Here is a partial list of the tyrannical policies of Southern governments (to say nothing of slavery itself). The central and state governments of the Confederacy:
► instituted military conscription;(5)
► used forced labor in their government-owned factories;
► preached anti-capitalism in Marxist terms, denouncing the “wage-slavery” of the North;(6)
► adopted military aggression as its foreign policy;
► carried out untold numbers of warrantless searches, seizures, and arrests, starting early in 1861;
► seized guns from civilians beginning in 1861 (after the war, governments of Southern states would enact the first gun control laws in the U. S.);
► printed paper money to finance military aggression, leading to runaway inflation;(7)
► repudiated lawful debts and contracts;
► took political prisoners;
► silenced dissent, curtailing freedom of the press, speech, and assembly;
► instituted a welfare state;(8)
► created, in less than three years, a bureaucracy of 70,000 in Richmond to manage the socialist Confederacy;
► regulated agriculture by imposing acreage controls on cotton and tobacco;
► nationalized control of foreign commerce, regulating exports, raising tariffs, and banning the importation of all “non-essential” goods;
► occupied East Tennessee with thousands of troops to prevent the counties there from seceding from the Confederacy (as the counties of western Virginia did).
DeBow’s Review, a Southern secessionist journal, wrote in 1862: “Every man should feel that he has an interest in the State, and that the State in a measure leans upon him.... It is implied in the spirit which times demand, that all private interests are sacrificed to the public good. The State becomes everything, and the individual nothing.”(9) The political ideology of the Confederacy was statist and socialist, and that ideology was to become the dominant political ideology of the twentieth century.
Those Latter Day Confederates who think the North and Lincoln are the sources of modern statism and socialism need to study more Southern history. With the exception of Black slavery, which was ended by the Thirteenth Amendment, the policies of the Confederacy have prevailed throughout the nation in the past century. Now we all live on an unconstitutional, welfare-statist, militaristic, faith-based federal plantation. Our massa in Washington tells us what to do, and his many overseers and drivers make sure we obey.Rather than rejoicing in the spectacular triumph of Confederate ideology in the twentieth century, Latter Day Confederates are resentful of the fact that they are not the masters and overseers they always imagined and presumed they would be.
It is of course true that the North was not without sin, and I have no desire to portray it as such. The sins of the North are all we read about in the propaganda of the Latter Day Confederates. The North’s “cold, Satanic mills” are contrasted with the idyllic plantations of the South, where one could sit on the veranda and sip mint juleps all day long. That is, if one was a slave master, and not a slave. But had the South not defended slavery, ignored and violated the Constitution, and attacked the United States, the sinful policies of the North – such as a temporary income tax (later declared unconstitutional by an alert Supreme Court when Congress tried it again), paper money (though it was made once again redeemable in gold in 1879), and the temporary suspension of habeas corpus (all of which policies were also adopted by the Confederacy) – would probably not even have been contemplated, let alone temporarily adopted. It was the war the South started that brought all these evils on.
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