Sabotage, treason, and free-booting

Race is America's original sin. In the wake of the largest flare-up of open and barely-concealed racism since the 1920s and during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, I must recommend an excellent volume that helps explain some of the insanity roiling about the republic.
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States) by James M. McPherson covers all the ugliness from the Mexican War to Reconstruction and all the social, economic, political, and military events in between. First published in 1988 as part of the authoritative Oxford University series on American history, the tome has been reissued and updated to keep up with changing historiography, and is also available in audio format narrated by the incomparable Jonathan Davis (not the lead singer of Korn). Battle Cry is available at just about any public library and is a standard textbook of the war in undergraduate classes.

Why recommend a twenty-five year old book on events so long ago you ask? Americans have traded the railroad and horse power for automobiles, AR-15s for muskets, and high-tech machinery for slave labor but one thing has not changed. Tension between reform and the status-quo, and between sections has been a constant in American history broken only by extraordinary circumstances. It is ironic in a Niebuhrian sense that a nation founded in the reform spirit has suffered from such weakness in the forces of reform during its history. By contrast, defenders of the status quo are always ferocious and powerful. The tensions broken by extraordinary circumstances are too often simply due to a stumble or weakening of conservatives and allowing pent up demand for change to finally trickle over the levees. The issues change, but the conservative attitude remains constant; angry, aggressive, bullying, irrational, and committed to the defense of power.

There have been efforts, going back almost to the beginning of the republic, to undermine or destroy opposition during wartime. There is strong evidence that the Constitution, so revered by the American right (ho ho), and the Bill of Rights attached to it is just a piece of parchment when it is most needed. Normally, but not exclusively, conservatives are responsible for the trampling of American liberty in times of crisis, real or imagined. Though trying to track ideology over the centuries is difficult, suppression of American's rights rarely occurs during periods of reform.

The Civil War was an anomaly as President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, suppressed some pro-confederacy newspapers, and so on. But Southern politicians prior to the war suppressed all manner of petitions concerning slavery, tabled many bills concerning the peculiar institution, and even invented a tool called "nullification" to disregard laws they did not happen to like. Lincoln was empowered to his extraordinary acts by the Constitution, that document specified some powers and implied others to suppress insurrection. During the war, Confederates had no qualms about abridging freedom for dissenters anytime the freedom to hold human beings as property was threatened.

Today, the authoritarians masquerading as conservatives are fond of referring to the "Democrat" party, or "Democrat" career politicians. When the authoritarian slave oligarchs battled the new party after 1854 they similarly dubbed them the "Black Republicans." Imagined terrors were rife, then as now, Lincoln was going to force the whites to marry off their daughters to big, buck negroes for instance. Just as the specter of socialism lurks everywhere from the moderately conservative Barack Obama. Authoritarians then as now understand one thing very well, a significant slice of white America is paranoid and prone to hysteria.

Southerners of the Antebellum period were content to remain in the Union, as long as they controlled it. Most presidents after Andrew Jackson were either Southerners themselves or "doe-faces" that is Northern men with Southern principles. The shrinking South as a proportion of the Union guaranteed parity in the Senate with the Missouri Compromise that free states could only be admitted with a slave state inverse. For a time Southerners milked the 3/5ths clause for all it was worth to keep up representation in the House but opportunity for immigrants in the North and the end of African imports of slaves meant the South and its values soon became a minority. It was only a matter of time before the North ran and elected one of its own as President.

This was the sabotage and eventual treason of the South, as soon as Dixie lost its grip on the Federal Government we were a nation no more. The so-called compromise of 1850 was a turning point in that control, what else can it be called but sabotage when the rules were changed for Kansas? The Southern slave power thumbed its nose at all precedent and inspired popular movements to invade Kansas for slavery, turning that territory into a civil war in miniature. Federal power was hamstrung by Southern obstruction in all cases save one, the slave power demanded public protection for their "property." The slave power was not content with the national armed forces swallowing half of Mexico as fertile ground for planting slavery. The popular party line (or aptly "sectional line") was that Southerners fought and died in the US Army to conquer Mexico so they should be able to enjoy their property in that vast new territory. All northern soldiers and expenditure be damned of course. But the threat that some of this manifest destiny might be reserved for freedom sent private armies of filibusters into the Caribbean and Central America to carve out new slave kingdoms there. Filibuster translates from Spanish as pirate or free-booter. Treason against their country in the form of secession naturally flowed from the loss of domination by the minority.