Well, Alexandra responded to the comments left to her earlier today, although she has since removed the posting. Arklahomboy pretty much nailed my general reaction to it

But, since she took it down, I’m going to try to keep down the indignation and just focus on a few things that I think need to be said here.

In 1776, King George the Third was the rightful ruler of the 13 American Colonies. The Law of the Land said that he was the sovereign and the people held their allegiance to him. On July the 4th, 1776, the first Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, dissolving their allegiance to the King of England. They asserted that men, by right, ought to be free to determine their own destiny. They declared that each of the 13 Colonies by right, and was, a free and independent nation, owing allegiance to no one but themselves, that the legitimacy of the government comes from the consent of the governed.

After the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation were signed. Worried about federal tyranny, the Articles of Confederation gave the Federal Government absolutely no power to tax. The federal government was so ineffectual that in 1787 the Constitutional Convention was called to revise the Articles of Confederation, but they were quickly scrapped in favor of writing the U.S. Constitution from scratch. However, several of the states, worried about federal tyranny, made the passage of the Bill of Rights mandatory to their approval of the Constitution. It should be noted that during the Constitutional Convention, it was Southerners who outlawed the slave trade.

As the nation grew, the North and the South grew further and further apart. The North focused on manufacturing and industry, and the South focused on agriculture. Because of the population density of the North, the Yankee states soon had an insurmountable majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate was tenuously balanced between the two regions, resulting in many feuds in terms of adding new states, most often causing a northern state and a southern state to be admitted to the union at the same time.

But, by controlling the House, and thus the taxation and appropriations bills, the Northern States were able to place tariffs on imports. This was good for the North, in that the manufactured goods that they sold didn’t have to compete with cheaper mass produced British goods in the marketplace. However, in the South, Britain was a major trading partner for the cotton that was being grown, and the tariffs that Britain put on goods from the U.S. in retaliation for high U.S. tariffs hurt the Southern States, never mind the higher prices for manufactured goods they were paying.

Additionally, the tax revenues were not being evenly distributed throughout the country. A disproportionate number of tax dollars were going to interstate improvement projects in the north, while the South had to do without. Over time, the tension built.

Finally, in the Presidential election of 1860, the Democratic party split, however, Abraham Lincoln not only did not win any of the Southern States, his support in the South was so marginal that his name didn’t even appear on the ballot. Lincoln was the embodiment of every grievance that the Southern states had with the Union. Having a man elected President who didn’t even appear on Southern ballots was the last straw, and the first wave of Southern States seceded.

After Lincoln tried to resupply Fort Sumter in defiance of the secession of South Carolina, he started calling up troops to put down the “rebellion”. North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Arkansas served him with conventions of secession rather than troops.

Slave states Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri never really seceded. The District of Columbia also allowed slaveholding. The State of West Virginia (although I’m not really sure how they square West Virginia with the Constitutional requirement that any part of a state forming a new state must have the approval of that state’s legislature) actually seceded from Virginia and rejoined the Union. To say that the War of Southern Independence was about slavery is to ignore historical fact. Not all slave states seceded, not all states in the Confederacy seceded when Lincoln was elected President, and there were legitimate grievances about taxation with the federal government.

And before you go around saying that the North was on the right side, I suggest you do some reading on a few choice Yankees. Start with Sherman, Grant, and Custer and work from there. Not all were devils, but considering the looting and pillaging of the northern armies on southern soil, they certainly didn’t show themselves to be men of honor.

And when it comes down to it, Men of Honor like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson exemplify the rightness of the Southern Cause. In all of American History, you will be hard pressed to find men of better character. They were not perfect, but they were honorable, which is infinitely more than you can say about the Yankee leadership during the war.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 11:11 pm by The Flannel Avenger and is filed under Rebel Alliance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.