Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. is an American author and military historian who specializes in the German war effort during World War II and the Confederate war effort during the American Civil War. He is the author of more than 40 books. Since I have pay more attention to history lately, One of his 2021 book caught my attention: It Wasn’t About Slavery – The Great Lie of the Civil War. it challenges the causes of our nation’s greatest tragedy. It gets into the macro issues, global trade, tariffs (the only source of federal revenue before income tax), the arguments over our form of government, the industrial revolution, global trade, sectionalism
Mitcham argues in the book: no political party advocated freeing the slaves in the presidential election of 1860. The Republican Party platform opposed the expansion of slavery to the western states, but it did not embrace abolition. The real cause of the war was a dispute over money and self-determination.
Before the Civil War, the South financed most of the federal government—because the federal government was funded by tariffs, which were paid disproportionately by the agricultural South that imported manufactured goods. Yet, most federal government spending and subsidies benefited the North. The South wanted a more limited federal government and lower tariffs—the ideals of Thomas Jefferson—and when the South could not get that, it opted for independence.
Lincoln was unprepared when the Southern states seceded, and force was the only way to bring them—and their tariff money—back. That was the real cause of the war. A well-documented and compelling read by a master historian, It Wasn’t About Slavery will change the way you think about Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the cause and legacy of America’s momentous Civil War.
Another book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America by Mary Grabar rebuke Zinn’s history as popular, but it is also massively wrong. Her argument open our mind to different perspective of the debates. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: A National Bestselling Book on U.S. History and the Fight for Racial Equality has sold more than 2.5 million copies. It is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors who know better, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation.
- How Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of Indians
- Why the American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time
- How the United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealth
- Why Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals
- How the Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule
- Why the Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders
To be a good citizen of United States, we certainly need to cultivate critical thinking, upgrade our qualification, and even more so for the government officials who take big paycheck.