Blame Abraham Lincoln for the Confederate Battle Flag
By
H. V. Traywick, Jr.
Photo:
I-95 Memorial Battle Flag, Chester, VA 5-18-2014, Courtesy of Frannie
Kellison
There
has been some controversy generated about the Confederate Battle Flag that will
be hoisted over Interstate 95 near Richmond. The arguments against it are the
predictable ones, such as that it is “divisive,” it makes Richmond look like a
“hick town” full of “ignorant people,” that we ought to be “looking ahead”
instead of “looking back” at something we have “moved on” from, and that it will
hurt “tourism” if we tell the Truth about our grandparents’ fathers instead of
selling them down the river to gawking tourists as scapegoats for all the social
ills of this nation. The unspoken assumption is that The War was fought over
slavery, and the implications of this assumption is that if anyone disagrees
with this point of view, they are either a racist or an ignorant redneck stuck
in the past. I thought we were supposed to have “moved on” from such
stereotypes.
General
Robert E. Lee was the leader, the heart, and the soul of the army that carried
that banner, and anyone attempting to characterize him with such a stereotype
only belittles himself. It takes men of worth to recognize worth in men. I will
not get sucked into the thicket of protesting too much. I will only say that if
the North were fighting to free the slaves and the South were fighting to keep
them, I find it most ironic that the Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate
Armies freed the slaves that came to him by inheritance, while the
Commander-in-Chief of the United States’ Armies kept his throughout the
War.
Card
#1: The War was fought over slavery.
Card
#2: Lincoln freed the slaves.
Card
#3: End of Story - Any Questions?
Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary, Fifth Ed. (Springfield, Mass: G & C. Merriam Co.,
1943), defines a mercantile system as an economic system designed “to secure a
favorable balance of trade, to develop agriculture and manufactures, to create a
merchant marine, and establish foreign trading monopolies.” Industrializing
England had such a system in relation to her agricultural colonies at the time
of the War for Independence in 1776. After the war, according to Thomas Prentiss
Kettell in his Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, (New York: George W.
and John A. Wood, 1860) p. 19, industrializing New England inherited the same
relationship to the rest of the newly independent agricultural States that
England had enjoyed.
A
mercantile nation cannot exist in a vacuum. A nation that employs it must have a
source of raw materials to sustain it. The system is thus divided into two
parts: the “core” industrial nation, and the agrarian “periphery” that supplies
the core with raw materials and a market for the core’s manufactured products.
This
is what happened between England and the American colonies in 1776, and this is
what happened between the North and the South in 1861. In both cases the balance
of trade became exploitative against the periphery. In both cases it drove the
periphery to secession. In both cases it drove the core to launch a war of
conquest against the periphery to drive it back under its control. This is what
both wars were about.
So,
what about slavery? Simple. In both cases, the core (England in1776 and the
North in 1861) employed free labor, while the periphery (the Thirteen Colonies
in 1776 and the Southern States in 1861) employed a slave-labor system. Put
England’s War to Prevent Colonial Independence on one side of the Algebraic
Equation, and put the North’s War to Prevent Southern Independence on the other.
Then factor out slavery as a mathematical constant on both sides of the
equation. One will see that it makes for a very Politically Incorrect cue card."
H.V.
"Bo" Traywick, Jr.
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