What Catholic Neo-Confederates Don't Want You To Know About Secession
Frank Cocozzelli printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Wed Nov 04, 2015 at 02:02:38 PM EST
During the summer of 2013 I wrote several posts about Catholic Neo-Confederates. My purpose was to explain the activities of libertarians such as Tom Woods, Thomas DiLorenzo and an organization known as the League of the South: all of whom advocate for the secession and nullification as tools to be used by the Christian Right.

To that end, they perpetuate the myth of an antebellum South that was united in its belief in and desire for secession. They paint a portrait of Old Dixie as both an orthodox Christian and libertarian paradise for all its inhabitants that was spoiled by a foreign intruder:  thus their claim that the conflict of 1861 to 1865 was not a Civil War initiated by a faction of Southern planters -- but a war of Northern aggression.

Bullfeathers and balderdash!

In an August 6, 2015 article Sarah Posner interviewed author Julie Ingersoll about her book on Christian Reconstructionism, Building God's Kingdom was asked about the influence the movement's founder, R. J. Rushdoony has had upon the Neo- Confederate movement. Ingersoll explained:

I've tried to handle this delicately and in detail in the book and a brief answer is really difficult. This is partly because neither of these movements has clear-cut membership requirements and it depends what you mean by Neo-Confederates. There are numerous organizations that identify as Reconstructionist and Neo-Confederate that hold lectures and conferences--there is a lot of cross-fertilization among them...

What's important, I think, is the larger way in which Rushdoony and the Reconstructionists helped build a resurgence of interest in and affection for, a pre-civil war vision of society. They did this, in part by promoting the work of Southern Presbyterian theologian R. L. Dabney and the view that the civil war was not about slavery but was a religious war to preserve a godly southern culture from the tyranny of a secularizing North.

Libertarian and traditionalist Catholic author Thomas E. Woods, Jr. is correct that the Civil War is surrounded by mythology. But with that said, the real myths are the ones Woods believes in and teaches in his homeschooling courses and in his books. The war was not about the North against the South, but patriot against secessionist. And for our purposes, many of those patriots included Southerners - a fact that today's secessionist faction all-too-conveniently ignores.

Take for example Woods's claims about the Civil War in his heavily criticized work - from both the left and the right, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Woods starts out his chapter on the Civil War by claiming it should be more accurately described as a "War Between the States."

Strictly speaking, there never was an American Civil War. A civil war is a conflict in which two or more factions fight for control of a nation's government. The English Civil War of the 1640s and the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to classic examples; in both cases, two factions sought to control the government. This was not the case in the United States between 1861 and 1865. The seceding Southern states were not trying to take over the United States government; they wanted to declare themselves independent.

But contrary to this assertion, secession was, as it is today, a tool of factionalism. As Civil War hero, General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain noted, "The flag we bore into the field was not that of particular States, no matter how many nor how loyal, arrayed against other States. It was the flag of the Union, the flag of the people, vindicating the right and charged with the duty of preventing any factions, no matter how many nor under what pretense, from breaking up this common Country."

Chamberlain's statement cuts the heart out of Tom Woods's central argument, that Southern secession was not a factious action. In fact, the majority of American Southerners did not support the secession.

Two excellent books on secession and nullification pose a challenge to Woods and his ilk: The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War by William W. Freehling and David Williams's Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War. On page 7 of the introduction of the latter, Williams makes two important points:

It seems to gratify the pride of most southerners, at least white southerners, to think that the wartime South was united. It seems also to gratify the pride of many northerners to think their ancestors defeated a united South. Few northerners seem willing to consider that's the Union may not have been preserved, the chattel slavery would not have ended when it did, without the service of nearly half a million Southerners in Union blue

And:

Our skewed image of the Civil War South also stems in part from the ways in which we emphasize the era's military and political aspects. The great mass of literature dealing with the war years focuses largely on battles and leaders. Such studies are crucial, to be sure. By focusing so much of our collective attention on those aspects, tends to foster the myth of sectional unity, minimizing dissent or ignoring it altogether. In doing so, we paint all southerners, all white southerners at least, with a broad brush of rebellion. This oversimplified an often not-so-subtle effort to, in a sense, generally demonize white southerners as led to the mistaken idea that the terms "Southern" and "Confederate" are interchangeable during the war. They are used as such in most texts to this day. That firmly embedded misconception leaves little room in the popular and, too often, professional imagination for the hundreds of thousands of southern whites who opposed secession and worked against the Confederacy.

Williams documents how secessionist factions seized control many of the state conventions called to decide whether or not to leave the Union. Over and over again the author cites examples of secessionist intimidation designed to prevent the participation in these meetings of those who chose loyalty to the United States. Williams said in a 2008 interview:

That's right. In late 1860 and early 1861, there were a series of votes on the secession question in all the slave states, and the overwhelming majority voted against it. It was only in the Deep South, from South Carolina to Texas, that there was much support for secession, and even there it was deeply divided. In Georgia, a slight majority of voters were against secession.

He also said:

The popular vote [in Georgia] didn't decide the question. It chose delegates to a convention. That's the way slaveholders wanted it, because they didn't trust people to vote on the question directly. More than 30 delegates who had pledged to oppose secession changed their votes at the convention. Most historians think that was by design. The suspicion is that the secessionists ran two slates -- one for and one supposedly against -- and whichever was elected, they'd vote for secession.

In that same interview Williams commented, "It seems like the common folk were very much ignored and used by the planter elite. As a result, over half a million Americans died." Such behavior does not describe a reasoned citizenry justifiably seeking independence but a poisonous faction trampling on the rights of the many.

Indeed, a close examination of Confederate society as well as of the Antebellum South exposes the weaknesses of economic libertarianism, especially of the Austrian School laissez-faire variety. And as both authors esoterically point out, it was devotion to libertarianism that ultimately did in the Confederacy.

As both authors point out the Confederate Army never had enough food to feed their soldiers. The problem was not enough farming but no government planning that would require the plantations to produce certain amounts of food. Instead, the plantation class exercised "their freedom" and concentrated on growing cotton and tobacco simply because those products were far more profitable. Woods, DiLorenzo and other Neo-Confederates often speak of the Confederacy and the Antebellum South as if they were paradise. That may have been true for the plantation class, but not for slaves and poor white farmers.

As David Williams points out in Bitterly Divided, plantation owners used slavery not only to exploit African-American labor also to control poor white dirt farmers. Slavery was used to keep wages artificially low by creating a surplus of cost-free labor. It also allowed the wealthier members of Southern society to build economic empires against which any smaller free labor enterprise had to struggle to compete with (at page 11, Williams states that on the eve of the Civil War half of the South's personal income went to just over 1000 families). The planters used their economic muscle to outbid poor whites for the best farmland - and in the process, drove up prices. And to control them politically, devices such as literacy tests and poll taxes were used to keep poor whites from voting - the same devious devices that would later be employed to keep African-Americans from exercising their right to vote.

How unpopular was the Confederacy in the South?  Those "nearly half a million Southerners in Union blue" more than replaced the 364,511 Federal soldiers and sailors killed in action. Our nation would not have been preserved without the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Southern whites and blacks dressed in blue uniforms, along with the countless others who engaged in everything from civil disobedience to out right guerilla activity.

As I have previously written, libertarian economic s is not about freedom per se but the freedom to oppress others:

This is libertarianism 's inherent fatal flaw: Its sole emphasis upon the liberty of the more powerful individual and its striking indifference to the rights of others. It fails to account for externalities -- when a third person is affected by an occurrence or transaction to which he is not a party. It is a philosophy of governance that refuses to consider that the individual's well-being is linked to the well-being of all within a given society

And this brings us back to the mythology pedaled by Rushdoony and the Reconstructionists -- that of an idyllic pre-Civil War Southern society and notion that the war was not about slavery but was a religious war to preserve a godly Southern culture from the tyranny of a secularizing North. It was not. It was more about preserving a caste system society based upon Mudsill economics -- a libertarian model that has more in common with feudalism than with capitalism.

Secession and nullification have regained currency with elements of the Christian Right in recent years, as Rachel Tabachnick and I have reported.  They now rise, zombie-like, and threaten true economic and religious freedom. One way to expose the fraudulent foundations upon which secession and nullification are built, is to look at our own history -- and to give long overdue credit to the brave American Southerners who helped to preserve the Union.




Display:
Libertarianism, and indeed laissez-faire in general is about the right to oppress others economically.  The dichotomy that's traditionally been in American politics is about how you define freedom. The so-called Freedom Caucus in the House defines freedom as the right to lord it over others they deem inferior to themselves, while others define freedom as the right to have opportunities available to the majority of citizens. Often, they have not been available to women or citizens of color. The definition of freedom should be the latter with the demographic changes we are experiencing, but the former concept of freedom still has great traction.

by khughes1963 on Wed Nov 04, 2015 at 10:06:46 PM EST

I'd known only a tiny bit about anti-succession southerners, but never realized that they were as prevalent as that.  One of my ancestors and a couple of his brothers fought for the north, while other brothers (don't know how many) fought for the south.  It split the family and I don't think that there was any reconciliation.

This thought hit me - I've heard throughout my life about "those horrible Yankee Carpetbaggers" (I've lived in the South for all but a few years when I was a little boy), and I know that there were some people that fit the stereotype, but now I wonder how many of them were displaced southerners who'd returned home after the war - but because they didn't support "the South" were more or less disowned and declared "Yankees"?  This also explains the people I encounter that seem to tie all of it together - they're bigots, they're libertarians, and they go ballistic when I tell them that people are not responsible for what happens TO them, but they ARE responsible for the damage they do to others (their ideology is largely based on the heretical old Calvinist ideology of "God rewards good people with wealth, health, and good things - and punishes the wicked sinners with poverty, illness, and suffering").  They also are very "PROUD TO BE SOUTH!" southerners and say nasty things about "Yankees", "Libruls", and anyone who doesn't fit their cherished stereotypes.

Those people especially don't like it when I say that rich people are protected from the consequences for their actions by their wealth and power, and the poor are generally forced to "eat" (so to speak) the consequences of their actions FOR them.  They also don't like the implication of responsibility for what you do to others - because it implies that you're also responsible for the well-being of the Other (or your neighbor).  (Note: some try to take that as a right to dictate the actions and lives of the Other, but you cannot draw that conclusion from it.)  I hadn't made the connection between that thinking and Libertarianism and the Confederacy.  It all makes sense.

Like so many other articles published to T2A, this one has been quite enlightening and helps to "tie it all together" so to speak.  I have much to think about and meditate on from this.

by ArchaeoBob on Thu Nov 05, 2015 at 02:46:48 PM EST

...I've heard this cited in various forms by Ian Paisley, Carl McIntire and fellow anti-Catholic extremist Calvinist Protestants to condemn darn near all of modern Catholic Social Teaching, calling it 'pink' and even arguing that Catholics must be denied civil rights in Ireland because a united Catholic-dominated Ireland would support Communism in the Cold War.

Although few on the Protestant Right are making such a direct contrast between a Puritan work ethic and 'pinko' Catholic views of social responsibility for alleviating poverty, the secular and Catholic conservative assaults on Pope Francis for his concern with economic justice remind me of this line.

Of course, although this line isn't inherently racist, the intersection of race and class in a nation founded on genocide followed by slavery and institutional white supremacy both legitimizes and reifies racist beliefs & policy positions by those who hold to a version of 'God gives people what they deserve'; see Gary North in the '80s arguing Africa is poor because it is 'socialist, demonist and cursed' in a work condemning the anti-colonial, anti-apartheid work of Euro-American Mainline Protestant progressives on that continent.

by amourexpansif93 on Thu Nov 05, 2015 at 03:00:09 PM EST
Parent

all the time when researching or advocating regarding poverty and the people who are poor.  It strikes at every turn... the more modern version is that poor people are broken somehow, that they've done something wrong and that's why they're poor.

We got a healthy dose of it this weekend... listening to a woman carry on about teaching poor people to budget and to live frugally so that they can build up their credit score and get themselves out of poverty (and a man carrying on about how people have to work together to address the "weaknesses" of those needing help).  It so enraged my wife that she wrote a (for her) lengthy diatribe against that thinking... pointing out that we are dirt poor (so much so that we've fallen through the cracks and cannot get medical care beyond maintenance medicines), have lived frugally for decades, have good credit, and both of us have degrees.  Yet we are still dirt poor (I can and do blame the local dominionist churches for that).  

The fact is, when you're fighting medical issues and are as poor as we are, finding decent employment is next to impossible (especially when the jobs they try to direct you to are physically impossible because of their religious ideology).  It doesn't matter how much education you have (I'm a third year Ph.D. student, trying to get where my educational credentials overwhelm any question about my physical limitations) or what you can do - if you're poor, you've obviously got something wrong with you.

This sort of attitude is intimately tied in with the rest of the picture ("the rest of the story") that we fight against.  It's all based on stereotypes... and Roman Catholics suffer from that (not that they're stereotyping, but they've been stereotyped) as much as anyone.  (I'd agree that the hierarchy often fits many of the stereotypes about them.)  Those that we struggle against, on the other hand, don't realize that they're motivated by stereotypical thinking and don't (as I like to put it) see themselves in the mirror.  They don't realize how evil and abusive they've become and how far they've gotten from the teachings of the Rabbi Yeshua - the very person they claim to worship or follow.


by ArchaeoBob on Mon Nov 09, 2015 at 11:43:34 AM EST
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(especially when the jobs they try to direct you to because of their religious ideology, are physically impossible)

It slipped right past my eyes!


by ArchaeoBob on Mon Nov 09, 2015 at 02:14:44 PM EST
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Actually Bob, as I was researching this issue I learned quite a bit myself. I have come to believe that it was the many loyal Southerners who provided the Union the margin of victory. They may have well saved this country, and by extension, the civilized world in the 20th century.

by Frank Cocozzelli on Sat Nov 07, 2015 at 07:10:43 PM EST
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As many Traditional Catholics believe in 'counter-revolution' against I) the postmodern 'rights revolution' of the 1960s which they see as evil largely because of its sexual and reproductive/feminist elements II) the modern Enlightenment (the 'revolution' which founded America and distinguishes it as a nation under the Constitution from the theocratic 13 Colonies, a distinction blurred by many right-wing Christian Nationalists including Reconstructionists) and even III) the Protestant Reformation as three wrongful challenges to the absolute authority of Holy Mother Church and a sacral-hierarchical order based on patriarchy, idealizing medieval-era European theocracies, it is not surprising they would prefer feudal organization of society over contemporary capitalism with its destabilizing effects on traditional absolutes of all kinds.  

There are also links to various movements over the past century led by antisemitic Catholics, often claiming support from Chesterton and Belloc, such as Alberta's Social Credit Party; the 'Third Position' (e.g. Derek Holland) which explicitly rejects both capitalism and communism as unspiritual systems which privilege the modern and secular over traditional ways; and European New Rightists such as those Rachel Tabachnick has reported on following their joining Ron Paul in speaking at a hard-core group of this nature in Canada.  

In the US such views are less common probably because they would conflict with the laissez-faire absolutism of others in the Rightist coalition. But it sometimes comes up, and I have spoken to traditional or schismatic 'ultra-traditional' (SSPX & beyond) Catholics who believe such an economic system is the only way to thwart the "Christ-killer, Rothschild, race-mixing International Bankers".

by amourexpansif93 on Thu Nov 05, 2015 at 02:46:55 PM EST


In my files I have the magazine published by Chalcedon, (Christian Reconstruction), that promotes the Civil War as a holy war.  It was the Calvinist South fighting the Universalist North according to the work.  Recall the movement things slavery is a Biblical mandate for our own century.

by wilkyjr on Fri Nov 06, 2015 at 08:10:39 PM EST

Well, Woods might be wrong on every other point he made, but i think he's right that it was not a civil war in the same sense that the English or Spanish or Chinese civil wars were.  The Spanish and Chinese cases are more well known because they are more recent: in each, there were two groups vying for power over the entire country.  In the Spanish case, the Fascists won, while in the Chinese case, they lost.

The war between the States is much more like a province rebelling unsuccessfully.  Perhaps the case of the Judean revolts in the Roman empire is closer (although i absolutely don't want to draw a parallel between the ancient Zealots and the 19th 1 per centers who controlled the huge plantations in the South and instituted and maintained slavery there).


by dan6 on Sun Nov 08, 2015 at 12:38:21 AM EST

Indeed, it was a Civil War.

As I quoted As Civil War hero, General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain above:

The flag we [the Union] bore into the field was not that of particular States, no matter how many nor how loyal, arrayed against other States. It was the flag of the Union, the flag of the people, vindicating the right and charged with the duty of preventing any factions, no matter how many nor under what pretense, from breaking up this common Country.


by Frank Cocozzelli on Sun Nov 08, 2015 at 03:11:37 PM EST
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I always thought how could they get justice from a corrupt system since they judge the current legal system to be biased.  cbd oil for sleep I have a whole bunch of suggestions for things to be asked for in discovery that could prove to be lots of fun.

by isabelladom on Sat Sep 17, 2022 at 12:08:56 AM EST


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