April 6, 2011 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 23 people. That is always so terrible in war, so very hard.” GRANT: “But it had to be done.” BISMARCK: “Yes, you had to save the Union, just as we had to save Germany.” GRANT: “Not only to save the Union, but to destroy slavery.” BISMARCK: “I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment.” GRANT: “In the beginning, yes. But as soon as slavery fired upon the flag, it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain on the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle. Our war had many strange features – there were many things which seemed odd enough at the time, but which now seem providential. A great commander like Sherman or Sheridan might have organized an army and put down the rebellion in six months or a year, or at the farthest two years. But that would have saved slavery, perhaps, and slavery meant the germs of a new rebellion. There had to be an end to slavery. Then we were fighting an enemy with whom we could not make peace. We had to destroy him. No convention, no treaty, was possible – only destruction.” BISMARCK: “It was a long war, and a great work well done.” The fact of the matter is everybody in Europe knew the Civil War was about slavery, and about the end of slavery. Some members of the British upper classes hoped to see the United States torn apart to reduce the threat of a country full of vengeful Irishmen who hadn’t forgotten the million deaths of the Potato Fame and the hanging of Irish patriots, but 40,000 working-class and middle-class Englishmen and Canadians joined 180,000 Germans and 175,000 Irishmen fighting for the liberation of the slaves, and for all of mankind. Once they were accepted, 179,000 African-Americans also joined the Union Army to fight for their own freedom. When the Confederates captured them, they shot a great many of the bold men in cold blood and sold the timid ones back into slavery. Impartial historians have demonstrated that hundreds of black federal soldiers were murdered in uniform, along with at least some of their women and children. A black American federal soldier captured by the Confederates faced about the same chances as a white American soldier captured by the Japanese on Bataan: murder by violence, murder by neglect of injuries, or slavery at hard labor on short rations until they were rescued. Southern orators ask us to remember the fate of the American heroes murdered on Bataan. They usually forget the 11,000 American heroes who died at Andersonville, some of whom were shot on empty pretexts and others starved in the middle of farm country full of food. “When it comes to the Civil War, Americans are no more inclined to confront the dark side of their history than that Japanese,” said Gregory Urwin, now a professor at Temple University. Professor Urwin should know. He detailed Japanese war crimes in a fine book about Wake Island in 1941, but when he dared to mention Confederate murders of black U.S. soldiers during the Civil War while teaching in the South, he was fired. Everybody knew this stuff 160 years ago. Hostility to the South may have been overdone. Most Southerners didn’t own slaves, and some were loyal to the Union. Many were genuinely chivalrous, and many were heroic. The fact remains that the cause that started the Civil War was slavery, and denial of that fact is a perversion of honest history. In an article in American Heritage Magazine’s “Civil War Chronicles,” retired college professor James W. Loewen points out that Southern states that seceded from the Union in 1861 almost invariably mentioned slavery: “An increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations (to return escaped slaves),” the Declaration of Secession of South Carolina stated. South Carolina also rejected the rights of Northerners to discuss the abolition of slavery in public – extended the “gag rule” from Congress to the churches and street corners of the North. Mississippi pretty much changed the title and used the same statement of secession as South Carolina, which mentioned Northern hostility to slavery over and over again as the cause of breaking up the Union. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world...a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” Arkansas complained, “People of the northern states have organized a political party…the central and controlling idea of which is hostility to the institution of African slavery.” Nobody who reads the documents of secession can entertain the slightest doubt that the South seceded because their legislators feared that slavery might eventually be voted out of existence – as of course it was by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Southern states ignored those amendments as soon as Reconstruction ended in 1877 and more pointedly as soon as Virginia’s own son Woodrow Wilson, later president of Princeton and governor of New Jersey, was in the White House. My fellow Americans, we can’t have this anymore. Tapping into the websites about the tsunami and the radiation in Japan, I found that nine out of 10 Americans wanted to help the Japanese. Of the remaining 10 percent, a minority prated about Pearl Harbor – actually a pre-emptive strike -- as a karmic instigator of earthquakes, while a majority hated the African-Americans far more than they hated even the Japanese. Isn’t it time we put this hate behind us – by telling the truth? The Civil War was caused because a minority of Southerners was getting rich off slavery and didn’t want to see a horrible anachronism voted out of existence. The kids in the South have a right to know this. The rest of the world already knows, and they’re laughing at the people who are still in denial. The 150th anniversary of the American Civil War starts this month and if the re-enactors can convince the federal authorities that clearly marked half-pint cans of black powder aren’t weapons of mass destruction, gun smoke will once again cloud the landscape at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg. Smoke, this kind with mirrors, is also to be expected. While most people north of the Mason-Dixon Line and all around the world believe the Civil War was about the overdue termination of American slavery, some people down in Dixie had re-enacted a “gag rule” like the one in Congress in the 1850s. Slavery is not to be discussed, and anybody who discusses it as a negative aspect of the Sunny South while in the Sunny South can expect some real trouble. The Civil War had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that rich Southerners bought and sold slaves, or how the slaves were treated. It had to do with the fact that crass, greedy, cowardly Northern bullies trampled on the rights of heroic Southerners. Just what rights were being trampled on, other than the right to buy and sell fellow humans, is almost never explicitly stated. The fact that the Confederates fielded a truly great army and fought a magnificent military defense is no secret. The fact that they did so in what Ulysses S. Grant described as “about the worst cause that men ever fought for” is kept from Southern children through the collusion of all too many parents, teachers, and textbook publishers. This should not be. The Wehrmacht was also a great army – in terms of the odds against the Germans, far greater than the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia – but the causes they fought for (sometimes through delusions of national self-defense) including the extermination of the Jews and Gypsies and the marginalization of the Slavs into serfs, were clearly evil. Nobody today tries to hallow that cause in Germany. The modern Germans have laws against Holocaust denial, including fines and possible prison terms, and they are still paying reparations to those victims who made it out of the death camps alive. Meanwhile, way down South, it was all the Yankees’ fault and the slaves were happy and gay. Actually, most of them weren’t gay, and most of them weren’t happy, based on accounts by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. After the American Civil War, Grant, the ultimate victor over Robert E. Lee, became a two-term president and left the White House under a cloud due to his devious friends and relatives. Grant toured the globe and stopped off in Berlin to call on Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of newly unified Germany. Bismarck was neither an overt racist nor an anti-Semite. He was also tri-lingual, speaking German, French, and English. Here’s how the Civil War looked in recent retrospect to a failed president who was also one of the greatest generals in American history, and to the greatest statesman in European history of that era. BISMARCK: “What always seems so sad to me about your last great war was that you were fighting your own Moonlight, magnolias, & murder Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: As a Vietnam veteran and commander of the Washington Elm Post 192 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars for Ridgewood/Ho-Ho-Kus, I am appalled at the recent events perpetrated by our state militia commanders on the veterans and families supported by the volunteer staff of the Teaneck Armory Family Assistance Center/Family Readiness Group/Food Pantry in Teaneck, which opened in 2004. I just came back from helping other volunteers at the food pantry close its doors. For some unknown reason, the TFAC, considered by the state, I am told, to be the model family assistance center in New Jersey, was closed several months ago and only the FRG and food pantry remained open. Now, the food pantry, supporting many military and veterans’ families in Teaneck and the immediate area, is forced to close by the NJ State Militia Commander. Where are the families going to go? They’ve been told to drive to Bordentown, where an enlarged family assistance center is being built! Is the state now getting ready to close the FRG and then the Teaneck Armory and sell the property to a developer? The closing of the pantry can’t be because of budgets. As I understand it, the pantry is staffed by volunteers (who pay for many things out of their own pockets) and takes up only a few rooms at the huge armory. All the foodstuffs, Caution: Travesty at work supplies, and finances are donated by many of us in the county. It can’t be because of any impropriety, because the local commander is charged with inspecting, auditing, and supervising the operation (which has received high praise for its efficiency, orderliness, cleanliness, etc.), as is The Adjutant General in the New Jersey Department of Military and Veterans Affairs under whose control and oversight is all of the New Jersey State Militia. So what is the reason? Please don’t say because for two years no one has been deployed from the armory. We are on the brink of a global military action, and we need the support of all our military, volunteers, and others. What kind of message are the commanders of our local and state militia sending to our military, their families, and future military volunteers? The Teaneck Armory Food Pantry is the link for the “silent cry” of the soldiers and their families and NJDMAVA is suffocating the cry. Immediately contact Governor Christie as Commander-in-Chief of the New Jersey State Militia and urge him to visit with the volunteers, hear their side of this travesty, and reinstate the TFAC and food pantry as soon as possible. May God Continue to Bless America! Stanley A. Kober, Commander Washington Elm VFW Post 192 Ridgewood/Ho-Ho-Kus