Here's what the back cover says about this book:
*****
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.
****
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.
3 comments:
"The North's economy was based mostly on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton around the world." Yes, and cotton was an extremely low-value added commodity, of which the U.S. economy would increasingly marginalize had not the South attempted to export is ideology of property in slaves into the territories, in essence attempting to nationalize the ideology of slaveholder's rights to own blacks.
The fact is, the South had a pre-industrial economy that failed to attract capital, and was already headed for a falling rate of productivity and further economic backwardness. Ironically, what investment that was sent to the South was overwhelming invested in planting, since that's all Southerners really knew how to do -- own black slaves, beat them into vicious submission, to eek out increasingly marginalized returns.
Moreover, insular agrarianism isolated the South, cutting it off from the influx of new people and ideas (people obviously hostile to chattel slavery and much more morally enlightened). Today, the Confederacy, if it had continued to exist, would be a poor primary exporter like a peripheral Latin American economy. Cutting edge industries, back then rail, steel, manufacturing, shipbuilding, and now high-technology information systems, robotics, and nano-technology, would be found nearly exclusively in the North. Folks might as well move to Mexico for all the Southern economy would be cracked up to be.
But again, Stogie, all this stuff you're spouting about the North being the aggressor against the South is more of the mythic national ideology of the South, the same ideology that claimed to favor liberty and states' rights, but in fact pursued tyrannical policies, nationalized economics, used murderous Gestapo-style police force to keep the system in place, and advanced racial ideologies to keep alive a social hierarchy of American apartheid.
If you're summarizing this Kizer dude's argument, he must be really bad. Hopefully the book is better than the summary, but this is economically illiterate. Yes, the South dominated cotton exports, but economic history shows that "King Cotton" is no longer king. The South was bound to backwardness one way or the other. But by bringing on the Civil War, Southerners guaranteed their experiment from 1961-1865 would wind up on the scrapheap of history, not unlike the Soviet Union (or the Nazis, if you prefer), with which the South's methods of tyranny had so much in common.
Donald, you are really sold on the great Northern myth of history, and it is obvious that you have serious butt-hurt from hearing truths and facts that crush your sacred myths. Further, in defense of those myths, you just make things up as you go along, and repeat the same falsehoods over and over again, even though convincingly refuted previously. The anti-slavery Yankee racists were not "more morally enlightened" in the least; they hated blacks, and sought to keep them out of the territories because of their racial bias. As for "American apartheid," Lincoln and the Northerners were all for it. They passed "exclusion laws" to keep free blacks out of their states. They were willing to amend the Constitution to preserve slavery permanently in order to persuade the South to remain in the Union. On September 18, 1858 at Charleston, Illinois, Lincoln told the assembled audience:
I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality ... I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman, or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men.
Your heroes have feet of clay.
As for the slaves, the fact is slaves in the South lived much better and with substantially less bias then did free blacks in the North. As for who started the war, it was Lincoln, and the North's war effort involved invading the Southern states and making total war on the whole population, including women and children. You refer to Nazis (typical), but Nazis invaded other countries for the purpose of conquest and control, making them much more similar to the Yankee North than tto the South.
You, Donald, live in a fantasy world, making you much more similar to progressives, socialists and Occupy communists then to conservatives. Your statements express a deep hatred for the South, so common to liberals and leftists. You cannot see beyond your deeply entrenched biases. You are what you pretend to hate.
LOL!
I'll respond later in a blog post as well, but it is you and your social construction of reality who is the leftist. In fact, the Southern view of history you espouse is a agglomeration of Marxism and radical libertarianism, and your repeated claims to "smacking" me down are nothing more than childish attestations of "No fair, I won. I won. Waaahhhaa!!
In fact, the moral enlightenment you should be talking about is the abolition of slavery. The Northern states, including Lincoln's Illinois, abolished the institution, because they knew they were on the wrong side of history. The Southern states fought to preserve it. They didn't fight to "save the culture and honor" of the South. They fought for their states rights to own property in slavery. That is the mainstream historical interpretation. I've cited some of the most authoritative historical research already. You're cited marginal crackpots and historical illiterates. Indeed, here you've not refuted a single point I've raised on the South's backward economy, instead resorting to ad hominems.
You say I keep repeating the same debunked points but you have not debunked them. You've ignored my points and argued against those I have not made. You keep arguing how racist the North is when I've never said Northerners were not so. But being racist and owning slaves are deeply qualitatively different. Southern leaders repeatedly and voluminous announced that their disunion was ultimately for the preservation of slavery, of their right to own other men. The only way that right could be preserved and justified was to support it with a radical white supremacist ideology that dehumanized blacks, infantilized them as dependent on Southern white benevolence, and demonizing them as inferior to to justify the brutal violence deployed to keep them down. The Southern states passed slave codes that gave slave owners the right to deploy racist violence against their property to keep them in line and compliant.
These are just facts, Stogie. And I'm not a Northerner. I'm a Californian. Indeed, I wonder why you still live in California, considering it was not part of the Confederacy and was never a slave-holding state.
Where were your ancestors from, Stogie? For which state did they fight?
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