Woke theory and Classical Liberalism

THE ECONOMIST, A BRIT PUBLICATION WITH AN INTERNATIONAL STAFF HAS TURNED IT’S BACK ON THE DEMOCRAT LEFT. Wokeism is a threat and violates the principles of classical liberalism, they say. Amazing—a publication that has always seemingly to been run by lib Democrats is now turning against them! But they explain their split. Classical liberalism (in which they pride themselves) believes that human progress is found in debate and reform, individual dignity, open markets, limited government, and separation of powers.  To an American, this sounds a lot like Conservatism.  How indeed did anyone who believes such things ever start sounding like the LDP of Canada or hate Trump like a lib Dem? And from that perspective are now appalled by the Left?

            The answer to this puzzle is that America and Europe have fought different battles.  Europe began with the confessional state and forced belief.  Spain and Italy had the Inquisition, Calvin’s Switzerland had death for dissenters, and everybody had pogroms for the Jews.  Free-thinking intellectuals were at war with the confessional state throughout the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Why did the churches behave so autocratically, especially during the Middle Ages?  Well, they learned it from the barbarians who came in the 4^th to 10^th century. Historian Will Durant relates stories of how, even after a surge of barbarians, the Roman citizens still had skills, but the barbarians rejected good physicians preferring magic, rejected good Roman Law in favor of trial by ordeal.  But most tellingly, could not be converted to better practices. They became nominally Christian, practically pagan.  The fire of Christian faith in Augustine, Patrick, Ambrose, and Jerome grew into a sort of dim, illiterate magic even though Europe became Christian.  When one possesses a strong God, dissent is not threatening. Jesus just let disbelievers walk away.  When one believes in a weak God, one must squelch debate and crush dissent.  It carried over. In modern Europe, polls have shown that more people believe in trolls, spells and fairies than the Christian faith.  Hence the French Revolution wanted “brotherhood” while the American Revolution wanted Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  When the consensus of brotherhood (the population or ruling elite) chooses rights they ascribe government as the author.  When they think morality, they think of something fuzzy, personal and hard to define.  A European thinks they are free because the government gives them the right to wear a tee shirt with an obscene hand gesture. An American thinks of freedom as freedom of opportunity, endowed by the Creator which cannot be taken away.

            The 13 colonies,were every bit as much confessional states as the British back home, and equally divided.  But the Great Awakening, a Christian Revival, swept the colonies in the 1740s and everything changed.  It became apparent to most people that finding peace with God was imperative in the harsh wilderness.  And that there were many versions of Christian belief (and others) but each person must work it out to come to grips with not just their faith but with their mission in life. British historian Paul Johnson says that America solved the dilemma of unity vs. tolerance by insisting on a common ethic of public behavior but allowing freedom of religion and free speech, Liberty, for the individual. Johnson, a Catholic, says this has changed American Catholics into a people who concern more with personal belief than Papal dispensations. Thus free speech was not a goal or ideal but a right secured by the Divine.  So while Europeans were happy that Jefferson wrote, “the loathsome combination of church and state” as a root cause of evils, they were tepid over complete religious and speech tolerance.  The upshot of the Bill of Rights was to permanently establish certain rights as bedrock to the American way. Hence others—atheists or Buddhists--could subscribe to America and be in unity with a melting pot nation. Nowhere is this more apparent than the enormous migration of Jews to USA.  Other countries might claim they were welcoming, but in America you get Rights!

            Comes now the woke-o locos.  They arose from an academic society that came up with a vague, malleable theory of racism associated with society’s structure and it has leftist, socialistic goals. Contradictions, for example: if the socialist goal is a universal public education/indoctrination, isn’t the insistence that Afro-Americans attend failing inner city schools a racism structure? Wokeism appeals to the usual alienation of youth and is encouraged by administrations of colleges. (Leftist university administrators outnumber moderates and conservatives 13 to 1)  None of these have to answer for what they create. Since those youth have now arrived as workers and leaders, they demand woke speech, woke business, and strident journalism, Democrat Party rule, and corporations.  Long term, this won’t survive.  No other system of business beats capitalism, but the woke-inistas won’t allow capitalism.  Math classes now have to talk to students about gender choice. Loss of freedom of thought will bring innovation and science to a halt. Weaponizing social media will only drive the opposition forces underground to foment civil war against this new status quo.

            Classical Liberals of Europe see all the evils of the confessional state in the woke movement—imposed orthodoxy, expulsion of heretics, book burning and creeds.  Actually, that’s rather amusing beecause both groups start with a godless premise. 

Icons and John of Damascus

Go to an Eastern Orthodox church and you will see people bowing to a picture and kissing it.  This is very disconcerting to a Protestant. It was just as controversial in the 700s as it is today. It was defended by John of Damascus, one of the prime heroes of the church.  John (ca. 675–749) is known as the great compiler and summarizer of the orthodox faith and the last great Greek theologian. He was born right after the Muslims overran Syria and his father was an administrator in the Byzantine Empire who continued to work for the Umayyad Caliph. His family was Arab-Syrian Christian. John may have had an early job in the Muslim court; we don’t know. He was certainly a polymath (a whiz in many things--math, art, theology and government.)  In that era, Muslims were on a constantly victorious march and could afford to be tolerant and content just to take over rule of formerly Christian countries, using the established officials.

 At age 41, in 716, John entered a monastery outside of Jerusalem and was ordained a priest. When the Byzantine emperor Leo in 726 issued a decree forbidding images (icons), John forcefully resisted. In his Apostolic Discourses he argued for the legitimacy of the veneration of images, which earned him the condemnation of the Iconoclast Council in 754. What needs to be understood about an icon (image) is that it may seem to be just a painted picture, but it is first a written Word of God.  “Icon” is Greek for image, used in scripture repeatedly to signify that Christ was God’s image/icon, and we are too.  God’s Word is an image/icon put in the form of symbols on a page. (Strange way of expressing it. Protestants might choke if told not to bring their Bible-icon to church.) And we confess that Jesus is this image/icon/”real physical matter” that is God in the flesh, John asserted.  In 787, John’s defense was presented to the Council at Nicea and the church ruled in favor of icon use.  But the practice of praying with a picture icon is more widespread in the Orthodox Church than the Roman Catholic Church.

John wrote the first definitive defense of the Christian faith against Islam and was highly critical of the Quran. His Fount of Wisdom was a massive summary of Christian truth from previous Christian theologians.  He wrote treatise after treatise against the heresies that plagued the Eastern world.  His defense of the orthodox faith left a lasting stamp on all of Christendom.  In the Lutheran Service Book are two hymns by John of Damascus, both Paschal (Easter) hymns:  “The Day of Resurrection” and “Come, You Faithful, Raise the Strain”.

John of Damascus is both a saint in the Catholic Church and the leading hero of the Eastern Orthodox faith. But he receives little mention among historians, perhaps a result of their secular bias.

Church changes that demanded Reformation

 

            By the end of the Middle Ages many people had concluded the church needed reform.  What had caused this and where did the church loose it?

            The Germanic Lombards invaded northern Italy in the 500s and began overrunning small Italian principalities down the peninsula which had been formerly retaken by the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian.  By 750, Lombards had conquered almost all of Italy (including Ravenna, the new Provincial capital and seat of the Papacy) except the Duchy of Rome.  The Pope had one ally, the Frankish kings.  King Charles Martel had driven back the Muslims at the Battle of Tours in 732, saving Christendom.  His son, Pepin III then defeated the Lombards and took over central Italy.  He made the Lombards sign a peace and gave the Italian territories to the Pope in 756.  Suddenly Popes had land and politics to deal with, as if they were kings. For 800 years barbarians overran Europe.  Worst were the last two, Magyars (Hungarians) and Vikings in the 10^th century.. But then suddenly Stephen of the Magyars and Canute of the Danes converted to Christianity.  Europeans were stunned to find there were no more barbarians. All of Christendom believed they had been saved by God –much more so than by their own feckless kings. As a result, the Papacy rose in admiration throughout the West.  The Pope in 999 was Sylvester II who was also the First French Pope.  He was a wonderful church father as well as a scholar who had assembled learning from the East.  Use of the abacus in math, celestial globes of the heavens, Euclidean geometry, the astrolabe for ship navigation, Roman surveying and music theory were some of his accomplishments.

            This gave the popes a wedge to open the door to further power.  Pope Gregory, in the mid 1000s, advocated reform for the clergy.  Priests and Bishops should be celibate, could not pay for their offices, and bishops were to be chosen by the pope (rather than popular election or kingly appointment).  This was controversial. But by 1198 when Innocent III became pope, the ideas had become accepted.  He demanded that the papacy be superior to all kings as well as all Christendom.  And since church councils were blessed by the Pope, they were declared to be correct in all judgments.  If a country chose its king by their own succession, not consulting the Pope, he used the Interdict—all people of the realm were excommunicated until they relented. The Fourth Lateran Council was called and declared the clergy were to be celibate and a higher form of human than the laity. Jews were declared blasphemers of Christ and pograms began. Innocent started the 4^th Crusade against the Muslims in the Holy Land.  It didn’t end well, when the Crusaders lost.  On the way home they sacked Constantinople, a Christian ally, and put a Latin ruler in place.  Another papal crusade against the (South France) Albigensian heresy ended in genocide. Innocent established two mendicant orders to do his missions and politics, the Francisans and Dominicans.  Franciscans ran elementary schools and Dominicans ran the colleges and had a monopoly on all teaching.  This was strongly challenged by the Reformation.  Dominicans held that reason could deduce more teaching than the Bible contained. After Innocent died in 1216, St. Lutgarda had a dream in which he cried out for help to her to get him out of purgatory (He had refused to bow his head during the Nicene Creed).  She prayed him out and thus the notion of purgatory went from theory to accepted fact. One of Innocent’s loyal Franciscans, Peter Olivi, advanced the idea of papal infallibility, (when the Pope speaks doctrinally,ex cathedra, his word is held infallible).  This idea too, was controversial. It had advocates and detractors at the time of Luther.  Catejan was a strong advocate who used it to condemn Luther.  Papal Infallibility was not formalized by the Catholic Church until 1870.

            Innocent III, it would seem, was anything but innocent.  Disagreement with many of the assertions of the 13^th century surrounding his papacy formed the heart of the Reformation. It should be noted that while Protestants had a Reformation, Catholics who stayed loyal also had a Reformation in the Council of Trent 1563, and continue to reform in Vatican II and III into the present day. Thus many modern Catholics are critical of Popes on social matters and quite a few, like those who headed an internal investigation of the priest sex scandals, are advocates of abolishment of celibacy.  

Utterly Tragic history between Old and New Testaments

 

The piece of Jewish history we are missing from the Bible (between Testaments) is like a horror show of Jews gaining then wasting independence with immoral rulers.  It began with Greeks overthrowing the Persians who ruled Palestine. In 323BC Alexander the Great died and the empire was divided between 4 generals.  Seluceus got Syria and Palestine and his dynasty ruled Israel for 160 years. But things went poorly. Judas Maccabeus and sons, Jonathan and Simon,led a guerilla revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Antiochus had a statue of Zeus built over the altar in the Temple at Jerusalem,164 BC, then offered a pig to Zeus as sacrifice. The “Abomination of Desecration” was too much for the Jews who fought a war led by the Maccabe brothers and won independence.  Simon succeeded brother Jonathan and was declared High Priest, National Governor, and Commander of the Army. Maccabean heirs=Hasmonean Dynasty.  But Simon was assassinated by the Ptolemies of Egypt in 134 BC. 

            John Hyrcanus, Simon’s son, came to power.  “Hyrcanus” indicates his close ties to Greek culture (Hellenization), and he hired a mercenary army to battle the Seleucids, whose Syrian empire was breaking up.  The Samaritans opposed Hyrcanus. They were a group composed of Jews left behind from the Babylonian Captivity 400 years before who had intermarried with Arabs and altered their faith into a pseudo-Judaism. Their language, Aramaic, became dominant and hence became the tongue of Jesus.  Hyrcanus laid siege to Samaria, destroyed their temple atop Mt. Gerizim, but he didn’t try to gather them back into the Jewish traditions.  He then conquered Edom and forced  the Idumeans (as Edomites are called) to convert, at least in name only.  Conquest, not faith, was the motivation for Hyrcanus.

            Aristobulus I succeeded Hyrcanus and ruled for just one year.  More Greek than anything, he wore a crown and took the title of ‘king’ rather than ‘ethnarch’ as his forebears had done. His brother Alexander Janneus then became king and married his widow, Salome Alexandra. He was a ruthless ruler who even killed another brother.  In a 6-year war with the Pharisees (sect which disagreed with the priestly succession), he killed 50,000 Jews. He fiercely defeated the Ptolemaic Empire of Egypt, the Nabateans (Arab traders south of Dead Sea), the Decapolis and Transjordan (northern Greek-settled areas).  But he was so sacrilegious as High Priest, his own people rebelled.  He refused to perform the water libation ceremony properly, pouring the water on his feet instead of the altar.  The crowd gasped and began to pelt him with citrons. Continued criticism led him to kill 6000 people in Jerusalem. An insurrection resulted with Seleucid help.  After narrowly defeating the dissidents, he had 800 Pharisees crucified.  On his deathbed, 76 BC, he gave power to his wife Salome, who was evidently the power behind the thrones.

            Salome had Pharisee relatives whom she had protected. She brought about peace in the realm by bringing back the Sanhedrin as a supreme court, stocking it with Pharisees. She stripped leadership posts from the Hellenized Sadducees who rivaled them.  And she fortified various cities so that Cleopatra and the Ptolemeies thought twice about attack.  But she ruled for only 9 years and her son Aristobulus II was conspiring to overthrow her the day she died. Thereupon a civil war broke out between Aristobulus II and his brother Hyrcanus II.  Both brothers rejected most Jewish traditions and were essentially Greeks with wives to match. First Hyrcanus, then Aristobulus was defeated, eventually leading to a siege of the Temple Mount which was totally trashed. Finally,63 BC, the Roman General Pompey moved in with Roman legions and a puppet Governor, Herod the Great, to take control of Palestine. Herod emplaced a massive Roman tax system that, over time drove many farmers bankrupt.  By his death in 4 BC, Herod personally owned half the land in Palestine, taken over from destitute farmers.   The Hasmonean dynasty had become a farce of fathers killing sons and wives in power grabs, religious leaders leading Hellenized lives.  That is the world to which Jesus was born.

How Britain became re-Christianized and Civilzed

 

Rome abandoned Britain around 400 AD and the society began to collapse.  The culture was too advanced and complex, too economically interdependent on southern Europe, to continue as it had been and defend itself as Rome had done.  By the time the pagan Saxons, Angles, Danes, Norwegians and Jutes arrived, much had fallen into disarray.  Farming had become subsistence, pottery ceased to be mass produced, brick building disappeared and wouldn’t return until the 14^th century. The invasion by Saxons, et. al. was piecemeal and took place over 200 years. Saxons were illiterate.

            So how did England become literate and Christian again?  A priest at St. Andrews monastery in Rome took the name of Augustine and was commissioned to take a stab at converting Britain. In 601 he was welcomed by Aethelbert, King of Kent, one of the 7 kingdoms (called the Saxon Heptarchy), located in extreme SE England.  Aethelbert had a Christian wife, Bertha, daughter of the king of the Franks. Augustine took up residence in a church that had been vacant for 200 years at Canterbury, was later designated Archbishop. That title comes down to us today. In a short time Aethelbert was baptized and many of his servants. Aethelbert thus became the first Christian English king.

             Augustine failed to gain allegiance of the underground Celtic church but was successful spreading the Gospel. In 625, Edwin, King of Northumbria (far north, next to Scotland), married Aethelbert’s daughter, Ethelburh, who brought along her chaplain, Paulinius. On the day of his first anniversary, Edwin narrowly escaped assassination and Ethelburh gave birth to a daughter.  Sobered by these experiences he promised Paulinius that he would become a Christian if God would give him victory over the West Saxons.  When Edwin won the battle it made him the most powerful king in the Heptarchy. He was baptized in 627 and Northumbria became Christian quickly. The influence of these two kings was compelling for other kings to adopt Christianity. East Anglia lies on the east coast (Suffolk and Norfolk today).  Redwald the king was radically pagan and drove his son, Sigebert, first to Aethelbert’s court and then to exile in France.  In 634 Sigebert returned and took control of the throne.  A devout Christian, he became so involved with the evangelism that in 638 he abdicated (retired) to a monastery and left control to his son. The final kingdom to accept Christianity was Sussex where a deposed king of Northumbria, Wilfrid, worked to bring Saxon nobles to Christ there.

            With the conversion of the Saxons came monasteries, the only place where one could obtain literacy and learning. Culture exploded in England.  In 676, an illiterate herdsman named Caedmon, after an evening of revelry had a vision that commanded him to write poetry for Christ.  In the vision, he recited verses he’d never heard, and to his surprise the following morning he could recite them perfectly. He was introduced to Hilda, abbess of Whitby who verified that he was reciting scripture.  She read him more scripture and he made them into more poetic verses. He spent the rest of his life turning Bible stories into verse, which were memorized and recited all over Dark Age Britain.  Boniface was born in Devonshire  and became a priest with a call to evangelize Europe.  He labored in Frisia (original homeland of the Saxons around present Bremerhaven), Holland and Germany with fearless methods.  He chopped down the sacred oak of Thor and tore down pagan shrines, preached and converted thousands.  He was martyred in Frisia in 754. A monk named Bede at Jarrow wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It is the primary and sometimes sole source for early English history. Alcuin of York was persuaded by Charlemagne to come teach his French clergy.  He taught Latin, culture, and theology and invented a French style of writing called Caroline Miniscule with small and capital letters that we use today. He taught Charlemagne and most of his court to read and write. He is considered the most significant figure in Western European classical and religious revival that began in the late 700s. The fact that his learning surpassed the Franks shows how fast Old English culture had risen.

Anne Sullivan, Samuel Clemens, and Helen Keller

 

 Little Anne was 5 when she contacted Trachoma, a bacterial disease that leads to rough scars inside the eyelids, erosion of the cornea and eventual blindness.   At 8 her mother died of tuberculosis and the children were orphaned.  Half-blind, Anne Sullivan was sent to an asylum at Tewksbury, Massachusetts.  The nuns there mismanaged the orphanage, but loved the children and taught Anne to be generous. They taught her to finger-spell, a method of touching fingers to a palm to spell a word.  Perhaps she could help another blind person in some way. Anne was transferred to Perkins School for the Blind soon thereafter. Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama and at age 19 months contracted something, perhaps Scarlet Fever, which left her deaf and blind.  She lived, as she described it, “at sea in a dense fog.’ But she was not dumb, having devised over 60 signs with which she communicated to Martha Washington, daughter of the black cook of Helen’s wealthy parents. The Perkins school was eventually contacted and they sent Anne to help the Helen.  It was an enormous struggle at first.  Anne was relentless in finger spelling but 7 year old Helen didn’t even know what a word was. Then one day, Anne ran cool water over Helen’s hand, and finger-spelled W-A-T-E-R. Helen remembered, “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten —A thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!"  That phraseology isn’t accidental.  Anne had shared her faith with Helen too.

            The brilliant student progressed rapidly,  Anne devised ways to teach vocabulary, not just names for everything.  The two were sent back to Perkins and then to 2 deaf schools in New York City.  At age 14, 1894, Helen met Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, and they became best friends. “To me, he symbolizes the pioneer qualities—the large, free, unconventional, humorous point of view of men who sail new seas and blaze new trails through the wilderness.” The famed author helped arrange for her to attend a secondary school and then Radcliffe College where she graduated in 1904, the first blind-deaf person to ever get a Bachelor of Arts degree.  She learned Braille and found she could “hear” music through vibrations, and identify people by their walk.  Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Keller learned to speak and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures on aspects of her life. She learned to "hear" people's speech using the Tadoma method, which means using her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker. She would travel to Clemens’ Connecticut home and practice on him. One evening he offered to read to her from his short story, “Eve’s Diary.” But how would they arrange it? She said, “Oh, you will read aloud and my teacher will spell your words into my hand.” “Well, I would have thought you could read my lips,” he teased. But she did.  She rested her fingers lightly upon his lips, felt his vibrating voice which she instantly identified as his southern drawl, and tried to not be mixed up by his gesticulations as he read. “To one hampered and circumscribed as I am it was a wonderful experience to have a friend like Mr. Clemens.  He never made me feel that my opinions were worthless…He knew that we do not think with eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measured by 5 senses.  He kept me always in mind while he talked, and treated me like a competent human being. That is why I loved him. Whenever I touched his face, his expression was sad, even when he was telling a funny story.  He smiled, not with the mouth but with his mind—a gesture of the soul rather than the face. Ah, how sweet and poignant the memory of his soft slow speech playing over my listening fingers…It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me, but when I recollect the treasure of friendship that has been bestowed upon me I withdraw all charges against life.  If much has been denied me, much, very much has been given me.”

            Keller went on to learn English, French, German, and Latin in braille, to write like Twain and to become world famous.  Clemens died 1910, the year after he had read “Eve’s Diary” to her. Anne Sullivan died in 1936 holding Keller’s hand, herself totally blind by then. Helen Keller lived and lectured for years until she died in 1968.  Her life was portrayed by Patty Duke in both play and film.  The interaction between Samuel Clemens and Helen Keller reminds us of ourselves and our best friend, Jesus Christ.  We are hampered with sin, but He found us not worthless.  We revere his Word, yet know that His Truth transcends the mere human words on a page--we see with eyes of faith. And though we are handicapped, He has given us New Life, so much that we cannot complain.  And we owe much to our generous human friends.  We “see” Jesus in them. Very much has been given us.

Understanding the background of the Civil War

God chose to free a bunch of slaves, the Jews, in order to lay the groundwork for his ultimate covenant of freeing humanity from the bondage of sin--is how Christians see it.  God hates slavery, said the Abolitionists, a movement against slavery that originated in churches in the generation before the Civil War.  Lincoln took this failing attempt of Christians to defeat slavery and translated it into easy moral reasoning fit for his election in 1860. “If a man raises a crop, why doesn’t he deserve the fruits of his labor?” “”You think slavery has to do with intelligence? The smart man rules the dumb? Well, someday you will meet someone smarter than you. Does that mean you must be his slave?”  Slavery is still political. Some ways of looking at the Civil War disagree with the established historic facts.

            It would be good to remember a few hard facts.  Cotton was so valuable and desired worldwide that it amounted to half the exports of USA. It was a non-crop until the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, then became virtually the single crop of the South after 1820.  It still took hand-picking. Slaves were so valued they sold for the price of a good house ($100,000 in today’s money). Plantation owners grew fabulously rich but represented only 5% of the population of the agrarian South.  Many more southerners were hillbillies, micro-farmers, and shop owners. The plantations became a huge lobbying group, bought newspapers, and swayed public opinion.  Nonetheless, 13 anti-slavery churches existed in Charleston in 1861. In 1860, the North had 21 million people; the South, 9 M with 4M being slaves. The North had almost all the manufacturing, naval power, and finances.  But the secret weapon of the Confederacy’s Democrats were the Northern Democrats.  N. Democrats had been organized by Martin Van Buren of NY with the goal of an Urban Plantation.  Immigrants (Irish and Germans) in ghettos were held in subjugation, denied many rights until they spoke English and became educated.  Manufacturers were the ‘plantation owners’. The goal of the South in seceding was to divide the country into two until the N. Democrats could win and bring down the hated Lincoln. This explains why the South seemingly had a tantrum and attacked Ft. Sumpter, when they could have simply stood fast.  Slavery could only have been abolished by constitutional amendment—‘fat chance’ politically, requiring 2/3 of both houses and ¾ of the states. In 1860 there was not one slave owned in USA by a Republican, the anti-slavery party, but many N. Democrats tacitly approved of the institution.

Revisionist historians dislike this traditional view.  They dethrone Lincoln as a closet racist and claim the war was about states rights, neglecting the role of Northern Democrats as allies of the South. They quote Lincoln writing to Horace Greely about how he didn’t care about slavery, just saving the union.  But this came at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, when Lincoln was coy, trying to hold onto border slave states and “War” Democrats, those who supported the union but let Lincoln know that they would switch sides if the war became about slavery. Lincoln was walking a tightrope politically, pretending The Union was the cause.  Jefferson Davis, meanwhile was giving fiery speeches about how it was all about slavery and how they had to simply hang on until the N. Democrats defeated Lincoln and demanded a truce, whereupon the South could become a separate, slave country, or a special section of USA.  

There was an earlier attempt at historic revisionism at the end of the 19^th century.  The “concealment version” of the war held that the Southern instigation of war was not due to partisan disagreement over slavery but to states rights and defense of their homeland.  This was the narrative of the 1915 movie, Birth of a Nation and the resurgence of the KKK after WW I. It was thinly disguised racism arguing for a natural privilege in the old Southern order. After the Civil War the partisan bickering didn’t stop.  Democrats opposed the 13^th 14^th and 15^th Amendments. The use of racial terrorism brought down the Reconstruction, running off Yankees and replacing the slavery with a version of bond serfdom in share-cropping and Jim Crow laws.

John Wilkes Booth was a typical War Democrat from Maryland (a slave state) that found himself switching sides after Atlanta fell to Sherman in the summer of 1864.  But Booth was no lone wolf.  In 1864 Democrat newspapers all over the North, even as far as The LaCrosse Wisconsin Democrat demanded assassination of Lincoln and Grant.  Booth echoed this, “Our cause is almost lost and something decisive and great must be done.”

That bitter partisanship  led to USA’s worst war is embarrassing for modern Americans still embroiled in partisanship. The history of racism is embarrassing for Democrats.  Northern casual ethnicism employed by the very manufacturers who made America grow is embarrassing to Northerners. Racial segregation just about everywhere embarrasses modern Americans and Republicans. Still the historic lesson remains.