We Can't Do Anything Right: The GOP and the Civil War

Mackubin Thomas Owens reviews a new book with the thesis that "The South Was Right and Historians Are Wrong" vis a vis what motivated the Southern States to secede from the Union and initiate the Civil War/War Between the States (trying to be ecumenical here). As we all learned in 4th Grade - and was understood back in 1860 - the Confederate States believed the election of Abraham Lincoln represented the end of the line for their efforts to preserve and extend the "peculiar institution." 

Post-war historians and commentators, however, while allowing that slavery was a factor in secession, have filled libraries with alternative explanations for the Civil War's origins. It has even become a leftist trope to denigrate Lincoln himself as a moral monster who had no interest in ending slavery, or protecting the rights of American blacks, except to the extent needed to further his own career. This, of course, is nonsense, but nonsense is never in short supply in America's public debate, especially when it's time to denigrate or diminish the achievements of the Republican Party. 

In his remarkable new book, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, James Oakes argues that the historians who deny the antislavery origins of the war are mistaken. He contends that from the outset, Republicans had slavery in their sights. Southerners understood that the antislavery threat to the South was real. Accordingly, secession was not an hysterical overreaction to Lincoln’s election but an understandable response to the fact that an antislavery majority in the North had elected an antislavery president. And indeed, Oakes contends, from the very beginning of the conflict, the Republicans worked assiduously to destroy slavery. The problem with the dominant narrative, he argues, is that too many historians have refused to take the Republicans at their word. 

Oakes expands the work of Allen Guelzo, who in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, argued that from the first day of his presidency, Lincoln had his eye firmly set on ending slavery. Oakes takes nothing away from Lincoln, but demonstrates that Lincoln’s approach was reflective of the Republican Party as a whole. While there were many differences between Lincoln and the Radicals within the Republican Party, they were of far less import than those between the Democrats and the Republicans. As Lincoln himself once remarked, the difference between Charles Sumner, the Radical Republican senator from Massachusetts, and himself was six weeks.

Yeah, God forbid anyone read the 1856 Republican Party platform:

Resolved: That, with our Republican fathers, we hold it to be a self-evident truth, that all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction; that, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished Slavery in all our National Territory, ordained that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, it becomes our duty to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it for the purpose of establishing Slavery in the Territories of the United States by positive legislation, prohibiting its existence or extension therein. That we deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislation, of any individual, or association of individuals, to give legal existence to Slavery in any Territory of the United States, while the present Constitution shall be maintained. 

Resolved: That the Constitution confers upon Congress sovereign powers over the Territories of the United States for their government; and that in the exercise of this power, it is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism — Polygamy, and Slavery.

Everyone in American political life can plausibly link themselves to the Founders, but only the GOP can claim credit for the hard-won achievements of the second founding, no doubt an intolerable truth for the left to abide. 

Sotto Voce: Syrian Civil War Edition

Probably Obama's jerkiest moment during the 2012 campaign was when he smirked during an interview on 60 Minutes that his opponents were "new" to foreign policy...as if a globe-trotting financier and the chairman of the House Budget Committee were rubes who had never crossed the county line. F*** you very much and enjoy your crow, jerk.

Actually, I remember being impressed with Paul Ryan's contributions to the foreign policy portions of his VP debate with Joe Biden. It really brought home the fact that foreign policy skills are more about having the right principles, rather than knowing who is president-for-life in this or that particular hellhole.

And, am I the only one who remembers "Scranton Joe" faux-bellowing, "Oh! So you want to start another war!" in response to some point Ryan made about the Obama administration's feckless retreat from Afghanistan? It's just amazing how these preening liberal peace-niks want to start major combat operations within a year of their successful election victories premised, at least in part, on "keeping up out of war."

It shouldn't be that hard to make political hay out of this fundamentally political duplicity, but the best the GOP has been able to come up with in the past 100 years has been Bob Dole's bicentennial-era crack about "Democratic Wars." (forehead slap)

(And let's hear it for our history of victorious "Republican Wars" back in the 19th century!)

Should Republicans vote to support Obama's vague proposals for punitive strikes against the Assad regime? Hell if I know, but I do know this: if all Obama wants to do is lob some cruise missiles or lead an air campaign, he doesn't need Congress to approve that.

I mean, Reagan invaded Grenada on 48 hours notice without asking permission, even killing some Cuban military "advisers" along the way. He also sent a punitive air strike against Libya, (remember Qaddaffi's "Line of Death?"), and waged a naval campaign in the Persian Gulf that decimated the Iranian navy.

On the other hand, when Iran (booooo!) and Iraq (booooo!) used chemical weapons on each other, Reagan did precisely nothing except let them bleed one another dry. That's an option, you know.

Also, I don't have time to look this up, but I am 99.99% sure that Bush 41 invaded Panama*, ostensibly an ally, without any great debate beforehand.

Not coincidentally, this was a time when America's international standing and military might was unquestioned.

Now we've got a president of the United States who acts like a senior associate who missed a filing deadline, and whom we're all supposed to treat as the smartest guy to ever hold the office.

The argument that we need to support Obama in order to preserve the prestige of the office of the President is falling on deaf ears here at Free Will HQ. Obama's the only guy whose prestige is on the line, and everyone knows it.

And put away your columns about "Munich moments" and how this is "like" the Spanish Civil War. It's nothing like the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War featured two cognizable adversaries whom you could support or work against depending on your ideological leanings. Who in Syria is the Franco? There is none.  

The effort to define some of the rebels as "moderates" is little more than desperate spin. Do we even know these peoples' real names?! At least when America had a civil war, curious Europeans could visit Washington and Richmond and get a sense of how the two sides were thinking and doing. John McCain visiting some desert encampments doesn't do that. (although all credit to him for actually going over there).

And, I hate to be politically incorrect, but Arab militants have a well-deserved reputation as fabulists depending on which set of westerners they're talking to.

Most important, there is no way our "intelligence," such as it is, can pinpoint who unleashed the chemical weapon attack that crossed Obama's red line. It very well may be that it was rebels, not Assad, who launched the attack. Looping YouTube videos of dead children won't change that. We have no business doing anything militarily on anything less than evidence that establishes Assad's fault beyond a reasonable doubt.

I continue to hold out hope that Obama might surprise us all either by (1) leaving Syria alone or (2) actually launching an effective attack that bloodies Assad enough to chasten him, but doesn't give the Islamists among the rebels the opportunity to seize power. Please at least tell me that they have been monitoring traffic around suspected WMD sites and that we have a vague idea whether Assad's stockpiles are being moved around!

This is, needless to say, a priceless opportunity for Republicans to use Obama's shrunken international standing (and the public's angry opposition to any proposed Syrian attack) and derail or roll back all of Obama's noxious domestic "achievements." That's certainly what liberals did when Nixon, Ford, and W were president. I'm sure the GOP has absolutely no intention of pursuing this for fear of harming the prestige of the office of the president during wartime.

It's just amazing how quickly Obama's fortunes have turned. A month ago, I don't think anyone would have guessed that a Syrian chemical attack would lead to the very real prospect of the president losing a congressional authorization vote opposed by dozens of members of his own party, not to mention conservative "warmongers" (who are usually skeptical of military adventurism, too. It's the moderates like McCain and Colin Powell who like to get gung ho). You can call people isolationists all you want, but the fact is that the US doesn't literally have an interest in every stupid conflict on the planet.

* yes, kids, this really happened.

Rise Again: What About Southern Heritage?

This excerpt from a book titled "The Mind Of the South" by Tracy Thompson (hint: the thesis of the book is that the South has no mind) recently passed through my Facebook timeline. The idea is that the South "still lies" about the Civil War, denying the War was about slavery, and playing up the states' rights angle. She tells this tale as an example of how things work in the Dear Ol' Southland:

In the course of our conversation, Yacine Kout mentioned something else—an incident that had happened the previous spring at Eastern Randolph High School just outside Asheboro. On Cinco de Mayo, the annual celebration of Mexico’s defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, a lot of Hispanic students brought Mexican flags to school. The next day, Kout said, white students brought Confederate flags to school as a message: This is our heritage.

Now, first I have to say that, if you Google "East Randolph High School Cinco De Mayo" or some other combination, the only results you get are the above excerpt and commentary thereon. I can't find anything about this supposed racist incident independent of Tracy Thompson's tendentious tract. 

Second, memo to prideful southern high school students: here in Amurrica, we got this here thing called the "American Flag" AKA the "Stars & Stripes." It looks like this:

Try waving that next time, guys. That's what kids do here in California in response to displays of the Mexican flag. 

Third, don't want to hurt any feelings, but if you're going to choose "Southern Heritage" versus "Mexican Heritage" (I know this is one of those "would you rather be blind or deaf?" kind of questions), wouldn't Southern heritage be the better choice? The Confederates, after all, considered themselves Americans. I don't know what message Mexican kids are trying to send by waving around the "Eagle & Snake," but it doesn't strike me as being "pro-American."  

Whatever southern heritage meant 50 or 100 or 150 years ago, today - ca. 2013 - it's a combination  of regional pride, bread pudding, and cussedness. It's about admiring the gallantry and bravery of the doomed southern armies who fought to the end for a cause that everyone now agrees was an awful one. One of history's ambiguous after-effects is the grudging admiration we can have for history's losers - I'm thinking of Napoleon's Grand Armee' or the Japanese in the Pacific War - who, whatever you might say, fought like hell, even if for the wrong reasons. 

If southern heritage means high school students in 2013 are going to saddled with the full panoply of southern sins, then the same should apply to the yokels displaying the Mexican flag. There's the massacre and enslavement of the Aztecs; a feudal agrarian system that keeps Mexican peasants in peonage to this day; a third world political system that overlays a corrupt crony capitalist oligarchy onto a huddled mass of poor kept in the thrall of pseudo-socialist slogans; and so on. The Mexican War with the US ended with Santa Ana and his cronies taking bribes in exchange for signing away the American Southwest. If southern heritage is problematic, so is Mexican. 

Then there's Mexico's frankly bizarre approach to race relations, as this graphic illustrates:

Wow! Where's a Mexican flag for me to wave? 

Call me old fashioned, but Confederate history is part of American history. Mexican history? It's about as important to America as Cuban or Canadian history. One clearly outranks the other. 

]I'm not going to go waving the Stars & Bars, but I won't begrudge someone else doing so; so long as they behave themselves. But the kids waving Mexican flags are just as obnoxious as any modern day neo-Confederate. 

Good Points

A lot of good points being made across the Blogosphere today:

Republicans ecstatic over the anti-Obamacare results in Missouri should temper their enthusiasm, since the status quo was and remains unsustainable. Repeal will not be enough. If Americans want to "keep" their current health care, they need to accept that they will have to actually pay for it. (Cafe Hayek)

Just because someone is a left-wing historian with an axe to grind, doesn't mean their research lacks merit. US involvement in the Korean Peninsula during the Cold War has actually inspired some useful historical writing from progressive types, as the "official" record has been hopelessly white washed. (Marginal Revolution)

The Obama Administration's approach to the "Birther" issue - mockery, combined with deliberate opaqueness that only encourages further "questions" - has had the opposite of its intended effect. The number of people who aren't sure whether Obama was born in the US is at 58%, at least in one poll. (Legal Insurrection)

In the wake of the Crash of '08, the US needs to do more than pass regulatory "reform," or build up balance sheets. Its regulators, finance pros, and ratings agencies need to rebuild their tattered reputations, or see themselves replaced by foreign competitors more willing to make bearish (i.e. rational) calls on US financials. (Ampontan)

American media outlets may be more numerous than ever, but they keep failing to report the same stories; namely that New Age/Leftist ideas and philosophies can be just as destructive and anti-human as anything you could point to on the Right. (The Macho Response)

Liberals like Paul Krugman claim to hate deflation because it creates a "downward spiral" that is hard to get out of. The truth is they hate the benefits of deflation: debt becomes more expensive, savings increase, and private capital formation encourages self-determination. So much easier if liberals could just artificially goose the economy with "stimulus" and zero per cent interest rates, and then inflate away all of the debt that their schemes generate. (Market Ticker)

If you are in New York City and want to talk to beautiful women, you need a Vespa and some blue shoes. At least that's what you need this summer. (The Sartorialist)

There's no scandal quite like a Republican bikini scandal. Apparently, the Left thinks this will kick off some sort of hypocrisy buzz. What they don't realize is that Republican bikini scandals remind people that the hot women are all on the right side of the aisle. (The Other McCain)

"When I Paint My Masterpiece" is one of Dylan's best songs from his post-accident semi-retirement period. It's also one that isn't well understood. (Brendan Bernhard)

While we can all put on an appropriately glum face on the anniversary on Hiroshima, it's worthy of comment that civilian battlefield deaths among our allies, including one battle that took place on American soil, have been forgotten despite their exceeding the toll from the atomic bomb. (The Belmont Club)

Life Is Not Fair. (The Leader of the GOP)

The Battle of Gettysburg

Today is the 147th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Gettysburg. History has tended to linger over the tragedy of Pickett's Charge, the "late" JEB Stuart, the defeat of Robert E Lee (D), and of course the high water mark of the Lost Cause. Comparatively little is known of the men in Blue (R), yet a visit to the Pennsylvania Monument tells the tale. These were great men, who fought just as hard, and as well, as their Southern counterparts. The only difference: they won.

The Monument, btw, includes a charming plaque stating that the soldiers were presenting the monument to the ladies of Pennsylvania who sacrificed so much during the war. Gettysburg, like few sites in the US, brought out the best in America - from the Gettysburg Address down to the tip-of-the-hat gentility towards the Home Front - even as it saw some of America's worst days.

And, dare I point out the vast gulf that separates the men of the 19th century who died to make men free; and the men (and women) of the 21st century who seem intent on grasping every scrap of "stimulus," "bailout" and "social justice" available? All in the name of (language abuse alert) "equality?" I've never been one to say that our best days are behind us, but certainly some of our better days are.