Bob McDonnell’s Confederate Moment

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/8/10

The difference back when my home state, Rhode Island, was a major slave port, was culture. Economy in the North was urban and heading toward industrialization. Economy in the South was agrarian. The two had never met and were temperamentally at odds. Jefferson anticipated Yankee invasion as early as 1797. In the 1820s Henry Adams wrote with stunningly accurate of how and when the Civil War would emerge.

But then as in all wars, economy was key: When industrialization began working in England and in the North equilibrium between North and South was broken. England ended her slave empire in the early 1830s – Evangelical piety arose once the slaves were no longer needed. Industrial wealth and vast flows of immigrants bolstered the Empire State and my great grandfather was drafted right off the boat from Ireland.

As C. Vann Woodward points out in “The Burden of Southern History,” the goals of the northern compact were three: prevent the states from secession, freeing the slaves, equality between white and black. But letters home from Vermont soldiers show that all the soldiers really cared about was Southern secession. When extreme wealth came to the North the first – territoriality – was suddenly possible. The only real problem was Stonewall Jackson, but when he was killed by friendly fire at Chancellorsville, the Southern spirit began to yield.

At the conquest, the South was poor and broken. It remained poor for almost a century. The North was rich and the Empire State was the richest and would go on to being the richest in the world until 1929. But then, after the Second World War, the wealth would spread in a South cheered by Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and beyond to the Southwest and Texas. Then it would recede from New York. And now Rick Perry’s Texas has the best balance sheet in the country and eight out of ten new hires are in Texas. While the real unemployed rate in New York City is said to be up to 20 percent, Albany’s government is corrupt to the core and the debt is endless.

The first purpose of the Civil War was economic consolidation under a single economic system and a single currency in a globalist vision designed by Alexander Hamilton, the New Yorker. Washington signed on with Hamilton at Jay’s Treaty in 1794, sealing the fate of America, sealing the fate of the South and Texas.

Until April 15, 2009, and the tax revolt at the Alamo and everywhere. Because it is all about economics. And the conqueror today looks to the economically healthy Southern and Western free states for material support and a hefty pension after burning Atlanta to the ground and bringing it into submission at the cost of 34,624 lives at Chickamauga, 51,112 at Gettysburg and 26,134 at Antietam in a matter of hours. How’s that supposed to work again?