The War Between The States - 1861

THE PILGRIMS
O how have the mighty fallen. It seems to be an inexorable law that where the light was once the brightest the darkness is later the deepest. So it was in New England, and the faith of the Pilgrims was all too soon extinguished in apostasy. Within a few short generations the sons of the Pilgrims turned apostate, adopting Unitarianism, DENYING THAT JESUS IS THE CHRIST. As early as 1701 Yale University was founded to counter the growing apostasy and theological liberalism at Harvard. By the time of the Revolutionary War the historic Calvinism of New England was already starting to give way to a more fashionable Arminianism to pave the way for the general slide into Unitarianism. Jonathan Mayhew, an outspoken Arminian, was himself not untainted with Unitarianism. New England became the fountainhead of apostasy after the Revolutionary War, producing not only rampant Unitarianism, but Universalism (Having rejected the Deity of the Savior it is logical to deny the need for salvation and postulate that all men shall be saved regardless of their relationship to Jesus Christ.) and later Seventh Day Adventism and Christian Science. Although these cults never constituted more than a minority of the population they represented the elite of wealth and education and had an influence far beyond their numbers.

ABOLITIONISM
Perhaps one of the most radical and destructive of the historic fruits of New England apostasy was the cult of Abolitionism. Then as now a social gospel was the logical alternative of denying the gospel of Jesus Christ. Abolitionism was such a radical social gospel. Salvation was no longer by a long denied Jesus Christ. Neither could eternal salvation be an issue with the Universalists. Hence salvation became temporal, worked out by man himself in the sphere of social action and reform. As with all such movements of social reform it sought to seize and use the sword of civil government to hack society into the desired shape. Government was to be transformed from the temporal administrator of divine justice upholding God's law to a massive engine of social reform. Having whetted their appetite the radicals turned from temperance meetings to the abolition of Negro servitude. And as always those who were impatient turned to the revolutionary violence of the French Revolution as characterized by the John Brown raid. Thus on a foundation of anti-Christianity the radicals launched a program of SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION that required a tremendous increase in the scope and centralization of governmental power. This led them into direct conflict with the Constitution of the United States that established a federation of sovereign states. As in 1776 the struggle over principles of government was settled on the battlefields, this time in the so-called American Civil War.

ETERNAL VIGILANCE
The liberties purchased by such blood and sacrifice in 1776 had been won by the vigilance of the colonies over their rights and needed to be zealously guarded by an equivalent unrelenting vigilance. Thomas Jefferson was such a watchdog. "Against the mighty efforts Federalism was making toward centralization, Jefferson and Madison hurled the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia resolutions…the doctrines set forth…was that if Congress made laws which violated the compact between the States such laws were not binding." (Watson: Thomas Jefferson p. 363). Jefferson's efforts, crowned by the Bill of Rights, guarded our liberties from almost immediate extinction and provided a bastion for freedom that was not breached till the Civil War.

The above resolutions prepared the way for another defense of liberty, the Nullification efforts of the South Carolinians in 1828. The general welfare clause in the constitution was not designed as a broad and general grant of power to the central government, but rather limited that government to activities that equally benefited all the states of the union. The funds for the federal government were almost entirely raised by excise duties through the tariff laws. As the tariff rate grew increasingly high it had two effects. First it discriminated against the South, which as an agricultural society imported more manufactured goods than the industrial North. Secondly it raised excessive revenues for the federal government which were used to finance and subsidize improvements such as railroads, canals etc., which were entirely local in their benefits. Considering such expenditures as unconstitutional and the excessive tariffs as illegal confiscation of her citizens' property, South Carolina balked, refused to pay the tariff and moved to nullify within her own borders the unconstitutional tariff act of 1828. Both sides prepared for war as President Andrew Jackson vowed to maintain the union by force if necessary. A premature civil war was barely averted by the timely reduction of the tariff rates by Congress. But in all their essentials the same ingredients were there that later precipitated the War Between The States.

SLAVERY
History is written by the conquerors and not by the conquered. Thus inevitably the vanquished lose far more than that which was lost on the battlefield. So it has been with the great Southland of this Republic that still has to have its day in the court of public opinion. First of all it was not a Civil War. It was not fought between bands of citizens of a unified nation with a single centralized government. It was fought between two confederations of sovereign states which had formerly formed one confederated republic. Secondly it was not fought over slavery. It was fought over principles of government, and the slavery issue only provided another testing ground for the two conflicting theories of government.

In his masterful defense of the South, Robert Lewis Dabney explodes the view that the war was fought over slavery. He quotes Lincoln as declaring "…that if the perpetuation of slavery tended to restore the Union, it should be perpetuated." (A Defense of Virginia, p. 88). He also shows the hypocrisy of an Emancipation Proclamation that applied only to the South while slavery actually continued to exist in some Northern states after the Civil War. Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation till 1863, and then not as a matter of principle, but of policy. It was issued as an act of war against the South in the hope of precipitating domestic and social chaos and servile insurrection in the seceded states.

A Defense of Virginia also contains one of the most thorough expositions of the Biblical doctrine of slavery. Defending the institution itself if exercised in accordance with the laws of Moses, Dabney harshly criticizes the real problem, the slave trade, an unBiblical exercise in menstealing. He irrefutably establishes that the South, especially Virginia, had labored for over a century to stop the slave trade, an activity that the South had scarcely participated in and Virginia not at all, but was operated chiefly by the British and later by New England. The latter having laid the foundation for their industrial power by the wealth of the slave trade, and having discovered that slavery was unprofitable in northern climates and industrial societies, now hypocritically turned on the South to whom they themselves had sold the slaves whose liberation they now demanded. Then as now it was more an exercise in usurpation of unconstitutional power than in Civil Rights, as "Many of the Southern States had been moving toward abolition…before the war began. Years before the Civil War the Virginia State Legislature missed passing a law to abolish slavery by one vote": (Steffgen: The Bondage of the Free, p. 92) The South fought for the Constitution and not for slavery.

That the rewriters of history termed it a civil war over slavery was designed to forever obscure the constitutional principles of States Rights raised by a War Between The States, and to drown the truth in a wave of the emotion and hysteria associated with abolitionism. It was designed to deny future generations of the deluded, knowledge of the cause of liberty that died at Appomatox.

THE RIGHT OF SECESSION
The Biblical foundation for our Constitutional Republic, a confederation of sovereign states, lies in the polity of Moses and in the Hebrew Republic, which was a confederation of twelve tribes. The Bible plainly declares that the confederated tribes of the Commonwealth of Israel had and practiced the right of secession. When Saul died the two southern tribes seceded from the House of Saul and elected David as King. Later the other ten tribes did likewise and joined the Southern Confederacy. At Solomon's death the ten northern tribes seceded, again dividing the nation into two separate tribal confederacies. All of this is clearly within the limits of the constitution of the Hebrew Republic and is sanctioned by scripture. God specifically commanded Rehoboam not to wage war against the seceded tribes. (I Kings 12:24).^* Neither was the Hebrew Commonwealth a rope of sand, but it stood for 500 years before the first secession and eighty more before the second.

Our Constitutional Republic was similarly a voluntary union of sovereign states, each State reserving all rights not specifically delegated, including the never-surrendered right of secession. Not only was this inherent from the very nature of the federal compact uniting the States, but it was fundamental to our very ideological foundation as found in the Declaration of Independence which declared, "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT…IT IS THEIR RIGHT, IT IS THEIR DUTY, TO THROW OFF SUCH GOVERNMENT." The Southern States in 1861 possessed all the natural and God-given rights of the colonies in 1776. If the patriots of 1776 were right then so were the patriots of 1861. Their cause was the same cause, and they rise and fall together. As John Quincy Adams stated in 1839, that…under these limitations have the people of each State in the Union a right to secede from the Confederated Union itself." (Stephens: A Constitutional View of the War Between the States, vol. 1, p. 527; Stephens was Vice-President of The Confederate States Of America, and his classic constitutional defense of the South is one of the greatest masterpieces of American political science.) Unlike the patriots of '76 the South did not have to resort to revolution, but rather merely a peaceful exercise of her constitutional right of secession. But an apostate North that cared little for the Constitution and yet less for the Scriptures, in defiance of God's rebuke of Rehoboam, waged a war of aggression and conquest against the seceded States. The sons of the liberals of 1861, who today scream for self-determination for every postage stamp country invested with cannibals or terrorists, still deny, as their fathers did, the right of self-determination to that flower of Christian civilization, the Old South, now forever gone with the wind.

THE CAUSES OF SECESSION
The causes of the secession of the Southern States in 1861 were identical to the causes of colonial secession from Britain as declared in the Declaration of Independence. That is continued, persistent and unredressed violations of constitutional right. The original seven Gulf States that seceded all declared in their Ordinance of Secession (simply a bill repealing the original act ratifying the Constitution) that the Federal Government was guilty of breach of contract and had through unconstitutional and usurped powers waged war on their domestic institutions and had threatened the very fabric of their society. The border states led by Virginia, opposing secession, were determined to save the Union within the constitution while upholding the rights of the seceded states. Their ultimate secession to the Confederacy was necessitated by the failure of the Lincoln administration to maintain even a semblance of constitutional behavior toward the seceded states. "The (Virginia Secession) Convention assembled with a fixed determination to preserve the Union, if forbearance and prudence could do it consistently with the rights of the States. But Mr. Lincoln's inaugural, with its hints of coercion and usurpation…the rejection of Mr. Crittenden's overtures, the refusal to hear the commissioners from Mr. Davis' Government at Montgomery and the secret arming of the Federal Government for attack, had now produced feverish apprehensions in and out of the Convention." (Dabney: Discussions, vol. 4, p. 88). Virginia's position, representative of all the Border States, was that secession though perhaps premature was constitutional, but force and coercion were not. The Virginia Secession Convention sent Col. Baldwin to negotiate with Lincoln. Virginia's proposal was that though she deplored a sectional President, elected on an unconstitutional platform, she would stay in the Union as long as Lincoln abided by the Constitution. She would persuade the other Border States to do likewise and work towards peaceful reconciliation and reunion with the seceded States on the basis of redress of constitutional grievances. If Lincoln insisted on exercising naked tyranny and force on the seceded States then Virginia would unsheathe her sword in defense of the Constitution. Lincoln's initial reaction was, "You are too late, sir, too late!" (Ibid. p. 92). Lincoln had already decided on, was already committed to war. While the South sought peace Lincoln repaid his political debts to those radical Abolitionists who were screaming for the blood of the South. As Col. Baldwin pleaded for peace, as with literal tears and agony he implored Lincoln to spare the nation a long and bloody war, Lincoln's final words closing the interview were, "What, then, would become of my tariff?". (Ibid. p. 94) Like Rehoboam, Lincoln was determined to have his taxes and to wage war to get them. "The Love of money is the root of all evil".

THE PURPOSE
And so is the love of POWER. The true purpose of the Civil War was an exercise in usurping POWER. The election of 1860, in a three-way race due to a split in the Democratic Party, had enabled a radical minority to seize control of the executive branch of the Federal Government. They had no control of Congress, and the serious turn of events could easily reawaken the nation, unite their opposition and drive them from power. Meanwhile the Constitution and the Congress could bar any implementation of the revolutionary program of the Red Republicans, the Jacobin party of the day, while they helplessly watched power slip from their hands. To the power-hungry zealots of the radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens, Sumner etc., WAR was the only answer. War that would centralize ALL POWER in the executive. WAR that would provide emergency POWERS, that could ride roughshod over the Constitution. War that could through propaganda rally the entire North behind the radical minority now in power. For the radicals WAR was a political necessity, and so WAR it was. WAR as always is a good cover for revolution, as Wilson and F.D.R. also discovered.

THE CONSTITUTION
While the South fought for the Constitution the North scrapped a Constitution that the Abolitionists openly denounced as a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. The Confederate States of America adopted the Constitution of 1789 with a few alterations to elucidate and strengthen the intent of the original framers. While the South adopted the Old Constitution and rescued it from being perverted, the Lincoln administration reigned as if the Constitution didn't exist. From its inception the Lincoln Administration, arrogating centralized and total power unto itself, piled one edict and proclamation upon the other without the least shred of constitutional authority or congressional approval. As one Senator complained on the floor of the United States Senate, "…we are to be called upon to follow the flag over the ruins of the Constitution? l believe that the whole tendency of the present proceedings is to establish a Government without limitation of powers, and to change radically our frame and character of Government." And commenting on the proposed bill before the Senate, "…everywhere where the authority of the President extends, in his discretion he will feel himself warranted, by the action of Congress upon this Resolution, to subordinate the civil to the military power,- to imprison citizens without warrant of law,- to suspend the writ of Habeus Corpus; to establish martial law,- to make seizures and searches without warrant,to suppress the press..if we pass it, we are…putting…in the hands of the President…the power of a Dictator." (Constitutional View of the War Between the States: vol. II, pp. 458-459). But it was already too late, the water was already over the dam. The REVOLUTION was already past and only sought to be rubberstamped. Lincoln had already accomplished all of the above. Throughout the North the press was silenced if it questioned the usurpations of the administration, and men who spoke up were arbitrarily thrown in jail. Maryland, stressing her constitutional rights, found her State Legislature as well as the Mayor and civil officials of Baltimore in jail, as were the best citizens of many of the Northern States. As Lincoln's Secretary of State boasted, "I can touch a bell on my right hand and order the arrest of a citizen of Ohio. I can touch the bell again and order the arrest of a citizen of New York. Can Queen Victoria do as much? He well knew that she could not, and that no Crowned Head in Europe, not even the Czar of Russia could do more!" (Ibid. p. 409)

Similarly, Lincoln's whole program of action against the South was unconstitutional. The reinforcing of Fort Sumter, the call for volunteers to invade the South, and the blockade of Southern ports were all illegal. If the South had really seceded then they were all acts of war, and Congress only has the right to declare war. If the States were not considered as having seceded then Lincoln had no shred of authority to blockade their ports. Neither does the constitution allow the President to send Federal troops into a State without the consent or invitation of the Legislature or Governor of that State. Neither did Lincoln have the authority to increase the number of Federal troops without an act of Congress. The blockade was also in gross violation of International Law, to which the United States was a signatory. (See Richardson: The Messages and Papers of Jefferson Davis And The Confederacy; pp. 348-360). Centralization of power, conscription, censorship and the death of constitutional and civil liberty were the means that the North used to liberate (?) the slaves. By contrast, "The real weakness of the Confederacy was that the Southern people insisted upon retaining their democratic liberties in wartime. If they were fighting for freedom, they asked, why should they start abridging it?…we should write on the tombstone of the Confederacy: 'Died of Democracy' (Ed. Note; i.e. Constitutional liberty)". (Rushdoony: The Nature of the American System, p. 42)

THE UNION
At the height of the Nullification crisis President Andrew Jackson declared, "The Union, it must be preserved". Lincoln professed as his war aim the preservation of the Union. They and many others were prepared to place the Union over the Constitution. But as with the justice and mercy of God, as with the grace and the law of God, the choice is unnecessary; there is no conflict. What is the Union? The Union is what the Constitution says it is. The Union was a voluntary confederation of sovereign states. That Union could only be maintained by and within the Constitution. To resort to a centralized despotism was more destructive of the Old Union than the mere secession of the seven Gulf States. Under Lincoln the Old Union forever vanished as much as the Old South did under Reconstruction. The Gulf States had prophetically seen it coming and had, adopting the Old Constitution, sought to maintain the Old Union. After a few months of the Lincoln administration the Border States equally committed to the Old Union had no choice except to secede and join the Confederacy. As one abolitionist preacher, anxious to get on with the Revolution and critical of Lincoln's professed war aim, avowed, "In fact as far as the old Union is concerned, the only arms now defending it are in the South." (Ibid., p. 81) If Union was the object the Constitution establishing it must be maintained and then no State would ever have seceded. If Union was the object then there was no need of RECONSTRUCTION.

RECONSTRUCTION
The Revolution takes care of its own. Like Martin Luther King Jr., another Civil Rights revolutionary a century later, and like the leaders of the French Revolution who themselves went to the guillotine in turn, when Lincoln had taken the Revolution as far as he could take it, and had outlived his usefulness, he too was liquidated. RECONSTRUCTION, the revolution after Lincoln, was a logical extension of the revolution under Lincoln, and none are so blind as those who lament the one and applaud the other. The war aim was not the preservation of the Union, but power and social revolution. And that necessitated RECONSTRUCTION. Had the Union been restored the seceded States would have swung the balance of power and swept the Red Republicans from the White House and impaired their control of Congress, and the Revolution would have died aborted. Thus for twenty more years a disenfranchised South was to be ruled by federal bayonets so that her political power could be prostituted to perpetuate the Revolution that was destroying her. For twenty years the South was outraged by looting, rapine, and quasi-legal plunder by carpetbag politicians, who manipulated the black race they had set to rule over their former masters. For twenty years the Old South suffered all the horrors of social revolution as emancipation, equality, integration, and enfranchisement of the Negro followed hard one on the other. For twenty years Southern pride and tradition were mocked and outraged by colored Legislatures of drunks and profligates manipulated by their oppressors. While the flower of her manhood was in the grave, property taxes were confiscatory, and her women were not safe, the South had to bow the knee to the conquerors, but never her soul. Had Robert E. Lee known how the surrender terms of Appomatox were to be kept he would have fought to the last man. They too had pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor!

THE WAR
To judge which cause is the cause of liberty one needs only to judge who fights the best, as the Alamo will testify. Washington's ragged army came out of Valley Forge to defeat the well-fed and equipped British regulars and stalemate the British Empire. So it was in the War Between the States. The North had a population advantage of 22 millions to 3.8 million over the South. The total enlistments in her armies were 2,530,000 versus only 660,000 for the South. The North had the advantages of The U.S. Army and Navy and all the arsenals, munitions and warships thereof. She could blockade the Southern ports and invest all her major navigable rivers. The North possessed all the power of industry for the manufacture of war materials, as well as the advantages of massive imports. Yet all this was insufficient as the South rolled up one major victory after another while outnumbered on every major battlefield better than three to one. In order to effect her conquest the North needed four years, 200,000 Negro troops, 500,000 foreign troops, expenditures of over 5 billion dollars and a resort to massive use of barbaric warfare. Unable to defeat the Confederate Armies in civilized warfare the North resorted to scorched earth policies reminiscent of Attila the Hun, and waging war on civilians to bring the South to her knees. Southern prisoners, treated as traitors rather than prisoners of war, died like flies in Northern camps while Lincoln continually reneged on exchange commitments, fearing that the release and exchange of 50,000 confederate veterans would put victory forever out of reach. The balance on the ledger was that THE SOUTH FOUGHT FOR LIBERTY. LIKE THE ALAMO THEIR VERY DEFEAT WAS VICTORY!!!

THE JUDGMENT
As Robert Lewis Dabney, the Chief Chaplain of the Confederate Armies, prophesied in 1867, "A Righteous God, for our sins toward Him, has permitted us to be overthrown by our enemies and His. Although our people are now oppressed with present sufferings and a prospective destiny more cruel and disastrous than has been visited on any civilized people of modern ages, they suffer silently, disdaining to complain, and only raising to the chastening heavens, the cry, 'How long, O Lord?' Their appeal is to history, and to Him. They well know, that in due time, they, although powerless themselves, WILL BE AVENGED THROUGH THE SAME DISORGANIZING HERESIES under which they now suffer, and through the anarchy and woes which they will bring upon the North. Meantime, let the arrogant and successful wrongdoers flout our defense with disdain: we will meet them with it again, when it will be heard; in the day of their calamity, in the pages of impartial history, and in the Day of Judgment." (A Defense of Virginia, p. 356)

CONCLUSION
Why raise the issue of the Civil War again at this time? First it is necessary to the history of the defence of Christian liberty that we are dealing with in this series. Secondly, it is necessary to understand the nature of our nation's constitution, liberties and history. Thirdly, Dabney's prophetic warning has come to pass. The same, unrepented of theological and political heresies that swept away the Old Union and the Old South are now threatening the whole nation. Now we are again faced with a centralized despotism and a total loss of constitutional liberties. America has recently undergone another Civil Rights revolution and now, as recent disorders indicate, Boston and West Virginia are being RECONSTRUCTED!!! As long as we continue to applaud the heresies that brought ruin to the Old South they will continue to come down as God's judgment on our own head. As long as we continue to justify a Lincoln or a Grant we can not complain of a Nixon, Ford, or Rockefeller. France has never recovered from the French Revolution and neither can she till she repudiates it and repents of it. So it is with America. We can never defend nor restore the Republic till we repudiate and repent of the Civil War. As scripture saith, "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" One thing only, they can rebuild them. For America, as a Christian Republic, that means a rejection of the apostasy and a return to the faith and the principles of our forefathers. It means tracing that long road back till we have resurrected and vindicated the cause that was crushed at Appomatox. And if not…we will proceed to a similar fate, till at that great and glorious Day of the Lord the books, of impartial history, shall be opened, and before the Great Judgment Seat Christ shall vindicate all his own.