Below The Beltway

Over at The Right-Wing Liberal, there’s an excellent post putting the Union view of the War of Southern Rebellion into perspective.

Here’s the money quote:

Every southerner is told that the Confederacy fought to make a country. Far fewer American recognize that the Unionists fought to save the country from ruin. Allowing the Confederates to leave would be to admit the experiment failed, to acknowledge that we would soon go the way of the squabbling Greek city states that fell to the Macedonians and later the Romans. It would destroy the work of the Framers, not restore it.

That is what we northerners understood; it is why we - even as we respect the reasons southerners donned gray - will never consider the rebel as noble as we do the Unionist. It is why we (those who refuse to forget) cherish the of memories northern men who came by the hundreds of thousands, bled, died, and when given the chance in 1864 (the first time a serious effort was made to allow the military to vote in American history), rejected the political weakness of their own ex-commander (McClellan) and voted literally to keep themselves in harm’s why by helping re-elect Lincoln. It is, for those who have ever wondered, why the Unionists took to the field. It is why we Yankees fought.

More than once in the historical record, you will find contemporary views that support this.

The idea that there could have been peace between an independent Confederacy and the Union is, I think laughable.

For one thing, both nations would have fought over the one issue that brought the war to the forefront — westward expansion. Even if the Confederacy had been allowed to go peaceably, or won it’s independence early in the war thanks to the incompetence of the Union’s Generals, one can easily see disputes breaking out in the West, especially after the resources in places like Colorado, Oklahoma, and Arizona were discovered.

For another, there would have been disputes over access to and use of the Mississippi River and it’s access to the Gulf of Mexico.

And there’s no reason to think that the breakup of the Union would have ended with just one new nation. Texas very well might have decided to go on it’s own — after all, that’s how they started out. New England may have finally followed through on the post-Revolutionary threats to go it alone. And then there’s the issue of foreign intervention from Mexico and elsewhere.

Before long, North America would have come to resemble Europe; a hod podge of states, each with it’s own interests and animosities and, given what was going on in Europe at the time, each of them being forced to look to one big nation or another for protection.

And there’s one other reason why fighting to keep the Union together in 1861 was the noble cause:

[T]he American republic could not survive if pieces of it could break away every time they lost an election.

This is an argument I dealt with when I wrote about this issue a year ago, and, as I noted back then it really goes to an argument the Founders themselves made in 1776:

In the most important part of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson set forth the criteria for when armed rebellion is justified:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, 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 to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security

In other words, taking up armed rebellion is not something that should be done for light or trivial reasons. Nor it is something that should be done when there are other, less violent methods for effecting political change.

(…)

Lincoln had said nothing, and certainly in the months prior to his Inauguration, had done nothing, to indicate that such a threat existed. Moreover, if the South had stayed in the Union and sent its Congressmen and Senators to Washington in 1861, they would have represented a voting bloc large enough that they would have been able to block any legislation they didn’t like, especially in the Senate.

They choose instead to rebel against their nation. For that, while history may not condemn them, it’s clear to me that they should not be honored.

And the idea that those who opposed them were aggressors bent on tyranny should be rejected for the absurdity that it clearly is.