“The most sanctified figure in American historiography is, by no accident, the Great Saint of centralizing "democracy" and the strong unitary nation-state: Abraham Lincoln. And so didn't Lincoln use force and violence, and on a massive scale, on behalf of the mystique of the sacred "Union," to prevent the South from seceding? Indeed he did, and on the foundation of mass murder and oppression, Lincoln crushed the South and outlawed the very notion of secession (based on the highly plausible ground that since the separate states voluntarily entered the Union they should be allowed to leave). But not only that: for Lincoln created the monstrous unitary nation-state from which individual and local liberties have never recovered.”
― Murray N. Rothbard
Watch the 12 minute video The Real Abe Lincoln
Introductory Articles
Southern Secession Was One Thing — and the War to Prevent It Was Another by Ryan McMaken
Both Lincoln and the Confederacy Were Awful by Tom Mullen
Yes, Virginia, The South Seceded Over Slavery by Gary North
Visit the more advanced website Lincoln's War
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The Real Lincoln by Thomas DiLorenzo
Lincoln Unmasked by Thomas DiLorenzo
When in the Course of Human Events by Charles Adams
The Real Lincoln by Charles Minor
America's Caesar by Greg Durand
Recarving Rushmore by Ivan Eland
Forced Into Glory by Lerone Bennett
Lincoln Uber Alles by John Emison
Lincoln's Marxists by Al Benson
Lincoln The Man by Edgar Lee Masters
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American Stalin: Abraham Lincoln
De-Mythologized Lincoln
King Lincoln Archives
Thomas DiLorenzo
Abraham Lincoln
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Lincoln's Inversion of the American Union
Gettysburg Address Decoded
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Lincoln: What They Won't Teach In School
The Real Lincoln
Lincoln's Tariff War
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Secession versus War
It is crucial to understand that the cause of Southern secession and the cause of the war that followed it are not the same. The word "secession" and the word "war" have two different meanings. They are not interchangeable or synonymous.
Secession - the action of withdrawing formally from membership of a federation or body, especially a political state.
War - a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state.
Southern secession in and of itself did not cause the war. It indirectly caused the war, but just because the South seceded does not mean the North had to invade. The causes of Southern secession and the causes of the war are two different questions. They are related to each other, but not synonymous. Too often Civil War historians incorrectly assume that the very existence of the Confederacy caused the Civil War.
Ryan McMaken in his article Southern Secession Was One Thing — and the War to Prevent It Was Another writes:
There's an old saying that "he who distinguishes well teaches well." In other words, if one's going to talk about an important subject, one should be able to define his terms and tell the difference between two things that are not the same.
This wisdom, unfortunately, is rarely embraced by modern pundits arguing about the causes of the American Civil War. A typical example can be found in an article at the Huffington Post in which the author opines: "This discussion [over the causes of the war] has led some people to question if the Confederacy, and therefore the Civil War, was truly motivated by slavery."
Did you notice the huge logical mistake the author makes? It's right here: "...the Confederacy,and therefore the Civil War...."
The author acts as if the mere existence of the Confederacy inexorably caused the war that the North initiated in response to it. That is, the author merely assumes that if a state secedes from the United States, then war is an inevitable result. Moreover, she also wrongly assumes that the motivations behind secession were necessarily the same as the motivations behind the war.
But this does not follow logically at all. If California, for example, were to secede, is war therefore a certainty? Obviously not. The US government could elect to simply not invade California in response.
Moreover, were war to break out, the motivations behind a Californian secession are likely to be quite different from the motivations of the US government in launching a war. For the sake of argument, let's say the Californians secede because they couldn't stand the idea of being in the same country with a bunch of people they perceive to be intolerant rubes. But, what is a likely reason for the US to respond to secession with invasion? A US invasion of California is likely to be motivated by a desire to extract tax revenue from Californians, and to maintain control of military bases along the coast.
Thus it would be absurd to equate the motivations of the California secessionists with those of the advocates for the invasion of California.
To put it simply: an act of secession, and a war that may follow it, are not the same thing.
And yet we find that commentary on the Civil War repeatedly conflates secession with the Civil War itself as if they were the same thing.
Tom Mullen in his article Both Lincoln and the Confederacy Were Awful writes:
Americans sympathetic to the Union generally believe the war was fought to end slavery or to “rescue the slaves” from political kidnapping by the slave states, that seceded from the Union to avoid impending abolition.
“No,” say those sympathetic to the Confederacy. The states seceded over states’ rights, particularly their right not to be victimized by high protectionist tariffs, paid mostly by southern states, but spent mostly on what we’d now call corporate welfare and infrastructure projects in the north.
That the states seceded for a different reason than the war was fought seems to elude everyone.
Historian Gary North writes in his article Yes, Virginia, The South Seceded Over Slavery:
If you want one mistake above all mistakes in understanding the Civil War, here it is: "Both the North and the South were primarily motivated to fight it out over the same issue." They were not. So, if you adopt that principle interpretation, you will never accurately understand the Civil War. The South seceded to defend slavery. The North invaded because Abraham Lincoln decided to defend the Union militarily in order to collect the federal government's tariffs. Abolitionists in the North fully understood Lincoln's economic motivation, and they were deeply disappointed. But there weren't many of them, so their disappointment didn't have much political impact on events in 1861.
Chris Calton writes in his article Did Tariffs Really Cause the Civil War?:
It is important to stress, of course, that the Union apologists who argue that the Civil War was waged over slavery are distorting the history as well. Secession was one thing, and the war to end it was another, as Ryan McMaken succinctly reminded us in a recent article. The fallacy that the war was fought over slavery is based on the inappropriate application of algebraic logic to historical analysis: according to the transitive property of algebra, if secession was driven by slavery and the war was driven by secession, then the war must have been driven by slavery.
But this kind of mathematical logic cannot logically apply to history, which as Mises reminds us in The Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science, is one of the two sciences of human action (page 41). Human action is driven by ideas. Action is purposeful. Action employs means to obtain desired ends. The study of history attempts to establish what these ends were during different historic episodes, and what means humans employed historically to achieve these ends. To determine this, Mises explains, historians must look at the historical evidence (unlike the other science of human action, praxeology, which is an a priori deductive science).
The evidence is clear. For the South, the ends aimed at was the preservation of slavery, and the means they employed to realize these ends was secession. The historical evidence makes this interpretation entirely evident. For the North, the ends aimed at was the preservation of the Union, and the means they resorted to in order to achieve this end was war.
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