The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil
War
By H. W. Crocker III
(Regnery Publishing, 370 pages, $19.95)
AN OFT-REPEATED TRUISM is
"History is written by the victors." Certainly this has been
the case of the War Between the States. Books written about the war
must number in the hundreds of thousands by now, and generally they
worship at the altar of the Union and the
Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln. And they keep on coming. The
majority of Americans, if asked, would say that the war was
principally about the national stain of slavery, that secession was
illegal, that the South provoked the war, that the
Union was worth preserving at the cost of
650,000 dead, that it was the only solution to the problem of
slavery, and that Lincoln was our
greatest president. Well, Harry Crocker doesn't think any of these
things are true, and in this enjoyable and provoking book he tells
his readers why.
Crocker, a Californian novelist,
editor, speechwriter, and amateur British
Imperialist, is the author of an idiosyncratic book on the history
of the Catholic Church, as well as a military history of the
U.S. and other books such as
Robert E. Lee on Leadership. His
current contribution, the latest of Regnery Publishing's popular
Politically Incorrect Guides, takes on the "Civil War," a.k.a. "The
War of Northern Aggression" (or, as some post- bellum Southerners
referred to it, "the late unpleasantness"). Make no mistake,
Crocker's sympathies lie with the South, and Part I of his book
describes "why the South was right." However, as one reviewer put
it, he does so with "great scholarship, great story-telling, and
great fun." The book's many informative sidebars full of
interesting quotes and Civil War trivia show that Crocker, although
serious about the justice of the South's cause, maintains his light
touch in provoking the reader to think differently about the War
that changed us from saying "United States 'are' rather than United
States 'is'" and all that came with it.
In a brisk 337 pages, Crocker covers the causes of the
war, the fractured 1860 presidential election, the role of the
abolitionists, and Lincoln's dilemma on
how to handle what he considered a rebellion.
Crocker also covers the key battles of the War Between the
States and offers some short insightful biographies of the
outstanding generals (and cavalry officers) on both sides of this
tragic conflict. Where could we find such generally admirable men
of valor and courage today? What Crocker attempts to make clear is
that the war was fought not over slavery but rather over
Lincoln's ruthless—and we presume
sincere—fixation on the Union as the
ultimate good for the citizens of the United
States. From the Southern point of view, which is also
Crocker's, the Southern states were simply following the principles
of 1776.
Crocker writes, "In their [South Carolina] Declaration,
the delegates (all eminent men and not a rabble of revolutionaries)
voted in a special convention 169-nil, that the Union now
subsisting between South Carolina and under the name of the United
States of America is hereby dissolved." South
Carolina had reclaimed its sovereign rights—and
had done so on the very same grounds that
Jefferson had laid out 84 years before:
"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."
This all sounds familiar to those who believe in the
natural law principle of subsidiarity, according to which "a
community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal
life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its
functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to
co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of
society, always with a view to the common good."
(Catechism of the Catholic
Church, no. 1883)
This may explain why the official newspaper of the
Vatican editorialized on behalf of
the South during the war, and Pope Pius IX sent a hand-woven Crown
of Thorns to Jefferson Davis, ex-president of the Confederacy, as
he languished in prison after the War. Crocker puts it this way,
"The Church in other words, was the natural ally of feudalism,
federalism (or states' rights) and conservatism. Given a choice
between a religiously ambiguous nationalist (Lincoln) and a
Catholic-educated defender of states' rights (Jefferson Davis), it
was no contest for the Pope."
And there was plenty of opposition in the North to the war
and to the sudden end of slavery that meant that Northerners could
expect a large number of freed slaves to emigrate and compete with
them for jobs. Crocker points out that
Pro-Southern Democrats were plentiful in the
Border States but also as far afield as
Ohio and New York
City. Maryland's were especially worrisome….But
Lincoln's deft suspension of civil liberties, imposition of martial
law, and jailing secessionist sympathizers (including Baltimore's
mayor and police chief and thirty-one Maryland State legislators)
alleviated most of the trepidation. All told,
Lincoln's administration jailed more than 13,000
political prisoners. The Supreme Court protested that the President
had no right to suspend "habeas corpus."
Lincoln replied he had a war to fight. As he had
the army on his side, and the Supreme Court did not,
Lincoln won the argument.
As for the question of slavery and the necessity of the
war to end it, Crocker asks:
Would slavery have persisted to this very day? No, it
seems certain that it would have been abolished peacefully, as it
found itself abolished everywhere else in the New
World in the nineteenth century. Imagine that there
had no been war against the South, and subsequently no
Reconstruction putting the South under martial law,
disenfranchising white voters with confederate pasts, and
enfranchising freed slaves as wards of the Republican Party.
Without that past, race relations in the South would have been
better, not worse, and the paternalist planters would have arranged
over time to emancipate their slaves in exchange for financial
compensation.
And perhaps there would have been an African American
president long before the recent election and much more rapid
economic and social equality. History is full of what-ifs. However,
this book could not be timelier. Where once there was the "Blue and
Gray," now there is the Blue and Red, and where once there appeared
to be irreconcilable issues over the right to secession, the growth
of slavery, tariffs, and economic domination, now there are clearly
irreconcilable viewpoints on what some consider to be even more
important issues, such as the right to life and the national
tragedy of more than 40 million abortions since 1973, traditional
marriage, and the overweening intrusion of government power not
simply in the states, but in the personal life of American
families. Rocky times could lie ahead. Avoiding violence of any
sort is a priority. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat
it.
