Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Federalism, the Constitution, Secession, Texas v. White and "The Lincoln Myth"

Someone asked James Michener once, “With all the research you do on your books, why do you write fiction?” His answer “So I can tell the truth.” In 2003 after a forced retirement from my job as a teacher of history and English due to whistle blowing, I embarked on a new career. With all doors to teaching closed to me, I decided to self-publish a book that would tell the “true” story of American history in fictional form. In 2009 I released the first edition of “The Peacemaker” a generational saga of American history that told a story of an American family from 1720 through 2001. The story is based on stories of disenfranchised Americans since the founding of this so called republic. Since its publication, I have spent countless hours traveling thousands of miles to carry the message of this book to the American reading public. I have continued reading and studying current as well as past stories of the progression of disenfranchised Americans and their lack of participation in building a legitimate republic that would make the great words of our documents of freedom ring true for everyone except the very small group of white, Christian, males over the age of 21 who became known as the Founding Fathers. This group controlled all the property taken over through annihilation of the legitimate cultures living in North America when they arrived. Recently, I discovered a new, as yet untold story about President Lincoln, the Civil War and why it was really fought. The name of the book is “The Lincoln Myth” by Steve Berry. The myth of the Civil War being fought to free the slaves was covered in that section of “The Peacemaker,” but Mr. Berry goes even further in his story. Using actual notes from the Constitutional Convention and correspondence from Abraham Lincoln to Joseph Smith, Mr. Berry weaves a story of a modern day plot by members of the Mormon faith in Utah to secede from the Union as they had tried to do during the Civil War and connects it with the current situation of states like Texas trying to secede from the Union today. Using quotations from James Madison and various members of the Constitutional Convention, Mr. Berry intimates that the Founding Fathers followed an agenda in writing the Constitution that was not only contrary to what their states had sent them to do, it was, in fact, something about which even the delegates attending the secret meeting had reservations. Setting up a Union with no right of secession for the states violated the very foundation of the Declaration of Independence that had justified America’s right to dissolve its connection with Great Britain. As the story develops, Mr. Berry uses President Lincoln’s own words to prove the Civil War was not about ending slavery. In fact, his book substantiates the claim made in “The Peacemaker” that the Emancipation Proclamation was no more than a political move to bring the South back into the Union. If the South had not continued fighting, slavery would have continued. The Civil War was about setting up an arbitrary perpetual union from which no state could secede despite perceived abuses. According to Mr. Berry, the Civil War and 600,000 deaths did nothing to settle any issue. This is why we are still fighting the Civil War today. The federal government has continued to get bigger and bigger and intrude into every area of American life. We are not a free people. We have built the most powerful war machine in the world. Ironically, the President of the United States is the most powerful commander-in-chief in the world. If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would be calling upon the American people to once again stand up to an abusive government run by a absolute monarch and “alter it and abolish it” and institute a new one.