Lessons of the Past

Lysander Spooner - Abolitionist/Philosopher

I was brought to think about a late, great man, Ed Keating (former Captain of Ladder 19) by another excellent firefighter I worked with who said he sees the Confederate battle flag as “a symbol of hatred to my people.” Ironically enough, my disagreement with the latter guy is the same as my disagreement with scores of what I’ve called “professional Irishmen,” and one of my favorite ALL TIME people was one - Ed Keating.

Ed was a professional Irishman all the way. That’s probably harder for me to grasp since I’m not merely half Irish and half Italian, some of my Northern Italian ancestors had roots further East, having come into that region with the rise of the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire. Some of those Northern Italians were Jews. There were also Corsicans among them...so I have no such singular connection. Some may well say, that that’s my loss...and it well may be.

I admired Ed’s reverence for his “own people.” He was fond of yelling, “2,000 years, NEVER AGAIN” when entering the firehouse. I didn’t get that and had only heard “Never again,” in reference to the Nazi Holocaust, so one day I asked him about it.

Ed looked at me crestfallen, stared at the name tag on my shirt and said, “Son, you don’t even know your own heritage.”

I was about to respond, “That’s not my heritage,” which would’ve been a lie, ALL of the various heritages that make up this polyglot me are “my heritages,” I just was raised to see myself as “American”...ONLY and SOLELY American.

At any rate, Captain Keating went into a lengthy exposition on the Irish slave trade and how until 1700 there were more Irish slaves in the Americas than Africans. About the bulk of the slave revolts and the bloodiest of them were those of these Irish slaves...and how the British embarked on a plan to mate the Irish slaves with the more docile Africans to create a “docile, hard-working hybrid.”

That didn’t work either.

He went into Cromwell’s nearly successful extermination of that group, first by scattering the Irish males to various parts of the world as soldiers and seamen, then with the Irish slave trade and how he was so successful that he dropped Ireland’s population from over 1.6 million to under 500,000 at the end of his reign. Ed also went into how later generations tried to “finish the job” with the engineered “Potato famine,” which ironically enough generated the greatest source of new troops for the Union’s war against the South as over 80% of Boston & New York’s Civil War regiments were comprised of Irish immigrants.

I was extremely skeptical of all that until I looked it up for myself and found that the truth...was even worse. Hard to even read.

Later I’d meet one of the only non-white people who knew about the Irish slave trade, in Mychal Massie, a black Conservative who ran a group called Project 21.

So, I’m now aware of that particular bit of history...a small chapter in the voluminous tome of man’s inhumanity to man. After reading so much of that history, I began to consider...HOW can I hold any righteous resentment against a person of English descent? They’re not guilty for the actions of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Besides, given the times and the harshness of ALL life, given those SAME criteria, any group today might engage in that SAME sort of inhumanity.

My father was a Civil War history buff, because his ancestors came over just prior to that war and served in it, thanks to the potato famine in Ireland.

When I think about the Civil War, I think about it differently now. I see it as the END of our original Constitution by cowards afraid to annunciate that. I see it as the conquest of the USA by foreign bankers whom this country owed untold BILLIONS in debt to after that war.

I believe that Lysander Spooner assessed the tragedy of the Civil War best in the introduction to his great work “No Treason” in 1867.

“The question of treason is distinct from that of slavery; and is the same that it would have been, if free States, instead of slave States, had seceded.

“On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union

“The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.

“No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle – but only in degree – between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man’s ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure

“Previous to the war, there were some grounds for saying that – in theory, at least, if not in practice – our government was a free one; that it rested on consent. But nothing of that kind can be said now, if the principle on which the war was carried on by the North, is irrevocably established.

“If that principle be not the principle of the Constitution, the fact should be known. If it be the principle of the Constitution, the Constitution itself should be at once overthrown.”

Sadly, truer words were never spoken and sure enough, after that war, the freedoms enumerated in that Constitution were slowly eroded by legislative fiat. Centralized governmental powers were expanded, even though for decades the federal government would pay lip service to “Constitutional principles” they KNEW were no longer upheld by anything in Washington, D.C.

A Universal Slavery?

Thats what Boston Abolitionist, American patriot and freedom-lover Lysander Spooner (1808 – 1887, pictured left) believed the American Civil War brought to America.

With one of my all time favorite quotes, Spooner put the Civil War and its aftermath into a proper and clear perspective; “On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate the slaves but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was willing to do so, if the slaveholders could thereby be induced to stay in the Union.

“The principle on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: that men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.

“No principle that is possible to be named can be more self-evidently false than this, no more self-evidently fatal to liberty. Yet it triumphed on the battlefield and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, then the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been really increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference in principle – only in degree – between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor.” (Lysander Spooner 1886)

The fact that the importation of slaves into America was outlawed in 1809, is a noble one that far too many Americans seem unaware of. Another little known fact is the legacy of black Confederates, despite the fact that there are now many books chronicling that fact.

In fact, “It has been estimated that over 65,000 Southern blacks were in the Confederate ranks. Over 13,000 of these “saw the elephant,” also known as meeting the enemy in combat. These black Confederates included both slave and free. The Confederate Congress did not approve blacks to be officially enlisted as soldiers (except as musicians), until late in the war.

“But in the ranks it was a different story. Many Confederate officers did not obey the mandates of politicians, they frequently enlisted blacks with a simple criteria, “Will you fight?”

“Historian Ervin Jordan explains that “bi-racial units” were frequently organized “by local Confederate and state militia Commanders in response to immediate threats in the form of union raids.” Dr. Leonard Hayes, an African-America professor at Southern University stated, “When you've eliminated the black Confederate soldier, you've eliminated the history of the South.”

As the war came to an end, the Confederacy took progressive measures to build back up its army. The creation of the Confederacy States Colored Troops, copied after the northern colored troops came too late to be successful. Had the Confederacy been successful it would have created the world's largest armies (at that time) consisting of black soldiers even larger than that of the North. This would have given the future of the Confederacy a vastly different appearance than what modern day racist or anti-Confederate Liberals conjecture.

“Not only did Jefferson Davis envision black Confederate veterans receiving bounty lands for their service, there would have been no future for slavery after the goal of 300,000 armed black CSA veterans came home after the war.”

http://www.37thtexas.org/html/BlkHist.html

The Civil War was not about slavery, in fact, to his shame, Abraham Lincoln made very clear that he would've accepted an accommodation with slavery had the South acquiesced on the primary issue o preserving the Union.

But the South felt its agrarian economy was being stifled by northeast banking interests and after James Buchana botched things, the die was cast and the Civil War was all but inevitable.

The South fought for the original Constitution (localized governance and State's Rights) and against a growing federal monolith. Even the Confederate General James Longstreet is reported to have said, “We should've freed the slaves and then fired on Fort Sumpter.”

And I say that knowing that many of my ancestors, on my father's side, came “off the boats” in Boston and New York and went right to war.

It was a necessary war and one that had to be fought. Lincoln was right that a divided nation would not last very long, but one of the casualties of that war was the original Constitution.