The coming Next American Civil War

Canadian David Warren is one of the most thoughtful and informed columnists writing today. Sadly, he begins his latest commentary this way:

When the next American Civil War starts, I imagine it will look something like Hong Kong: a big melee spreading through all public spaces (I note that USA is bigger than Hong Kong). But there will be fairly limited casualties, at first, each of which will become the subject of unrestrained media outrage, until the media collapse under physical reprisals. Later, the better and better armed demonstrators, on both sides, will tactically “evolve.” The surveillance state itself will begin to disintegrate, and with it any hope of restoring public order, through agencies such as police, courts, and prisons. Things like border surveillance will be abandoned, with immediate consequences, but as the attraction of going to the States diminishes, no one will mind. More noticeably, the economy will break down. Because the American military was designed chiefly to defend against foreign powers, on a very large scale — and the threat will instead be domestic and scattered — the Army will be (at first) effectively neutralized. Isolated firefights between Democrat and Republican soldiers will escalate to firefights between ships and aeroplanes, but these will end fairly quickly as a Pentagon dictatorship seizes control. Within a year, I expect, though only a small part of their arsenal will prove useful, bullet-enforced curfews will restore relative peace to the streets. I don’t expect the death toll to be more than a few hundred thousand, at least from direct conflict as the guns come out. Interruptions of food supply, and the spread of disease, will cost much more — but possibly less (proportionately) than in the last Civil War, in which both sides were better organized.

Read the whole thing.

Note this: "... possibly less (proportionately) than in the last Civil War... ." The War of Southern Secession took 700,000 lives, military and civilian. That amounted to 2.23 percent of the nation's population of 31,443,321. Proportional deaths today would amount to almost 7,400,000.

The main way I demur from David's assessment is that I said in mid-November 2016 that the Next American Civil War had already started: "America's low-intensity civil war."

Technically speaking, a civil war is one fought over who shall control the single, central government of a nation. The 1930s' Spanish civil war is a perfect example because both armies were fighting over who would govern the entire nation. What we call the American Civil War was not actually that; it was a war of secession. The CSA was not fighting to control the American central government but to separate from it altogether.

Rioting following election day 2019

What these harassments and the post-election riots are about is control of the central government - and the insurrectionists are using violence to achieve their goals. Don't think that just because the electoral college will vote and Trump's inauguration will take place that all this will suddenly fade away like magic. 

Everywhere in history, any time the Left has lost, it has turned more violent. Violence always underlies their means. 

That "low-intensity" battle to control the central government continued in the political-intelligence realm. CNBC reported in February, "Justice Department officials discussed if Trump could be removed as president via 25th Amendment after firing FBI Director James Comey: Andrew McCabe." The headline says it all, but here are the opening grafs:

Justice Department officials were so concerned about President Donald Trump’s fitness for office in May 2017 that they discussed whether Trump could be removed from office by convincing Vice President Mike Pence and a majority of the president’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reportedly says in a new interview.

Those discussions came on the heels of Trump’s dramatic firing of FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017, according to McCabe’s interview with CBS’ '60 Minutes' ... .

Do not think that the Left is not already preparing for another Trump electoral victory. As Clausewitz said, "War is an extension of politics by other means." And Antifa is arming itself quite effectively.

Back to David Warren:

Perhaps the “battle of the worldviews” will resolve itself in some other way. The only thing I can safely predict is that, as the U.S. Constitution continues to dissolve, over the heat of parties that do not care for it, the country’s stability must also dissolve.

I am reminded of the old riddle, "How does someone go bankrupt?" And the answer is, "Slowly, and then very quickly." We the People abandoned Constitutional government over many years, nay, decades. It has accelerated this millennium. Next year, no matter the outcome of the election, it will go to full speed. The balkanization of the American people, deliberately under way for at least 60 years, will come to fruition. There is already no such thing any more as a national consensus on any kind of social or political topic.

There is no longer any cement (national ideals, polity, values, and aspirations) holding the bricks (the states) together. At best, the United States will abandon the "United" part of that and a loose federation will form among groups of states joined in tighter federations. At worst? Sorry, I do not want to go there.

Stanford University's Victor Davis Hanson asks, "Is America Entering a Dark Age?"

Update:

1. We also need to understand that some American cities have already chosen sides and are already complicit in enabling violence by the Left: Police Do Nothing as Antifa Thugs Violently Attack Trump Supporters After Minneapolis Rally. This continues a pattern in other cities such as Seattle and Portland.

Understand: those cities' political leaders are literally using the power of their office to do violence against the ideological opponents. As I have explained before, for the Left violence is never merely a last resort, it is simply one tool of the toolbox. Immersed in a neo-Marxist understanding that the United States is nothing but a theater for class struggle, they (as their Leninist forebears) see no distinction between using violence or political processes to attain their ends - the only thing that matters is that the ends are attained.

2. Reader Peter B. emails,

In addition to the likelihood that US combat vets are involved with Antifa, here’s a report that Antifa has been training with Kurdish militias in Syria: https://www.oann.com/kurdish-militia-trained-antifa-fighters-in-northern-syria/. 

I have not heard that before, but I would not be surprised. If true, Antifa members are probably posing as sympathetic volunteers to learn what the Kurds know about insurgent warfare. 

Update: 7 in 10 say US ‘on the edge of civil war’

Partisan political division and the resulting incivility has reached a low in America, with 67% believing that the nation is nearing civil war, according to a new national survey.

“The majority of Americans believe that we are two-thirds of the way to being on the edge of civil war. That to me is a very pessimistic place,” said Mo Elleithee, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.

Also, in the US the Left's shock troops are already in place and are getting ready. 

Confederate monuments: part 2, the myth of "noble Lincolnism"

In part one of this series I offered a reflection on the significance of Confederate monuments past and present, and perhaps some insight into why they have become such a flash point today. I wrote that perhaps,

... we can assess both the war and its memorials with some dispassion – although higher passion seem to be the order of the day now.

First, let us dispense with all the “Lost Cause” nonsense Southern apologists invented after the war.

But there is another shoe to drop. I think I'll call it "noble Lincolnism," the idea that Abraham Lincoln and by extension the Union cause were morally pure and wholly admirable. In fact, Abraham Lincoln was a racist bigot and it is by no means unfair to say he was a white supremacist through and through. So:

Second, let us dispense with all the nonsense that Lincoln and the Union army were moral paragons who fought to free the slaves. 

Why do we consider this man great?

In her book, Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln's presidency, Doris Kearns Goodwin made a most astonishing claim: 

"Armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of [Lincoln’s] life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his part." -- Doris Kearns-Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, p. 207. 

Some armies of scholars they must have been to have overlooked what Lincoln said in 1858:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . . . I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race." -- Abraham Lincoln, First Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ottawa, Illinois, Sept. 18, 1858, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln vol.3, pp. 145-146.

That Lincoln deeply opposed slavery cannot be gainsaid. It is laughable that he thought African Americans (they could truly be called that, then) should or even could gain legal, social or moral equality with whites. However, that did not distinguish him from about 99 percent of American whites, North or South, of his day. It was chattel slavery Lincoln opposed bitterly. He never made the leap that freed slaves should be equal citizens of the Republic. He did not think they could and did not think they should. 

In fact, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln endorsed the a proposed 13th amendment to the Constitution, called the Corwin Amendment after Ohio Republican Thomas Corwin. This amendment, which was never ratified, specifically forbade altering the Constitution in any manner that would enable the Congress to interfere with slavery "within any state." The Corwin amendment's wording was ridiculous, but its intent was clear: slavery was to be enshrined in the Constitution forever. Here is what Lincoln said:

I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution--which amendment, however, I have not seen--has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.

Observed John A. Lupton, Associate Director and Associate Editor for The Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project, 

By tacitly supporting Corwin's amendment, Lincoln hoped to convince the South that he would not move to abolish slavery and, at the minimum, keep the border states of Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina from seceding.

The amendment obviously never proceeded, but why would Lincoln endorse such a measure? He uttered the answer plainly:

The Union must be preserved, and hence all indispensable means must be employed.

Preserving the Union was more than Lincoln's policy goal. It was his fetish, a religious-type quest. The South's argument in favor of its secession was based on a contract view of the Constitution. The Constitutional contract, they claimed, had been broken, hence they could withdraw from the Union if they wished. Lincoln's theoretical foundation for destroying the Southern states to compel them to stay within the union was based on his elevation of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents above the Constitution. Lincoln said this explicitly in his first inaugural address:

The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union." 

But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is 'less' perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.

The Union, he held, was a binding covenant between the states, not a contract, and that covenant could neither be negated nor nullified.

There is no doubt that for Lincoln preserving the Union was vastly more important than the rights of blacks, including their liberation. In his first inaugural, Lincoln endorsed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, which as I explained in part one was a contributing cause for the South's secession because several free states refused to enforce it. In the first inaugural:

One section of our country believes slavery is 'right' and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is 'wrong' and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, can not be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both cases 'after' the separation of the sections than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction in one section, while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other.

Every Civil War historian knows that Lincoln did not commit the US Army to battle against the Southern states to free the slaves. Freeing the slaves was of little consequence in his mind. Writing to influential New York editor Horace Greeley in August 1862, Lincoln explained why (Lincoln's italics):

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. 

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 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; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

What about the Emancipation Proclamation? 

There were actually two proclamations. The first was issued in September 1862, the second on Jan. 1, 1863. It is the second one that historians usually refer to as "the" proclamation. Here is the National Archives' explanation of the scope of the order:

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."  Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.  Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free a single slave, it fundamentally transformed the character of the war. ...

It did indeed transform the character of the war. Even so, the idea that Lincoln changed the emphasis of the war from preserving the Union intact to freeing the slaves because of elevated ideals is highly problematic - in fact, rebutted using Lincoln's own writings.

Here is the timeline:

• July 1862 -- the first draft of the first emancipation proclamation is written. Lincoln's cabinet advises him that he must wait to release it until the Union army has won a significant victory, else the issuance will be seen as a desperate act to shore up support for the war amidst fading fortunes on the battlefield. The proclamation is shelved, awaiting such a victory. 

• August 1862 -- Lincoln writes in his own hand the letter to Horace Greeley, quoted above, stating that freeing the slaves is a matter of indifference to him.\

• September 1862 -- On the 17th, Union and Confederate forces fight near Antietam creek, Md. It was the bloodiest one-day battle of the War with almost 23,000 soldiers of both sides killed, wounded or missing. Lee turned his army back toward Virginia. Despite the spectacular ineptitude of Union Gen. George B. McClellan in allowing Lee's army to escape, Lincoln decides that the outcome is sufficient to issue the proclamation drafted in July, and he does so on the 22nd. 

The September proclamation was not one of action. It was a warning to the seceded states that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state that did not end its rebellion against the Union by January 1, 1863. None did, so in January Lincoln issued what basically amounted to an "execute" order of the September proclamation.

The relevant part of the September proclamation to this discussion is that it specifically said that the purpose of abolishing slavery was to restore the Union. In it, the federal government promised to help states pay for the "gradual abolishment of slavery within such State or States---that the object is to practically restore, thenceforward to be maintain[ed], the constitutional relation between the general government, and each, and all the states ..." (link).

Lincoln was politically compelled to change the focus of the war effort to emancipation because Northern support for the war was melting away. Its costs in lives, treasure and time was magnitudes more than anyone ever imagined. By the end of 1862 there was an active peace movement in the North that grew stronger even after the Proclamation was issued.

There was serious (though ultimately unfounded) concern in Washington that Britain would openly side with the South because of the Union blockade of Southern ports cut off Southern cotton to the backbone of England's economy, textiles. Jeff Davis's government made the same miscalculation, but at the time both North and South thought the threat was very possible.

Issuing the Proclamation was a mainly political act that was first of all intended to signal Great Britain that to side with the CSA was to ally with a slavery state and take sides against the slaves' proclaimed, but not yet accomplished, liberation. This Britain would never have done (and economically did not need to do anyway).

The second thing the Proclamation did was turn the North's casus belli from political to holy. Lincoln did not become an abolitionist until he understood that the the North would never suffer the abattoir of the Civil War merely to preserve the Union, but it would bleed profusely "to make men free," as Julia Ward Howe's hymn urged.

Remember, Lincoln wrote his letter to Horace Greeley after the first proclamation had been written, which spins it somewhat differently than Lincoln the great humanitarian liberator. Clearly, considering both the first proclamation and the letter to Greeley, written so close together, Lincoln saw abolition as a means to achieve his never-changed goal: the Union of states must be preserved. Abolition was never an end in itself. It was not abolition for the sake of abolition nor even for the sake of slaves!

In the movie Gods and Generals, there is a scene where Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) tells his brother, also a Union officer, that if they both have to die to free the slaves, then so be it, even though abolition was not an original aim of the war.

It is the Northerners kind of war that Americans have waged more utterly than any other. As military historian T. R. Fehrenbach wrote in This Kind of War, "Wars fought for a higher purpose must always be the most hideous of all." War is such an awful thing that it must be entered into for only the most transcendental purposes. Hence, any war - as opposed to a punitive expedition, such as Panama, 1989 - that Americans engage in must be a crusade, because only crusades can justify the costs and the suffering. War is to be waged only reluctantly, even sadly, but waged ferociously.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said, "In war there can be no substitute for victory," because when war is entered into for supreme purposes, to stop short of victory is to betray that purpose. In American Holy War, the political end is secondary to the military victory. Political structures are imposed by Holy War's victorious conclusion, they do not determine the conclusion. The role of politics is to pick up the pieces when total victory has been won.

This was Lincoln's insight: that absent a morally transcendent cause, the North would not continue the war. He provided the cause, but to him it was all smoke and mirrors, indeed it was politically-calculated trickery. There was indeed a powerful, morally-centered abolitionist movement in the northern states. But their cause was never Lincoln's cause.

And so he led the American nation deeper into an abyss of bloodshed that ultimately took the lives of two percent of its population, the equivalent of 6,460,000 dead today. Why anything about the Civil War is glorified or memorialized is quite beyond me, and I find it utterly incomprehensible that Abraham Lincoln is considered a great president.

Update: Joel W. emails,

I think you were too harsh on Abraham Lincoln. He was a great president: He kept the Union together, which was his main goal. The United States today would not be the country it is if the country had split during the Civil War. I believe that the United States, for all its faults, is the greatest country in the world, and possibly in history. If we had become two countries, we would not be as great.

Although I had not done as much research as you, I realized long ago that Lincoln's main goal was the preservation of the Union, not the emancipation of the slaves, and certainly not the elevation of the former slaves as full citizens.

One point you did not mention was that until he was assassinated, he was hated by many - in the North. (And most of the South, of course). Once he was killed, he became a martyr - and was elevated to the high status that many see him in today. If John Wilkes Booth had not done his work, it is possible that Lincoln could have ended up being impeached, rather than Andrew Johnson.Who knows? Johnson, a Democrat, had much harsher views of the ex-slaves than even Lincoln did.

I do not take issue with any of Joel's points. Lincoln was a complex man. But for perspective, would we expend 6.5 million American lives today to keep California in the Union, or any other set of secession-minded states there is?

Lincoln was more than willing to see no end of bloodshed to preserve the Union, he said it and proved it.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [Second Inaugural Address]

The Civil War ended legalized chattel slavery in the United States. But that was not why the North went to war. Abolitionists forced Lincoln's hand, including Union generals in the field. I would say that the North accomplished a mission that it did not really set out to do but failed to accomplish the mission that it did set out to do - reunify the country.

Can anyone look at our country today and honestly call us a "Union"?

Slavery could not have survived as an institution in the South. Alternative histories are always highly speculative, but a lot of prominent Southern figures realized this beginning as early as 1850 simply by assessing the economic realities of the slave trade and cotton production. For example, several figures pointed out that the South grew the cotton, shipped it to the North where it was milled and made into clothing, and then the South bought the clothing to wear. As one Southern industrialist (there were not many) tried to explain, the South sold raw cotton to the North at a nickel a pound and then bought it back at double or more! (Lowell, Mass., had more looms than the entire South.) Many tried to diversify the South's economy but they were silenced by the pro-slavery PC codes of the day.

Britain's economy was at the time based heavily on its textiles industry, which was the most advanced in the world - so advanced the design of its machines were actually state secrets. Before the War, this industry was heavily reliant on Southern raw cotton. Both Lincoln's and Davis's governments thought that Britain's loss of supply of Southern cotton would be so severe that Britain would have to take active measures to restore the supply.

But Britain had not become the pre-eminent economic power in the world because it was run by fools. Britain's industrialists and government were much more aware of the weakness of their supply chain, and well before the Civil War. They started large cotton production operations of Egypt and India before the Civil War. By 1861, the quantity and quality of this cotton, especially Egyptian cotton, were so high that Britain managed the reduction of Southern cotton imports well.

Economically, in 1861 the South's problem was not wealth. It was actually far wealthier than the North. Its problem was getting capital because the South's wealth was highly illiquid. More than three--fourths of the South's Net Asset Value was in land and slaves; some historians say as high as 90 percent. Neither land nor slaves could be sold for cash quickly. This was a major impediment to industrializing the South and improving its infrastructure, although the South did make devoted attempts to do both in the 1850s and achieved great increases. But the North did more.

King Cotton turned out to be a tyrant monarch. At the end of the 1840s raw cotton prices had plunged to less than 5 cents per pound. But the next decade saw prices surge to almost 11 cents per pound. Profits from slave-labor cotton and sugar (where the South led also) convinced almost all Southerners that they could never face a financial threat. The 1850s was the era of King Cotton for the South, but for all the money being made, almost none was invested in materiel that could ensure the seceded states could ensure their success by force of arms.

In short, the South never actually prepared for secession even though it had been a popular topic for many years. The South imagined that secession would inevitably be successful and peaceful.

I do not encourage Gone With the Wind-ism, but this is not a bad half-minute summary:

The Official American Hymn to Warfare

I am a retired Army combat-arms officer and I agree with Laurence M. Vance: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is blasphemous (at best) and has no place being sung in Christian worship services. It is found in The United Methodist Hymnal but let us pray it will be excised when(ever) the next hymnal is published.

Killed in action soldiers of the Battle of Antietam, near Dunker Church. Why do churches sing a hymn that celebrates wholesale killing and destruction and calls them holy and good?

Read the whole article for a detailed, line-by-line explanation why this "hymn" is best described as a satanic perversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Here is the conclusion:

The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” ought to be parodied, satirized, and lampooned. It has nothing to do with God or Christianity. It is not a Christian hymn. It does not belong in a Christian hymnbook. It should not be sung in any Christian church — Northern or Southern. It should not be on the lips of any Christian — Yankee or Southerner. It is partisan political paean to bogus history and faulty theology. For much too long Christians have sung this “hymn” with religious fervor while remaining in ignorance as to its history and theology. For much too long pastors and song leaders have included this “hymn” in church services without stopping to consider whether it is an appropriate song for a Christian worship service. Disparaging the singing of this song has nothing to do with being a Confederate sympathizer, or being unpatriotic or anti-Lincoln, but it has everything to do with exercising biblical discernment. Traditions are hard to break, and especially religious ones, but the singing of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is one that must go.

And the sooner the better.

America's low-intensity civil war

And he's not the only one: "Film Director and Writer Paul Schrader Calls for Violence to Protest Against Trump"

I have spent the last five days meditating on Trump's election. Upon consideration, I believe this is a call to violence. I felt the call to violence in the 60's and I feel it now again. This attack on liberty and tolerance will not be solved by appeasement. Obama tried that for eight years. We should finance those who support violence resistance. We should be willing to take arms. Like Old John Brown, I am willing to battle with my children. Alt right nut jobs swagger violence. It's time to actualize that violence, Like by Civil War Michigan predecessors I choose to stand with the black, the brown and the oppressed.

Schrader is a washed-up Hollywood figure  who quickly received this Twittered response.

All this aside, though, Schrader is not at all the only one calling for violence against Donald Trump, his forthcoming administration and those who voted for him.

Then there's this from Instapundit: Who Pays for the Anti-Trump Demonstrations/Riots?

The sacking of Portland is, so far, only the worst of what is happening across the country. There’s plenty more, accompanied by chants of “Love Trumps Hate” alternating with”Kill the Police.” Not very gentle stuff for supposed peacemakers. But perhaps they were only imitating their leader. Further, supposed neo-Nazi graffiti linked with Trump’s name are being reported by the MSM, which, not surprisingly, makes no serious attempt to determine if they are real or the work of provocateurs. (In most cases, I’m betting on the latter.)
The operative question, however, is just who pays for this mayhem and what do they want. Asra Nomani posted a list of 100 supporters of the Trump Protests on Twitter. You will recognize many names. 33 out of the 100 received money from one man, referred to at the link in proper Twitter syntax as @georgesoros.

I have already posted about the Left's fantasy that the electoral college will magically decide to vote for Hillary. But now they've gone beyond and are actually threatening electors:

According to reports out of Idaho and elsewhere, Clinton supporters have obtained Electoral College voters’ personal information and are harassing them with calls, Facebook messages, emails and even home visits, encouraging them to become “faithless electors,” and change their Trump votes to Clinton votes.

And they aren’t being kind about it: “A lot of ’em use bad, rough language,” said Layne Bangerter, one of Idaho’s electors. “Nothing I feel intimidated over. But we’re watching it very closely. They’ve got our home phone numbers, our cell numbers, our emails, our Facebook. We’re just getting an orchestrated barrage from the left.”

“They attack my religion, they attack my politics, they tell me that I must be a terrible father, I must be a terrible American, they use foul language — every swear word,” Bangerter said.

Which led Sarah Hoyt (whence the link) to respond,  “Do you want a civil war?  That’s how you get a civil war.”

More here.

Technically speaking, a civil war is one fought over who shall control the single, central government of a nation. The 1930s' Spanish civil war is a perfect example because both armies were fighting over who would govern the entire nation. What we call the American Civil War was not actually that; it was a war of secession. The CSA was not fighting to control the American central government but to separate from it altogether.

What these harassments and the post-election riots are about is control of the central government - and the insurrectionists are using violence to achieve their goals. Don't think that just because the electoral college will vote and Trump's inauguration will take place that all this will suddenly fade away like magic.

Everywhere in history, any time the Left has lost, it has turned more violent. Violence always underlies their means. As I have posted, the party that claims it is all about peace and love never shrinks from beating the crap out of its opponents or even murdering them. That won't change come January 20.

Update: Scott Alexander writes, in a lengthy essay I think everyone, right or left, should read:

Among the stories I was able to confirm on moderately trustworthy news sites that had investigated them somewhat (a higher standard than the SLPC holds their reports to) are ones about how Hillary supporters have beaten up people for wearing Trump hats, screamed encouragement as a mob beat up a man who they thought voted Trump, knocked over elderly people, beaten up a high school girl for supporting Trump on Instagram, defaced monuments with graffiti saying “DIE WHITES DIE”, advocated raping Melania Trump, kicked a black homeless woman who was holding a Trump sign, attacked a pregnant woman stuck in her car, with a baseball bat, screamed at children who vote Trump in a mock school election, etc, etc, etc.

Update: Austin Bay: "Identifying electors and then attempting to intimidate them into switching their votes is an ipso facto effort to overturn a national election." That is, an attempt to control the national government, the very definition of a civil war. Read the whole thing.

Why did the American Civil War not continue?

Reposted from November 2003

War and reconciliation: only in America? 

Glenn Reynolds posted a photo of a Civil War monument near his Univ. Of Tennessee office. It presents bas-relief figures of a Union soldier and a Confederate soldier clasping hands in reconciliation. Glenn writes,

In fact, of course, the American South knows what it's like to lose a war, and to be occupied ...

But American southerners know something that apparently a lot of other people seem to have trouble with: how to lose a war and not hold a grudge. (Much of one, anyway). ...

There are a lot of reasons for that, but the American experience of reconciliation after one of the world's bloodier and more divisive conflicts is one that perhaps ought to get more attention. It may be that, like so many things American, it is exceptional. But maybe not.

I think there are two main reasons the North and the South were able to reunite without the conflict being carried openly through the generations, as experienced in much of the rest of the world after the end of bitter wars:

First reason: the Confederacy’s leaders demanded it and set the example



Confederate Lt. Gen. N. B. Forrest forbade revenge and commanded his men to be reconciled with the Union

The Confederate army’s leaders set the tone for this remarkable reconciliation when they surrendered their armies. In Tennessee, CSA Lt. Gen Nathan Bedford Forrest’s final orders to his soldiers, May 9, 1865, told them explicitly that reconciliation was their duty:

... Reason dictates and humanity demands that no more blood be shed. Fully realizing and feeling that such is the case, it is your duty and mine to lay down our arms -- submit to the “powers that be” -- and to aid in restoring peace and establishing law and order throughout the land. ...

Civil war, such as you have just passed through naturally engenders feelings of animosity, hatred, and revenge. It is our duty to divest ourselves of all such feelings; and as far as it is in our power to do so, to cultivate friendly feelings towards those with whom we have so long contended, and heretofore so widely, but honestly, differed. Neighborhood feuds, personal animosities, and private differences should be blotted out; ...

I have never, on the field of battle, sent you where I was unwilling to go myself; nor would I now advise you to a course which I felt myself unwilling to pursue. You have been good soldiers, you can be good citizens. Obey the laws, preserve your honor, and the Government to which you have surrendered can afford to be, and will be, magnanimous.

In 1887, Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy's president, said in the last speech he would ever make,

The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes, and its aspirations. Before you lies the future, a future full of golden promise, a future of expanding national glory, before which all the world shall stand amazed. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation to be wished—a reunited country.

General Robert E. Lee’s farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia was short, and while less specific than Forrest’s in commanding reconciliation, it set the tone, especially since the army already knew that Lee has strictly forbidden guerilla warfare after the army disbanded. Said Lee,

... feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.

By the terms of the agreement, officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from a consciousness of duty faithfully performed; and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessings and protection. ...

It must be noted as well that by order of General U. S. Grant, Lee’s men had been provided with tens of thousands of Union rations, had received medicines and medical care. Grant permitted Confederate soldiers to retain their horses and beasts of burden for spring planting, animals which ordinarily would have been seized as war prizes. 

Union Lt. Gen. Joshua Chamberlain, perhaps the most remarkable soldier of the whole war, was directed by Grant to receive the surrender of the Confederate ranks. Chamberlain’s men lined both sides of the road at Appomattox Court House, Va., to receive the surrender of the Confederate divisions, led there by Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon. As the gray soldiers marched to Chamberlain’s place, he gave a command unprecedented for such an occasion. He later wrote,

I resolved to mark it [the surrender] by some token of recognition, which could be no other than a salute of arms. ... Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond; - was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?

He gave the command, and,

... instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier's salutation, from the "order arms" to the old "carry" - the marching salute.

Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual, - honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!

The Union soldiers and officers watched as the fabled divisions of the Army of Northern Virginia approached to case its colors and surrender its arms. Chamberlain recounted the battles each had lost and won. Finally, the last Confederate division approached -

Ah, is this Pickett's Division? - this little group left of those who on the lurid last day of Gettysburg breasted level cross-fire and thunderbolts of storm, to be strewn back drifting wrecks, where after that awful, futile, pitiful charge we buried them in graves a furlong wide, with name unknown! Met again in the terrible cyclone-sweep over the breastworks at Five Forks; met now, so thin, so pale, purged of the mortal, - as if knowing pain or joy no more. How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all!

As the the Union became increasingly confident of victory, the Northern mood shifted unevenly toward reconciliation. Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address of March 4, 1865 was openly partisan; his hearers had no doubt where he stood. Incredibly, though, he did not see the "terrible war" as vindicating Northern virtue but as the divine judgment of God upon North and South alike. It was on that basis that the nation was to be renewed: common judgment and common grace. Like Augustine, Lincoln saw that the will to dominate is woven even into human yearnings for peace and justice. Even a justifiable war leaves the victor morally scarred.

But Lincoln and the Republican Congress never agreed on the means to reunite the country. His assassination ensured that the harsh members of Congress, the "radical Republicans," would gain the upper hand. Andrew Johnson attempted to carry out a Lincolnian plan of leniency in the South. General Grant reported to him in December 1865,

... [the citizens of the Southern States] are anxious to return to self-government within the Union as soon as possible; that they are in earnest in wishing to do what they think is required by the government, not humiliating to them as citizens, and if such a course was pointed out they would pursue it in good faith.

But this course of action was exactly what the radical Republicans refused to permit. The Northern domination of the South during Reconstruction, 1865-1877, was very harsh, and often brutal. Glenn Reynolds wrote,

... my grandmother can still tell stories that she heard from her grandmother about Union soldiers passing through and stripping the place bare of everything except what they were able to hide, and of the years (decades, really) of privation that followed the war.

And those are the mild stories. Incongruously to our modern sensitivities and myths, freed black Americans in the South suffered at least as much as whites, often more, because the liberating Union army was fiercely racist. The work of national reconciliation was badly damaged by the Reconstruction. The country was reconciled despite Reconstruction, and would have been reconciled sooner had the North been less oppressive after the war. 

Second reason for reconciliation: the South realized it had been truly defeated 

Forrest’s farewell began,

The Cause for which you have so long and so manfully struggled, and for which you have braved dangers, endured privations, and sufferings, and made so many sacrifices, is today hopeless. The government which we sought to establish and perpetuate, is at an end.

Lee also stated the plain truth.

After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. ...

The Southern troops who returned home found their families had suffered almost as badly as they had. The Northern blockade of Southern ports, its domination of the Mississippi River, the destruction of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and Sherman’s march to the sea through Georgia, thence north through both Carolinas - all combined to devastate the South as a whole. Entire cities were burned: Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, Columbia, SC, Richmond and others. Farmland was scorched, properties confiscated, homes destroyed. 

I can find no estimates of civilian dead in the South (or North), but Southern military dead totaled more than a quarter million from all causes. The Union lost 100,000 more military dead; however, the Northen lands were not harmed nor were the soldiers’ families.

The returned Southern soldiers could not claim, as the Germans did after World War I, that they had been "stabbed in the back" by traitors at home. While the Southern government can be justly accused of incompetence in many ways, disloyal to the Army it was not. 

The Southern armies were wrecked on the battlefield. The nation was outmaneuvered politically in North America and abroad. Industrially, the South never approached the capacity of the North, nor could it possibly have raised as large an army. While the people of the North actually grew wealthier during the war, the ordinary people of the South often were impoverished. 

The South, in all its manifestations, was utterly defeated. In a real sense, the South had no choice but to reconcile with the North. There was no chance of the South rising again. "King Cotton" could never command the loyalty of overseas markets again as Great Britain had begun large-scale cotton cultivation in India and Egypt. Cotton was the fuel for Britain’s textile industry; the empire’s self-sourcing of cotton played a large role in keeping Britain from entering the war on the South’s side. So not only were enormous expanses of cotton plantations ruined in the South, there was no market for the crop near large enough to sustain another Southern drive for independence, and the South had no other economic ace up its sleeve. 

Some other factors in helping reconcile was the undeniable fact that freed blacks served as "kicking dogs" for displaced aggression of white Southerners against the North, a displacement that obviously continued for many decades. There was also still a sense that South and North shared a common heritage. Honor codes always played a large part in Southern manhood, and this fact reinforced the will of paroled soldiers and civilians to keep their word after they took the Union-required oath of loyalty to the United States.

Even so, the reconciliation was slow and uneven. Some may argue that reconciliation is not yet complete, but that’s a topic for another blogger. 

Update: I meant to point out, too, that Union Gen. William T. Sherman said he waged war hard in order to make the peace soft. The last Confederate offensive action of the war took place in March 1865 against his army, near Bentonville, NC. One of my ancestors, a soldier of the CSA's Army of Tennessee, was in the fight. (Sherman's army was called the Army ofthe Tennessee, which can be confusing to those who don't know that the South named its armies after regions or states, and the Union tended to name armies after rivers, for some reason. 

I wrote about casualties in the Civil War and now, and what my daughter has to do with the Battle of Franklin.

This is also an excellent and comprehensive Civil War site by an amateur historian, a Chicago police lieutenant, no less.

And as a final piece of personal trivia, my wife is the great(3)-niece of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy.

The Lincoln myth and political trickery

There are is some good information here, but overall this is not very good history. Watch the video, then keep reading.



The idea that Lincoln changed the emphasis of the war from preserving the Union intact to freeing the slaves because of elevated ideals is highly problematic - in fact, rebutted using Lincoln's own writings. Abraham Lincoln was a racist whose personal bigotry was barely this side of CSA Vice President A. Stephens, who was probably Lincoln's closest friend when they both served in Congress.

Lincoln changed the focus of the war effort to emancipation because Northern support for the war was melting away. Its costs in lives, treasure and time was magnitudes more than anyone ever imagined. By the end of 1862 there was already an active peace movement in the North that grew stronger even after the Proclamation was issued.

There was serious (though ultimately unfounded) concern in Washington that Britain would openly side with the South because of the Union blockade's cutting off of Southern cotton to the backbone of England's economy, textiles. The Jeff Davis's government made the same miscalculation, but at the time both North and South thought the threat was very possible.

The deadliest political trickster
in American history.

The issuing of the Proclamation was a purely political act that was first of all intended to signal Great Britain that to side with the CSA was to ally with a slavery state and take sides against the slaves' proclaimed, but not yet accomplished, liberation. This Britain would never have done (and economically did not need to do anyway).

The second thing the Proclamation did was turn the North's casus belli from political to holy. Lincoln did not become an abolitionist until he understood that the the North would never suffer the abattoir of the Civil War merely to preserve the Union, but it would bleed profusely "to make men free," as Julia Ward Howe's hymn urged.

In July 1862 the first draft of the first emancipation proclamations was written. (There were two proclamations, this one released on Sept. 22, 1862, the other released on Jan. 1, 1863. That is the one usually thought of as "the" Emancipation Proclamation, and that is the one counted as such by the National Archives. But the first was months before.) 

Having accepted counsel that the proclamation needed to be released from a position of military strength, lest it be seen as desperation to shore up the war effort, this draft was parked until a battlefield victory of note could be made. The relevant part of this proclamation to this discussion is that it specifically said that the purpose of abolishing slavery was to restore the Union. In it, the federal government promised to help states pay for the "gradual abolishment of slavery within such State or States---that the object is to practically restore, thenceforward to be maintain[ed], the constitutional relation between the general government, and each, and all the states ..." (link).

The month after the drafting of the first proclamation, Lincoln wrote to influential New York editor Horace Greeley. In it, Lincoln explained (emphases are his):

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 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; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

Remember, Lincoln wrote this letter to Horace Greeley actually after the first proclamation had been written, which spins it somewhat differently than Lincoln the great humanitarian liberator. Clearly, considering both the first proclamation and the letter to Greeley, written so close together, Lincoln saw abolition as an instrument to achieve his never-changed goal: the Union of states must be preserved. It was not abolition for the sake of abolition nor even for the sake of slaves! 

In the movie Gods and Generals there is a scene where Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) tells his brother, also a Union officer, that if they both have to die to free the slaves, then so be it, even though abolition was not an original aim of the war.

It is the Northerners kind of war that Americans have waged more utterly than any other. As military historian T. R. Fehrenbach wrote in This Kind of War, "Wars fought for a higher purpose must always be the most hideous of all." War is such an awful thing that it must be entered into for only the most transcendental purposes. Hence, any war - as opposed to a punitive expedition, such as Panama, 1989 - that Americans engage in must be a crusade, because only crusades can justify the costs and the suffering. War is to be waged only reluctantly, even sadly, but when waged, done so ferociously.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said, "In war there can be no substitute for victory," because when war is entered into for supreme purposes, to stop short of victory is to betray that purpose. In American Holy War, the political end is secondary to the military victory. Political structures are imposed by Holy War's victorious conclusion, they do not determine the conclusion. The role of politics is to pick up the pieces when total victory has been won.

This was Lincoln's insight: that absent a morally transcendent cause, the North would not continue the war. He provided the cause, but to him it was all smoke and mirrors, indeed it was politically-calculated trickery.

To Lincoln slavery was not even the point politically. In his inaugural address he explicitly supported of the "Corwin Amendment" to the US Constitution, which had passed both houses of Congress shortly before. The proposed amendment to the US Constitution stated simply,

No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

Observed John A. Lupton, Associate Director and Associate Editor for The Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project, 

By tacitly supporting Corwin's amendment, Lincoln hoped to convince the South that he would not move to abolish slavery and, at the minimum, keep the border states of Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina from seceding.

There is some good analysis in the USMA professor's piece, but ultimately it is just not very good history.

The Civil War did not start over slavery

It's occurred to me that an awful lot of people do not understand that the reasons that Southern states seceded and the reasons the Civil War was fought are not the same.

As I have posted, the South seceded to protect and even expand the institution of slavery, and for no other reason.

But South Carolina did not fire on Fort Sumter to protect slavery. After the CSA was formed in Feb 1861, "Its conservative government, with Mississippian Jefferson Davis as president, sought a peaceful separation, but the United States refused to acquiesce in the secession," according to History.com.

Had the war not broke out in Charleston harbor, President Lincoln would have made sure it broke out somewhere. His correspondence and public utterances make it clear that he was absolutely determined, even including war, that the Union would not be sundered.

There was at the time, and remained for three or four years after the Sumter battle, a substantial peace movement in the North that urged the Southern states be permitted to depart in peace. Lincoln adamantly refused this position, stating that the Union of states was unalterable and no state, once admitted, could separate itself from the Union. (This was, btw, explicitly contrary to the position of one Thomas Jefferson, but let it pass.)

In his First Inaugural address, after the CSA had been formed, Lincoln made this explicitly plain:

I therefore consider that. . . the Union is unbroken; and. . . I shall take care that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend, and maintain itself.

But of course this was a threat, raw and naked, and all his contemporaries understood it that way.

South Carolina seceded on Dec. 24, 1860. Why did they wait until April 12, 1861, to fire on the fort? Because they did not want war. Jeff Davis even sent a delegation to see Lincoln to negotiate the transfer of Fort Sumter to the CSA. The delegates were authorized to set an amount to pay the US government for the fort. Lincoln refused to see them and sent them home.

As late as the day before the battle, Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker directed that if Anderson and his men evacuated the fort, they would not be hindered by force. Anderson actually told CSA military emissaries on April 11 that he intended to evacuate on April 15, a date that was accepted by the Confederate commander. (Anderson also admitted that he had only a few days' provisions on hand.)

But with a US Navy task force to reinforce and resupply Sumter having arrived and sitting at the harbor's entrance, Confederate Gen. P.G.T Beuaregard knew that dates and timetables meant nothing any more. He sent word to Anderson that the fort would be fired on beginning at 4.30 a.m. the next morning.

By no stretch of the most active imagination can it be credibly maintained that the South fired on Fort Sumter to protect slavery. Having declared itself to be part of an independent nation, S.C. worked for four months to convince the Union to abandon a fortress sitting in command of the harbor's approaches. The state and its new nation would either be sovereign over its territories or they would not. And as long as the fort was staffed by Union troops, they would not. This is how the CSA's leaders understood the situation. They could no more accept a Union-garrisoned fort in Charleston harbor that George Washington would have agreed to permit a British fort in New York harbor after 1781.

There is a widely accepted, though not universally agreed-on analysis of April 1861 that,

... the situation at Sumter presented Lincoln with a series of dilemmas. If he took action to maintain the fort, he would lose the border South and a large segment of northern opinion which wanted to conciliate the South. If he abandoned the fort, he jeopardized the Union by legitimizing the Confederacy. Lincoln also hazarded losing the support of a substantial portion of his own Republican Party, and risked appearing a weak and ineffective leader.

Lincoln could escape these predicaments, however, if he could induce southerners to attack Sumter, "to assume the aggressive and thus put themselves in the wrong in the eyes of the North and of the world." By sending a relief expedition, ostensibly to provide bread to a hungry garrison, Lincoln turned the tables on the Confederates, forcing them to choose whether to permit the fort to be strengthened, or to act as the aggressor. By this "astute strategy," Lincoln maneuvered the South into firing the first shot.

Even in the North, there was widespread acknowledgment that Lincoln was the one who began the war, including among members of Congress (many of whom approved). After the battle, The New York Evening Day-Book editorialized:

We have no doubt, and all the circumstances prove, that it was a cunningly devised scheme, contrived with all due attention to scenic display and intended to arouse, and, if possible, exasperate the northern people against the South…. We venture to say a more gigantic conspiracy against the principles of human liberty and freedom has never been concocted. Who but a fiend could have thought of sacrificing the gallant Major Anderson and his little band in order to carry out a political game? Yet there he was compelled to stand for thirty-six hours amid a torrent of fire and shell, while the fleet sent to assist him, coolly looked at his flag of distress and moved not to his assistance! Why did they not? Perhaps the archives in Washington will yet tell the tale of this strange proceeding…. Pause then, and consider before you endorse these mad men who are now, under pretense of preserving the Union, doing the very thing that must forever divide it.

The Civil War began because of the singular determination one man, Abraham Lincoln.

Interesting trivia:

1. The surrender ceremony was held April 14, but the barrage had lasted 34 hours. No one was killed on either side during the battle.

2. The South did not take Anderson or his men prisoner. In fact they ordered a 100-round artillery salute to be fired to honor them. But a cannon malfunctioned in firing the salute barrage, killing a cannoneer, the only fatality of the whole sad affair and the first fatality of the Civil War.

3. Maj. Anderson was himself a former slave holder. He served the rest of the war in Union service.

4. Fort Sumter was not even completed when S.C. seceded.

5. After an overnight awaiting high tides, a South Carolina vessel sailed Anderson and his men to the Union ships where they were transferred to Union hands without incident.

6. The United States flag was raised again over Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865, exactly four years after it had been lowered. The officer raising the flag was Robert Anderson, then a medically-retired major general.

7. Below, Fort Sumter as seen from The Battery in Charleston, where the CSA guns were (my photo from 2010).