AMERICAN HISTORY
Pilgrims Private Property and the First Thanksgiving Early America "Overall, it should be evident that the Constitution was a counterrevolutionary reaction to the libertarianism and decentralization embodied in the American Revolution. The Antifederalists, supporting states’ rights and critical of a strong national government, were decisively beaten by the Federalists, who wanted such a polity under the guise of democracy in order to enhance their own interests and institute a British-style mercantilism over the country. Most historians have taken the side of the Federalists because they support a strong national government that has the power to tax and regulate, call forth armies and invade other countries, and cripple the power of the states. The enactment of the Constitution in 1788 drastically changed the course of American history from its natural decentralized and libertarian direction to an omnipresent leviathan that fulfilled all of the Antifederalists’ fears." - Murray Rothbard Abraham Lincoln and His War “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 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. If the South abolished slavery in 1850 and then seceded in 1860-1861, the North still would have invaded. "It is common knowledge that Lincoln did not want to abolish slavery in the South. He had said so too often. High school textbooks tell this story. The textbooks usually don't talk about what he was really interested in: collecting tariffs in southern ports, especially Charleston and New Orleans. They claim he was solely motivated by his desire to save the Union. He did want to save the Union, but he was not solely motivated to save the Union. He wanted his tariffs. Tariffs were basic to the Republican Party, just as they had been basic to the Whig Party, out of which the Republicans had emerged in 1854. Lincoln and been a high tariff politician ever since his first political campaign in 1832. He was open about this." - Gary North "Though Northern agitation toward African slavery, especially fomenting slave insurrection in the American South, pushed the Southern States to political secession, economic questions that had been weakening the fraternal Union since 1788 had become a paramount concern of Northern business interests in early 1861. Those interests would not accept an independent South with a lower tariff structure which would leave Northern ports idle, and helped influence Lincoln to wage his destructive war." - Gary North “The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavor to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not the separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and assure to it, with its twenty million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt of, development? Accordingly must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to put it down by a bloody and futile civil war?" - Karl Marx, 20 October 1861 "The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a mere tariff war, a war between a protection system and a free trade system, and England naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slave owner enjoy the fruits of slave labor in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war.” - Karl Marx, 20 October 1861 "I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it, in any kind of association with any generous or chivalrous sentiment on the part of the North. But the North having gradually got to itself the making of the laws and the settlement of the tariffs, and having taxed South most abominably for its own advantage, began to see, as the country grew, that unless it advocated the laying down of a geographical line beyond which slavery should not extend, the South would necessarily to recover it's old political power, and be able to help itself a little in the adjustment of the commercial affairs. Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens." "As to Secession being Rebellion, it is distinctly provable by State papers that Washington, considered it no such thing – that Massachusetts, now loudest against it, has itself asserted its right to secede, again and again – and that years ago, when the two Carolinas began to train their militia expressly for Secession, commissioners sent to treat with them and to represent the disastrous policy of such secession, never hinted it would be rebellion." - A letter from Charles Dickens to the W. W. Cerjat on 16 March 1862 WEBSITES Lincoln's War ARTICLES Southern Secession Was One Thing — and the War to Prevent It Was Another Both Lincoln and the Confederacy Were Awful Yes, Virginia, The South Seceded Over Slavery Just War Lincoln's Inversion of the American Union Gettysburg Address Decoded 5 Things You May Not Know About Lincoln, Slavery and Emancipation The Lincoln Myth: Ideological Cornerstone of the America Empire The Whitewashed Tyranny of Abraham Lincoln The Terrible Truth About Abraham Lincoln and the Confederate War Abraham Lincoln and the Two 13th Amendments What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You About Lincoln and the War Did Lincoln Want War? The Brutality of Slavery BOOKS The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. Dilorenzo Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe by Thomas J. Dilorenzo Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession by Charles Adams ===== Warren Harding and the Forgotten Depression of 1920 Herbert Hoover, the Hyper-Interventionist Murray Rothbard argued that the cause of the Great Depression was the result of Herbert Hoover’s policies which sought to keep wages and profits high. Video What Caused the Great Depression? ARTICLES The Hoover-Roosevelt Depression Did Hoover Really Slash Spending? Hoover's Attack on Laissez-Faire Industrial Employment and the Policies of Herbert C. Hoover FDR, the Great Depression, and World War 2 "In their understanding of the Depression, Roosevelt and his economic advisers had cause and effect reversed. They did not recognize that prices had fallen because of the Depression. They believed that the Depression prevailed because prices had fallen. The obvious remedy, then, was to raise prices, which they decided to do by creating artificial shortages. Hence arose a collection of crackpot policies designed to cure the Depression by cutting back on production. The scheme was so patently self-defeating that it's hard to believe anyone seriously believed it would work." - Robert Higgs "Critics of Roosevelt's New Deal often liken it to fascism. Roosevelt's numerous defenders dismiss this charge as reactionary propaganda; but as Wolfgang Schivelbusch makes clear, it is perfectly true. Moreover, it was recognized to be true during the 1930s, by the New Deal's supporters as well as its opponents." - David Gordon "Roosevelt's first instinct was always to lie, but halfway through an answer the president realized he could tell the truth and get away with it, so he would shift gears and something true would trickle out." - Turner Catledge, (New York Times White House correspondent during FDR's administration) "No, Roosevelt did not restore our economic system. He did not construct a new one. He substituted an old one which lives upon permanent crises and an armament economy. And he did this not by a process of orderly architecture and building, but by a succession of blunders, moving one step at a time, in flight from one problem to another, until we are now arrived at that kind of state supported economic system that will continue to devour a little at a time the private system until it disappears altogether. He did not restore our political system to its full strength. One may like the shape into which he battered it, but it cannot be called a repair job. He changed our political system with two weapons—blank-check congressional appropriations and blank-check congressional legislation. In 1933, Congress abdicated much of its power when it put billions into his hands by a blanket appropriation to be spent at his sweet will and when it passed general laws, leaving it to him, through great government bureaus of his appointment, to fill in the details of legislation. These two baleful mistakes gave him a power which he used ruthlessly. He used it to break down the power of the states and to move that power to Washington and to break down the power of Congress and concentrate it in the hands of the executive. The end of these two betrayals—the smashing of our economic system and the twisting of our political system—can only be the Planned Economic State, which, either in the form of Communism or Fascism, dominates the entire continent of Europe today. The capitalist system cannot live under these conditions. Free representative government cannot survive a Planned Economy. Such an economy can be managed only by a dictatorial government capable of enforcing the directives it issues. The only result of our present system—unless we reverse the drift—must be the gradual extension of the fascist sector and the gradual disappearance of the system of free enterprise under a free representative government." - John Flynn "The figure of Roosevelt exhibited before the eyes of our people is a fiction. There was no such being as that noble, selfless, hard-headed, wise and farseeing combination of philosopher, philanthropist and warrior which has been fabricated out of pure propaganda and which a small collection of dangerous cliques in this country are using to advance their own evil ends." - John Flynn ARTICLES These Eight Words Helped Cause the Great Depression How FDR Made the Depression Worse Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR When FDR and Stalin Were Best Buddies FDR – The Man, The Leader, The Legacy How FDR Forced Japan to Attack Pearl Harbor While Lying About Trying to Avoid War FDR and the Collectivist Wave BOOKS The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal by Robert Murphy The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America by Burton W. Folsom Jr. America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 by Wolfgang Schivelbusch Back Door To War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941 by Charles Callan Tansill Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor by Robert Stinnett The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable by George Victor Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy by Percy L. Greaves Jr. FDR Goes to War by Burton W. Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom Richard Nixon The President's Economic Betrayal Jimmy Carter The Last republican President . |
Books
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods Conceived in Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution--and What It Means for Americans Today by Thomas J. Dilorenzo A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson & Roosevelt by John V. Denson A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny by Patrick J. Buchanan The Progressive Era by Murray N. Rothbard FDR,The Great Depression, and the New Deal The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal by Robert Murphy FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America by Burton W. Folsom Jr. America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard PRESIDENTS The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. Dilorenzo Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe by Thomas J. Dilorenzo The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried to Save Her by Brion McClanahan Reassessing the Presidency : The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom by John V. Denson (Editor) Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty by Ivan Eland Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II by Jim Powell . |