The Cause of the Civil War: Historian
Thomas Fleming Discovers the “Yankee Problem in America”
By Thomas J. DiLorenzo
July 13, 2013
Historian and novelist Thomas Fleming is the author of more than fifty
books, including two very good revisionist histories of the two world
wars:
The New Dealers’ War, and
The Illusion of Victory in World War I. He has authored
biographies of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and has written
extensively about the founding generation, including his best-selling
book,
Liberty! As a regular on PBS and NPR he is as “mainstream”
as it gets. That is, he was, until he published his
latest book,
A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the
Civil War.
No respectable historian believes the Deep North/government school
fantasy that enlightened and morally-superior Northerners elected Abe
Lincoln so that they could go to war and die by the hundreds of thousands
solely for the benefit of black strangers in the “deep South.” And
Thomas Fleming is as “respectable” as one gets in terms of contemporary
writers of history. Fleming has discovered what scholars such as
the late, great Murray Rothbard and the not-late-but-still-great Clyde
Wilson wrote about many years ago: A war was not necessary to end slavery
-- the rest of the world did it peacefully; only 6 percent of adult
Southern men owned slaves, which means that the average Confederate
soldier was not fighting to preserve a system that actually harmed him
and his family economically; and that the real cause of the war was what
Fleming calls a “malevolent envy” of the South by New England “Yankees”
who waged a war of economic conquest. In his own words, from the inside
front cover of A Disease in the Public Mind:
- [Northern] hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to
slavery. Abolitionists were convinced that New England, whose
spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leaders
of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern
“slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson.
The inside cover of the book asks, “Why was the United States the
only nation in the world to fight a war to end slavery?” The
standard “answer” to this question, which I have asked many times in my
own writings, is that Southern plantation owners were by far the most
evil human beings in world history, far more evil than British slave
owners, Spanish slave owners, or French, Danish , Dutch and Portugese
slave owners. Therefore, no peaceful means of ending slavery was
ever possible. This of course makes no sense at all, and Thomas
Fleming recognizes it.
He points out that “Only 316,632 Southerners owned slaves -- a mere 6
percent of the total white population.” This leads Fleming to ask
the obvious question: “Why did the vast majority of the white
population unite behind these slaveholders in this fratricidal war?
Why did they sacrifice over 300,000 of their sons to preserve an
institution in which they apparently had no personal stake?”
Fleming actually understates this point: Slavery only benefited the
slave-owners who exploited the slaves but was economically harmful to all
the rest of Southern society because slave labor is inherently inferior
to free labor. The entire South was poorer as a result.
Moreover, the average Confederate soldier, who was a yeoman farmer who
owned no slaves, was harmed by the slave-owning plantation owners through
unfair competition. That is why so many Northern states like
Illinois banned the migration of blacks, free or slave, from their
borders, and it is also the main reason why the Republican Party opposed
the extension of slavery into the new territories -- they wanted to
“preserve them for free white labor,” as Lincoln himself once said.
In every major Civil War battle Confederate soldiers who did not own
slaves fought against (mostly border state) Union Army soldiers, such as
Ulysses S. Grant, who did own slaves (Grant’s wife Julia, cousin of
Confederate General James Longstreet, inherited slaves from her South
Carolina family and Grant was the overseer of his father-in-law’s slave
plantation for a period of time before the war).
Fleming contends that the real reason for the war -- and for why, of all
the nations on earth, only the U.S. associated war with the ending of
slavery -- was twofold: First, there was the extreme “malevolent
envy” of Southerners by the New England “Yankee” political class, who had
long believed that they were God’s chosen people and that they
should rule America, if not the rest of the world.
Second, there were a mere 25 or so very influential New England
abolitionists who had abandoned Christianity and even condemned Jesus
Christ, while embracing the mentally insane mass murderer John Brown as
their “savior.” This is part of the “disease in the public mind”
that is the theme of Fleming’s book.
John Brown, who had declared himself to be a communist, had organized
terrorist attacks in Kansas which included the murder of entire families
who did not own slaves, and the murder of free black men. “Perhaps
most appalling,” writes Fleming, “were the murders of James P. Doyle and
his two oldest sons, while Doyle’s wife, Mahala, pleaded frantically for
their lives . . . . The Doyles were immigrants from Tennessee who .
. . had no interest in owning slaves.” Brown claimed that his
purpose was “to strike terror into the hearts of the proslavery
people.” He planned even larger acts of terrorism at Harpers’ Ferry
in 1859 where he was apprehended by U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E.
Lee, and he was hanged for his crimes.
Fleming discusses in great detail how John Brown came to replace Jesus
Christ in the minds of Northern abolitionists, who adopted his mantra
that blood must shed in order to eradicate sin. That is, if
they were to be saved and sent to Heaven, there must be bloodshed,
and the more the better. That is why peaceful emancipation
was not achieved in America, writes Fleming: It was not stubborn and evil
Southern plantation owners who were the problem, it was the bloodthirsty
abolitionists.
John Brown “descended from Puritans” and was “the personification of a
Puritan,” says Fleming. And he truly became a “god” to the New
England “Yankees.” “Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed awe and
near-worship of John Brown,” writes Fleming. He lavished praise on
John Brown’s “religion of violence.” Emerson called Brown
“that new saint” who “would make the gallows as glorious as the
cross.” Henry David Thoreau said that “Brown was Jesus.” He
was “the bravest and humanest man in the country,” said Thoreau with
horribly clunky English. He described Brown in that way after learning of
Brown’s execution of non-slaveowning, innocents in front of their wives
and children. These men were clearly crazy, and their writings must
have contributed a great deal to the “disease in the public
mind.”
The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was also a John Brown worshipper.
As a typical New England Yankee Garrison possessed “the prevailing
attitude” of New Englanders in that “they were inclined to believe in the
moral depravity of anyone who disagreed with them,” and had “an almost
total lack of empathy” for their fellow countrymen in other parts of the
country. This, says Fleming, was “a flaw that permeated the New
England view of the rest of America.”
An abolitionist compatriot of Garrison’s named Henry C. Wright declared
that Jesus Christ was a “dead failure” for allowing slavery to exist, and
insisted that “John Brown would be a power far more efficient” than
Christ. Armed with such beliefs, Garrison and comrades waged a
decades-long campaign of hatred against all Southerners. Their
newspapers broadcast for decades that the South was “a province ruled by
Satan” and was guilty of “four unforgivable sins: violence, drunkenness,
laziness, and sexual depravity.” “From Richmond to New Orleans, the
Southern states are one great Sodom,” wrote one New England
publication. Fleming writes that such frantic “theological
somersaults” were strikingly similar to “the public frenzy that gripped
Massachusetts during the witch trials . . .” And some people
wonder why Southerners in 1861 no longer wanted to be part of a union
that included New England Yankees.
Thomas Fleming has discovered historical truths that Clyde Wilson long
ago wrote about. In an essay entitled “The Yankee Problem in
American History” Wilson pointed out that “by Yankee I do not mean
everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. Lots of them have
always been good folks.” He, like others before him, used “the term
[Yankee] historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended
from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance,
hypocrisy, greed, and lack of congeniality, [and] for ordering other
people around . . . . They are the chosen saints whose mission is
to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own
image.” “Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Clyde Wilson continues, “is a
museum-quality specimen of the Yankee -- self-righteous, ruthless, and
self-aggrandizing.”
By 1860, writes Wilson, “The North had been Yankeeized, for the most part
quietly, by control of churches, schools, and other cultural
institutions, by whipping up a frenzy of paranoia about the alleged plot
of the South to spread slavery to the North,” the theme of Abe Lincoln’s
“House Divided” speech. Of course, that was never the plan and
never a possibility, but the “diseased” public mind of the North, fueled
by the slick political rhetoric of politicians like Lincoln, actually
persuaded many in the North.
Clyde Wilson describes abolitionism in almost an identical fashion that
Thomas Fleming does:
- Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on
Sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It
was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders Were
evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s driving
Mission to establish Heaven on Earth . . . . Most abolitionists had
Little knowledge or interest in black people or knowledge of life in The
South . . . . many abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and
Blacks would disappear and the land repopulated by virtuous Yankees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of these. He once predicted that
since black people were, in his opinion, and “inferior race,” they would
eventually “go the way of the Dodo Bird” and become extinct.
A Disease in the Public Mind is filled with scorn for the abolitionists
and their un-American beliefs, including their belief of the inferiority
of black people. By failing to know anything at all about Southern
society, never spending any time there, writes Fleming, the abolitionists
did not understand that many of the slaves were highly skilled and
talented blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, farmers, and artisans of all
sorts. This ignorance has led generations of Yankees, including
many of today’s “liberals,” to believe that because of slavery, the
descendants of slaves “would have to be treated like children, at best,
or creatures form an alien planet at worst.”
Thomas Fleming would likely be in complete agreement with Murray
Rothbard, as well as Clyde Wilson, on the nature of mid-nineteenth
century “Yankees.” Rothbard wrote in his essay, “Just War,” that:
- [T]he North’s driving force, the ‘Yankees’ -- that ethnocultural
group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate
New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern
Illinois -- had been swept by . . . a fanatical and emotional
neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent ‘postmillenialism’ which held that as
a precondition for the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a
thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth. The Kingdom is to be a
perfect society. In order to be perfect, of course, this Kingdom must be
free of sin . . . . If you didn’t . . . stamp out sin by
force you yourself would not be saved (emphasis added).
This is why, said Rothbard, the “Northern war against slavery
partook of a fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to
uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and
loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle. They
were Pattersonian humanitarians with the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the
Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era.”
Thomas Fleming points out that the husband of Julia Ward Howe, author of
the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was one of the financiers of John
Brown’s terrorist mass murder sprees. Her song replaced “John
Brown’s Body” as the Yankee anthem as it celebrated the mass murder of
hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens as “the glory of the coming of
the Lord.”
Thomas Fleming discusses many other historical facts in A Disease in the
Public Mind that yours truly has also written about and been
denounced as a liar, a slavery defender, a “Neo-Confederate,” and
worse. He praises Thomas Jefferson for being among the first
American statesmen to propose the peaceful emancipation of Southern
slaves. He describes in detail the breathtaking hypocrisy of New
Englanders who “rediscovered the sacred union,” he writes sarcastically,
after having plotted to secede from the union for a dozen years after
Jefferson’s election as president.
Fleming also writes of how the “Yankees” habitually attempted to plunder
the South with protectionist tariffs that protected their manufacturers
from competition. He understood that the Republican Party’s
opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territories was based
on their wish of “Free Soil for Free (White) Men,” the title of chapter
19. That is, they wanted a Homestead Act that would hand out free
land to white settlers while banning the existence of all black
people, free or slave. He quotes Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greely
explaining that his “paramount objective” was to “save the union” and not
to end slavery.
In his final chapter Thomas Fleming writes about Oliver Wendell Holmes,
who was an officer in Lincoln’s army who was wounded in battle.
After the war, “For seventy years, he repeatedly condemned the
abolitionists and others who claimed they had a message from some higher
power that everyone had to obey. Above all he voiced his contempt
for people whose claim to certitude often persuaded other men to kill
each other.” If this sounds familiar, it is because it has been the
guiding principle of American foreign policy ever since 1865.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/thomas-j-dilorenzo/who-caused-the-1861-65-bloodbath/
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