The agitation over Confederate monuments rests upon The Myth of American History, which proclaims that “The Civil War was all about slavery, the righteous North waged it to free the slaves, and the evil South fought to keep them. End of story. Any questions?” Well, yes. Something doesn’t compute, here. If the North were waging a war on slavery, why didn’t she wage war on New England cotton mills and their profits from slave-picked cotton? Or on New York and Boston, the largest African slave-trading ports in the world according to the January 1862 Continental Monthly? Or on Northern shipyards that outfitted the slave ships? Or on New England distilleries that made rum from slave-harvested sugar cane to use for barter on the African coast? Or on the African slavers themselves, such as the Kingdom of Dahomey, who captured their fellow Africans and sold them into slavery in the first place? And why did Abraham Lincoln choose to inaugurate the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere to, in effect, drive Southern slavery back into the Union? And why did his Emancipation Proclamation – a cynical, desperate war measure of his total war against the South that did not pretend to free any slave who was not behind Confederate lines, and which was not issued until halfway through the war when the South was winning it - say that slavery was alright as long as one was loyal to his government – proven the following summer when he admitted West Virginia, a “slave State,” into the Union? And why did he work until the day he died to deport blacks back to Africa? And why was slavery Constitutional in the North throughout the entire war?
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