Neo-Confederates and The Far Left

My friend Paul Zummo has an interesting post at his blog Letters from Cato, on the odd alignment of some interests between Neo-Confederates and the hard Left:

Neo-Confederates and others who have a more sympathetic understanding of the Confederacy don’t generally agree on much with far-left Progressives. And yet they do have at least one thing in common: they share a revisionist interpretation of the Civil War generally and Abraham Lincoln specifically. Both downplay the significance of the Civil War and the elimination of the scourge of slavery, and both portray Lincoln as a typically racist white man who didn’t really care all that much about the plight of slaves and whose interest in emancipation was purely part of a larger effort to preserve the Union and win the war.

In my life I have spilled a metric ton of digital ink arguing that this is an egregiously mistaken or warped view of American history, so I’ll address these inaccuracies briefly. First of all, with regards to the cause of the war, yes it was about slavery. One only has to read the documents produced by the secessionist states and speeches from the likes of Alexander Stephenson to understand this. The idea that tariffs or some other underlying economic motives were factors is frankly absurd. Lincoln and Douglas spent seven debates in Illinois arguing about popular sovereignty as it relates to whether territories should be able to choose whether or not slavery would be legal as they moved to statehood. Tariffs did not come up. Nor are they mentioned much in the articles of secession.

It is true that Lincoln and the union government did not engage in war to eliminate slavery, and many if not most union soldiers didn’t care one way or the other too much about the issue. And the same is also generally true of confederate soldiers. Yet there is no serious proof that the ultimate precipitating cause of the division between north and south was anything other than slavery. Once the war started the men were fighting for their country (in the north) or for their homeland (in the south). But why were they fighting to begin with? Surely not tariffs.

And this leads us to Lincoln and emancipation. First of all, it is true that Lincoln was not an abolitionist per se, though he was adamantly opposed to slavery. And his animating purpose at the outset of the Civil Was was the preservation of the union at any costs, including the potential of chastened seceded states returning and keeping slavery. But as the war wore on, Lincoln saw the opportunity to emancipate slaves and he took it. In part it was a war measure, but he also saw it as the right thing to do, and so overruled practically his entire cabinet in issuing it.

Go here to read the rest.  History is always subject to analysis and interpretation but finally, as John Adams noted, facts are stubborn things.  Any movement which attempts to deny the “stubborn things” of history is inherently untrustworthy.