Louis Weichmann

[Wild Bill]

What "anarchy" are you speaking of?

It is nice to blame everything on slavery, but before we get all mushy and moralistic, what we really are talking about here is political power. To put it simply, the Founders made a deal--the North got a common market through the commerce clause of the Constitution and the South got recognition of slavery, through the 3/5 clause, the existence of the slave trade from Africa until 1808, the equal representation of the states in the US senate, and the extraterritoriality of slavery. The problem was two-fold: no one knew when the Constitution was written that upland cotton would become an ideal staple because of the invention of the cotton gin, and the grandsons and granddaughters of the Northern compromisers at the Constitutional convention could no longer accept the secondary control of the government by the South through what was conveniently branded the Slave Power Conspiracy. If one gets rid of all the nonsense spewed forth by then abolitionists and the antislaveryites and reads the cases of Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) and Ableman v. Booth (1859), one would see that the Northern position had lost out on its illegalities and the Civil War was pure bunk. It was caused by the North to save a losing legal position.

Read, e.g., Arthur Bestor, "State Sovereignty and Slavery," Illinois State Historical Society, Journal, 53 (1960), 117-80; James Oakes, Freedom National (2013) and his Scorpion's Sting (2014), and his "Was the Civil War Really about Slavery?" Salon (August 29, 2012); Walter Williams, The Civil War wasn't about Slavery," Jewish World Review (Dec. 2, 1998); and William J. Cooper, "The Critical Signpost on the Journey toward Secession, "Journal of Southern History, 77 (no. 1, Feb. 2011), 16ff.

Or just for fun, Pamela, read Steve Berry's novel, The Lincoln Myth. He is a lawyer with an interesting thesis.