Pat Lang, who I often quote on military issues, is a former analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and generally takes a pragmatic view of military affairs and foreign policy.
He describes himself as a conservative, though he has been highly critical of the Cheney-Bush administration and their war in Iraq, and on their foreign policy more broadly.
I haven't thought of him as a "paleo-conservative" in the Pat Buchanan mold. But in this post, he passes along without comment a ridulously neo-Confederate take on the Civil War: The Constitution and the Civil War - Arbogast 10/04/06. [10/05/06 - Lang has apparently removed the post and its comments entirely. A cached version of the post is here without the comments. See my post of 10/05/06 for quotes from the original.]
This legalistic quibbling quickly became a standard defense for the Lost Cause. Slavery, the "sacred institution" for which the Confederate states seceded and fought, had been thoroughly discredited during the war. Not only was the slaveowners' revolt massively destructive in itself. But many thousands of soldiers got to see slaves and plantations up close and personally. It didn't make them advocates of multiculturalism in today's sense. But it left most of them thoroughly disgusted with slavery, where many Northerners before had been indifferent to the suffering that the Peculiar Institution caused to its human property.
Arbogast's argument is ahistorical in another way. The Constitution did not specify any right to secede. It did specify that the federal government was required to guarantee and republican form of government in all states. And the notion that the Confederate states were peacefully and quietly withdrawing from the Union is hogwash. This was a revolt aimed at destroying the Constitution of the United States. The seceding states immediately began seizing federal army posts and weapons, and building a hostile army of their own.
It may take a tiny bit of imagination today to see what was blantantly obvious to everyone at the time. Or at least a willingness to undertake that sometimes-painful task of actually thinking about it. The Mississippi River was the economic lifeblood of the then-western (now Midwestern) states. A Confederacy that controlled the lower half of the Mississippi River had an economic stanglehold onthe free states in that area. They would have been forced to either join the Confederacy in short order or be subjucated to them. The guiding principle of Thomas Jefferson's foreign policy that led to the Louisiana Purchase was still valid in 1860: The United States had to control New Orleans. And any power other than the US that controlled New Orleans was automatically the chief adversary of the US.
Plus, the most bitter controversy leading up to the Civil War was the status of fugitive slaves who escaped to the free states. The South insisted on stern federal laws that required states and localities to hunt down and return slaves who had escaped their vicious slave system. And none of the slaveowners or their representatives gave a damn about "states rights" in that regard. Since the slave states dominated the federal government throughout the 1850s, the South didn't have much to say about states rights in that period until Lincoln was elected in 1860. In any case, preserving and defending slavery always, always took priority over states rights considerations for the "lords of the lash".
Historical "what-ifs" are always tricky. But this one is less so than most. If the South was enraged at the Northern states in the 1850s for being too supportive of runaway slaves, when the Northern states labored under the tyrannical Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 demanded by the South, how much more would they be upset at an independent country on their northern borders with no legal or Constitutional obligation whatsoever to return their runaway human property? They would have tried to militarily conquer the North, or make it into something like vassal state.
Short of outright surrender to the Slave Power - which is the course that the pitiful President James Buchanan pursued between the 1860 election and Lincoln's inauguration in March 1861 - the Union had no choice put to put down the slaveowners' rebellion militarily.
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