In 1860, the people of the United States elected Abraham Lincoln to the office of President. For several decades prior to his inauguration, the issue of slavery had divided the nation culturally and politically. Generally speaking, the largely agrarian southern half of the nation viewed slave labor as an economic necessity -- particularly on large acreage plantations. The much more industrialized (and rapidly becoming more so), and small farm dominated northern half of the nation, which benefited from massive European immigration flows to its manufacturing centers, was far less economically dependent on slave labor.
As the Republic grew, adding new states whose clout in Congress affected the balance of political power, legislative compromises kept a rough political balance between "slave" and "free" states; but the inhumane practice of chattel slavery remained a belying blight on the moral standing of a nation that professed the God-given rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to "all" men in its founding documents.
As abolitionist fervor grew in the northern states and the southern states felt their 10th Amendment rights ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.") under threat, and sectional tension increased, "slave state" politicians (most of whom were slaveholders -- as opposed to the vast majority of their constituents) saw secession from the Union as the only means of maintaining their socio-economic status quo.
"States Rights!" was the secessionist battle cry.
Of course for the states in rebellion, "states rights" ultimately meant a state's right to maintain the institution of slavery. The southern canard that the Civil War was fought for "economic reasons" and was "not about slavery" fails to admit that the South's "economic reason" was slavery.
"Free the slaves!" was the Union battle cry.
But..., not necessarily at first. "Preserve the Union!" was actually the initial battle cry, reflecting the main war aim of Lincoln and company. It wasn't until several early battles, far bloodier than anyone had imagined, presaged a long war that would have a far greater cost in men and material than anyone had imagined, that the necessity for wrapping the Union cause in religious fervor became evident.
Abolitionist sentiment, whipped to a religious fever pitch from Northern pulpits, soon became a far more palatable reason for continuing the horrors of war than merely preserving the Union. The Battle Hymn of the Republic, with its stirring abolitionist themes, actually didn't make an appearance and gain any usage until well into the war
"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free..."
"If, in Jefferson’s words, the Constitution had erected a 'wall of separation' between the church and the federal government, there was no corresponding wall between church and culture. Closed off from making policy, churches organized independent societies for Bible distribution, for alcoholism reform, for observance of the Sabbath, and for suppressing vice and immorality. And, they grew. By the time the French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville took his celebrated tour of the United States in the 1830s, he was amazed to find that while 'in the United States religion' has no 'influence on the laws or on the details of political opinions,' nevertheless, 'it directs the mores' and through that 'it works to regulate the state.'"
Guelzo's premise (based in part on books by Harvard president Drew Faust, and Yale’s Harry Stout) was that religious fervor in the mid-1850s was a major contributor to the unprecedented carnage wreaked by the Civil War and that the United States' war aim of preserving the Union, if not initially driven by religious zeal to right a moral wrong, came to that notion as the only way to justify continuance of a war whose horrendous human toll was orders of magnitude beyond what had been expected at its outset. Guelzo warns,
"A nation guided by realpolitik knows when to cut its losses. A nation blinded by the moral gleam of a 'fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel' and charmed by the eloquence of a president with an uncanny knack for making his assessment of political problems sound like the Sermon on the Mount, obeys no such limitations."
In other words, a sense of a particular immorality, especially a wrong against humanity, buoyed by religious standards and proscriptions, becomes not just casus belli ("cause for war" for you LSU grads), but ultimately the force that propels one side so imbued to victory, no matter the cost.
In this, the Colonel thinks, is a warning of things to come in our Republic.
The Colonel believes that a great moral question -- greater even than the inhumanity of slavery which divided our Republic in the early 19th Century and led to the greatest loss of life of any war in our nation's history -- divides our nation today. He speaks, of course, of the issue of killing a child in the womb. Just as slavery set afire the hearts of the religious 150 years ago, today's commercialized killing of defenseless children is kindling a like flame. The Colonel knows; it burns in his, and not much stirs the cold, flinty cinder that passes for a heart deep in the military recesses of his chest.
The Colonel believes a Second American Civil War is all but inevitable. The sides of the conflict are setting up much like they did 150 years ago. "States' rights" will again be the secessionist battle cry. "States' rights" meaning the right to maintain the legality of the commercialized procedure that kills an innocent and completely helpless child in the womb, without limitation.
Apologists for the procedure that ends an innocent and completely helpless child's life misappropriate the term "slavery," referring to a woman "inconvenienced," "punished," or "handicapped" (their very own words) by carrying an "unwanted" (again, their words) child to full term as a "sexual slave." Imagine Lincoln's or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s reaction to such a comparison.
Apologists for the procedure that ends an innocent and completely helpless child's life hang their legal hats on the "settled law" (their words) of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. In Roe, the majority (in a 7 - 2 decision) ruled that a right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman's decision to end an innocent and completely helpless child's life, but that the state's interests in regulating the procedure that ends an innocent and completely helpless child's life -- the woman's health and the innocent and completely helpless child's viability -- were limited to regulation of the procedure that ends an innocent and completely helpless child's life to the third trimester of pregnancy.
There was a similar law-settling U.S. Supreme Court case prior to the First American Civil War. In the 1857 Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford , the majority (in a 7 - 2 decision) ruled that people in the United States who had been imported as slaves or were offspring of slaves, whether free or slave, were not American citizens and could not sue in federal court. The Court ruled that Congress lacked power to ban slavery in the U.S. territories, and that the rights of slaveowners were constitutionally protected by the Fifth Amendment because slaves were categorized as property.
In other words, men and women of African descent were NOT afforded the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." A clearly outrageous claim, since repudiated by a catastrophic war and amendments to the Constitution. What was "settled law" precedent by an overwhelming majority of the United States Supreme Court, was swept aside in a tsunami of blood and humane reason buoyed by religious belief in the sanctity of all human life.
Never mind that most Constitutional jurists and scholars believe that Roe's constitutional underpinnings are fabricated out of the thin air of convenience rather than any studied jurisprudence. No, we are to accept it as "settled law" and an enshrined right simply because it has been on the books for two generations.
By that reasoning, the heinous and inhumane institution of racial segregation should still be accepted practice. In 1896, the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Fergusson the majority ruled (7 - 1) that, in accordance with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment (the very same Constitutional Amendment from which the 1973 session of the Supreme Court drew a hitherto unknown right to privacy on which to base a woman's right to a procedure to end the life of an innocent and helpless child), states could practice racial segregation of public facilities as long as the denied race had access to roughly equal public facilities of their own.
Outrageous, no?
And yet, Plessy was the settled law of the land for three generations. The "separate but equal" precedent of Plessy was unanimously (9 - 0, for you LSU grads) overturned by the Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
That's right, segregation was settled law for fifty-eight years.
Frankly, the Colonel can not fathom the depths of depravity one must go to place an innocent and helpless child's right to life below that of a man's right to drink from the water fountain of his choice.
So, here's what the Colonel believes is on the horizon for our Republic:
As more and more judges and justices are appointed to the courts of our lands based on loyalty to the Constitution instead of subversion and perversion of its protections of liberty (of all persons) and prohibitions of government tyranny, the injustices and harm done over the last half century by judges and justices legislating from the bench will be overturned and reversed as surely as Brown overturned Plessy.
This, of course will not sit well with those who prefer personal convenience over constitutionality. The Colonel refers to those socialists who couldn't care less about the Constitution and who have congregated in a minority of states that are increasingly hostile to the federal government's enforcement of the Constitution in matters of life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness for its CITIZENS. When Roe, and other cherished socialist decisions, are challenged and lost, the socialist legislatures of those states will take more and more anti-federal steps, the likes of which will make the current anti-federal sanctuary laws look like child's play.
The federal government's hand will eventually be forced.
Federal troops will be sent to restore constitutionality.
Don't think it can happen? Look at Little Rock, Arkansas in 1956 or Oxford, Mississippi in 1962.
What's the worse case scenario? Socialist-governed state secession from the Union. Want to talk about precedent? Try Fort Sumter and the next four years of carnage on for size.
The official United Nations estimate of the death toll of the legal Atlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th Centuries is seventeen million. That number eclipses the loss of life during the First American Civil War by over 20 times.
Nearly fifty million innocent and completely helpless children have lost their lives to the legalized and, shamefully, commercialized practice of abortion. That number eclipses the loss of life in all of America's wars by nearly a factor of 40.
The Colonel is okay with a Second American Civil War to free the children, and the subsequent reconstruction of the socialists found in rebellion to the Constitution. It's what he is trained for. Heck, it's what he swore a solemn oath to do. But, if you aren't trained or sworn to that end, perhaps there's another way.
How about we compromise?
What if instead of the federal government subsidizing the commercial killing of innocent and completely helpless children, that money was instead set aside to fund the adoption of those children by people who desperately want them?
Might just derail the coming train wreck that will be the Second American Civil War.
Of course, that would ruin the chance for the Colonel and his kind to march into secessionist territory and stand on the necks of the rebels. But, that's the nature of compromise.
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