A little background on myself. My name is Eric Davis, Jasper is my 3rd Great Grandfather, who I honor as my profile. I started my historical journey with no bias on a quest to find out the truth concerning the war. My interest was peaked as I worked on my genealogy. I was a screw up in high school and I couldn’t have cared less about history, or any subject for that matter. The history bug hit me later in life. I chose a blue collar career and I served my community for 28 years. For the last 15 years or so, I have studied the antebellum era and that alone. The reason most of you oppose the South is because you concentrate on slavery alone. You feel as though nothing else matters besides ending it at any cost. But the cost was heavy, especially when ending slavery was not for the wellbeing of slaves but as a means to destroy the political and economic enemy. Lincoln’s war affectively perverted the Constitution and changed the character of the government framed by our founders. This is why I support Confederate principles. It has nothing to do with slavery or race, as that isn’t what motivated Lincoln to invade the South. I support the Confederate cause because they supported the Constitution as ratified by the states.

Moral concern for slaves was not a priority for Republicans during Reconstruction. While nearly all the ex-slaves remained in the South where they yearned for land, the Federal Government gave them none. From 1865 to 1873, less than 10% of all Federal public works spending was in the former Confederate states, despite their greater need. In combination, New York and Massachusetts got more than twice as much as all the states in the former Confederacy. (David L. Cohn, The Life and Times of King Cotton, 148-49, 155-56; Hodding Carter, The Angry Scar, 321; Matthew Josephine, The Robber Barons, 93)

Many argue that tariffs weren’t a factor for war, but one of the most convincing clues that tariffs were a prime reason Northerners chose to fight a war rather than evacuate Fort Sumter and let the seven cotton states leave in peace is evident in America’s postbellum tariffs. Through their Republican Party proxy, the winners of the war increased the tariff on dutiable items from an average of 19% on the eve of the Civil War to an average of 45% for fifty years thereafter.

I hope the person who moved all the mobile buttons around on this app gets stuck in traffic after 2 bran muffins and a large cup of coffee.

Historian Charles Adams concludes that Northern merchants “now saw that there was only one course for them. They had prospered under the Union as one nation, and they now believed that prosperity would continue only if the United States was maintained as one nation. They had no choice but to support Lincoln and his policy of preserving the Union. Better to pay for armed conflict now than suffer prolonged economic disaster in a losing trade war. (Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events, 66, 70)

The Confederate Government never organized a Supreme Court because its founders generally interpreted the U. S. Constitution strictly. Although authorized to form one, they were never satisfied that they had developed a method that would prevent the Court from exceeding its authority.

In the 1803 Marbury v. Madison case, Chief Justice John Marshall established judicial review. Thomas Jefferson felt compelled to reply by explaining that Marshall’s ruling contradicted the “checks and balances” constitutional principle. He wrote, “The Constitution on this hypothesis a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.” Nonetheless, Marshall continued to issue decisions further narrowing states’ rights. His rulings in Fletcher v. Peck, Cohen v. Virginia and McCullogh v. Maryland, limited the powers of state legislatures. After 1815, most of the Court’s rulings favoring Federalism would benefit the central government.

Northeastern politicians called for secession when Thomas Jefferson was buying the Louisiana Territory. The seven senators who voted against ratification were from Delaware and New England. Although officially objecting that Jefferson lacked constitutional authority to buy the land, their true complaint was that the vast territory would inevitably result in the addition of more states, thereby reducing the influence of their own states in the Federal Government. Some argued for secession. Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering wrote Boston’s George Cabot in January 1803, “The principles of our Revolution point to the remedy - a seperation.” (Timothy Pickering to George Cabot, January 29, 1804, The Founders Constitution, Chapter 7, Document 24: University of Chicago Press; Thomas Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind, 92)

Freebird. . .

The rule of General Benjamin Butler in New Orleans in 1862, is especially memorable for the deliberate murder of William B. Mumford, a citizen of the Confederate States, against whom the tyrant had invented the extraordinary charge that he had insulted the flag of the United States. The fact was, that before the city had surrendered, Mumford had taken down from the mint the enemy's flag. The ensign was wrongfully there; the city had not surrendered; and even in its worst aspects, the act of Mumford was simply one of war, not deserving death, still less the death of a felon. The horrible crime of murdering in cold blood an unresisting and non-combatant captive, was completed by Gen. Butler on the 7th of June. On that day, Mumford, the martyr, was publicly executed on the gallows. The Massachusetts coward and tyrant had no ear or heart for the pitiful pleadings to save the life of his captive, especially by his unhappy wife, who in her supplications for mercy was rudely repulsed, and at times answered with drunken jokes and taunts. The execution took place in the sight of thousands of panic-stricken citizens. None spoke but the martyr himself. His voice was loud and clear. Looking up at the stars and stripes which floated high over the scene before him, he remarked that he had fought under that flag twice, but it had become hateful to him, and he had torn it and trailed it in the dust. “I consider," said the brave young man, "that the manner of my death will be no disgrace to my wife and child; my country will honor them." ~ Excerpt from Pollard’s, Southern History of the War, 1866.

Secession was not a southern idea. Northern states threatened secession at least 5 times during America’s first 60 years: 1. The first time came in George Washington’s presidency when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton warned that the Northern states would secede unless the Federal Government agreed to assume an obligation to pay off their Revolutionary War debts.  2.In 1803, New Englanders threatened secession over the Louisiana Purchase. They worried that the new territories would ultimately become new states thereby reducing New England’s influence.  3. In 1807, New England again threatened secession after America announced a trade embargo, hoping to avoid the War of 1812, by use of economic sanctions. 4. When the British finally blockaded New England during the last seven months of the thirty-month war, the region held a convention in Hartford to discuss secession or other steps to protect their interests from Federal powers. 5. As late as 1844, leaders in the Northeastern states threatened to secede over the proposed annexation of Texas.

“The Confederate soldier went to war because he loved his people, because his country was invaded, because his heart was throbbing for his hearthstone. Here was the land which gave him birth; here was his childhood home; here were the graves of his dead; here was the church spire where he had learned it was not all of life to live nor all of death to die. No hostile foot should ever tread this consecrated ground except over his dead body…He could face the line of fire, but not the shame of standing back." ~ General Stephen Dill Lee on what motivated the Southerner to fight at a speech at the annual reunion of the UCV, in Louisville, 1905

“Three Months in the Southern States,” documented Colonel Fremantle’s travels through the Southern Confederacy, April - June 1863. He along with most of his fellow Englishmen, were inclined to favor the North due to the aversion to slavery. Gradually, he comes to the conclusion that the conflict is not over emancipation, but over differing economic systems, one commercial and industrial, the other largely agricultural. The North, seeking domination over all people and all things, the other content to live off the land. However, both are joined by a written constitution. The numerically superior North imposes protective tariffs on the imports of the South. The tariffs are a bounty to the North and a burden to the South. Those tariffs have the effect of levying an unequal and therefore unconstitutional tax on the consumer.

“He bowed the heavens also, and came down with thick darkness under His feet... He made darkness His hiding place, His canopy around Him, Darkness of waters,  thick clouds of the skies.” —Psalm 18

Anyone care to guess what “infamous” speech this excerpt is taken? This portion of the speech is always ignored by those who use it for their nefarious purposes. “Allow me briefly to allude to some of these improvements. The question of building up class interests, or fostering one branch of industry to the prejudice of another under the exercise of the revenue power, which gave us so much trouble under the old constitution, is put at rest forever under the new. We allow the imposition of no duty with a view of giving advantage to one class of persons, in any trade or business, over those of another. All, under our system, stand upon the same broad principles of perfect equality. Honest labor and enterprise are left free and unrestricted in whatever pursuit they may be engaged. . . This old thorn of the tariff, which was the cause of irritation in the old body politic, is removed forever from the new.”

This passage is an address presented to Robert E. Lee when he was given George Washington's sword upon being appointed commander of Virginia's forces in April 1861. "When the Father of his Country made his last will and testament, he gave his swords to his nephews with an injunction that they should never be drawn from their scabbards, except in self-defense, or in defense of the rights and liberties of their country, and that, if drawn for the latter purpose, they should fall with them in their hands, rather than relinquish them. Yesterday, your mother, Virginia, placed her sword in your hand upon the implied condition that we know you will keep to the letter and in spirit, that you will draw it only in her defense, and that you will fall with it in your hand rather than that the object for which it was placed there shall fail."

Concerning Jefferson Davis’s defensive war policy. . . In his congratulatory address to the army on their victory before Richmond in 1862, President Davis referred to the prospect of carrying the war into the North. . . But it was urged that our army was too feeble to undertake at present an aggressive policy. . . It is curious to observe how completely the ordinary aspects of war were changed and its horrors diminished, with reference to the North, by the false policy of the South, in keeping the theatre of active hostilities within her own borders. Defeat did not dispirit the North, because it was not brought to her doors. Indeed, the realization of the war in the North was, in many respects, nothing more than that of an immense money job. The large money expenditure at Washington supplied a vast fund of corruption; it enriched the commercial centres of the North, and by artificial stimulation preserved such cities as New York from decay; it interested vast numbers of politicians, contractors, and dissolute public men in continuing the war and enlarging the scale of its operations; and, indeed, the disposition to make money out of the war accounts for much of that zeal in the North, which was mistaken for political ardor or the temper of patriotic devotion. —Pollard, A Southern History of the War

THE BATTLE OF SHILOH April 6–7, 1862 There was one very remarkable circumstance in the battle of Manassas, which alone must give it an interest distinguished from that of any other engagement of the war. It was that, in the army which achieved that victory, there was represented, by troops, every State then in the Southern Confederacy. At Shiloh, the troops engaged were principally Tennesseans, Mississippians, Alabamians, Louisianians, Floridians, Texans, Arkansians, and Kentuckians. There was also a battery of Georgians in the field. The behavior of these troops had given us additional reason for the pride so justly felt in Southern arms and Southern prowess. Each and all of them fought  so bravely that no distinction can be made between corps from different States. Battles are won by each soldier feeling that the day depends upon his own individual efforts, and, on the field of Shiloh, this spirit was displayed, unless in rare instances of cowardice, or the more numerous exceptions of demoralization by the pillage which had unfortunately been permitted of the enemy's camp. ~ Pollard, A Southern History of the War

By a large, the North’s relationship with slavery, though extraordinarily profitable, was a distant one. That distance allowed the North to minimize and even deny its links with the institution that fueled its prosperity. Consider this: ~ New England and the Mid-Atlantic began their economic ascent in the eighteenth century because the regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. ~ Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves in the South. — Higginbotham, “Complicity”

Lincoln, nor the majority of the people in the North cared about the wellbeing of slaves, which motivated them to oppose the westward “expansion of slavery.” Their opposition toward  westward expansion was simply to keep blacks out of the new territories. Those territories were reserved for white settlers and Northern business interests. Probably most importantly, whoever controlled this new territory, added more representation in Congress.