Circa1865

From the fearsome arquebuse of the Middle Ages to the modern jets carrying atomic weapons, the arms industry provided governments with the means to wage war. Without the arms industry Lincoln would have been unable to arm 2 million men to subdue the South, and with his war came the scandals of enormous commissions paid to men who merely obtained contracts for arms and munitions. The Northern government became a source of easy money for arms merchants selling $14.50 pistols at $25, and $117 for diseased horses worth no more than $60. Dupont was a reliable Northerner who refused to sell his gunpowder to the South for political reasons, thus helping ensure the subjugation of those Americans. Perhaps if Dupont had refused to produce powder for Lincoln’s armies for use against fellow Americans . . .

Merchants of War

“Who – to be specific – has the power to declare war? All constitutions of the world (except the Spanish) vest the war-making power in the government or in the representatives of the people. They further grant the power to conscript man-power to carry on such conflicts. Why is there no ethical revolt against these constitutions?

Governments also harbor and foster forces like nationalism and chauvinism, economic rivalry and exploiting capitalism, territorial imperialism and militarism. Which is the most potent for war, these elements or the arms industry? The arms industry is undeniably a menace to peace, but it is an industry to which our present civilization clings and for which it is responsible.

It is an evidence of the superficiality of many peace advocates that they should denounce the arms industry and accept the present state of civilization which fosters it. Governments today [1934] spend approximately four and a half billion dollars every year to maintain their war machines. This colossal sum is voted every year by representatives of the people.

There are, of course, some protests . . . but by and large it is believed that “national security” demands these huge appropriations. The root of the trouble, therefore, goes far deeper than the arms industry. It lies in the prevailing temper of peoples toward nationalism, militarism and war, in the civilization which forms this temper and prevents drastic or radical change. Only when this underlying basis of the war system is altered, will war and its concomitant, the arms industry, pass out of existence.

The fact is that the armament maker is the right-hand man of all war and navy departments, and, as such, he is a supremely important political figure. His sales to the home government are political acts, as much as, perhaps even more so, the tax collector. His international trade is an act of international politics . . . [and his] international sale of arms, even in wartime, is merely business.

The world at present apparently wants both the war system and peace; it believes that “national safety” lies in preparedness, and it denounces the arms industry. This is not merely confused thinking, but a striking reflection of the contradictory forces at work in our social and political life.

Thus it happens that so-called friends of peace frequently uphold the institutions of armies and navies to preserve “national security,” support “defensive wars,” and advocate military training in colleges.

Out of this background of conflicting forces the arms maker has risen and grown powerful, until today he is one of the most dangerous factors in the world – a hindrance to peace, a promoter of war. He has reached this position not through any deliberate planning of his own, but simply as a result of the historic forces of the nineteenth century. Granting the nineteenth century [was one of] amazing development of science and invention . . . the modern armament maker with all his evils was inevitable.”

(Merchants of Death, H.C. Engelbrecht & F.C. Hanighen, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1934, excerpts pp. 7-10)

By the time of the July-August 1861 special session of Congress, Lincoln had already raised an army, as well as money, without congressional approval – and defied the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. After the disasters of First Manassas and Ball’s Bluff, the Republican Radicals, or, “Jacobins” of Lincoln’s party, began their ruthless investigations into generals who were deemed lacking in sufficient zeal in destroying Southern resistance.

This was the Republican Committee on the Conduct of the War, whose targets were not permitted to know the charges against them, so-called evidence was kept secret, and prejudgment of the unfortunate general was common. Usually the officer under investigation was held in confinement without charges; “the defamation of character, however, could not be outdone; petty persecution continued to plague him; and at last, finding his usefulness to the army destroyed, he resigned” (Civil War and Reconstruction, Randall, pg. 370).

The Radical Cause Uber Alles

“In Washington [in January 1862], [Gen. William S.] Rosecrans was summoned to appear before the Committee on the Conduct of the War. This joint committee of the Congress, called by T. Harry Williams the “unnatural child of lustful radicalism and a confused conservatism,” grew out of Northern differences regarding war aims.

Conservatives, Lincoln the foremost, declared themselves for restoration of the Union, even with slavery. The Radicals considered Lincoln’s war policy mild; they shuddered to think that Democratic generals might convert battlefield victories into election victories; and they seized upon the minor disaster at Ball’s Bluff to set up machinery to investigate the whole conduct of the war.

[Major] John C. Fremont, the “Pathfinder” and Republican presidential candidate in 1856 . . . [in the West] had won no victories, but had declared martial law, confiscated property, disregarded Washington, become involved in procurement scandals, allowed his accounts to become muddled, declared emancipated the slaves of Missourians convicted of bearing arms against the United States, and finally had been removed [by Lincoln].

The Radicals proclaimed him a martyr, and determined to restore him to command. Lincoln yielded to their pressures.

Behind Lincoln’s hesitancy [of directing McClellan’s movements in Virginia] lay complex pressures, obscure and sometimes contradictory forces. T. Harry Williams comments: “Plots and counterplots boiled beneath the troubled surface. [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton hatched innumerable schemes to destroy his enemies. McClellan twisted and turned as the Radicals struck. And behind all was the implacable Committee. It seems possible that a meeting between Stanton and the Committee on the Conduct of the War was worked out to cause McClellan to fail in his campaign.

The Radicals apparently wanted a quick victory, but not at the expense of abolition; a great victory, but not one that would make Democrat McClellan a national hero and hurt them personally or the Radical cause.”

(The Edge of Glory: A Biography of General William S. Rosecrans, William M. Lamers, LSU Press, 1961, excerpts pp. 66-69)

In the four prewar years 1856-1860, total federal expenditures were a mere $274 million, and financed by tariffs (disproportionately paid by the South), and the sale of public lands. The direct costs of the Northern war effort 1861-1865 is estimated at $2.3 billion; when indirect costs such as outright destruction and soldier pensions are included the estimate rises to $8 billion. “[The] Union’s expenditures on the war were equivalent to more than 70% of the North’s share of the 1859 gross domestic product. Lincoln’s war economy enabled Philip Amour to make $2 million selling pork to the Northern army; Clement Studebaker amassed a fortune providing wagons to Northern forces, and Andrew Carnegie grew rich as an iron merchant.

Lincoln’s Broad Economic Revolution

“First . . . the [Northern] citizenry remained passionately resistant to any form of federal income tax. A second option was to turn to borrowing. The great advantage of this choice was that it would pass some of the cost of the war on to future generations (in the form of interest and debt). A final choice was to print money and declare it legal tender – a policy not without cost. The printing of currency not backed by specie would raise prices, thus financing the war through inflation.

As soon as the war began, President Lincoln ordered Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase to begin taking steps to fund the war. Chase faced an economy that had barely recovered from the Panic of 1857 before being thrown into recession by the secession crisis. Chase initially turned to increase import fees, excise taxes and the sale of government land, but he soon shifted his attention to the sale of [war] bonds [hoping] to fund its war effort through a form of borrowing.

Congress [passed] the revolutionary Legal Tender Act [in] February 1862 [which] provided for the issuance of $150 million in non-interest bearing notes. Although not backed by gold or silver, these “greenbacks” were legal tender for all debts except import duties and interest on government loans. By issuing notes without the backing of specie, the government risked serious inflation.

In August 1861 Congress passed a 3 percent tax on incomes of more than eight hundred dollars, but it was a year before those funds were collects. The following July a new revenue measure expanded income taxes and added an assortment of other levies.

In late summer 1862 bond sales had dwindled [and] Secretary Chase turned to Philadelphia broker Jay Cooke to orchestrate a massive campaign to stimulate them. This strategy [of 2500 agents nationwide] anticipated the patriotic war bond drives of World Wars I and II. [Roughly] one in four Northern families [purchased them,] Yet it appears most war bonds ended up in the hands of banks and wealthy investors.

The final piece of Chase’s financial program did not fall into place until midway through the war. The National Banking Act of February 1863 (and legislation of June 1864) established a new system of banks. Finally, in March 1865, Congress passed a 10 percent tax on all notes issued by State banks [which was sufficient to] drive most State banks into the new banking system.

When all was said and done bond sales funded two-thirds of the North’s military expenses. Various forms of wartime taxation funded 21 percent of the war’s cost, and the remaining costs were financed through inflation. By printing greenbacks the federal government caused an increase in prices, which had a measurable impact on the Northern economy. At their peak, prices rose to 80 percent above antebellum levels.

The funding legislation passed by the war Congress raises a broader issue. How did wartime measures reshape the American economy?

One long-standing interpretation is that the war was a triumph of industrial capitalism. With for decades the intellectual heirs of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had battled over the constitutionality of federal measures to assist economic development.

With the [Southern] congressmen safely out of the way [in 1861] – so the interpretation goes – Republicans were free to pursue an agenda which features protective tariffs and strong banking legislation. The Civil War provide the perfect excuse for imposing a broad economic revolution.”

(The North Fights the Civil War: The Homefront, J. Matthew Gallman, Ivan R. Dee, 1993, excerpts pp. 96-99)

Republican opposition to compromise efforts brought forth by Democrats thwarted attempts to truly “save the Union.” Ohio Democrats Samuel S. Cox and John A. Crittenden formed a committee in late December 1860 to craft compromises more palatable to Lincoln and his Republican cohorts. By February 4, 1861, Republican party intransigence triumphed over peace as the Crittenden Compromise emitted a dying gasp. It was then clear which party was “disloyal” to the Union and Constitution, and who was to blame for bringing on a war destined to kill a million Americans.

Lincoln Versus “20 Millions of Secesh”

“If what the abolition disunionists say be true [that] no power on earth can prevent its success, and let us see why. They declare that all who vote the Democratic ticket are disloyal to our Government – “sympathizers” with the rebellion, etc. If this be true, let us see how strong the rebels are. The vote of 1860 developed about seven inhabitants to every voter in the land.

Now, there are in the loyal States the following numbers that vote the Democratic ticket, which will not probably vary 5,000 either way – near enough to meet the argument: 1,685,000.

Here, then, right in the loyal States, are one million, six hundred and eighty-five thousand votes that “sympathize with the rebellion,” according to Abolition say-so. Multiply this by seven, and you have 11,795,000 persons here at the North who are in “open sympathy with the rebels.”

Add this vast number to the 10,000,000 in the rebel States, and its gives 21,795,000 “traitors,” which, subtracted from the 30,000,000 of the entire white population of the whole Union, and it leaves only 8,205,000 “loyal” people to contend against over twenty millions of “secesh.”

This argument is not ours. It is only the presentation of the Abolition “argument,” and the bare statement shows the malicious absurdity of the Abolition asservation. Let the Administration once throw out the “copperhead” element, and it will find itself in a woefully decimated dilemma.”

(Miscellaneous Facts and Figures, The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XXXVII, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 305-306)

No Union Saved

“The notion that Lincoln “saved the Union” is as naïve as the notion that he “freed the slaves.” The Union he saved was not the one he set out to save. The Civil War destroyed the “balance or powers” between the States and the federal government which he had promised to protect in his 1861 inaugural address.

This was not Lincoln’s intention, but it is the reason many of his champions praise him. James McPherson celebrates Lincoln’s “second American Revolution”; Gary Wills exults that Lincoln “changed America” with the Gettysburg Address, which he admits was a “swindle” (albeit a benign one).

In other words, Lincoln’s war destroyed the original constitutional relation between the States and the federal government. His own defenders say so – in spite of his explicit, clear and consistent professed intent to “preserve” that relation.

The Civil War wasn’t just a victory of North over South; it was a victory for centralized government over the States and federalism. It destroyed the ability of the States to protect themselves against the destruction of their reserved powers.

Must we all be happy about this? Lincoln himself – the real Lincoln, that is, – would have deprecated the unintended results of the war. Though he sometimes resorted to dictatorial methods, he never meant to create a totalitarian state.

It’s tragic that slavery was intertwined with a good cause, and scandalous that those who defend that cause today should be smeared as partisans of slavery. But the verdict of history must not be left to the simple-minded and the demagogic.”

(Slavery, No; Secession, Yes, Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s Real News of the Month, March 2001, Volume 8, Number 3, excerpts pg. 9)

Lincoln the Tragic Hero

“[Lincoln’s] favorite play was Macbeth. He had read it often, he wrote to the actor James Hackett, “perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader . . . I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.” He had seen Booth in that role too.

Lincoln’s fascination with this play is itself interesting. He knew that much of the country saw him as a Macbeth – a tyrant, a usurper, a murderer, and his conscience may have promoted him to ask whether he could reasonably be seen in that light. He had expected a quick end to the “rebellion,” but the war had dragged on for years, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.

Many Northerners clamored for a peace settlement. If the war was not justified, Lincoln had much to answer for, infinitely more than he could have imagined at the beginning.

Apart from the scale of violence against the South, including its civilian population and their property, Lincoln aroused angry opposition in the North. “Saving the Union” had required him to transgress against the Constitution and civil liberties; he acted as a dictator, assuming both legislative and executive powers.

An Illinois newspaper accused him of “seeking to inaugurate a reign of terror in the loyal States by military arrests . . . of citizens without a trial, to browbeat all opposition by villainous and false charges of disloyalty against whole classes of patriotic citizens, to destroy all constitutional guarantees of free speech, a free press, and the writ of habeas corpus.”

His biographer David Donald notes: “Editors feared that they might be locked up in Fort Lafayette or in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington if they voiced their criticisms too freely, and even writers of private letters began to guard their language.”

As the ghastly war continued inconclusively, Lincoln must have pondered Macbeth’s words:

“I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far, that should I wade no more

Returning were as tedious as go o’er”

In scale of character, in eloquence, and in impact on his country, Lincoln had the dimensions of a Shakespearean tragic hero. Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that tragic action must have “magnitude”; and Lincoln’s action certainly had that quality. He also displayed the tragic flaw of rash judgment; despite his deliberation, he had ignored the advice of his cabinet by launching war over Fort Sumter, failing to foresee the madly disproportionate violence that would ensue from a legalistic dispute over secession.

The tragic hero is neither saint, villain, nor passive victim: he is the cause of his own and his society’s ruin, in spite of his own intention. As Aristotle says, the ruin of a purely innocent man is not tragic, it is injustice. That of a purely evil man is not tragedy, but justice.

Lincoln was driven to meditate on the events he had set in motion. By the fall of 1862 he was reflecting: “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” In 1864 he wrote: “I claim not to have controlled events, but plainly confess that events have controlled me.”

Was he trying to disclaim responsibility? He always insisted that the South “began” the war, which, even if true, would not necessarily mean that the South bore the guilt for what the war became. Perhaps sensing this, he referred the problem to Providence, which had allowed the war to continue and spread.”

(America’s Tragic Hero, Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s Real News of the Month, March 2001, Volume 8, Number 3, excerpts pp. 4-5)

Lincoln soon realized that his war to save the union was an impossible dream and that the only way to victory was invasion and capturing slaves to deny the agricultural South of its needed labor force. Additionally, he allowed State governors to recruit homeless blacks in areas overrun by Northern troops and credit them to State quotas – thus relieving white Northerners of having to fight in an unpopular abolition war. William Milo Stone (1827-1893) below was a native of New York who moved to Iowa and served as captain in a State regiment. He was captured at Shiloh and paroled by President Jefferson Davis to help facilitate a prisoner exchange.

Another Myth of Saving the Union

“Col. [William M.] Stone, the Governor of Iowa, in canvassing that State in the summer of 1863, in his speech in Keokuk on the 3rd of August, said:

“Fellow citizens – I was not formerly an abolitionist, nor did I formerly suppose I would ever become one, but I am now [and] have been for the last nine months, an unadulterated abolitionist. Fellow citizens – the opposition charge that this is an abolition war. Well, I admit that this is an abolition war. It was not such at the start, but the administration has discovered that they could not subdue the South else than making it an abolition war, and they have done so . . . and it will be continued as an abolition war as long as there is one slave at the South to be made free. Never, never can there be peace made, nor is peace desirable, until the last link of slavery is abolished . . .”

Morrow B. Lowry, an abolition State Senator in Pennsylvania, at a [Union] League meeting in Philadelphia in 1863 said:

“This war is for the African and his race . . . When this war was no bigger than my hand, I said that if any Negro would bring me his disloyal master’s head, I would give him one hundred and sixty acres of his master’s plantation (Laughter and applause).

[A] Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune said through that sheet . . . “For years the disunionists of the North have manifested the boldness of Cromwell, the assiduity of beavers, the cunning of foxes, [and] the malignancy of Iscariots. Their money has been poured out free as water, in publishing and circulating Abolition tracts, speeches, inflammatory and incendiary appeals – not to national honor and pride, but to the passions and hot bed sentimentalities that fester in the breasts of malcontents.

In 1852, a series of pamphlets were issued for Massachusetts, entitled, “The United States Constitution and its Pro-Slavery Compromises.” From the “Third edition, enlarged,” of this treasonable publication we take the following:

“If, then, the people and the courts of a country are to be allowed to determine what their own laws mean, it follows that at this time, and for the last half-century, the Constitution of the United States has been, and still is a pro-slavery instrument, and that anyone who swears to support it, swears to do pro-slavery acts, [thus] violates his duty both as a man and as an Abolitionist.”

(Progress of the Northern Conspiracy (Continued)., The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XII, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 59-60)

In its State Convention in 1851, Massachusetts radicals resolved that “the constitution which provides for slave representation and a slave oligarchy in Congress, which legalize slave catching on every inch of American soil . . . that the one great issue before the country is the dissolution of the Union . . . therefore, we have given ourselves to the work of “annulling this covenant with death,” as essential to our own innocency, and the speedy and everlasting overthrow of the slave power.”

Apparently, there were those in Massachusetts at that time who had forgotten the locally-produced rum sailing for the coast of West Africa on Massachusetts-built, captained and provisioned ships. The African slaves would not be in the South without the help of New England, and its infamous transatlantic slave trade.

Abolition Secessionist Motives and Pretexts

“Gen. Jamison, one of the Abolition marplots of Kansas, made a speech to his soldiers on the 22nd of January, 1862, which appeared in the Leavenworth Conservative, in which he shows that the firing on Sumter was not the beginning of the war.

“For six long years we have fought as guerillas, what we are now fighting as a regiment. This war is a war which dates away back of Fort Sumter. On the cold hill side, in swamps and ferns, behind rocks and trees, ever since ’54 we have made the long campaign. Away off there we have led the ideas of this age, always battling at home, and sometimes sending forth from among us a stern old missionary like John Brown, to show Virginia that the world does move.”

Parson Brownlow, in his debate with Parson Pryne, in Philadelphia in 1858, said:

“A dissolution of the Union is what a large portion of the Northern Abolitionists are aiming at.” (see Brownlow and Pryne’s debates).

Thurlow Weed, for penning the following truth, was, as he avers, was driven from the editorial chair of the Albany [New York] Journal.

“The chief architects of the rebellion, before it broke out, avowed that they were aided in their infernal designs by the ultra-Abolitionists of the North. This was too true, for without said aid the South could never have been united against the Union. But for the incendiary recommendations, which rendered the otherwise useful [Hinton] Helper book, a fire brand, North Carolina could not have been forced out of the Union. And even now, the ultra-Abolition Press and speech makers are aggravating the horrors they helped to create, and thus by playing into the hands of the leaders of the rebellion, are keeping down the Union men of the South, and rendering reunion difficult, if not impossible.” But hatred of slavery was not the moving cause of these Abolitionists. They were secessionists, per se, and only used the slavery ghost to frighten unsuspecting and otherwise well-disposed person into their schemes.

And so it was in 1814, when the secessionists of [New England’s] Hartford Convention made opposition to slavery one of the cornerstones of their disunion edifice . . . disunion, as the motive, was in the background, and slavery, as the shibboleth or pretext, in the foreground.”

(Progress and Evidence of the Northern Conspiracy, The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XI, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 54-55)

The only liberal democratic America which existed for German revolutionaries prior to 1860 was in the Northern States, already given over to burned-over districts and various “isms” of reform and communal-living movements. Well-before 1860, and mostly due to the foreign immigration in the North and flowing westward, two very different Americas existed. The South retained the Founders republic and Constitution; the North became the liberal democratic America which German revolutionaries believed they were migrating to. The Southern soldier fought for political independence against not only conscripted and bounty-enriched patriots in blue, but also recently-arrived Germans dreaming of a liberal socialist America. It was not by accident Lincoln purchased a German-language newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, to help him win the Republican nomination in 1860, and one-quarter of his army of invasion were German.

The Teutonic Tide

“After the Revolution, a number of the Hessian hirelings who had been brought over by the British settled in America . . . [and joined] the German settlements, avoiding the English-speaking communities in the United States because of the resentment shown towards them. The second period of German migration began about 1820 and lasted through the Civil War. [Between] 1845 and 1860 there arrived 1,250,000, and 200,000 came during the Civil War. [Due to the defeat of the socialist revolutions in Europe in 1848,] There seemed to remain only flight to liberal democratic America.

Arrived in America, these Germans were not content to settle, like dregs, in the cities on the seacoast. [And] westward they started at once . . . by way of the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, and later by the new railway lines into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin and Iowa. St. Louis was the center of a German influence that extended throughout the Missouri Valley.

Unlike the Irish, the Germans brought with them a strange language [and] many of the intellectuals believed they could establish a German state in America. “The foundations of a new and free Germany in the great North American Republic shall be laid by us,” wrote Follenius, the dreamer, who desired to land enough Germans in “one of the American territories to establish an essentially German state.”

After 1870 a great change came over the German migration. More and more industrial workers, but fewer and fewer peasants, and very rarely an intellectual or man of substance, now appeared at Ellis Island for admission to the United States. The new Germans came in hordes even outnumbering the migrations of the fifties. Humility on the part of these newcomers now gradually gave way to arrogance. Instead of appearing eager to embrace their new opportunities, they criticized everything they found in their new home.

In 1895 there were some five hundred German periodicals published in America, and many of the newer ones were rabidly Germanophile. Before the United States entered the Great War, there was a most remarkable unanimity of [pro-German] expression among these German publications; afterward, Congress found it necessary to enact rigorous laws against them. As a result, many of them were suppressed, and many others suspended publication.”

(Our Foreigners, A Chronicle of Americans in the Making; The Chronicles of America Series, Allen Johnson, editor, Yale University Press, 1921, excerpts pp. 129-131; 134-135; 141-143)

In truth, New England led the secession movement from Britain with its revolt against British Navigation Acts. In contrast, the Southern colonies were exporters and did well as British Americans, though they had formed a provincial identity of independence, or, “States’ Rights.” This of course preceded the Articles of Confederation and 1787 Constitution.

Regarding the counterrevolution of the 1860’s and its result, the author quoted below writes: “the revolution of the 1860’s ended up devastating New England almost as much as it did the South. What emerged in the late 19th century, as John Quincy’s grandson Henry described it, was a country ruled by speculators, stockjobbers and imperialists. Boston rule would have been infinitely preferable to rule by the set of gangsters who engineered the election of Grant, Arthur, McKinley, and Harding and their spiritual descendants who control both parties today.”

Lincoln’s Counterrevolution to the Revolution

“Lincoln did not initiate the political revolution that destroyed the American republic. The bandwagon was hurtling along in its course long before he leaped aboard and seized the reins. The effect of his presidency and of the war he either brought on deliberately or blundered into was to annul the American Revolution, which might be more accurately described as a counterrevolution. But if we are going to stick to conventional language, we can say that Mr. Lincoln’s project in national democracy as the counterrevolution to the revolution of 1776.

To understand why some Americans – and not just in the South – opposed the Lincolnian counterrevolution, we have to first understand why so many Americans had been willing to go to war in the 1770’s.

In Massachusetts, of course, one can find sound economic reasons. The British government was eager to find ways to make the colonies pay for the wars that had been undertaken on their behalf, and taxation and regulation of industry and commerce seemed to be – and indeed was – a solution that was both reasonable and just. New Englanders, feeling the pinch of mercantilist policies, were understandably annoyed, and when the insult of constitutional innovation (the suspension of charters and the so-called Intolerable Acts) was added to the injury inflicted on their economic life, they were ripe for revolution.

The planters and merchants of Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry, by contrast, were making out rather well within the [British] empire. In the 1770’s, Charelston was one of the wealthiest and by far the most civilized city in North America. By the outbreak of the Revolution, Charleston merchants and Lowcountry planters formed an American aristocracy.

While most historians and political ideologues have claimed, over and over, that the American rebels were devotees of John Locke’s theory of natural rights and the social contract, there is very little evidence of this. Every important statement and virtually all the little manifestos of church parishes and small townships stake their claim on the Common Law rights of Englishmen.

A key word was equality, not of all human beings, but the equality of Americans in possessing the rights of the English. Patrick Henry put it succinctly: The colonists are entitled “to all the liberties, privileges, franchises that have at any time been held, enjoyed, and possessed by the people of Great Britain.” Provincials resented the fact that Parliament denied them the benefits of several significant statutes, such as the Habeas Corpus Act, the Act of Settlement, and the Bill of Rights.”

(Why They Fought, Thomas Fleming, Chronicles, April 2015, excerpts pp. 8-9) www.chroniclesmagazine.org