Historian and novelist Thomas Fleming is the author of more than fifty books, including two very good revisionist histories of the two world wars: The New Dealers’ War, and The Illusion of Victory in World War I. He has authored biographies of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and has written extensively about the founding generation, including his best-selling book, Liberty! As a regular on PBS and NPR he is as “mainstream” as it gets. That is, he was, until he published his latest book, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War...
Fleming has discovered what scholars such as the late, great Murray Rothbard and the not-late-but-still-great Clyde Wilson wrote about many years ago: A war was not necessary to end slavery – the rest of the world did it peacefully; only 6 percent of adult Southern men owned slaves, which means that the average Confederate soldier was not fighting to preserve a system that actually harmed him and his family economically; and that the real cause of the war was what Fleming calls a “malevolent envy” of the South by New England “Yankees” who waged a war of economic conquest. In his own words, from the inside front cover of A Disease in the Public Mind:
[Northern] hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to
slavery. Abolitionists were convinced that New England, whose
spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been
the leaders of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by
Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson.
slavery. Abolitionists were convinced that New England, whose
spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been
the leaders of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by
Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson.
Fleming actually understates this point: Slavery only benefited the slave-owners who exploited the slaves but was economically harmful to all the rest of Southern society because slave labor is inherently inferior to free labor. The entire South was poorer as a result. Moreover, the average Confederate soldier, who was a yeoman farmer who owned no slaves, was harmed by the slave-owning plantation owners through unfair competition. That is why so many Northern states like Illinois banned the migration of blacks, free or slave, from their borders, and it is also the main reason why the Republican Party opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories – they wanted to “preserve them for free white labor,” as Lincoln himself once said. In every major Civil War battle Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves fought against (mostly border state) Union Army soldiers, such as Ulysses S. Grant, who did own slaves (Grant’s wife Julia, cousin of Confederate General James Longstreet, inherited slaves from her South Carolina family and Grant was the overseer of his father-in-law’s slave plantation for a period of time before the war).
Fleming contends that the real reason for the war – and for why, of all the nations on earth, only the U.S. associated war with the ending of slavery – was twofold: First, there was the extreme “malevolent envy” of Southerners by the New England “Yankee” political class, who had long believed that they were God’s chosen people and that they should rule America, if not the rest of the world. Second, there were a mere 25 or so very influential New England abolitionists who had abandoned Christianity and even condemned Jesus Christ, while embracing the mentally insane mass murderer John Brown as their “savior.” This is part of the “disease in the public mind” that is the theme of Fleming’s book...
Fleming discusses in great detail how John Brown came to replace Jesus Christ in the minds of Northern abolitionists, who adopted his mantra that blood must be shed in order to eradicate sin. That is, if they were to be saved and sent to Heaven, there must be bloodshed, and the more the better. That is why peaceful emancipation was not achieved in America, writes Fleming: It was not stubborn and evil Southern plantation owners who were the problem, it was the bloodthirsty abolitionists.
John Brown “descended from Puritans” and was “the personification of a Puritan,” says Fleming. And he truly became a “god” to the New England “Yankees.” “Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed awe and near-worship of John Brown,” writes Fleming. He lavished praise on John Brown’s “religion of violence.” Emerson called Brown “that new saint” who “would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau said that “Brown was Jesus.” He was “the bravest and humanest man in the country,” said Thoreau with horribly clunky English. He described Brown in that way after learning of Brown’s execution of non-slaveowning, innocents in front of their wives and children...
Thomas Fleming points out that the husband of Julia Ward Howe, author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was one of the financiers of John Brown’s terrorist mass murder sprees. Her song replaced “John Brown’s Body” as the Yankee anthem as it celebrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens as “the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Thomas Fleming discusses many other historical facts in A Disease in the Public Mind that yours truly has also written about and been denounced as a a liar, a slavery defender, a “Neo-Confederate,” and worse. He praises Thomas Jefferson for being among the first American statesmen to propose the peaceful emancipation of Southern slaves. He describes in detail the breathtaking hypocrisy of New Englanders who “rediscovered the sacred union,” he writes sarcastically, after having plotted to secede from the union for a dozen years after Jefferson’s election as president.
Fleming also writes of how the “Yankees” habitually attempted to plunder the South with protectionist tariffs that protected their manufacturers from competition. He understood that the Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territories was based on their wish of “Free Soil for Free (White) Men,” the title of chapter 19. That is, they wanted a Homestead Act that would hand out free land to white settlers while banning the existence of all black people, free or slave. He quotes Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greely explaining that his “paramount objective” was to “save the union” and not to end slavery.
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