Donald Trump, the Civil War, and Truth

There’s a lot of misinformation going around these days, and it starts right at the top. It’s no surprise that our Twit in Chief doesn’t know why the Civil War started—there are plenty of Americans who have sat through US history classes and apparently passed them who don’t know why either. There is of course a great deal of written material to comb through on the way to figuring it out, but what it comes down to is that the rich white men, of South Carolina in particular, joined by the rich white men of the cotton planting states between Charleston and New Orleans, had developed, by the winter of 1860, when Abe Lincoln became president, what for them was a successful system of self-regenerating labor which they could deal in as a commodity as well as make use of at what felt to them like a bargain rate.

The involuntary bondage of West Africans and their descendants—the first North American African slaves appeared in 1619—was inextricably woven into the history of colonial America, but it was more favored and didn’t just endure but grew in the areas where field labor was of greatest value, even after the slave trade itself was abolished and many European nations had outlawed the practice.

Because they feared Lincoln would yield to public pressure from women, liberals, and bleeding hearts in the North, and act to end slavery at the federal level, southern state legislatures, beginning with South Carolina, began seceding from the union between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration (which was bigger than Donald Trump’s), and by April of 1861 the lines were drawn although public opinion in border states and interstate business commitments made things complicated.

Nevertheless, Lincoln acted to resupply the troops at Fort Sumter, an act characterized by apologists as “northern aggression,” although it was more along the lines of a juicy, irresistible provocation. Southern gunners opened fire on the fort, and Lincoln sent out the call for volunteers, which was happily answered. Before the real fighting started most potential soldiers on each side acted much like today’s Trump supporters, marching around in little circles, riding horses, and having shooting competitions to show how tough they were. In the south, they took to spearing their caps with dyed feathers, and polishing quite obsolete sabers.

As soon as the fighting started everything changed drastically. Officers began to die mysteriously of lead poisoning thought to be caused by exposure to the troops, and a guard was posted at most battles to reduce desertion, so men made suicidal charges against fortified positions and the newspapers wrote it up, along with black-bordered lists of casualties that began to fill entire pages. Matthew Brady and a handful of pioneers photographed the camp life, the military pomp, and the brutal aftermath of horrific battles. Those images will be with us forever.

Southerners declined rapidly from ardent secessionists to stubborn survivors. Union armies were made up of new immigrants dragooned into local militias, working class drifters, farmers and the idle. They were made to live in cheap, mass produced clothing unfit for most conditions, but they had shoes, which the rebels soon had to do without. Many shoes changed hands when one occupant died suddenly and interested parties found the exchange rates favorable and could make the secondhand pair fit.

The American Abolition movement was growing and becoming professional. Respectable people were arguing that black and white were fundamentally equal—a proposition inimical to the southern planter which later turned out to be demonstrated clearly by science.

In a bizarre historical twist, many southerners and northerners today are making similar assertions, with similar proof, while promoting ideas about racial “purity” and inherited advantage, and seeking to gain political credibility in light of presidential indifference to their existence along with widespread approval of their pseudo-scientific claims. These are firmly rooted in the thoroughly discredited phrenological and eugenical traditions, and akin to the Christian-approved “short” version of history which holds that Creation was a blessed event not unlike the hatching of an egg and took place shortly before the oldest bristlecone pines were sprouted but several tens of millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

What is not revealed to these Usherites is whether men ever actually rode unicorns, or only hunted them.

The southern frontiersman and small farmer, meanwhile, had other interests and usually only managed to acquire slaves through gambling or other types of business. He was forced to fight in the Civil War by Home Guard units posted in small towns and commissioned to ferret out and turn over recalcitrant volunteers. The rebels could and did fight effectively whenever they really needed to, and most strategists will agree they were in a superior position—at least Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia--right up until Pickett’s Charge, which ended their foray into Pennsylvania, and ended any real chance they had at negotiating favorable terms—meaning preserving slavery, because the Emancipation Proclamation, enacted on New Year’s Day 1863, ended any hope of restoring status quo or forming a new, slave-owning nation.

U.S. Grant soon took over the federal army, sacrificing tens of thousands of conscripts on a months-long running battle through the Virginia backwoods and farm country which ended only when Lee’s contingent of veterans had been depleted through battle, disease, and desertion, surrounded by the blue shirts with their cookwagons and supply lines.

Those who argue the war was over state’s right can’t name any rights at stake, except to make drunken references to tariffs which hurt farmers more than they hurt factories. That may have been an issue but tariffs don’t usually lead to fighting words, and they didn’t in 1861.

In fact, the south had been fighting since the days of the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the Constitution to preserve their right to enslave others in the clear light of moral scrutiny which only intensified as America became more democratic. With the elimination of property qualifications for male white suffrage, women began to speak along the same, but expanded lines. The freedom-loving quality of American rhetoric was inconsistent with the fact of widespread legal slavery in America, plain and simple, and states in the south knew the institution was doomed, thus the logic of secession.

The war was literally fought over state’s rights, but the only right at issue was legal slavery based on racial characteristics. Confederate battle flags may have a sentimental meaning to the descendants of confederate soldiers, but they are incompatible with the American national standard.

The real question is, who took Donald Trump’s history classes for him?

Some sources:

A History of the American People, Paul Johnson;

A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Company Aytch, Sam Watkins

#civilwar #phrenological #psuedooscientific #Picketts