Defending the Union?

This monument to the Union Veterans of the War of 1861-1865 stands beside the Cortland County Courthouse, Cortland, New York. The inscription reads:

CENTENNIAL OFFERING OF

CORTLAND COUNTY

TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE

WHO FOUGHT IN DEFENSE

OF THE UNION

1861 - 1865

A.D. 1876

This is such a very sad monument to an utterly needless war.  The monument, erected only 11 years after the War to Prevent Southern Independence, attempts to justify an unnecessary war by calling it a war to "defend" the Union. 

Actually, the Union, and the United States, were not in need of defense from the Confederate States because they were not under attack. It was the northern Union which was the aggressor in this unfortunate conflict, which resulted in the deaths of 620,000 American soldiers, plus countless thousands of innocent civilians, utterly destroying cities, villages and farms throughout the South.

Most historians agree that had there never been a so called "American Civil War," slavery would have soon ended peacefully in the South, just as it had ended in the North. Few people seem to remember that Massachusetts was the first state to legalize slavery, and that all of the slave ships which ever sailed from America were under the United States flag and from northern ports such as Boston, New York and Providence.

No slave ship ever sailed from the South, or under a Confederate flag. In fact, the Confederate Constitution outlawed the salve trade (the importation of new slaves) and many of the Confederate leaders were actively working toward a gradual emancipation - just as had happened in Europe and the northern states, and as was still happening in South America. In none of these other places was a war necessary to end slavery, and it would not have been necessary in the Confederate States of America.

Without the attrocities committed by the Yankees in this this War of Northern Aggression, and the subsequent punitive "Reconstruction," race relations would be much better today throughtout the United States. It is also quite possible that the Confederate States would have peacefully returned to the Union if only Lincoln would have ended the unfair taxation in which the Southern states paid up to 85% of the national budget, which was spent mostly in the North. Instead, Lincoln planned to raise the unjust tarrifs against the South by 40%, and then he called for an army to collect those taxes. That's when, and why, the South seceded. The terrible effects of Lincoln's misguided war are still being felt almost 150 years later.

Political Spin on a Union Monument

The inscription on the Union Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Oswego, New York, is typical of the political spin placed on such monuments in the North. The men from Oswego County who fought during the war of 1961-1865 were not "defending" the Union. The United States was not under attack.

The Confederate States of America no more wanted to conquer and rule the North than the American colonies wanted to capture Great Britain during the American Revolution. The conflict was entirely a "War of Northern Aggression," a term which is still in wide use in the South.

The southern states, which had a small minority of the nation's population and votes, were paying as much as 85 percent or more of the national budget through unfair trade tariffs. Abraham Lincoln, discounting the Southern vote, campaigned on a pledge to greatly increase those already lopsided taxes against the South. After he was elected, the southern states seceded, and did so with more just cause and with firmer legal standing than had the original 13 colonies when they seceded from Great Britain in 1776.

Upon taking office, Lincoln called for an army to invade the Confederate States of America. When almost all of his advisors were against the war, Lincoln responded, "If the South goes, who will pay for the government?"

I have visited and photographed scores of Union monuments but have never seen one which proclaims that the North fought to free the slaves. No one thought that to be the case at the time. In his campaign for president, Lincoln had been adamant that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it was already in practice. After all, Slavery had been legally practiced in every northern state and the North was still in the process of gradually phasing slavery out.

The slavery pretense for the war was tacked on in what Lincoln called a "war measure," long after the war began. My own Confederate great grandfather, and two of his brothers, were all three killed by Union troops long before Abraham Lincoln gave his Emancipation Proclamation, which did not free a single slave, including thousands of slaves in several Union states.