Re “Confederate statues in State Capitol remain unaddressed,” Free Press Feb. 13-15 edition:

The Confederate States formed no more of a “traitorous regime” for seceding from the voluntary Union of sovereign states to which they had voluntarily acceded than the 13 slaveholding colonies that had seceded from the British Empire in 1776 and formed the Union in the first place.

Secondly, the Confederacy held that the slavery issue was a state issue, not a national issue, just as the United States held at the time. Slavery was constitutional in the United States throughout the war, and in many Union states it was still legal.

The U.S. Constitution protected slavery in the United States until the passage of the 13th Amendment after the war was over. It was voluntarily ratified by both the victorious Northern states and the defeated Southern states — a United States gratefully relieved of a burden that had bedeviled them since colonial times.

So what was the war really about? Let us drop the racist progressive identity politics concerning Confederate monuments and follow the “Yankee dollar” — wealth originating with New England’s African slave trade (New York and Boston were the largest African slave trading ports in the world at the time of President Lincoln’s election) and the North’s manufacture of slave-picked cotton:

The United States was constituted as a voluntary Union of sovereign states, but with Abraham Lincoln came a Northern political party that would usurp government power and turn the Southern states into its “cash cow” colonies just as England had done with her American colonies. As a result, seven Southern states withdrew peacefully from the Union.

But with the “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse, so President Lincoln launched an armada against South Carolina to provoke her into firing the first shot and get the war he wanted. South Carolina responded, just as Massachusetts had responded to King George III’s provocation at Lexington and Concord.

Virginia stood for the Union until President Lincoln called for troops to subjugate the Confederacy, at which point she refused, immediately seceded and indicted President Lincoln for “choosing to inaugurate civil war.” Four other states followed Virginia out. Virginia’s decision makes clear what that war was truly about: The North’s war against the South’s secession.

President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — claiming his war of invasion, conquest and coerced political allegiance against the Confederacy was to save “government of the people by the people for the people” — is pure Orwellian “doublespeak,” while his Emancipation Proclamation plainly stated that slavery was alright as long as one was loyal to his government. But that exposes “the myth of American history” as a “red herring,” masking a murderous usurpation of power.

Confederate monuments speak truth to this power. No wonder the party of big government wants them torn down. To do so, the party is agitating a lie to stir emotions that will turn into votes.

One may tear down every monument to everyone who ever made a dime off slavery — from the Western Hemisphere to the European and African continents — and milk a lie until the political cows come home, but it won’t change a thing. The truth cannot be killed.

As Edmund Burke said of the French Revolution: You are gibbeting the carcass while your house is the haunt of robbers.

H.V. TRAYWICK JR.

Richmond