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November 13, 2023

The first U.S. Civil War was fought by the North to preserve the Union and to abolish slavery.

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President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 as the war dragged on; the North won, and slavery was formally abolished in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In the post-war rubble of the embittered South, a new systemic racism known as Jim Crow emerged. After Reconstruction which ended in 1876, Jim Crow held sway into the twentieth century when, thanks to the hard work and sacrifices of many Americans, Jim Crow was defeated, and with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, outlawed.

Unfortunately there are some who seek to deconstruct the Civil War by suggesting the North didn’t fight the war to abolish slavery. Their proof? Racism persisted after that war. Flying under the banners of CRT, cultural Marxism, and identity politics, a few well heeled sophists and a larger number of cultists are acting to undermine the accomplishments of abolitionists, soldiers, and civil rights leaders of our past by contending systemic racism defines America and persists.

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These Jacobin-like absolutists hold sway in quite a few big cities, more than just a few states, and in the District of Columbia.

Is their larger purpose to deny any virtuous participation or contributions toward racial harmony in order to demoralize those who don’t know history and thereby destabilize the U.S.?

Slavery was abolished almost 158 years ago. Systemic racism certainly existed but it never reflected American ideals and was outlawed 60 years ago after millions worked and sacrificed to make the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts happen.

Slaveholders and their supporters betrayed American ideals right out of the gate. So did the Southern Democrats and others with Jim Crow. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was right to assert that he was there at the Lincoln Memorial to cash a check, long denied, drawn on American ideals. Both Lincoln and Dr. King paid the ultimate price to deliver on that promise by first abolishing slavery, then outlawing the systemic racism that survived the war.

The first American Civil War was fought by the Confederacy, a.k.a., the South, to preserve the right to own slaves, to resist Union political power that was clearly trending toward abolition with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, and to defend their land. Northerners fought to re-unite the Union, the Confederacy having by then seceded, and to further American principles by abolishing slavery. The shooting war started in 1861, but the real war began long before 1861.