Speaking with the Sons of Confederate Veterans

On October 1, I had the privilege to speak to a group of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Waul’s Texas Legion, Camp 2103 in Katy, Texas. Below is a summary of what I discussed with them:

Most history books state that the war was fought because of slavery. But that’s not the real truth. The two main causes of the war were too many taxes and too much government. For anybody following current events, that should sound familiar!

Cause 1 – Too Many Taxes

Before the war, there was no federal income tax. Most federal revenue came from tariffs, which were taxes on goods imported from other countries.

When countries have to pay more to trade their goods, they usually raise their own prices to offset the costs. This made imports more expensive than goods made here in America. Since the southern economy was based on farming, the South relied a lot more on imports than the North. So southerners generally paid more for their goods than northerners.

Another way that countries offset high tariffs is to raise tariffs of their own, making it more expensive for Americans to export their goods. The South exported more goods than the North, which meant it was usually more expensive for southerners to do

international business than it was for northerners.

On top of this, northern business leaders lobbied the federal government for even higher tariffs because raising the cost of foreign goods protected cheaper American-made goods from competition. These were known as “protectionist” tariffs because they were taxes raised solely to protect American business, not to raise revenue.

So then along comes the Republican Party, which (not so coincidentally) was organized just a few years before the war. The Republicans made it plain and clear that they supported northern business interests, which couldn’t help but hurt southern interests.

Now back then there was lots of debate about whether protectionist tariffs were even constitutional. In fact, southerners were so strongly opposed to these types of taxes that when they formed the Confederacy, protectionist tariffs were outlawed under the

Confederate Constitution.

While the war was being fought, the Republicans took advantage of no southern opposition in Congress and sent tariffs through the roof. And they pretty much stayed that way until the Sixteenth Amendment came along in 1913 and started the progressive income tax we have today.

Incidentally, the progressive income tax was actually first introduced in the North during the Civil War. The high tariffs weren’t enough to cover the costs of the war, so the federal government created a bureaucracy to collect taxes on income, which was the

forerunner of the IRS. It went away after the war ended, but of course it came back in 1913 under the Sixteenth Amendment.

So starting with tariffs and continuing with income taxes, the floodgates were opened for the government to tax and spend just about as much as it pleased. And this was one of the main causes of the Civil War.

Cause 2 – Too Much Government

The founders knew that centralizing power in the federal government would threaten state sovereignty. The founders also knew that centralization just wasn’t practical in a country like ours. This is because one region will always get preferential treatment over the other regions, depending on who’s in power.

Before the Civil War, the differences between North and South were like night and day. When all the country’s power gets put into a central government, only one region’s interests can be served at a time. This naturally leads to one region exploiting the other for economic and political gain. It can also force one region to compromise its sovereignty at the hands of the other.

As stated before, the Republican Party served mostly northern business interests. So we know what region it favored. Republicans also wanted to centralize government by teaming up with preferred businesses. They did this by supporting what was called

“internal improvements” back then, or what we call pork-barrel spending today.

Republicans knew that a good way for government to grow was to use taxpayer

money to dole out pork.

Most of this went to the hottest new industry of the time, which was the railroad. Politicians talked up the railroads just like they talk up stuff like green energy and health care today. At the same time that the North was spending millions of tax dollars per day

fighting the war, it was also spending millions more on companies like the Union Pacific to build a transcontinental railroad, which was the biggest public works project of its time. The line got built, but not before unprecedented scandals took place and the project cost millions more than originally estimated.

Most southerners strongly opposed this type of government spending because they believed it would only increase lobbying, corruption, and abusing tax dollars. That’s why most types of pork barrel spending were prohibited in the Confederate Constitution. And ever since the war, government pork-barrel spending and corruption has gotten bigger

and bigger until it’s nearly bankrupting our country today. And all this started—at least on a major scale—during the Civil War.

Northern industry boomed in the decade before the war, and the northern population was skyrocketing because immigrants were coming to America to take on the new industrial jobs. The population growth meant that the North was getting more representation in Congress. And when the Republicans won control of Congress and the White House in 1860, southerners were about to be consistently outvoted in Washington for the first time. America was about to turn into what James Madison once feared would be the “tyranny of the majority,” under which minority interests would be

constantly ignored. To fix this, southerners played what they thought was their final trump card to stop big government taxing and spending—and that was

secession.

There was a time when most Americans took the Constitution literally, especially the Tenth Amendment, which says that all powers not granted to the federal government belong to the states and the people. Southerners not only took this literally, but they

invoked the Tenth Amendment as a check against a growing federal power. In fact, the South invoked not only the principles of the Constitution, but also the Declaration of Independence, which was essentially an announcement of secession from England.

So we all know how the war ended, but what have we seen since then? Well, to fight and win a war in which over 600,000 people were killed, the federal government had to balloon to a size never seen in this country before. The massive mobilization of troops and industry that was needed to win turned America into the centralized world power

that we are now.

When the war ended, the government did shrink quite a bit, but it never shrank back down to its pre-war size. And as time went on, it gradually got bigger and bigger with each Congress and each president, eventually becoming the giant that we have today.

What It Means Today

The greatest legacy of the war was the end of slavery and the movement toward equal rights for all Americans. But I also contend that another extremely important legacy was the removal of that check that states once had on federal power. Since the war, the

federal government hasn’t had to worry about states challenging its power or

nullifying laws or seceding from the Union. And it’s no surprise that government has grown ever since, after all, when federal politicians are allowed to go unchecked by the states, there’s no limit to the power they’ll grant themselves.

And that’s why I needed to write The Civil War Months. I wanted to provide a comprehensive account of the most important event in our history and explain the truth about why it happened, how it happened, and why it’s still so very important to understand if we are going to honestly handle the issues that we’re facing today.