I’m finally fed up. The time for sitting on the fence and watching atrocities with an unbiased calculating mentality are over. I’m not sure if it is a result of the political climate of election year, the increasingly intrusive legislation that passes without a whisper from the people, or the accumulation of the absurd over the years. But for whatever reason, I have lost all objectivity.
As a result of my newly acquired state of mind I am forced to look at what is most repugnant in the history of America and the source of the centralized right-robbing consolidation that has become the federal government: Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was the worst president the United States ever had. But he was the best dictator. His expansionist “improvement” and economic policies are the sort that make those of socialist leanings drool. The fact that he could achieve his success at the end of bayonets and still be considered one of the greatest presidents in our history is utterly baffling. It is no secret that I am from the south (Texas), and I am sure many are already accusing me of some kind of flashback psychosis, or that I should just forget about the distant past and move on with the present. I can’t and I will attempt to explain why.
The southern states were tired of paying the vast majority of the taxes and getting only a pittance back from the government. The majority went to fuel the industrial revolution in the north. When Lincoln won the Presidency, it was clear that the South could no longer reside within the Union, as he proclaimed on many occasions to not only maintain the level of taxation, but to increase it. The effect of the Whig/Republican expansionist policies and partisan taxation against one geographical region would have eliminated all possibility of any sort of realistic representation in D.C. The ongoing trend in the north toward centralization of the federal government was diametrically opposed to the strict Constitutionalism of the South. A break was inevitable.
First, and most obvious is the fact that the South did not invade the Union states. The battles of the so-called Civil War were not fought on Union soil; they were fought in the Confederacy. That means that Union soldiers traveled to the South for the express purpose of conducting war. The means by which Lincoln did this were in direct opposition to everything the Constitution of the United States stood for. Many (a great many in fact) union state citizens, press, and legislators were sympathetic to the Confederate cause and sought to allow the Confederacy to leave peacefully, hoping for future goodwill and even possible re-unification, not to mention adherence to the Constitution and the secessionist history of the United States up until that time.
But Lincoln was having none of that. He imprisoned citizens, members of the press, and even duly elected union legislators for nothing more than expressing concern over Lincoln’s “interpretation” of the Constitution. People were arrested for not including Lincoln in their prayers. Newspapers were shut down or threatened into compliance. Ordinary citizens were arrested and jailed in federal prisons on mere suspicion of political dissent. Armed military personnel were placed at ballot boxes to coerce the public into "favorable" voting decisions. And this was all in the union states. In the South, things were much worse.
Lincoln sent his greatest thugs…err, generals not to the frontlines to combat the Confederate army, but into the interior of the South to destroy our towns and cities. Under the watchful eyes of thugs like Generals Sheridan and Sherman, Union army soldiers entered towns that had not a single soldier from the Confederacy, but pleny of women, children, and the elderly. These "soldiers" burned down virtually all civilian dwellings, stole everything of any perceived wealth, slaughtered livestock and took grain for soldier consumption (when they were no longer hungry or in need of provisions, they simply killed the rest of the livestock and left the carcasses on the side of the road, and scattered the grains to the wind), murdered innocent civilians, raped women and left those that remained alive without shelter, clothing or a scrap of food at the onset of winter. They dug up our graveyards, scattered the remains of our loved ones and pocketed anything of value.
When the Union army actually did fight real soldiers, the often did so behind a “human shield” line of Confederate prisoners of war. This brings up another point. While the Confederacy, short of all supplies, food and munitions were able to treat prisoners of war with all the fairness and leniency one could expect, with three meals a day, adequate sleeping and sanitation provisions, etc, the Union used its bloated overages in food and sanitation sparingly with regard to their POW’s. Water came from holes they dug in the sand, the food was often infested with insects and worms, and place and provision for any and all sanitation was often nonexistent. Living quarters were often outdoors, where prisoners remained exposed to the elements 24 hours a day. Not so bad I guess. As Union Col. E.N. Hollowell said, “there was meat enough in the crackers, bugs and worms.” Yummy. James and Walter Kennedy, in the book The South Was Right!, provide this particular instance of Union atrocity, along with a corresponding Confederate version of this sort of circumstance. Union Maj. C.V. Foster, had this to say of the Union POW’s in Charleston:
“ Our officers, prisoners of war in Charleston, have been ascertained to be as follows: Fresh meat three quarters of a pound or one half pound hard bread or one half pint of meal; beans, one fifth pint.”
So there we are. Four long years of pillage, plunder, rape, murder and scorched earth “total war” tactics that would make the likes of Hitler and Stalin really stand up and take notice. Even with these unscrupulous tactics, the South maintained itself in the war, winning major battles consistently throughout. In fact, if not for these unscrupulous attacks on helpless civilians and a massive influx of European "soldiers" Lincoln recruited from the prisons of Europe, the South would very likely have won and repelled the invasion.
Some European nations were entertaining the idea of assisting the Confederacy in realizing its independence. This would have ended the war in favor of the Confederacy regardless, but Lincoln wasn’t having any of that after all the trouble he went through. That’s where the Emancipation Proclamation came in. Far from “freeing the slaves”, it was only, in Lincoln’s own words, “a war measure” designed to firstly quell any thoughts of European intervention (it did this with limited success) and secondly to incite servile rebellion (didn’t happen). This document freed only those slaves that were not in the control of the Union army. All Union states were allowed to retain their slaves. All Confederate states under the military control of the Union were not affected. It was pure politics.
But, bygones being bygones as they are, four years pass, the Union finally rapes and murders enough to win the war and all is forgiven. Lincoln talks about “mending wounds” and “binding the union” and the world is a happy place. Wrong. The Republican Party (who by then monopolized our government as a result of the above mentioned voter enforcement tactics) immediately removed all state government officials from their elected offices and installed military rule in the Confederate states. This is what we euphemistically call “Reconstruction”. Twelve years of military rule in the South. In order to "save the Union", a military despotism was installed to force the populace into political submission. The Yankees wanted the Southern states to amend their Constitutions and adopt the fourteenth amendment. If they would submit to this, they could have their representation in Washington DC and perhaps return to a democratically elected government. Not wanting to be coerced into voting against their beliefs, the states declined the “offer” and were subject to military rule, where the only law of the land was the whim of the soldiery. White voters were robbed of the right to vote and the ex-slaves were given the right to vote and forced to vote for Lincoln’s Republican Party. Well, they were sometimes forced. Other times, they were bribed with promises of land and other riches (most of which never materialized). The martial officials were openly corrupt, accepting bribes without any need for hiding or concealing their actions. Destitute widows of the Confederate cause solicited themselves to the military occupiers, not for money but for food to feed their starving children. By the time the southern states were sufficiently oppressed to incline toward voting in the amendment, some of the states loyal to the Union, appalled by the treatment of the former Confederacy, were refusing to ratify it. To this day the amendment has not been properly ratified by the required vote. It was simply added on as a "joint resolution"; just another in a long line of irreverent attacks on our Constitution. What remained of the wealth in the land was systematically funneled north, and the economy did not recover itself to pre-war conditions until a century later; that brings this "ancient history" right into modern relevance -financial recovery was not complete until my own lifetime. Of course, the racial tensions and adversities as a result of perverted Reconstruction policies continues even today.
The federal government then brought in its education. Public education. This is the same public education that now “educates” the children of this nation into utter ignorance. Our children learn the Union version of the “Civil War”, the dreamland reality where Lincoln was an honest, benevolent President. The one the “freed the slaves” and “saved the Union”. The war was not fought to free the slaves. The fact that we are the only civilized nation to utilize war to free slaves attests to this fact, as do Lincoln’s own words. And as for saving the Union, he did so only in a geographical sense; it was the Confederacy that was fighting to preserve the ideals found within the Constitution; individual liberty, limited government and state sovereignty. It is the “education” of our children that enrages me most of all. We are force-fed this fictitious “benevolent Lincoln” story so that we will be apologetic and ashamed of our history when we were right. And it is Lincoln’s legacy of “internal improvements” and taxation that persist to this very day. It is the policies of Lincoln that are invoked when the Constitution gets in the way of the legislative contrivances of Congress. He set the precedent. He made it OK for everyone else. All of the bloated government programs initiated by Wilson, FDR, and presidents all the way to present day find their ancestral roots in Abraham Lincoln and his mercantile government dreamland while the Constitution effectively died with the Confederate cause. His dream has become my nightmare and its only getting worse.
