Friday, June 26, 2015

"Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States -- the Irrefutable Argument"

Gene Kizer, Jr. has written a must-read book for anyone concerned with the Confederate flag debate.  It is titled "Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States -- the Irrefutable Argument."

Here's what the back cover says about this book:
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This book proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the North did not go to war to free the slaves or end slavery.

The North went to war because it faced economic annihilation and a Southern competitor that controlled the most demanded commodity on earth:  cotton.  The North's economy was based mostly on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton around the world.  Cotton alone was 60% of U.S. exports in 1860.  When the South seceded, the Northern economy began a dramatic collapse, and by war time, there were hundreds of thousands of hungry, unemployed Northerners in the street -- and the "tocsin of war" sounded.

Economically ignorant Northern leaders  then passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff that threatened to destroy the Northern shipping industry by rerouting trade away from the high-tariff North and into the low-tariff South.  The Morrill Tariff was like pumping gasoline into an already raging fire.

Abraham Lincoln was the first sectional president in American history.  He was president of the North, and the North was clamoring for war.  He saw an opportunity to start it without appearing to be the aggressor, so he took it.  Thus, he started a war that killed 800,000 men and wounded a million.

The idea that the good North was so outraged over slavery that they marched armies into the South to free the slaves is an absurdity of biblical proportions and this book proves it.

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Gene Kizer, Jr. graduated magna cum laude in 2000 from the College of Charleston with History Department Honors and the highest award for the History Department, the Outstanding Student Award.  He won the Rebecca Motte American History Award the year before.

Order a copy of this book at Amazon here.