[lbo-talk] Tea Partiers: A paleocon perspective

C. G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Thu Apr 29 14:01:29 PDT 2010


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."
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list