[Was Lee a Traitor? by Walter D. Kennedy. Shotwell Publishing LLC, 2024; 72 pp.]
Walter Kennedy’s outstanding new book is much more than a defense of Robert E. Lee from the charge of treason, though it is certainly that. Kennedy offers us a careful analysis of the nature of the union of states established by the Constitution, in the course of which he argues that Abraham Lincoln—far from being the savior of the Union against the efforts of the Confederate States to rebel against it—was, in fact, the destroyer of the Union as originally understood.
Before addressing Kennedy’s argument, though, a question needs to be asked. Why is the nature of the War between the States—and the roles of Lincoln and Lee within that war—relevant to us today, any more than, say, the question of whether Alcibiades was a traitor to Athens is relevant to us?
Kennedy’s answer to this question, in part, is that we need to understand the nature of the Union in order to effectively combat the “woke” tyranny that now threatens us. The proponents of this cultural Marxist ideology demand that we destroy monuments built to honor those whom they deem to be “racists,” including among these well-known generals of the Confederate Army. Conservatives like Sean Hannity oppose this—recognizing that the wokists wish to obliterate the past in order to replace it with their own Orwellian concoction—but they lack the historical resources necessary to make a convincing case to retain the monuments intact. If Robert E. Lee really was a traitor, why should he be honored?
Kennedy’s case that Lee was not a traitor is simple and straightforward. The Union was a compact among the sovereign states which had won their independence from Great Britain, in which certain aspects of that sovereignty—such as the conduct of foreign relations—were delegated to the federal government. A state could not, for example, send its own ambassador to a foreign country or sign a treaty with it. If a state wished to “go it alone,” it was free to secede from the union. Admittedly, the Constitution does not mention explicitly the right of secession, but it is implicit from the nature of the Union.
The right to secede was recognized by a large number of prominent figures of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period, including Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. Some people held a more strongly nationalist view of the nature of the Union, but Lincoln’s ridiculous opinion that the Union created the states definitely cannot be sustained, and only a few people have had the temerity to defend it. Certainly, the Constitution does not grant the federal government the right to invade a state, as James Buchanan, the president at the time the initial states of the Confederacy seceded, recognized, even though he is derided for weakness by neocons who wish to subject us to global control.
There is another relevant principle, to my mind a decisive one, emphasized by the eminent jurist St. George Tucker. The principle is that a union cannot succeed unless it is based on freely given consent and continued amicable relations. A state cannot be forced to remain in a union against its will, and the baleful consequences of the War between the States—in which 800,000 military men lost their lives, as Kennedy reminds us, and the subsequent horrors of post-war Reconstruction—amply show what happens if this principle is disregarded.
An objection might occur to the reader, but Kennedy has anticipated it and has ample resources to counter it. The objection is that the Confederate states seceded in order to preserve slavery. Whatever the immense costs of the war and the change in the constitutional balance between the federal government and the states, they were the justifiable price to extirpate slavery.
As Kennedy notes, this objection fails on numerous grounds. First, the war did not extirpate slavery, but left it in place in the border states, which had not seceded from the Union. Second, slavery was in the course of amelioration and eventual elimination through emancipation in the South, having been recognized as an evil by no less than Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America, and General Robert E. Lee. Third, most Southerners did not own slaves and—among those who did—very few owned large plantations. While the existence of slavery as a cause of the war cannot be denied, it was only one of a number of other causes and by no means the most significant of them.
There is another point that needs to be made, though it is probably the most controversial. Even if Lincoln had aimed to emancipate the slaves, doing so was not worth the enormous costs of the war, as the conditions for slaves in the South were far better than for free blacks in the North.
And, to return to less controversial ground, Lincoln did not aim to free the slaves. He expressly said that if he could save the Union by keeping slavery intact, he would do it. He viewed blacks as inferior to whites and favored their removal from the United States. In point of fact, the merciless war he waged against the South delayed the end of slavery, which would probably have been achieved peacefully, absent Lincoln’s interference. As the great libertarian legal theorist Lysander Spooner noted, the war—far from diminishing the number of slaves—increased them by making everyone a slave of the federal government. Spooner certainly cannot be viewed as an apologist for slavery; he helped finance the raids of John Brown.
In the course of his exposition of the war’s causes, Kennedy advances a philosophically interesting argument. He says that those who point to slavery as the primary, if not sole, cause of the war are engaging in “univariate” analysis. Once they have found a causal factor, they stop and fail to consider the subordinate place of slavery within the causal network.
Once Lee’s home state, Virginia, seceded from the Union, the conditio sine qua non of his allegiance to the Union lapsed, and thus, he cannot be considered a traitor. The real traitor was Lincoln, who unilaterally upended the balance of power between the states and the federal government that the Constitution established; and it was this betrayal that has enabled the “woke” tyranny of today.
Kennedy’s very short book is a fine example of the adage multum in parvo, and I urge all those who wish to restore our freedom to read it.
