Jefferson Davis Was Right!

[Captain Cisco]

No, I am NOT talking about the slavery thing. I think we can all agree that slavery was bad and that it's a good thing that it was abolished. I go on record as saying that I have no wish to see a return of that institution, nor do I believe the Confederacy was correct in seeking to protect it. That said:

What I am talking about is the greater struggle that the American Civil war was REALLY about - that is the conflict between state sovereignty and a powerful, centralized Federal government.

A little backstory for those who have not studied this period as I have (a history major who concentrated on this era and continues to study it today): As the United States grew, so too did the disagreement over the direction this country was headed. North and South were disparate peoples - the North industrial and urbanized; the South agrarian and more rural. Socially, the two were also different, with the South adopting many of the customs of the European landed aristocracy with power and prestige handed down with family ties, and the North a more economic driven society based on the self-made man principle. For decades, the two opposing views had managed to coexist with a series of compromises meant to appease both sides, but which really resulted in growing division and animosity. Eventually, slavery became the ideological battleground between these two views. Slavery offended the North, and for the Southerners it was an essential part of their economy. The election of 1860 sent a shiver of dread through the collective soul of the South as Abraham Lincoln - though vowing to keep his hands off slavery - was still viewed as an abolitionist because of his statements in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. So, fearing that the Federal Government would move against the institutions of their society, the Southern States seceeded from the Union, and that set off 5 years of war.

Now, my point:

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, claimed again and again that the Confederacy wanted only to be "left alone." The States of the Confederacy only wanted to exist as they had existed since the Revolution against Britain. They did not want the North (i.e. the Federal Government) interfering in their internal affairs. They did not want a government dictating to the citizens of the States how they should live their lives. Yet that, in the end, is what happened. The North won. Slavery was abolished (again, a good thing to come out of this), but in the course of Reconstruction, the concept of the "sovereign state" was effectively put to death. The era of Big Government had begun.

Today, we have been handed the legacy of that Northern victory. Each year, more and more power is sucked away from the people and the states and placed into the hands of the ever-growing Federal Government. The arms of that government are growing longer and longer and reaching deeper and deeper into the lives of the citizens, telling them how to eat, how to educate their children, what kind of lightbulbs to use, and taking more and more of their money to redistribute it as THE GOVERNMENT sees fit, instead of how the PEOPLE see fit. I see all this happening, and I am forced to truly wonder - was Jefferson Davis right? Did he foresee this happening? I don't attribute mystical clairvoyance to him, but he was an intelligent and astute man who understood politics and government. Could he have realized that the first steps toward a tyrannical central government were beginning in his time, and sought to prevent it?

I was raised in the North. I was taught all my life the version of history where the North was right and the South was wrong. And usually, Slavery was the key point of that argument. But now, understanding history and that it is written by the victors, I am forced to look objectively at the greater issue that surrounded that pivotal American event, and am forced to conclude that the Northern victory may have been a great disaster to the American experiment. We now pay a price for the unity the Northern victory brought as we look at a national government speeding toward the monolithic. As I look at the disastrous situation we face today because of that ever-expanding central government, I am forced to conclude, about the greater issue of the state vs. the central government, that Jefferson Davis was indeed right.