[lbo-talk] Tea Partiers: A paleocon perspective

[C. G. Estabrook]

The primary purpose of the US Civil War was indeed to end slavery, but not from 
altruism. (The situation of the freed slaves in the South, particularly after 
1877, was often worse than under slavery.)  It was a contest between two 
regional economic elites, agriculturalists and industrialists in the North and 
slave-owners in the South, over who should develop the lands in the West stolen 
from Mexico and the native Americans.  The two elites had competing and 
incompatible methods of exploiting labor - chattel slavery in the South and the 
wage-contract in the North (and the latter could be the harsher).

Hence the central Republican demand for "no extension of slavery" was an 
assertion of the Northern ruling group's claim, as the Southern rulers well 
understood. When the Republicans got control of the federal government, the 
latter withdrew - and were attacked militarily from the North, surely 
unjustifiably, in spite of all the crimes of slavery.

Incidentally, there was a rather interesting element in the Republican party 
after the Civil War that argued that their party to be consistent should be 
devoted to the ending of wage slavery.  --CGE

On 4/29/10 1:31 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:
> I quote my friend Jack Ross of the American Conservative (from a Facebook
> thread):
>
> ... "I've no love lost for the Lost Cause, but the morality tale of the
> virtuous North is indispensable to the perpetuation of the American Empire.
> With the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln cynically transformed his war into a war
> against slavery no differently than Bush transformed the Iraq War in
> mid-course into a war to spread democracy. And if you believe that
> conscription is slavery, you must acknowledge that the heroic New York Draft
> Riots (really New York's War of Independence) was a greater revolt against
> slavery than any that took place in the South during the war."
>
> Curiously, this makes more sense than 95% of the commentary emanating from
> the left.
>
> -- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
> lytlað."
>
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