Why the South Was Right

And Why We Must Renew The Cause

by Steve Wilkins

With the defeat of the South, true liberty, liberty in the historic and Biblical sense, was lost to this land. James McPherson has remarked, ‘the Civil War changed the United States as thoroughly as the French Revolution changed that country. . . The United States went to war in 1861 to preserve the Union ; it emerged from war in 1865 having created a nation.’ (Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, p. viii) The War for Southern Independence was indeed the American equivalent of the French Revolution.

It is little wonder that a young man named Karl Marx who was living in London at the time working as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, followed the War with great interest and excitement. He saw the implications of the War for the world and wrote gleefully to his friend Friedrich Engels that the War would be the beginning of a ‘world transforming . . . revolutionary movement.’

Slavery, so far from being the cause of the war, was merely the pretext for revolution. As Prussian military theorist, Carl Von Clausewitz once stated, ‘War is the pursuit of political goals by other means.’ There was seldom a more successful revolution. The old Constitutional Republic was destroyed and an octopus‑like centralized government took its place.

James McPherson has noted, ‘The war marked the transition of the United States to a singular noun. The ‘Union' became the nation, and Americans now rarely speak of their Union except in an historical sense.’ This is a significant change. Our speech reflects this. Before 1865 the accepted usage was ‘The United States are,’ but since that time it has been ‘The United States is.’ We are no longer a union of confederated states, but a nation where the individual integrity and political sovereignty of the states is denied.

Thus, the old federal republic in which the national government rarely touched the average citizen except through the post‑office is now dead and has been replaced by centralized bureaucracy which seeks to control every action. What we call liberty, our forefathers called slavery.

This was precisely what Dr James H. Thornwell and others had feared. In a tract entitled ‘Our Danger and Our Duty’ Dr Thornwell stated in regard to the consequences of a Northern victory, ‘If they prevail, the whole character of the Government will be changed, and, instead of a federal republic, the common agent of sovereign and independent States, we shall have a central despotism, with the notion of States for ever abolished, deriving its powers from the will, and shaping its policy according to the wishes, of a numerical majority of the people; we shall have, in other words, a supreme,