[Peace-discuss] News from Neptune on UPTV 11 April 2014

[C. G. Estabrook]

NEWS FROM NEPTUNE for 11 April 2014
A "War of Northern Aggression" Edition
Produced and directed by Caleb Seripinas
on Urbana Public Television (7pm Fridays)

RON SZOKE on concentration of wealth;
KAREN ARAM on Seymour Hersh on war in Syria; and
CARL ESTABROOK on the imaginary US Civil War.

ON THIS DAY IN 1861 Confederate troops were preparing to attack the Federal government fort in the harbor of Charleston, SC – establishing the tradition of the first shot, when the US government is planning war: cf. the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor (1898), sinking of the RMS Lusitania (1915), & attack on Pearl Harbor (1941) - n.b. all maritime events. The Lincoln administration was preparing to attack the Confederate states, who had done roughly what the British colonies in North America had done in 1776 – declare independence.

I RECOMMEND HERE historian William Marvel, who has been called one of the few Lincoln scholars whose "books do not read like defense briefs in The War Crimes Trial of Abraham Lincoln" <http://archive.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo167.html>.

IN HIS 2006 book, 'Mr. Lincoln Goes to War,' "Marvel leads the reader inexorably to the conclusion that Lincoln not only missed opportunities to avoid war but actually fanned the flames — and often acted quite unconstitutionally in prosecuting the war once it had begun."

In his first inaugural address Lincoln … said that there need be "no bloodshed" unless a state refused to pay the tariff tax, which had just been doubled (the Morrill Tariff) two days before Lincoln's inauguration. Since the Southern states that had seceded had no intention of paying taxes to the U.S. government any more than they intended to pay them to the British government, this was an explicit threat of war over tax collection - which you remember had been at stake in the outbreak of the American Revolution.

MARVEL WRITES, "Lincoln's address drew [an] ominous reaction across the South. Moderate newspapers strained for hopeful interpretations, but the Richmond Dispatch read it as a declaration of war because of the implied threat of coercion." South Carolinians "translated Lincoln's denial of the right of secession [in the speech] and his refusal to yield federal facilities [which the South offered to pay for] as a solemn promise to subjugate the Confederacy."

...there was overwhelming support in the North in early 1861 for peaceful secession. Marvel quotes newspapers in New York, Washington, Illinois, Delaware, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere as saying so. He also notes that there was a strong movement to form a "central Confederacy" involving New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey.

Lincoln's decision to incite a war had nothing to do with freeing slaves, writes Marvel. "[H]e gambled [by resupplying Fort Sumter] on provoking a war to assure the dominance of federal authority" …

Lincoln's objective at Fort Sumter, writes Marvel, was to "launch a patriotic frenzy" in the North as a prelude to waging war ... The Republican Party orchestrated demonstrations in cities throughout the North:

“Perceived reluctance and insincerity [to invade the South] led Unionist mobs to descend on dissident businesses and individuals, demanding nationalistic demonstrations. Pennsylvania mobs destroyed the offices of dissenting newspapers, forced business owners to adorn their buildings with flags, and intimidated political figures into public expressions of Unionism. In New York City a resident described an absolute ‘despotism of opinion' in which considerations of personal safety discouraged any unflattering remarks about the Lincoln administration or government policy.” [Cf. 'Support Our Troops' a decade ago.]

Marvel describes how Lincoln ordered the arrest of the Maryland legislature and how he ignored the Southern peace commissioners who sought a compromise. He also recognizes the importance of Lincoln's illegal suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus, which was followed by the imprisonment of at least 13,000 Northern political dissenters without any due process. "Without that repression, later war measures, like the imposition of direct federal conscription for military service, might not have survived public opposition to become fixtures contradictory to a free society."

When the public did protest the revocation of their personal liberties, "Lincoln responded to the public outcry with more severe repression . . . and with more audacious examples of it. [He] would grow sufficiently confident to wield unilateral authority and military might against the most fundamental elements of democracy, imprisoning duly elected representatives of the people, arresting opposition candidates, and ‘monitoring' elections with soldiers . . ."

The U.S., like all the other countries of the world in the nineteenth century that ended slavery (including the British and Spanish empires, the French, Danes, Swedes, Dutch, and others), could have done so peacefully and in a relatively short amount of time.- an alternative to having the federal government murder some 350,000 fellow citizens in the 1860s, the equivalent of 3.5 million deaths today. Lincoln covered up his war crimes with a masterful use of religious rhetoric

Marvel writes, "Peaceful emancipation on some scale seems at least to have been feasible. The repeal of the fugitive slave laws would have encouraged even more slaves to escape . . . further weakening the institution. . ." Furthermore, "just as isolation hastened the end of apartheid government in South Africa, the international stigma and external economic pressures of an increasingly enlightened world ought eventually to have driven Confederates . . . to a voluntary abolition . . ."

THE LATE CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (a sad case) quoted a far better historian than himself on the point: "[Perry Anderson's] undergirding assumption [is] that American imperialism remains, if I may so condense it, the primary enemy ... A few years ago, when we jointly addressed a gathering in New York, he startled me by announcing that he  thought the Confederacy should have been allowed to secede. His reasoning was elegant enough — slavery was historically doomed in any case; two semi-continental states would have been more natural; American expansionism would have been checked; Lincoln was a bloodthirsty Bismarckian étatiste and megalomaniac..."

That was also the view of course of the late Gore Vidal.

"'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.” --Abraham Lincoln, Springfield IL 1858

The US Civil War (1861-5) was a murderous and unnecessary conflict in which a Southern ruling class, who lived by extracting surplus labor from direct producers by means of chattel slavery, were attacked and defeated by a Northern ruling class, who lived by extracting surplus labor from direct producers by means of wage slavery.

It was thought that the two systems could not exist in juxtaposition ("half slave and half free"), and the dominant social groups came into conflict after the Mexican War over the vast increase of US territory taken from Mexico. After the a dozen years of contestation, war was precipitated by Lincoln, a minion of the Northern ruling class.

"Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the prospect of competing against a forced-labor system. But favoring free soil did not mean agitating to free the black man. The majority of Western farmers were not abolitionists ... Their objective was to exclude both the white planter and the black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace. That goal, and the attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party" [W. A. Williams].

Although chattel slavery was abolished, the war did not result in material improvements for the working classes in either the North or the South.* The ruling classes coalesce to some degree in opposition to working class demands (cf. "Compromise [sic] of 1877"). The American 'robber baron' Jay Gould (1836-92) is reported to have said, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

But it will take another trumped-up war, 50 years after Appomattox, to stymie popular demands. (See Randolph Bourne, "War Is The Health of the State," 1918.)

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*"Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II" is a book by American writer Douglas A. Blackmon, published by Anchor Books in 2008. It explores the forced labor of imprisoned black men and women through the convict lease system used by states, local governments, white farmers, and corporations after the American Civil War until World War II in the southern United States. Blackmon argues slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War, but instead persisted well into the 20th century. Slavery by Another Name began as an article Blackmon wrote for The Wall Street Journal detailing the use of black forced labor by U.S. Steel Corporation.

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