (as required by the Constitution).
4. He illegally shut down and confiscated the printing presses of dozens of newspapers that had spoken out against him.
5. He re-instated and summarily promoted an Army officer who had been court martialed and cashiered by the US Army for war crimes.
6. He even had an arrest warrant issued for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court because said justice refused to back his illegal actions.
7. Chief Justice Roger B Taney ruled that Lincolns actions were illegal, criminal and unconstitutional.
8. He invaded the South without the consent of Congress as required by the Constitution.
9. He blockaded Southern ports without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution.
10. He imprisoned without trial, hundreds of newspaper editors and owners and censored all newspaper and telegraph communication.
11. He created two new states without the consent of the citizens of those states in order to artificially inflate the Republican Parties electoral vote.
12. He ordered Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections to assure his Parties victories.
13. He confiscated private property, including firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively gutted the Tenth and Ninth Amendments as well.
14. He had his Generals attack US cities full of women and children and burn them to the ground.
It should be remembered that during the Abraham Lincoln Administration, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments had not been made part of the U.S. Constitution; there was at the time only 12 Amendments. Individuals were considered Citizens of their respective States, and only in that respect where they U.S. Citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment deals primarily with Interstate Commerce, however it also transfers citizenship from the jurisdiction of the States to that of the Federal Government.
The Constitution, which originally protected the citizens from an overpowering Central Government, as a result of these three Amendments, now empowers and protected the Central Government from its own citizens. Thus the intentions of the Founding Fathers were reversed! However Abraham Lincoln had none of these Amendments at his disposal, and even if he had, they were added to the U.S. Constitution only as a result of force, which makes them self nullifying.
Therefore when Abraham Lincoln raised and army to overthrow the secession of the Southern States, thereby subjugating the Confederate States of America, which was created as a result of its newly ratified Constitution, he violated his Presidential Oath. The Confederacy on the other hand fired on Fort Sumter out of the sovereign right of any nation, to secure its territory against foreign occupation. Those who had occupied Fort Sumter were offered generous terms, including assistance if needed!
The Constitution, which originally protected the citizens from an overpowering Central Government, as a result of these three Amendments, now empowers and protected the Central Government from its own citizens. Thus the intentions of the Founding Fathers were reversed! However Abraham Lincoln had none of these Amendments at his disposal, and even if he had, they were added to the U.S. Constitution only as a result of force, which makes them self nullifying.
Therefore when Abraham Lincoln raised and army to overthrow the secession of the Southern States, thereby subjugating the Confederate States of America, which was created as a result of its newly ratified Constitution, he violated his Presidential Oath. The Confederacy on the other hand fired on Fort Sumter out of the sovereign right of any nation, to secure its territory against foreign occupation. Those who had occupied Fort Sumter were offered generous terms, including assistance if needed!
Lincoln when asked, "Why not let the South go in peace?"
Lincoln replied: "I can't let them go. Who would pay for the government?"
Lincoln replied: "I can't let them go. Who would pay for the government?"
Jacobin ~ a member of an extremist or radical political group; especially : a member of such a group advocating egalitarian democracy and engaging in terrorist activities.
Egalitarian ~ Affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people.
Few Americans realize that although he is “remembered” as a caring, compassionate president who was forced to fight a war against kindred spirits to free the slaves, Abraham Lincoln (the first of three successive Jacobin presidents) was the only President to ever successfully suspend the Constitution, declare martial law over the nation for four years (even though the impact of Lincoln’s wartime declaration of martial law was felt in the South until 1879), and assume absolute dictatorial powers over the people of the United States.
Lincoln, who won the White House in 1860 with a “mandate” from 39.6% of the people is treated by historians as a man of unquestionable patriotic integrity who struggled tirelessly to preserve the Union. Lincoln is historically remembered as the joint heir—with George Washington—of expanding liberty and guaranteeing freedom to all Americans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Lincoln actually had no intention of freeing the slaves. His communiques with the political and military leaders of his day confirm that fact. The “ploy” to free the slaves in the Southern States originated not with Lincoln but with his military advisors who believed if Lincoln issued such a proclamation the slaves in the Southern States would rebel against their “masters” and start a second revolution deep within the South, wrecking havoc on the economy of the Confederate States (which, at the moment) was winning what the South believed was a war to protect the sovereignty of the States over the central government—a threat universally feared by all of the Founding Fathers except John Adams, John Jay, John Pickering and Alexander Hamilton when the Constitution was structured.
In point of fact, Abraham Lincoln was the political pawn of the Jacobins who created the Republican Party from the Free Soil Party. During the election cycle of 1860, Salmon Portland Chase, the former Free Soil governor of Ohio and one of the Jacobin leaders of the newly created Republican Party, sought the presidential nomination of the Party but it was denied him by the Jacobin leadership in Congress, Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner who knew that Chase could not beat Stephen Douglas.
The Jacobins desperately wanted one of their own in the White House. They were convinced that only Lincoln could beat Douglas. Chase, who conceded that the goals of the Party were more important than any one man, conceded the nomination to Lincoln but only after Lincoln agreed to grant Chase whatever cabinet post the former Ohio governor wanted.
Stevens, Sumner, Chase and the Jacobin majority had been trying since 1854 to realign the balance of power between the States and the federal government by legislatively imputing the superiority of the federal government over the States in a clear and succinct violation of the Constitution. The Jacobins also attempted to ram legislation through Congress that would create a new privately-owned central bank in the United States—and they needed a President who would sign the legislation into law. They thought that man would be Lincoln, but they were wrong.
As the Campaign of 1860 exploded into the nastiest political race since 1834, the Democratic Party splintered into three factional groups, each with a Presidential candidate. The Northern Democrats nominated Douglas and the Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge. A third faction, fearing that several of the Southern States would secede from the Union if the superior federal attitude that was emanating from the Jacobin Congress was not crushed, split off and formed the Union Party in hopes of preserving the nation without conflict. In all, five political parties offered presidential candidates. With 39.6% of the popular vote but enough electoral votes to win the office, Lincoln became president.
Because the Jacobin candidate, Lincoln, won the White House, South Carolina officially adopted Articles of Secession on December 20, 1860 in protest of Lincoln’s election. The Southerners were convinced that with a Jacobin puppet in the White House, nothing would be able to stop the Jacobins from usurping the Constitution and upsetting the balance of power between the States and the federal government. States’ rights, in their opinion, was lost. The Southern delegations knew that with Lincoln, the Jacobin’s candidate, in the White House and with the Jacobin’s control over both the House and Senate, the Jacobins would very quickly control the federal court system, and States’ rights would be subverted by a supra-federal system.
The Ordinance was delivered to Congress and South Carolina withdrew from the Union. The Jacobins denounced the South Carolinian Congressional delegation and threatened to send federal troops into the State to “restore order.” The federal government insisted that South Carolina did not possess supra-sovereignty and had no authority to withdraw from the Union. In protest to the Jacobin edict, between January and May, 1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina also withdrew from the Union. Delegates from the first seven States to secede met in Montgomery, Alabama on February 4, 1861 and formed the provisional government of what they called the Confederate States of America.
On March 4, 1861 Lincoln was inaugurated. Within days of Lincoln’s succeeding James Buchanan as the 16th President of the United States, Confederate forces seized all federal funds, property and munitions in the South. Lincoln sent a warning to Jefferson Davis (the newly installed president of the Confederacy) that if the Confederate States did not submit to the lawful edicts of the federal government, Union troops would be forced to restore order and arrest the belligerents for treason. In response, Confederate general Pierre Beauregard laid siege to Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12 and 13 and demanded the withdrawal of all Union forces and the surrender of the Fort to the Confederacy. After a two day siege, Major Robert Anderson, the commander of the arsenal, surrendered Fort Sumter and returned to Washington in disgrace.
On April 15, Lincoln suspended Congress until July 4 and declared that a state of martial law existed. He called for 75 thousand volunteers to enlist for 90 days in order to put down the rebellion. A month later, with very few volunteers willing to take up arms against their neighbors (and many times relatives) in the South, Lincoln renewed his call for volunteers by demanding that 42 thousand men volunteer to serve 3 years (or until the end of the war). When Lincoln’s manpower-needs remained unfilled, Lincoln ordered the forced conscription of troops to fill the ranks of the Union army and the military “draft,” albeit illegal, was born.
When Congress finally met on July 4 the Union was in dire straits. Lincoln’s strong arm tactics not only did not work, seven Southern States had, by that time, seceded from the Union. Thirty thousand Lincoln conscriptees were in uniform but they were largely untrained raw recruits. Under the command of Gen. Winfield Scott, the troops were assigned to protect Washington, DC. Facing Scott’s raw recruits were 25 thousand troops under Beauregard near the Mannassas railroad junction and another force under the command of Gen. Joe Johnson was in the Shenandoah Valley at Harpers Ferry. Seventeen days later, those forces merged and clashed with Union forces commanded by Gens. Robert Patterson and Irvin MacDowell at Mannassas in what history recalls as the First Battle of Bull Run. The Union troops were routed and scurried back to Washington like whipped pups.
With two resounding defeats under their belts, morale in the North quickly disintegrated. Conscripted Union soldiers deserted faster than they could be replaced with newly conscripted “volunteers.” The army drafted new “soldiers” any way they could—many times virtually at gunpoint. In addition, those Americans unwilling to give up their sons to the military to fight other Americans were many times viewed by the Lincoln Administration as Southern sympathizers. In far too many cases, the property of those deemed to be sympathetic to the South (who in fact, in many cases, were simply God-fearing people who did not believe neighbors should be waging war against neighbors) was seized by the military on the orders of the Jacobins. Then, without due process, the seized property was arbitrarily sold at public auction. The proceeds were deposited into the US Treasury to help defray the cost of Lincoln’s War.
Further revenues were raised by a Presidential Proclamation issued by Lincoln in August, 1861 that authorized the federal government to assess and collect a 3% flat tax on all incomes in excess of $800. In July, 1862 the Jacobin Congress “legalized” Lincoln’s action by passing the Legal Tenders Act that converted Lincoln’s flat tax into a graduated income tax and created the Internal Revenue Service which would be assigned the task of collecting taxes and seizing the property of those viewed by the Jacobins as disloyal to the Union. Later, the IRS would become the legal ‘enforcers” of the carpetbaggers during the “Reconstruction” of the South. A Jacobin bureaucrat on the staff of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Lafayette C. Baker, was given the military rank of Colonel and became the head of the government’s tax collectors. The “agents” used by the IRS to collect the assessed taxes were Union army soldiers.
(The IRS became the first federal “police force.” The second federal police agency would be the Secret Service which was created in 1864 when the Jacobins tired of Lincoln. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had previously protected the President, was fired and the Secret Service was assigned the task of protecting the life of the president and vice president. The head of the White House protection detail was Col. Lafayette C. Baker. Baker was assigned the task of protecting Lincoln at the Ford Theatre the night he was assassinated. In his deathbed confession two years later, Baker specifically named Stanton as the ringleader of the plot to kill both Lincoln and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Named by Baker as conspirators were 11 newspaper publishers, 11 senior military officers, 11 bankers who put up $85 thousand for the assassinations, and 11 politicians that included Chase, Sumner and Stevens.) (NOTE: the deathbed confession of Lafayette C. Baker is [or, at least in 1985 was] on file in the National Archive. Missing is an addendum referred to in the confession that purportedly names the remaining conspirators. Missing also are approximately 20 pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary that detail his recruitment to assassinate Lincoln. According to the military officer who read those pages before surrendering the diary to the Provost Marshall who was handling the investigation, Booth named Stanton as the ringleader who recruited him to shoot Lincoln.)
Baker’s IRS-Secret Service “Interrogation Center,” and the holding cells used to detain suspected “Southern sympathizers,” was in the basement of the Treasury building in Washington. Those suspected by the Secret Service of spying or those accused of collaborating with, or associating with, other rebel sympathizers, or those caught, or suspected of, dealing in Southern contraband, or those accused by the IRS of attempting to evade the payment of Lincoln’s tax, were arrested without warrants, denied their Constitutional rights, and held without bail until they confessed or could be successfully railroaded. Most suspects were beaten until they confessed to whatever wrongdoing they were accused. There was no habeas corpus. There was no due process. Lincoln totally abrogated the Constitution of the United States under the guise of a national emergency that demanded extreme measures to protect the Union.
The military tax collectors from the IRS personally visited the factories, farms and shops in the North to collect the income taxes due the government. “Disputes” were settled by immediate seizure. Business owners had no legal recourse in actions reminiscent of a medieval high sheriff’s tax collector. By the time the Civil War ended the IRS had become very proficient in collecting taxes. (The wartime seizure tactics that the IRS developed during the Civil War and during Reconstruction were codified into the federal statutes and are still used today to arbitrarily seize the property of “suspected” tax evaders or those who simply cannot pay their “tax bills”—all without genuine due process. Compounding the irony of IRS justice, when American citizens who are accused of not paying their “fair share” go to court with the IRS, they are forced to defend their actions in an IRS court before a judge who is an IRS agent.)
From 1865 to 1879 the Internal Revenue Service was used by Jacobin bureaucrats and opportunistic carpetbaggers who were greatly enriched by the patronage system by serving as the “administrators” of the military governors of the conquered rebel States. When the carpetbaggers saw an estate they wanted, the bureaucrats arbitrarily levied tax assessments against the bankrupt or nearly bankrupt plantation owners (usually former Confederate officers or statesmen who were still viewed as “belligerents” by the Re-constructionists even though the war was over). If the plantation owners could not meet the demands of the tax collector, their property was seized and sold at public auction. Many times, the only bidder at the auction was the carpetbagger who wanted the property, and whose actions initiated the tax lien that resulted in the forced sales.
The unelected bureaucrats and the carpetbaggers who profited handsomely from Reconstruction wanted to promulgate the national emergency declared by Lincoln when the North and South went to war. The Jacobins wanted to create a permanent system of military governance in the South in order to punish the Confederacy. In addition, they wanted to create a supra-central government that could permanently abrogate the Bill of Rights since the Constitution continually got in the way of the “expedient management of the State.
Jon Christian Ryter...
Lincoln, who won the White House in 1860 with a “mandate” from 39.6% of the people is treated by historians as a man of unquestionable patriotic integrity who struggled tirelessly to preserve the Union. Lincoln is historically remembered as the joint heir—with George Washington—of expanding liberty and guaranteeing freedom to all Americans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Lincoln actually had no intention of freeing the slaves. His communiques with the political and military leaders of his day confirm that fact. The “ploy” to free the slaves in the Southern States originated not with Lincoln but with his military advisors who believed if Lincoln issued such a proclamation the slaves in the Southern States would rebel against their “masters” and start a second revolution deep within the South, wrecking havoc on the economy of the Confederate States (which, at the moment) was winning what the South believed was a war to protect the sovereignty of the States over the central government—a threat universally feared by all of the Founding Fathers except John Adams, John Jay, John Pickering and Alexander Hamilton when the Constitution was structured.
In point of fact, Abraham Lincoln was the political pawn of the Jacobins who created the Republican Party from the Free Soil Party. During the election cycle of 1860, Salmon Portland Chase, the former Free Soil governor of Ohio and one of the Jacobin leaders of the newly created Republican Party, sought the presidential nomination of the Party but it was denied him by the Jacobin leadership in Congress, Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner who knew that Chase could not beat Stephen Douglas.
The Jacobins desperately wanted one of their own in the White House. They were convinced that only Lincoln could beat Douglas. Chase, who conceded that the goals of the Party were more important than any one man, conceded the nomination to Lincoln but only after Lincoln agreed to grant Chase whatever cabinet post the former Ohio governor wanted.
Stevens, Sumner, Chase and the Jacobin majority had been trying since 1854 to realign the balance of power between the States and the federal government by legislatively imputing the superiority of the federal government over the States in a clear and succinct violation of the Constitution. The Jacobins also attempted to ram legislation through Congress that would create a new privately-owned central bank in the United States—and they needed a President who would sign the legislation into law. They thought that man would be Lincoln, but they were wrong.
As the Campaign of 1860 exploded into the nastiest political race since 1834, the Democratic Party splintered into three factional groups, each with a Presidential candidate. The Northern Democrats nominated Douglas and the Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge. A third faction, fearing that several of the Southern States would secede from the Union if the superior federal attitude that was emanating from the Jacobin Congress was not crushed, split off and formed the Union Party in hopes of preserving the nation without conflict. In all, five political parties offered presidential candidates. With 39.6% of the popular vote but enough electoral votes to win the office, Lincoln became president.
Because the Jacobin candidate, Lincoln, won the White House, South Carolina officially adopted Articles of Secession on December 20, 1860 in protest of Lincoln’s election. The Southerners were convinced that with a Jacobin puppet in the White House, nothing would be able to stop the Jacobins from usurping the Constitution and upsetting the balance of power between the States and the federal government. States’ rights, in their opinion, was lost. The Southern delegations knew that with Lincoln, the Jacobin’s candidate, in the White House and with the Jacobin’s control over both the House and Senate, the Jacobins would very quickly control the federal court system, and States’ rights would be subverted by a supra-federal system.
The Ordinance was delivered to Congress and South Carolina withdrew from the Union. The Jacobins denounced the South Carolinian Congressional delegation and threatened to send federal troops into the State to “restore order.” The federal government insisted that South Carolina did not possess supra-sovereignty and had no authority to withdraw from the Union. In protest to the Jacobin edict, between January and May, 1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina also withdrew from the Union. Delegates from the first seven States to secede met in Montgomery, Alabama on February 4, 1861 and formed the provisional government of what they called the Confederate States of America.
On March 4, 1861 Lincoln was inaugurated. Within days of Lincoln’s succeeding James Buchanan as the 16th President of the United States, Confederate forces seized all federal funds, property and munitions in the South. Lincoln sent a warning to Jefferson Davis (the newly installed president of the Confederacy) that if the Confederate States did not submit to the lawful edicts of the federal government, Union troops would be forced to restore order and arrest the belligerents for treason. In response, Confederate general Pierre Beauregard laid siege to Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12 and 13 and demanded the withdrawal of all Union forces and the surrender of the Fort to the Confederacy. After a two day siege, Major Robert Anderson, the commander of the arsenal, surrendered Fort Sumter and returned to Washington in disgrace.
On April 15, Lincoln suspended Congress until July 4 and declared that a state of martial law existed. He called for 75 thousand volunteers to enlist for 90 days in order to put down the rebellion. A month later, with very few volunteers willing to take up arms against their neighbors (and many times relatives) in the South, Lincoln renewed his call for volunteers by demanding that 42 thousand men volunteer to serve 3 years (or until the end of the war). When Lincoln’s manpower-needs remained unfilled, Lincoln ordered the forced conscription of troops to fill the ranks of the Union army and the military “draft,” albeit illegal, was born.
When Congress finally met on July 4 the Union was in dire straits. Lincoln’s strong arm tactics not only did not work, seven Southern States had, by that time, seceded from the Union. Thirty thousand Lincoln conscriptees were in uniform but they were largely untrained raw recruits. Under the command of Gen. Winfield Scott, the troops were assigned to protect Washington, DC. Facing Scott’s raw recruits were 25 thousand troops under Beauregard near the Mannassas railroad junction and another force under the command of Gen. Joe Johnson was in the Shenandoah Valley at Harpers Ferry. Seventeen days later, those forces merged and clashed with Union forces commanded by Gens. Robert Patterson and Irvin MacDowell at Mannassas in what history recalls as the First Battle of Bull Run. The Union troops were routed and scurried back to Washington like whipped pups.
With two resounding defeats under their belts, morale in the North quickly disintegrated. Conscripted Union soldiers deserted faster than they could be replaced with newly conscripted “volunteers.” The army drafted new “soldiers” any way they could—many times virtually at gunpoint. In addition, those Americans unwilling to give up their sons to the military to fight other Americans were many times viewed by the Lincoln Administration as Southern sympathizers. In far too many cases, the property of those deemed to be sympathetic to the South (who in fact, in many cases, were simply God-fearing people who did not believe neighbors should be waging war against neighbors) was seized by the military on the orders of the Jacobins. Then, without due process, the seized property was arbitrarily sold at public auction. The proceeds were deposited into the US Treasury to help defray the cost of Lincoln’s War.
Further revenues were raised by a Presidential Proclamation issued by Lincoln in August, 1861 that authorized the federal government to assess and collect a 3% flat tax on all incomes in excess of $800. In July, 1862 the Jacobin Congress “legalized” Lincoln’s action by passing the Legal Tenders Act that converted Lincoln’s flat tax into a graduated income tax and created the Internal Revenue Service which would be assigned the task of collecting taxes and seizing the property of those viewed by the Jacobins as disloyal to the Union. Later, the IRS would become the legal ‘enforcers” of the carpetbaggers during the “Reconstruction” of the South. A Jacobin bureaucrat on the staff of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Lafayette C. Baker, was given the military rank of Colonel and became the head of the government’s tax collectors. The “agents” used by the IRS to collect the assessed taxes were Union army soldiers.
(The IRS became the first federal “police force.” The second federal police agency would be the Secret Service which was created in 1864 when the Jacobins tired of Lincoln. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had previously protected the President, was fired and the Secret Service was assigned the task of protecting the life of the president and vice president. The head of the White House protection detail was Col. Lafayette C. Baker. Baker was assigned the task of protecting Lincoln at the Ford Theatre the night he was assassinated. In his deathbed confession two years later, Baker specifically named Stanton as the ringleader of the plot to kill both Lincoln and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Named by Baker as conspirators were 11 newspaper publishers, 11 senior military officers, 11 bankers who put up $85 thousand for the assassinations, and 11 politicians that included Chase, Sumner and Stevens.) (NOTE: the deathbed confession of Lafayette C. Baker is [or, at least in 1985 was] on file in the National Archive. Missing is an addendum referred to in the confession that purportedly names the remaining conspirators. Missing also are approximately 20 pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary that detail his recruitment to assassinate Lincoln. According to the military officer who read those pages before surrendering the diary to the Provost Marshall who was handling the investigation, Booth named Stanton as the ringleader who recruited him to shoot Lincoln.)
Baker’s IRS-Secret Service “Interrogation Center,” and the holding cells used to detain suspected “Southern sympathizers,” was in the basement of the Treasury building in Washington. Those suspected by the Secret Service of spying or those accused of collaborating with, or associating with, other rebel sympathizers, or those caught, or suspected of, dealing in Southern contraband, or those accused by the IRS of attempting to evade the payment of Lincoln’s tax, were arrested without warrants, denied their Constitutional rights, and held without bail until they confessed or could be successfully railroaded. Most suspects were beaten until they confessed to whatever wrongdoing they were accused. There was no habeas corpus. There was no due process. Lincoln totally abrogated the Constitution of the United States under the guise of a national emergency that demanded extreme measures to protect the Union.
The military tax collectors from the IRS personally visited the factories, farms and shops in the North to collect the income taxes due the government. “Disputes” were settled by immediate seizure. Business owners had no legal recourse in actions reminiscent of a medieval high sheriff’s tax collector. By the time the Civil War ended the IRS had become very proficient in collecting taxes. (The wartime seizure tactics that the IRS developed during the Civil War and during Reconstruction were codified into the federal statutes and are still used today to arbitrarily seize the property of “suspected” tax evaders or those who simply cannot pay their “tax bills”—all without genuine due process. Compounding the irony of IRS justice, when American citizens who are accused of not paying their “fair share” go to court with the IRS, they are forced to defend their actions in an IRS court before a judge who is an IRS agent.)
From 1865 to 1879 the Internal Revenue Service was used by Jacobin bureaucrats and opportunistic carpetbaggers who were greatly enriched by the patronage system by serving as the “administrators” of the military governors of the conquered rebel States. When the carpetbaggers saw an estate they wanted, the bureaucrats arbitrarily levied tax assessments against the bankrupt or nearly bankrupt plantation owners (usually former Confederate officers or statesmen who were still viewed as “belligerents” by the Re-constructionists even though the war was over). If the plantation owners could not meet the demands of the tax collector, their property was seized and sold at public auction. Many times, the only bidder at the auction was the carpetbagger who wanted the property, and whose actions initiated the tax lien that resulted in the forced sales.
The unelected bureaucrats and the carpetbaggers who profited handsomely from Reconstruction wanted to promulgate the national emergency declared by Lincoln when the North and South went to war. The Jacobins wanted to create a permanent system of military governance in the South in order to punish the Confederacy. In addition, they wanted to create a supra-central government that could permanently abrogate the Bill of Rights since the Constitution continually got in the way of the “expedient management of the State.
Jon Christian Ryter...
In declaring secession illegal, and the U.S. a consolidated state, Abraham Lincoln enacted the first income tax, the first draft, supported internal improvements and nationalizing banks. Such centralizing, socialistic and militaristic restructuring of America was certainly more comparable to the fascism that defined Hitler’s Germany than the agrarian-based economies and loose-knit state militias that defined the Confederate States of America.
Jack Hunter...
The ethnic division between Yankees and other Americans goes back to earliest colonial times. Up until the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were considered to be the American mainstream and Yankees were considered to be the "peculiar" people. Because of a long campaign of cultural imperialism and the successful military imperialism engineered by the Yankees, the South, since the war, has been considered the problem, the deviation from the true American norm. Historians have made an industry of explaining why the South is different (and evil, for that which defies the "American" as now established, is by definition evil). Is the South different because of slavery? white supremacy? the climate? pellagra? illiteracy? poverty? guilt? defeat? Celtic wildness rather than Anglo-Saxon sobriety?
Unnoticed in all this literature was a hidden assumption: the North is normal, the standard of all things American and good. Anything that does not conform is a problem to be explained and a condition to be annihilated. What about that hidden assumption? Should not historians be interested in understanding how the North got to be the way it is? Indeed, is there any question in American history more important?
According to standard accounts of American history (i.e., Northern mythology), New Englanders fought the Revolution and founded glorious American freedom as had been planned by the "Puritan Fathers." Southerners, who had always been of questionable character, because of their fanatic devotion to slavery, wickedly rebelled against government of, by, and for the people, were put down by the armies of the Lord, and should be ever grateful for not having been exterminated. (This is clearly the view of the anonymous Union Leaguer from Portland, Maine, who recently sent me a chamber pot labeled "Robert E. Lee's soup tureen.") And out of their benevolence and devotion to the ideal of freedom, the North struck the chains from the suffering black people. (They should be forever grateful, also. Take a look at the Boston statue with happy blacks adoring the feet of Col. Robert Gould Shaw.)
Aside from the fact that every generalization in this standard history is false, an obvious defect in it is that, for anyone familiar with American history before the War, it is clear that "Southern" was American and Yankees were the problem. America was Washington and Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase and the Battle of New Orleans, John Randolph and Henry Clay, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Boone, and Francis Marion. Southerners had made the Constitution, saved it under Jefferson from the Yankees, fought the wars, acquired the territory, and settled the West, including the Northwest. To most Americans, in Pennsylvania and Indiana as well as Virginia and Georgia, this was a basic view up until about 1850. New England had been a threat, a nuisance, and a negative force in the progress of America. Northerners, including some patriotic New Englanders, believed this as much as Southerners.
When Washington Irving, whose family were among the early Anglo-Dutch settlers of New York, wrote the story about the "Headless Horseman," he was ridiculing Yankees. The prig Ichabod Crane had come over from Connecticut and made himself a nuisance. So a young man (New York young men were then normal young men rather than Yankees) played a trick on him and sent him fleeing back to Yankeeland where he belonged. James Fenimore Cooper, of another early New York family, felt the same way about New Englanders who appear unfavorably in his writings. Yet another New York writer, James Kirke Paulding (among many others) wrote a book defending the South and attacking abolitionists. It is not unreasonable to conclude that in
Young Abe Lincoln amused his neighbors in southern Indiana and Illinois, nearly all of whom, like his own family, had come from the South, with "Yankee jokes," stories making fun of dishonest peddlers from New England. They were the most popular stories in his repertoire, except for the dirty ones.
Right into the war, Northerners opposed to the conquest of the South blamed the conflict on fanatical New Englanders out for power and plunder, not on the good Americans in the South who had been provoked beyond bearing.
Many people, and not only in the South, thought that Southerners, according to their nature, had been loyal to the Union, had served it, fought and sacrificed for it as long as they could. New Englanders, according to their nature, had always been grasping for themselves while proclaiming their righteousness and superiority.
The Yankees succeeded so well, by the long cultural war described in these volumes, and by the North's military victory, that there was no longer a Yankee problem. Now the Yankee was America and the South was the problem. America, the Yankee version, was all that was normal and right and good. Southerners understood who had won the war (not Northerners, though they had shed a lot of blood, but the accursed Yankees.) With some justification they began to regard all Northerners as Yankees, even the hordes of foreigners who had been hired to wear the blue.
Here is something closer to a real history of the United States: American freedom was not a legacy of the "Puritan Fathers," but of Virginians who proclaimed and spread constitutional rights. New England gets some credit for beginning the War of Independence. After the first few years, however, Yankees played little part. The war was fought and won in the South. Besides, New Englanders had good reasons for independence — they did not fit into the British Empire economically, since one of their main industries was smuggling, and the influential Puritan clergy hated the Church of England. Southerners, in fighting for independence, were actually going against their economic interests for the sake of principle.
Once Southerners had gone into the Union (which a number of wise statesmen like Patrick Henry and George Mason warned them against), the Yankees began to show how they regarded the new federal government: as an instrument to be used for their own purposes. Southerners long continued to view the Union as a vehicle for mutual cooperation, as they often naively still do.
In the first Congress, Yankees demanded that the federal government continue the British subsidies to their fishing fleets. While Virginia and the other Southern states gave up their vast western lands for future new states, New Englanders demanded a special preserve for themselves (the "Western Reserve" in Ohio).
Under John Adams, the New England quest for power grew into a frenzy. They passed the Sedition Law to punish anti-government words (as long as they controlled the government) in clear violation of the Constitution. During the election of 1800 the preachers in New England told their congregations that Thomas Jefferson was a French Jacobin who would set up the guillotine in their town squares and declare women common property. (What else could be expected from a dissolute slaveholder?) In fact, Jefferson's well-known distaste for mixing of church and state rested largely on his dislike of the power of the New England self-appointed saints.
When Jeffersonians took power, the New Englanders fought them with all their diminishing strength. Their poet William Cullen Bryant regarded the Louisiana Purchase as nothing but a large swamp for Jefferson to pursue his atheistic penchant for science.
The War of 1812, the Second War of Independence, was decisive for the seemingly permanent discrediting of New England. The Yankee ruling class opposed the war even though it was begun by Southerners on behalf of oppressed American seamen, most of whom were New Englanders. Yankees did not care about their oppressed poorer citizens because they were making big bucks smuggling into wartime Europe. One New England congressman attacked young patriot John C. Calhoun as a backwoodsman who had never seen a sail and who was unqualified to deal with foreign policy.
During the war Yankees traded with the enemy and talked openly of secession. (Southerners never spoke of secession in time of war.) Massachusetts refused to have its militia called into constitutional federal service even after invasion, and then, notoriously for years after, demanded that the federal government pay its militia expenses.
Historians have endlessly repeated that the "Era of Good Feelings" under President Monroe refers to the absence of party strife. Actually, the term was first used to describe the state of affairs in which New England traitorousness had declined to the point that a Virginia president could visit Boston without being mobbed.
Yankee political arrogance was soulmate to Yankee cultural arrogance. Throughout the antebellum period, New England literature was characterized and promoted as the American literature, and non-Yankee writers, in most cases much more talented and original, were ignored or slandered. Edgar Allan Poe had great fun ridiculing the literary pretensions of New Englanders, but they largely succeeded in dominating the idea of American literature into the 20th century. Generations of Americans have been cured of reading forever by being forced to digest dreary third-string New England poets as "American literature."
In 1789, a Connecticut Puritan preacher named Jedidiah Morse published the first book of
A few years after Morse, Noah Webster, also from Connecticut, published his American Dictionary and American spelling book. The trouble was, it was not an American dictionary but a New England dictionary. As Webster declared in his preface, New Englanders spoke and spelled the purest and best form of English of any people in the world. Southerners and others ignored Webster and spelled and pronounced real English until after the War of Southern Independence.
As the books show, Yankees after the War of 1812 were acutely aware of their minority status. And here is the important point: they launched a deliberate campaign to take over control of the idea of "America."
The campaign was multi-faceted. Politically, they gained profits from the protective tariff and federal expenditures, both of which drained money from the South for the benefit of the North, and New England especially. Seeking economic advantage from legislation is nothing new in human history. But the New England greed was marked by its peculiar assumptions of moral superiority. New Englanders, who were selling their products in a market from which competition had been excluded by the tariff, proclaimed that the low price of cotton was due to the fact that Southerners lacked the drive and enterprise of virtuous Yankees! (When the South was actually the productive part of the U.S. economy.)
This transfer of wealth built the strength of the North. It was even more profitable than the slave trade (which New England shippers carried on from Africa to Brazil and Cuba right up to the War Between the States) and the Chinese opium trade (which they were also to break into).
Another phase of the Yankee campaign for what they considered their rightful dominance was the capture of the history of the American Revolution. At a time when decent Americans celebrated the Revolution as the common glory of all, New Englanders were publishing a literature claiming the whole credit for themselves. A scribbler from Maine named Lorenzo Sabine, for one example among many, published a book in which he claimed that the Revolution in the South had been won by New England soldiers because Southerners were traitorous and enervated by slavery. As William Gilmore Simms pointed out, it was all lies. When Daniel Webster was received hospitably in Charleston, he made a speech in which he commemorated the graves of the many heroic Revolutionary soldiers from New England which were to be found in the South. The trouble was, those graves did not exist. Many Southern volunteers had fought in the North, but no soldier from north of Pennsylvania (except a few generals) had ever fought in the South!
George Washington was a bit of a problem here, so the honor-driven, foxhunting Virginia gentleman was transformed by phony folklore into a prim New Englander in character, a false image that has misled and repulsed countless Americans since.
It should be clear, this was not merely misplaced pride. It was a deliberate, systematic effort by the Massachusetts elite to take control of American symbols and disparage all competing claims. Do not be put off by Professor Sheidley's use of "Conservative Leaders" in his title. He means merely the Yankee ruling elite who were never conservatives then or now. Conservatives do not work for "the transformation of America."
Another successful effort was a New England claim on the West. When New Englanders referred to "the West" in antebellum times, they meant the parts of Ohio and adjacent states settled by New Englanders. The rest of the great American West did not count. In fact, the great drama of danger and adventure and achievement that was the American West, from the Appalachians to the Pacific, was predominantly the work of Southerners and not of New Englanders at all. In the Midwest, the New Englanders came after Southerners had tamed the wilderness, and they looked down upon the early settlers. But in Western movies we still have the inevitable family from Boston moving west by covered wagon. Such a thing never existed! The people moving west in covered wagons were from the upper South and were despised by Boston.
So our West is reduced, in literature, to The Oregon Trail, a silly book written by a Boston tourist, and the phony cavortings of the Eastern sissy Teddy Roosevelt in the cattle country opened by Southerners. And the great American outdoors is now symbolized by Henry David Thoreau and a little frog pond at Walden, in sight of the Boston smokestacks. The Pennsylvanian Owen Wister knew better when he entitled his Wyoming novel,
To fully understand what the Yankee is today — builder of the all-powerful "multicultural" therapeutic state (with himself giving the orders and collecting the rewards) which is the perfection of history and which is to be exported to all peoples, by guided missiles on women and children if necessary — we need a bit more real history.
That history is philosophical, or rather theological, and demographic. New Englanders lived in a barren land. Some of their surplus sons went to sea. Many others moved west when it was safe to do so. By 1830, half the people in the state of New York were New England-born. By 1850, New Englanders had tipped the political balance in the Midwest, with the help of German revolutionaries and authoritarians who had flooded in after the 1848 revolutions.
The leading editors in New York City, Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, and the big money men, were New England-born. Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania steel tycoon and Radical Republican, was from Vermont. (Thanks to the tariff, he made $6,000 extra profit on every mile of railroad rails he sold.)
The North had been Yankeeized, for the most part quietly, by control of churches, schools, and other cultural institutions, and by whipping up a frenzy of paranoia about the alleged plot of the South to spread slavery to the North, which was as imaginary as Jefferson's guillotine.
The people that Cooper and Irving had despised as interlopers now controlled New York! The Yankees could now carry a majority in the North and in 1860 elect the first sectional president in U.S. history — a threat to the South to knuckle under or else. In time, even the despised Irish Catholics began to think like Yankees.
We must also take note of the intellectual revolution amongst the Yankees which created the modern version of self-righteous authoritarian "Liberalism" so well exemplified by Mrs. Clinton. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Germany to study. There he learned from philosophers that the world was advancing by dialectical process to an ever-higher state. He returned to Boston, and after marrying the dying daughter of a banker, resigned from the clergy, declared the sacraments to be a remnant of barbarism, and proclaimed The American as the "New Man" who was leaving behind the garbage of the past and blazing the way into the future state of perfection for humanity. Emerson has ever since in many quarters been regarded as the American philosopher, the true interpreter of the meaning of America.
Clyde Wilson
Unnoticed in all this literature was a hidden assumption: the North is normal, the standard of all things American and good. Anything that does not conform is a problem to be explained and a condition to be annihilated. What about that hidden assumption? Should not historians be interested in understanding how the North got to be the way it is? Indeed, is there any question in American history more important?
According to standard accounts of American history (i.e., Northern mythology), New Englanders fought the Revolution and founded glorious American freedom as had been planned by the "Puritan Fathers." Southerners, who had always been of questionable character, because of their fanatic devotion to slavery, wickedly rebelled against government of, by, and for the people, were put down by the armies of the Lord, and should be ever grateful for not having been exterminated. (This is clearly the view of the anonymous Union Leaguer from Portland, Maine, who recently sent me a chamber pot labeled "Robert E. Lee's soup tureen.") And out of their benevolence and devotion to the ideal of freedom, the North struck the chains from the suffering black people. (They should be forever grateful, also. Take a look at the Boston statue with happy blacks adoring the feet of Col. Robert Gould Shaw.)
Aside from the fact that every generalization in this standard history is false, an obvious defect in it is that, for anyone familiar with American history before the War, it is clear that "Southern" was American and Yankees were the problem. America was Washington and Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase and the Battle of New Orleans, John Randolph and Henry Clay, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Boone, and Francis Marion. Southerners had made the Constitution, saved it under Jefferson from the Yankees, fought the wars, acquired the territory, and settled the West, including the Northwest. To most Americans, in Pennsylvania and Indiana as well as Virginia and Georgia, this was a basic view up until about 1850. New England had been a threat, a nuisance, and a negative force in the progress of America. Northerners, including some patriotic New Englanders, believed this as much as Southerners.
When Washington Irving, whose family were among the early Anglo-Dutch settlers of New York, wrote the story about the "Headless Horseman," he was ridiculing Yankees. The prig Ichabod Crane had come over from Connecticut and made himself a nuisance. So a young man (New York young men were then normal young men rather than Yankees) played a trick on him and sent him fleeing back to Yankeeland where he belonged. James Fenimore Cooper, of another early New York family, felt the same way about New Englanders who appear unfavorably in his writings. Yet another New York writer, James Kirke Paulding (among many others) wrote a book defending the South and attacking abolitionists. It is not unreasonable to conclude that in
Young Abe Lincoln amused his neighbors in southern Indiana and Illinois, nearly all of whom, like his own family, had come from the South, with "Yankee jokes," stories making fun of dishonest peddlers from New England. They were the most popular stories in his repertoire, except for the dirty ones.
Right into the war, Northerners opposed to the conquest of the South blamed the conflict on fanatical New Englanders out for power and plunder, not on the good Americans in the South who had been provoked beyond bearing.
Many people, and not only in the South, thought that Southerners, according to their nature, had been loyal to the Union, had served it, fought and sacrificed for it as long as they could. New Englanders, according to their nature, had always been grasping for themselves while proclaiming their righteousness and superiority.
The Yankees succeeded so well, by the long cultural war described in these volumes, and by the North's military victory, that there was no longer a Yankee problem. Now the Yankee was America and the South was the problem. America, the Yankee version, was all that was normal and right and good. Southerners understood who had won the war (not Northerners, though they had shed a lot of blood, but the accursed Yankees.) With some justification they began to regard all Northerners as Yankees, even the hordes of foreigners who had been hired to wear the blue.
Here is something closer to a real history of the United States: American freedom was not a legacy of the "Puritan Fathers," but of Virginians who proclaimed and spread constitutional rights. New England gets some credit for beginning the War of Independence. After the first few years, however, Yankees played little part. The war was fought and won in the South. Besides, New Englanders had good reasons for independence — they did not fit into the British Empire economically, since one of their main industries was smuggling, and the influential Puritan clergy hated the Church of England. Southerners, in fighting for independence, were actually going against their economic interests for the sake of principle.
Once Southerners had gone into the Union (which a number of wise statesmen like Patrick Henry and George Mason warned them against), the Yankees began to show how they regarded the new federal government: as an instrument to be used for their own purposes. Southerners long continued to view the Union as a vehicle for mutual cooperation, as they often naively still do.
In the first Congress, Yankees demanded that the federal government continue the British subsidies to their fishing fleets. While Virginia and the other Southern states gave up their vast western lands for future new states, New Englanders demanded a special preserve for themselves (the "Western Reserve" in Ohio).
Under John Adams, the New England quest for power grew into a frenzy. They passed the Sedition Law to punish anti-government words (as long as they controlled the government) in clear violation of the Constitution. During the election of 1800 the preachers in New England told their congregations that Thomas Jefferson was a French Jacobin who would set up the guillotine in their town squares and declare women common property. (What else could be expected from a dissolute slaveholder?) In fact, Jefferson's well-known distaste for mixing of church and state rested largely on his dislike of the power of the New England self-appointed saints.
When Jeffersonians took power, the New Englanders fought them with all their diminishing strength. Their poet William Cullen Bryant regarded the Louisiana Purchase as nothing but a large swamp for Jefferson to pursue his atheistic penchant for science.
The War of 1812, the Second War of Independence, was decisive for the seemingly permanent discrediting of New England. The Yankee ruling class opposed the war even though it was begun by Southerners on behalf of oppressed American seamen, most of whom were New Englanders. Yankees did not care about their oppressed poorer citizens because they were making big bucks smuggling into wartime Europe. One New England congressman attacked young patriot John C. Calhoun as a backwoodsman who had never seen a sail and who was unqualified to deal with foreign policy.
During the war Yankees traded with the enemy and talked openly of secession. (Southerners never spoke of secession in time of war.) Massachusetts refused to have its militia called into constitutional federal service even after invasion, and then, notoriously for years after, demanded that the federal government pay its militia expenses.
Historians have endlessly repeated that the "Era of Good Feelings" under President Monroe refers to the absence of party strife. Actually, the term was first used to describe the state of affairs in which New England traitorousness had declined to the point that a Virginia president could visit Boston without being mobbed.
Yankee political arrogance was soulmate to Yankee cultural arrogance. Throughout the antebellum period, New England literature was characterized and promoted as the American literature, and non-Yankee writers, in most cases much more talented and original, were ignored or slandered. Edgar Allan Poe had great fun ridiculing the literary pretensions of New Englanders, but they largely succeeded in dominating the idea of American literature into the 20th century. Generations of Americans have been cured of reading forever by being forced to digest dreary third-string New England poets as "American literature."
In 1789, a Connecticut Puritan preacher named Jedidiah Morse published the first book of
A few years after Morse, Noah Webster, also from Connecticut, published his American Dictionary and American spelling book. The trouble was, it was not an American dictionary but a New England dictionary. As Webster declared in his preface, New Englanders spoke and spelled the purest and best form of English of any people in the world. Southerners and others ignored Webster and spelled and pronounced real English until after the War of Southern Independence.
As the books show, Yankees after the War of 1812 were acutely aware of their minority status. And here is the important point: they launched a deliberate campaign to take over control of the idea of "America."
The campaign was multi-faceted. Politically, they gained profits from the protective tariff and federal expenditures, both of which drained money from the South for the benefit of the North, and New England especially. Seeking economic advantage from legislation is nothing new in human history. But the New England greed was marked by its peculiar assumptions of moral superiority. New Englanders, who were selling their products in a market from which competition had been excluded by the tariff, proclaimed that the low price of cotton was due to the fact that Southerners lacked the drive and enterprise of virtuous Yankees! (When the South was actually the productive part of the U.S. economy.)
This transfer of wealth built the strength of the North. It was even more profitable than the slave trade (which New England shippers carried on from Africa to Brazil and Cuba right up to the War Between the States) and the Chinese opium trade (which they were also to break into).
Another phase of the Yankee campaign for what they considered their rightful dominance was the capture of the history of the American Revolution. At a time when decent Americans celebrated the Revolution as the common glory of all, New Englanders were publishing a literature claiming the whole credit for themselves. A scribbler from Maine named Lorenzo Sabine, for one example among many, published a book in which he claimed that the Revolution in the South had been won by New England soldiers because Southerners were traitorous and enervated by slavery. As William Gilmore Simms pointed out, it was all lies. When Daniel Webster was received hospitably in Charleston, he made a speech in which he commemorated the graves of the many heroic Revolutionary soldiers from New England which were to be found in the South. The trouble was, those graves did not exist. Many Southern volunteers had fought in the North, but no soldier from north of Pennsylvania (except a few generals) had ever fought in the South!
George Washington was a bit of a problem here, so the honor-driven, foxhunting Virginia gentleman was transformed by phony folklore into a prim New Englander in character, a false image that has misled and repulsed countless Americans since.
It should be clear, this was not merely misplaced pride. It was a deliberate, systematic effort by the Massachusetts elite to take control of American symbols and disparage all competing claims. Do not be put off by Professor Sheidley's use of "Conservative Leaders" in his title. He means merely the Yankee ruling elite who were never conservatives then or now. Conservatives do not work for "the transformation of America."
Another successful effort was a New England claim on the West. When New Englanders referred to "the West" in antebellum times, they meant the parts of Ohio and adjacent states settled by New Englanders. The rest of the great American West did not count. In fact, the great drama of danger and adventure and achievement that was the American West, from the Appalachians to the Pacific, was predominantly the work of Southerners and not of New Englanders at all. In the Midwest, the New Englanders came after Southerners had tamed the wilderness, and they looked down upon the early settlers. But in Western movies we still have the inevitable family from Boston moving west by covered wagon. Such a thing never existed! The people moving west in covered wagons were from the upper South and were despised by Boston.
So our West is reduced, in literature, to The Oregon Trail, a silly book written by a Boston tourist, and the phony cavortings of the Eastern sissy Teddy Roosevelt in the cattle country opened by Southerners. And the great American outdoors is now symbolized by Henry David Thoreau and a little frog pond at Walden, in sight of the Boston smokestacks. The Pennsylvanian Owen Wister knew better when he entitled his Wyoming novel,
To fully understand what the Yankee is today — builder of the all-powerful "multicultural" therapeutic state (with himself giving the orders and collecting the rewards) which is the perfection of history and which is to be exported to all peoples, by guided missiles on women and children if necessary — we need a bit more real history.
That history is philosophical, or rather theological, and demographic. New Englanders lived in a barren land. Some of their surplus sons went to sea. Many others moved west when it was safe to do so. By 1830, half the people in the state of New York were New England-born. By 1850, New Englanders had tipped the political balance in the Midwest, with the help of German revolutionaries and authoritarians who had flooded in after the 1848 revolutions.
The leading editors in New York City, Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, and the big money men, were New England-born. Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania steel tycoon and Radical Republican, was from Vermont. (Thanks to the tariff, he made $6,000 extra profit on every mile of railroad rails he sold.)
The North had been Yankeeized, for the most part quietly, by control of churches, schools, and other cultural institutions, and by whipping up a frenzy of paranoia about the alleged plot of the South to spread slavery to the North, which was as imaginary as Jefferson's guillotine.
The people that Cooper and Irving had despised as interlopers now controlled New York! The Yankees could now carry a majority in the North and in 1860 elect the first sectional president in U.S. history — a threat to the South to knuckle under or else. In time, even the despised Irish Catholics began to think like Yankees.
We must also take note of the intellectual revolution amongst the Yankees which created the modern version of self-righteous authoritarian "Liberalism" so well exemplified by Mrs. Clinton. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Germany to study. There he learned from philosophers that the world was advancing by dialectical process to an ever-higher state. He returned to Boston, and after marrying the dying daughter of a banker, resigned from the clergy, declared the sacraments to be a remnant of barbarism, and proclaimed The American as the "New Man" who was leaving behind the garbage of the past and blazing the way into the future state of perfection for humanity. Emerson has ever since in many quarters been regarded as the American philosopher, the true interpreter of the meaning of America.
Clyde Wilson