Michael F. Holt Book: Why the South HAD to Secede and Why Today is Even Worse

ORIGINALLY published on February 6th, 2014

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – UPDATED-23 July, 2013. This post has been updated to address some of the wild, hysterical claims of oh, so virtuous neo-abolitionists

“You are not free to debate many of the great issues of our time in your local town hall.  You’re going to be told, “Well, Congress, has already settled that.  The Supreme Court has already settled that.  You don’t have any say so in that.”  Republicanism is what was defeated.  This began the process of finally defeating republicanism in 1865.  It took another 70 years or so to completely snuff it out, but by the time of the Supreme Court revolution of the late 1950s, aided and abetted by the New Deal, republicanism lay dormant or near dormant.” Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

If you want the book, by all means, get it.  It is The Political Crisis of the 1850s by Michael F. Holt.  The book was recommended to me by the one and one Dr. Kevin Gutzman.  I have the book as a result of Gutzman urging me to get it.  I wanted to learn the true causes behind the War of Northern Aggression.  I’ve had the book for almost a year and I just finished it yesterday morning. I spent two and a half hours reading the last chapter and marking it up.  I saved this one passage for you.  This is from the book Political Crisis of the 1850s.  This is what you say to Chris Matthews, to Rachel Maddow, to conservatives who are on certain television networks and talk radio shows that say the War of Northern Aggression was fought exclusively, and everybody knows it, for slavery.  Yes, there were people who fought the War of Northern Aggression to protect slavery.  That was not the principle cause.  If you read Holt’s book, this is proven not only anecdotally, it is proven empirically with voting data, which is why this is important.  This is the one paragraph out of this book, if you take anything away from it, that you must get.Mike:  To the subject of secession, as it keeps coming up, and whenever you broach it, you’re going to be bludgeoned and clubbed over the head that it’s illegal.  [mocking] “Everybody knows the Civil War was fought over slavery.  We settled that.  Since there ain’t no more slavery, can’t be no more secession.  Move on.  It’s over.”  I want to read something to you.  I cannot find a digital copy of this book.  I do not recommend that you read this book.  It’s going to be one of the few I recommend you don’t read simply because it’s very long and written very esoterically.  As a matter of fact, it is written for people that read at the Flesch-Kincaid Level 22.  This is written by a professor for professors.  Since most of us aren’t professors, you’re going to have to read this thing two or three times to get it.  There’s a lot of stuff in there you probably don’t need to know or don’t want to know, but there are some nuggets in here.

[reading]

It must be reemphasized that white Southerners had always shared the same devotion to republican values as other white Americans.  Identifying an antirepublican dragon, associating it with the opposition party, and crusading to slay it, had been the basic tactic of southern politics since the 1820s.  As in the north, contests between the Whigs and Democrats had been explicitly portrayed as battles to save self-government, liberty and equality from power, privilege and despotism.  Southern Democratic voters, most of whom were nonslaveholders, had ardently embraced the Jacksonian fight against banks, paper money, corporations, and positive state action of any kind.  Party conflicts, moreover, had often reflected regional antagonism within states between wealthy planters from the black belt and poor nonslaveholding whites from the hill country or piney woods areas.

The Second Party System had provided an outlet for class and regional hostilities in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as in the upper south states by identifying within those states parties, whose programs fostered some powerful or privileged menace to the freedom, equality, and interest of voters, and by allowing people to defeat those supposed anti-republican forces by voting against the opposition party in local, state, and national elections.  Because parties presented alternative ways to secure republicanism and alternative vehicles through which contending groups could seek to control government, Southerners, just like other Americans, had believed that republican government could be preserved and perfected through the political process.  For Southerners, like other Americans, that achievement, and not the protection or extension of black slavery, was the preeminent political goal.

[end reading]

Mike:  That is why the South seceded.  Holt walks you through how they seceded.  First it was the states of the Deep South; there were seven.  The states of the Upper South resisted because they thought things were working out fine.  They thought they could just defeat Lincoln in Congress.  They had a majority.  They were ultimately convinced otherwise because they believed the election of Abraham Lincoln, and then the first actions by the Lincoln administration, posed a mortal threat to republicanism.  Ladies and gentlemen, that was their cause.

Let me ask you a question.  Doesn’t the Obama administration, didn’t the Bush administration before it, didn’t the Clinton administration pose mortal threats to republicanism?  Not only did they pose mortal threats to it, they have succeeded in almost snuffing it out.  You are not free to debate many of the great issues of our time in your local town hall.  You’re going to be told, “Well, Congress, has already settled that.  The Supreme Court has already settled that.  You don’t have any say so in that.”  Republicanism is what was defeated.  This began the process of finally defeating republicanism in 1865.  It took another 70 years or so to completely snuff it out, but by the time of the Supreme Court revolution of the late 1950s, aided and abetted by the New Deal, republicanism lay dormant or near dormant.  It was killed in the 1960s.  This is what must be revived, republicanism.  It doesn’t have anything to do with slavery, nothing, zero.  It has everything to do with local rule, self-determination and republicanism.


End Mike Church Show Transcript

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