The Civil War Again

Libertarian Girl is writing about the Civil War again. In her latest she makes the statement:

Leftists would rather believe that the Civil War was a fight about tariffs, turning a noble cause into a greedy war about nothing but money and allowing leftists to wallow in guilt about being American.

I'm not sure where she's getting this interpretation. It isn't Leftists that think this. Leftists are the ones that think the civil war was only about freeing slaves. They also believe myths like the South's economy was based on cotton, which isn't true either.

Leftists, "blue staters", aka yankees, love to wrap themselves in the self-righteousness of freeing the slaves and claiming the South fought tooth and nail to hang on to the institution because our economy would fail when we had to pay people to pick cotton. Sorry, only 18% of the South's 569,201 farms produced enough agricultural staples to be classified as plantations by the Census Bureau. Fewer than 5% of the South's white's owned any slaves, and fewer than a third were even members of slave ownning families. Most Southerners made their living raising livestock, primarily hogs* but cattle too. This was, and still is, a battle of states rights. You can see it to this day in the recent efforts to abolish the electoral college by Sen. Feinstein and the grandstanding by Sen. Boxer and Congresswomam Tubbs in Ohio. It is nothing but an attempt to destroy this country by destroying federalism and states rights.

She says:

Paleo-conservative southerners also want to revise Civil War history. These types want to revel in the supposed "glory" of the Old South, and there's nothing glorious about a Confederacy that existed for nothing except slavery. So they made up the story that the South was about noble things like states' rights. Yet, in fact, the Confederacy was about nothing but slavery. The "states' rights" argument is bogus. The only "right" that was at issue was the "right" to own slaves, which is a right that no state should be allowed to have.

Besides the fact that that statement is breathtaking in its ignorance, it is also sad commentary on this country that the majority of people believe this PC rubbish and somehow seem to believe that if they dare to even entertain any other ideas their souls will forever be tainted. They will be branded RACIST for all the world to see.

Update: John Ray brings to our attention an article about Political Correctness in the case of professor Summers comments:

The soul of Political Correctness is a blinkered insistence that something is true, because of politics, especially in the face of all reason and evidence to the contrary.

As I have already stated above, the same can be seen in play in the debate of the causes of the Civil War.

*Walter Prescott Webb's classic The Great Plains provides a table that shows the number of Texas cattle driven to market in each of the fifteen years from 1866 to 1880. The average annual number was about 280,000, the total during the period 4,223,497. By contrast, during the last fifteen years of the antebellum period, Southerners drove or otherwise marketed an average of 4,468,400 hogs per year, the total during the period was 67,026,000. -- from Cracker Culture, Celtic Ways in the Old South, Grady McWhinney, pg. 53-55.