By Michael November 25, 2012
While watching the Florida State Seminoles play against the Florida Gators yesterday afternoon I was appalled by a commercial (see video below) glorifying Abraham Lincoln and celebrating the South’s conquest by the United States.
The commercial singles out for praise a bill introduced by US Congressman Justin Morrill, a New England protectionist and one of the founders of the Republican Party, which created a system of land grant universities (click here for a University of Florida website praising Lincoln and the land grant college system he signed into US law). Morrill, along with other leading Republicans, was an anti-Southern partisan and pushed for a tariff which effectively doubled taxes on Southerners (who paid from two-thirds to three-fourths of the tax, depending on which source is used).
The Northern majority in the US House of Representatives allowed for those such as Morrill to spend the Southerners’ tax money on internal improvements in the North. This was a regional system of wealth redistribution from Southerners to Northerners.
The commercial begins by saying ‘as the Civil War [sic] raged….’ As most Southern nationalists understand, there was no civil war in the United States in the 1860s. The South did not fight to gain control of the US central government; it fought a war to secede from that government. Northerners, on the other hand, fought a war to control the South and prevent Southerners from becoming independent. The war did not abstractly ‘rage.’ Rather, it was waged by the United States against the Southern people to prevent their self-determination, which Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence referred to as an ‘unalienable’ right of all people.
It then goes on to say that ‘President Lincoln knew that access to higher education could help unite the nation. [sic]‘ Here again, we must correct the people who wrote the script for this commercial. The United States was and is a government. Originally it was a Federal Union of sovereign States. Lincoln’s war effectively destroyed the sovereignty of the States and created a centralised regime. While the de facto nature of the central government’s relationship to the States (which should no longer be referred to as States since today their peoples enjoy none of the sovereignty that was won in the Revolutionary War) was changed by Lincoln and his armies, neither the government nor the people of the United States are in any true sense a ‘nation.’
The US population is today a motley assortment of nationalities composed of numerous racial, ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic groups. There is no national body of people called ‘Americans.’ Nor was the North and South ‘united’ by Lincoln; rather, the South was conquered and subjected to US rule. As nineteenth century Southern nationalist leader Robert Barnwell Rhett wrote in in his memoir after the South’s conquest:
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While watching the Florida State Seminoles play against the Florida Gators yesterday afternoon I was appalled by a commercial (see video below) glorifying Abraham Lincoln and celebrating the South’s conquest by the United States.
The commercial singles out for praise a bill introduced by US Congressman Justin Morrill, a New England protectionist and one of the founders of the Republican Party, which created a system of land grant universities (click here for a University of Florida website praising Lincoln and the land grant college system he signed into US law). Morrill, along with other leading Republicans, was an anti-Southern partisan and pushed for a tariff which effectively doubled taxes on Southerners (who paid from two-thirds to three-fourths of the tax, depending on which source is used).
The Northern majority in the US House of Representatives allowed for those such as Morrill to spend the Southerners’ tax money on internal improvements in the North. This was a regional system of wealth redistribution from Southerners to Northerners.
The commercial begins by saying ‘as the Civil War [sic] raged….’ As most Southern nationalists understand, there was no civil war in the United States in the 1860s. The South did not fight to gain control of the US central government; it fought a war to secede from that government. Northerners, on the other hand, fought a war to control the South and prevent Southerners from becoming independent. The war did not abstractly ‘rage.’ Rather, it was waged by the United States against the Southern people to prevent their self-determination, which Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence referred to as an ‘unalienable’ right of all people.It then goes on to say that ‘President Lincoln knew that access to higher education could help unite the nation. [sic]‘ Here again, we must correct the people who wrote the script for this commercial. The United States was and is a government. Originally it was a Federal Union of sovereign States. Lincoln’s war effectively destroyed the sovereignty of the States and created a centralised regime. While the de facto nature of the central government’s relationship to the States (which should no longer be referred to as States since today their peoples enjoy none of the sovereignty that was won in the Revolutionary War) was changed by Lincoln and his armies, neither the government nor the people of the United States are in any true sense a ‘nation.’
The US population is today a motley assortment of nationalities composed of numerous racial, ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic groups. There is no national body of people called ‘Americans.’ Nor was the North and South ‘united’ by Lincoln; rather, the South was conquered and subjected to US rule. As nineteenth century Southern nationalist leader Robert Barnwell Rhett wrote in in his memoir after the South’s conquest:
A political union can only exist between independent political entities. Such was the Union constituted by the Constitution of the United States, “between the States.” But this Union – a Union of independent political entities – a Union of free-will and choice -, is gone; and the connexion [sic] now existing themselves what were formerly States, is no union at all; but is the operation of the different parts of a central consolidated power, held together by fear and force.Southerners did not need Federally-created universities. Had the South not been invaded by the USA, a quarter million of its people killed by those who claimed to be their countrymen, and much of its pre-war wealth looted or destroyed, its people would have continued to build universities as they needed them. Southerners in 1860 had one of the wealthiest societies in the world. They also had an understanding of education which fit their society. This system was quite different from New England’s system of public education but then the two peoples came from very different cultures and had different needs and social goals.
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