I turn into Glenn Beck for a post

I'm in a Civil War class right now and I'm loving it. When reading history, it's best to try to objectively judge the figures based on the standards of their own time. That's the best way to enjoy history, and it's only fair to them. That means not comparing things to modern day politics. Sometimes this is really hard not to do. It makes me feel like Glenn Beck, pretending to be some sort of pseudo-historian, feeling around in the dark for patterns I want to see. Take, for example, the comparison I find myself making between Southern secessionists and the modern Tea Party movement (it's fair to say that most Southern sympathizers today would associate with the Tea Party, so I'm not completely off right?). But god damn it, the similarities are just too hard to ignore. I can't just shut my eyes and pretend they're not there. You see the rich and privileged Southerners with everything to gain spread propaganda and misinformation to convince the poor whites that it was their fight. After a few peeps, the Southern moderates follow along without question as the radicals stamp them out. Their ranks are filled with paranoid conspiracy theorists who are afraid of their enemies not because of what they are doing, but because of what they might do. It's like a bizarro revolution, where instead of fighting for the oppressed and the ideas of the enlightenment, they're fighting for ignorance and keeping the oppressed in shackles.

Well, in our book, McPherson explains what's going on. The Southern secessionist movement was a counterrevolution, and whenever these pop up in history, they are never portrayed in a good light. A counterrevolution is a backlash against revolutionary principles. When abolitionists started gaining a little traction in the early 1800s, Southerners stopped looking at slavery as a necessary evil, and transformed it into a moral institution to be embraced.

Here's an awesome excerpt from the book, with Lincoln ridiculing the South's idea of tyranny. I would argue that the South's idea of tyranny mirrors the modern Republican party's childish view towards Obama.

Revolution was "a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause," wrote Lincoln. But "when exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power." The South had no just cause. The event that precipitated secession was the election of a president by a constitutional majority. The "central idea" of the Union cause, said Lincoln, "is the necessity . . . of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose."

And here's the very long excerpt showing what I believe to be similarities between then and now, and a further explanation of counterrevolutions. Just for reference, whenever you see the phrase "Black Republican," that was an inflammatory name Southerners gave to Republicans to imply that they're black sympathizers.

But the American Revolution, not the French, was the preferred model for secessionists. Liberté they sought, but not égalité or fraternité. Were not "the men of 1776 . . . secessionists?" asked an Alabamian. From "the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights . . . which our fathers bequeathed to us," declared Jefferson Davis, let us "renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty."

What were these rights and liberties for which Confederates contended? The right to own slaves; the liberty to take this property into the territories; freedom from the coercive powers of a centralized government. Black Republican rule in Washington threatened republican freedoms as the South understood them. The ideology for which the Fathers had fought in 1776 posited an eternal struggle between liberty and power. Because the Union after March 4, 1861, would no longer be controlled by southerners, the South could protect its liberty from the assaults of hostile powers only by going out of the Union. "On the 4th of March, 1861," declared a Georgia secessionist, "we are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it." The question, agreed Jefferson Davis and a fellow Mississippian, was "Will you be slaves or will be independent? . . . Will you consent to be robbed of your property" or will you "strike bravely for liberty, property, honor and life?"

What stake did nonslaveholding whites have in this crusade for the freedom of planters to own slaves? Some secessionists worried a great deal about this question. What if Hinton Rowan Helper was right? What if nonslaveowners were potential Black Republicans? "The great lever by which the abolitionists hope to extirpate slavery in the States is the aid of non-slaveholding citizens in the South," fretted a Kentucky editor. How would they ply this lever? By using the patronage to build up a cadre of Republican officeholders among nonslaveowners--first in the border states and upcountry, where slavery was most vulnerable, and then in the heart of the cotton kingdom itself. Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia feared that some whites would be "bribed into treachery to their own section, by the allurements of office." When Republicans organized their "Abolition party . . . of Southern men," echoed the Charleston Mercury, "the contest for slavery will no longer be one between the North and South. It will be in the South, between the people of the South."



[...]

So [secessionists] undertook a campaign to convince nonslaveholders that they too had a stake in disunion. The stake was white supremacy. In this view, the Black Republican program of abolition was the first step toward racial equality and amalgamation. Georgia's Governor Brown carried this message to his native uplands of north Georgia, whose voters idolized him. Slavery "is the poor man's best Government," said Brown. "Among us the poor white laborer . . . does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal. . . . He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men." Thus, yeoman farmers "will never consent to submit to abolition rule," for they "know that in the event of the abolition of slavery, they would be greater sufferers than the rich, who would be able to protect themselves." Much secessionist rhetoric played variations on this theme. The election of Lincoln, declared an Alabama newspaper, "shows that the North [intends] to free the negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South." "Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter?" a Georgia secessionist asked nonslaveholders. If Georgia remained in a Union "ruled by Lincoln and his crew . . . in TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the slaves of negroes." To defend their wives and daughters, presumably, yeoman whites therefore joined planters in "rallying to the standard of Liberty and Equality for white men" against "our Abolition enemies who are pledged to prostrate the white freemen of the South down to equality with the Negroes." Most southern whites could agree, according to secessionists, that "democratic liberty exists solely because we have black slaves" whose presence "promotes equality among the free." Hence "freedom is not possible without slavery."

This Orwellian definition of liberty as slavery provoked ridicule north of the Potomac. For disunionists to compare themselves to the Revolutionary fathers "is a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of '76," declared William Cullen Bryant's New York Evening Post. "The founders fought "to establish the rights of man . . . and principles of universal liberty." The South was rebelling "not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. . . . Their motto is not liberty, but slavery." Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence spoke for "Natural Rights against Established Instituions," added the New York Tribune, while "Mr. Jeff. Davis's caricature thereof is made in the interest of an unjust, outgrown, decaying Institution against the apprehended encroachments of Natural Human Rights." It was, in short, not a revolution for liberty, but a counterrevolution "reversing the wheels of progress . . . to hurl everything backward into deepest darkness . . . despotism and oppression."

Without assenting to the rhetoric of this analysis, a good many disunionists in effect endorsed its substance. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were wrong if they meant to include Negroes among "all men," said Alexander Stephens after he had become the vice president of the Confederacy. "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition." Black Republicans were the real revolutionaries. They subscribed to "tenets as radical and revolutionary" as those of the abolitionists, declared a New Orleans newspaper. Therefore it was "an abuse of language" to call secession a revolution, said Jefferson Davis. We left the Union "to save ourselves from a revolution" that threatened to make "property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless." In 1861 the Confederate secretary of state advised foreign governments that southern states had formed a new nation "to preserve their old instituions" from "a revolution [that] threatened to destroy their social system."

This is the language of counterrevolution. But in one respect the Confederacy departed from the classic pattern of the genre. Most counterrevolutions seek to restore the ancien regimé. The counterrevolutions of 1861 made their move before the revolutionaries had done anything--indeed, several months before Lincoln even took office. In this regard, secession fit the model of "preemptive counterrevolution" developed by historian Arno Mayer. Rather than trying to restore the old order, a preemptive counterrevolution strikes first to protect the status quo before the revolutionary threat can materialize. "Conjuring up the dangers of leaving revolutionaries the time to prepare their forces and plans for an assault on their terms," writes Mayer, "counterrevolutionary leaders urge a preemptive thrust." To mobilize support for it, they "intentionally exaggerate the magnitude and imminence of the revolutionary threat."

Though Mayer was writing about Europe in the twentieth century, his words also describe the immediate secessionists of 1860. They exaggerated the Republican threat and urged preemptive action to forestall the dangers they conjured up. The South could not afford to wait for an "overt act" by Lincoln against southern rights, they insisted. "If I find a coiled rattlesnake in my path," asked and Alabama editor, "do I wait for his 'overt act' or do I smite him in his coil?"