As always, a big thank you to Stephen Hall for our Monday morning post!!
There are those in society who keep debating the root causes of the Civil War over a hundred and fifty years ago, some of them with a view to the possibility that another civil war could occur in their lifetime. Understanding the actual cause or causes of any particular war in a daunting task and always a complex and intricate issue.
There is not enough space is a simple little blog post to even attempt to discuss the various influences and contributing factors and political agendas which contribute to even the most straightforward of conflicts, much less a civil war which is always far more complex in the breakdown of a society itself.
However, we can discuss the contributions of a couple factors in several of the wars of this nation’s history, at least superficially. Two major considerations in every war are the demographics and the logistics.
For instance, one of the major advantages of the colonists in the Revolutionary War was that the British supply lines effectively had to cross an ocean, and they had no real friendly and effective base of operations on this side of the pond.
Educators often neglect to teach children the vital importance of West Point, and the attempted betrayal of Benedict Arnold which could have spelled the complete destruction of the Revolution.
Why was it that vital? Simply put, the fort at West Point commanded the Hudson River, no ships could sail past the fort if it was in hostile hands. Who controlled West Point, controlled the Hudson.
So why was the Hudson so important? Because, although the states of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina were huge in terms of area; at that time in the colonies, about half of the population of those colonies lived east of the Hudson, the other half filled the vast rural areas west and south of the Hudson.
Demographically speaking, the controlling the Hudson would have split the revolution in half, which combined with the naval blockade would have effectively starved the north-eastern states into submission in short order.
The Hudson, and thus West Point, were vital for demographic reasons, the distribution of the population. Never underestimate the impact of population distribution in war.
It was the overwhelming numbers of white settlers which would effectively prevent the native nations from ever creating an effective defense against the European invasion in the United States’s westward expansion, their Manifest Destiny to connect and occupy the continent from coast to coast.
However, my attention to this subject was a discussion between a couple people I follow on Twitter concerning the original cause of the Civil War.
In modern schools, it is taught that the Civil War was fought solely over the issue of slavery, despite the Union’s assertion that the war was fought to “preserve the union” and not over slavery. But then, the South seceded because a member of the abolitionist Republican party was elected president in the first place.
The Confederacy always maintained that they fought the war to uphold the rights of states to determine their own laws and not be dictated to by the federal government, in other words, over “states rights”. On the other hand, those very laws the states were wanting to protect were the laws enabling slavery.
It has been pointed out that there had been no indication in Congress that the government was trying to implement changes in the laws merely because Lincoln had been elected, so what really precipitated the secession? To understand what was really going on, just as in the case with West Point, you need to look at the demographics of the times and not to view things from our later points of view.
Population wise, even with the 3/5 compromise in the Constitution, the population of the northern states outnumbered the southern states by almost three to one. So about three fourths (3/4) of the members of the House of Representatives were elected from the north.
However, in the Senate, the south, including Maryland and Missouri, had managed to hold on to fifty percent of the Senators having an equal number of states as the north. So the Senate for a time acted as a bulwark against any federal legislation which could cut into slavery or the laws of the southern states.
The north had a number of other advantages which would come into play in the actual functioning of the war, being more industrialized, more railroads, et cetera, but it was the political demographics which concerned the politicians.
A quick glance at the map clearly shows that the south was on the precipice of losing all political power in the federal government. As new states were set to come into the union, the south would lose the Senate, as it had already lost the House. Even Texas’s agreement that it could divide into six separate states could only temporarily relieve the imbalance, the south was doomed to become a permanent minority in all branches of government.
The main reason the South chose to secede, was and was not the issue of slavery, just as it was and was not the issue of states’s rights; it was a waning political power and they read the writing on the wall that their place in the nation was about to become overwhelmed.
The cause of war is almost always a cause of desperation, where people see the writing on the wall, and see no other option than to take up arms or submit to the political will of others, to fundamentally change their own culture, their own philosophy. Most people would rather die than to change their philosophy.
So, given that none of this is controversial, or difficult to understand, why to teachers keep trying to push the more simplistic version of history? Why are supposedly college educated “social justice” lunatics trying to tear down statues and proclaim that everything southern, including grits, is racist? Why does this topic keep coming up every few years to have to be defeated again and again?
At the same time, we have been experiencing increased chatter and speculation on the possibilities that our nation could be plunged into a second Civil War. Many people point to the idea that our nation is almost evenly divided politically, and drifting further apart ideologically. However, what to the demographics tell us?
Consider that the Democrat party has lost nearly a thousand political seats in the eight years that Obama was President. Much like an inversion of the South prior to the Civil War, consider this popular electoral map:
Geographically speaking, liberalism is facing a permanent loss in the Senate. Even more so if the 17th Amendment were repealed and the state legislatures were to again appoint the Senators.
Further, the population dynamics are that the leftists are so heavily concentrated in the urban areas they have managed to even lose the House of Representatives. As the urban areas which sustain leftist politics continue to implode the way of Detroit and Baltimore, without the sustained input of new liberals through open border immigration policies, the left can only foresee continuing declines in the House.
Having lost the Senate, lost the House, lost the Presidency, and starting to lose the Courts, the left is on the verge of facing a position of permanent minority status, not the majority of minority coalition for which they strive.
Politically, the left’s position becomes increasingly untenable, increasingly they become desperate. The collectivist philosophy is becoming increasingly less mainstream, concentrated in urban areas, being slowly choked of from a viable political majority. In short, demographically speaking, the left is on the wrong side of history.
The rise of violent, radical, militant groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and others, viewed in this light, is a natural and predictable response to an increasingly marginalized philosophy. The writing is on the wall to read, secede now, or concede your way of life. History does not have an actual right or wrong side, but it does occasionally force people into an indefensible position.
