Southern Nationalism

I believe this individual used to be a White Nationalist on Stormfront a long time ago:

“I do understand that people in the South feel that they were treated very unfairly by the North, in the War between the States. I know how much you hate the word ” Civil War”, so I will refer to it as the War between the States. Will you can continue to call it the War of Northern Agression.”

I prefer to use the term “War Between the States” which was coined by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist No. 8. He wrote about the “case of disunion” which might be formed “out of the wreck of the general Confederacy.”

The reason that I use that term is to stress the importance of sectional conflict across the broad expanse of American history: before the war, during the war, and long after the war. It has been going on continuously over any number of issues (slavery was just one issue, civil rights was another) ever since the ratification of the Constitution.

“I will even agree with you that there were more factors then just slavery on why this War was fought.”

As Jefferson Davis makes clear in his memoirs, the conflict was going on between the “commercial and navigating states” and the “planting states” long before it crystallized into a conflict between “free states” and “slave states” after the gradual demise of slavery in the North during the early nineteenth century.

“It was partly state rights vs federal government rights and who held the greater power. Slavery was something that New Englande from the beginning wanted to end.”

New England was perfectly happy to supply the South, the Caribbean, and the Latin American slave states with an abundant supply of slaves for over a century. Even at the Constitutional Convention, New England had yet to fully embrace the abolition of the slave trade, which is why it was postponed until 1808.

“At the beginning when they set up this new government New England didn’t want slavery to be legal in any part, but agree to postpone the issue for a number of years. Then at some point it had to be dealt with.”

The U.S. Constitution was the Compromise of 1789.

As part of the Compromise of 1789, New England got the commercial Union that it wanted above all else, while the South got the 3/5ths rule and the fugitive slave clause, and later the Bill of Rights including the Tenth Amendment. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is there any clause that slavery had to be “dealt with” by the federal government.

“It was your economic way of life, but yet New England felt it was morally wrong to hold and keep slaves.”

New England felt it was “morally wrong” to hold and keep slaves … but mysteriously, interestingly enough, Yankeeland was perfectly willing to process the cotton grown by those slaves on Southern plantations in its own textile industries, and clothe themselves in the products of slavery, and tax Southern households with protective tariffs in order to redistribute wealth created by slavery to the North through internal improvements.

If slavery was so morally wrong, why didn’t New England secede from the Union, as the abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison wanted? Why didn’t they oppose internal improvement bills financed by slavery? Why didn’t they shut down their textile mills or process only “fair trade” cotton?

“So yes there are many considerations to take to heart and think about as we come to an honest opinion about President Lincoln and his fight to keep the Union together as one.”

By seceding from the Union, the North was perfectly free to abolish slavery in the Union and the territories with a constitutional amendment. In fact, this is exactly what William Lloyd Garrison had always wanted, who for twenty years had been the foremost disunionist in America.

Now that the South had left the Union, the North was no longer “morally complicit” in slavery. How did Abraham Lincoln respond to this triumph of anti-slavery? He tried to ratify a constitutional amendment that would have preserved slavery for all time. He instructed his generals to preserve slavery in states where it existed like Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri.

Lincoln himself said that if he could “preserve the Union” without liberating a single slave that he would do it. Going all the way back to the Constitution Convention, New England had been willing to sacrifice everything (including its opposition to slavery) for the commercial Union.

It was “the Union war” right down until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

“I believe that was his intent and not just to punish the South for daring to believe in the right for them as states to decide what they wil and will not believe. Yet, many felt that there had to be a strong federa government.”

Of course.

The war turned on the question of secession, not slavery: was the Union national, perpetual, and indissoluble, or was it federal, tentative, and voluntary? Slavery was merely the “incident” that destroyed the Union over the larger constitutional question.

“My question to White Nationalists who still fly and hold the Confederate lfags close to their heart, is do you think the South will rise again under your leadership? Do you really think that you will be able to keep the South as you believe it should be?”

I think that secession will reemerge as a mainstream issue in the decades ahead. We’re already at the point where nullification has reentered the mainstream:

(1) First, the Southwestern states (Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona) will fall to the Democrats due to changing racial demographics, giving them a national lock on the White House and Supreme Court.

(2) Second, it is only a matter of time before Southern states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia tip into the Democratic column, also due to changing racial demographics.

(3) Third, the Democratic attempt to run America like Chicago will prove to be explosive, and it will lead to the revival of states’ rights and secession talk in Dixie.

(4) Fourth, the exploding national debt and the paralysis of the economy will weaken federal institutions, especially as the military disintegrates and the welfare state collapses under financial pressure.

(5) The Union will break when the cost of the Union becomes too high. It only takes two or three states to launch the movement and force other states to take sides. States like Texas, Florida, and Virginia might break apart in the process in the same way that West Virginia was created.

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