This is a very good book. I wish I had read it when it was first published. This should be mandatory reading in all American History Courses. ( )

I found this to be an interesting book. There are many facts in here which condemn the North for its' invasion of a foreign country. I agree with much of this. The facts are laid out nicely, and are hard to disprove. However, this book has one major weakness. This book does not restrict itself solely to the facts. The authors write this book with two purposes in mind. The first is to show that the South was right, and the South seceded legally, and the North violated a sovereign country. It does a good job of meeting this goal. The other intent of the authors is to portray the North as evil. This is not restricted to the time of the Civil War. The North has been evil since before the Founding, and it is still evil. Not only that, but it seems like virtually all Northerners are evil. This is pure emotion. They do not make a good case for this. If they had stuck to the facts, showing the rights of the South, this would be an excellent book. Still read it, just do so with a grain, or two, of salt. ( )

This book is aimed at Southerners whom the Kennedys hope will reassert themselves as Nationalists, to exactly what end is not clear, but successfully seceding from the Union would be a possibility. Parts of this books are very impressive, but much of it is either feeble, or sounds like a paranoid conspiracy fantasy. All problems are caused by the dread Northern-Yankee-Liberal-Black militant (NYLB) axis, never by Southerners themselves. I found if difficult to assign stars and was torn between two and three. I found the Kennedys' combination of ethnocentrism, excessive self-pity and belligerence rather wearing. I found it appropriate that one of their sources is named McWhiney. I am rather bemused by lines like: “These attacks come from the liberal media of Yankeedom and their Scalawag running dogs of the “New South” mentality.” (p.196) I am also skeptical of quotes from Lincoln referenced from Admiral Semmes' memoirs and the like. The South, the North, all their people and history are presented as monolithic, so facts are cherry picked and applied to the whole. When I am reading the parts that I know the most about, I realize that the Kennedys are ignoring a great deal of evidence presented elsewhere. One may argue that this is an openly partisan book, and they are not required to be fair, but it doesn't make for a refutation of other arguments. The unprejudiced reader should be accordingly skeptical.

The authors assert, for example, that Southerner have been made to sit on the stools of repentance and have not been allowed to present their side. They quote Southerners like Admiral Semmes who worried that Northerners would never read his book because it was so unflattering to them, but ignore the fact that it didn't actually work out that way. (In the bibliography, his book is listed as published in New Jersey.) In the presence of large and active groups like the United Daughters and Sons of the Confederacy, this is certainly not true. And it has not been true for a long time. It is a commonplace that the Civil War is an exception to the rule that the victors write the history. In his book, The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865-1900, Rollin Osterweis chronicles the popularity of the romantic myth of Southern Chivalry in both the North and the South. He does agree with the Kennedys that some of the impetus for reconciliation came from the desire Northern business interests to exploit the natural resources of the South, but the result was a willingness to listen sympathetically to their version of things. The popular Northern magazine, The Century, wanted to encourage reconciliation and solicited Southern stories, and in their extremely successful series “Battles and Leaders” asked both Northern and Southern military leaders to give their accounts of the war. By the end of the century, even former abolitionists were willing to leave race relations to be managed by Southern whites. In his essay “Long Legged Yankee Lies,” (published in This Mighty Scourge), James McPherson recounts the efforts of Southern organizations to purge every school and library in the South of anything less than positive about Southern whites. My favorite was the attempt to censor the Encyclopedia Britannica for calling slavery exploitive. Liston Pope, speaking of his education in North Carolina in the 1920s, remarked to Osterweis: “I could never understand how our Confederate troops could have won every battle in the War so decisively and then have lost the war itself.” So ineffective has the brainwashing by the dread NYLB axis been, that according to David Von Drehle “Why They Fought” (Kindle single), a poll found that “a majority, including two-thirds of white respondents in the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, answered that the South was mainly motivated by 'states rights' rather than the future of slavery.” I remain firmly in the minority. James W. Loewen in his books Lies My Teacher Told Me (1999, 2007 ed.) and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (with Edward H. Sebesta) surveys both textbooks and high school teachers and finds that the Kennedys' unsupported assertion that slavery is incorrectly taught as the cause of the Civil War is wrong on both counts.

The section asserting that the several states never surrendered their sovereignty is a fairly impressive section. After reading the other parts of the book, however, I wonder if it is merely my ignorance that makes it seem so. But it is strongly argued, with quotes given in an addendum from a number of Northerners who supported secession, whether at the time of the Civil War or in preceding years. Given this, it would have been nice it the seceding states had attempted first to use a mutual legal process, like setting the matter before the Supreme Court or a convention of states, given that the right to secede has not actually been established in process. At least the states' rights issue would have been debated, and perhaps upheld, in the whole country. This issue is crucial to most of the Kennedys' contentions.

The section on the Fourteenth amendment also seems pretty well argued, but I assert the same caution. I had not been aware that it was not received enthusiastically throughout the country as a whole and that that was one reason for requiring the Southern states to ratify it as a condition of re-entry. The Kennedys point out the irony of this. These two sections on secession and the Fourteenth amendment made the book worth reading for me. I don't know if I will ultimately accept their reasoning, but I do have a much better understanding of the arguments. Clearly I have more reading to do.

With this and with the issue of secession, the Kennedys privilege the states as the representatives and protectors of the people. But history, like Jim Crow laws, and other forms of discrimination throughout the country, show that they cannot be relied upon to protect the liberties of all of the people all of the time. Neither can the Federal government, which is what makes life so complicated. The Kennedys are quite right the North was also guilty of discrimination, but that doesn't solve the problem. If Southern whites were second class citizens, blacks and Native Americans were, at best, third class. The rights of black Americans are not dependent upon the moral superiority of the North to the South, but on their own status as citizens. The Kennedys' arguments for voter qualifications would carry more weight if it were not true that African-Americans who could pass those qualifications were still denied to right to vote.

I wasn't originally going to discuss the view of slavery in this already very long review, but I disagree with the first reviewer. I don't know how one can argue that the Kennedys don't defend slavery. I am not arguing the facts here, although they are incomplete, only the description of the book. True, they say: “Also let us state here that we are not defending the system of slavery, but rather seeking the truth about the history of that institution” (p.86), but what they claim as the truth is quite a defense, to the point that they later feel the need to say: “Now, if the foregoing sounds as if we are advocating the return of the system of African servitude, let us restate emphatically that this is not what we are are suggesting … “ (p.116) In the chapter “Race Relations in the Old South”, we find:

In our research of [The Slave Narratives], we have noted an overwhelming body of evidence (more than seventy percent) in which only positive statements were made about the relationship between slaves and masters. … [T]his relationship was very close and mutually respectful.” (p.81)

To quote: “Just as we would not condemn all parents because some are abusive, neither would we condemn all slave holders because a few were abusive.” p.86

“This type of relationship could not be enforced with a whip, but it existed and was based on respect and love” (p.87)

“... an English abolitionist, James S. Buckingham, who in 1842 wrote, 'This is only one among the many proofs I had witnessed of the fact that the prejudice of color is not nearly so strong in the South as in the North. [In the South it is not at all uncommon to see the black slaves of both sexes, shake hands with white people when they meet, and interchange friendly personal inquiries … '” (p.88)

“In 1861, a slave named Harrison Berry wrote and published a pamphlet entitled 'Slavery and Abolitionism, as Viewed by a Georgia Slave.' … here we have in black and white, the very words of a slave as he attacks 'fanatical abolitionists.'” (p.109-110)

“Three different sources make the argument that blacks were well-treated as a whole under the system of Southern slavery.” (p.116) ( )

Who said you can't judge a book by it's cover? You can with this one. This book first draws parallels between the American Revolution and the Secession (which Confederates did at the time) and tries to prove (rather convincingly), that there was a legal right to secede from the Union. Then they document atrocities committed by US troops (a forgotten subject), then talk about blacks who fought for the South (another forgotten subject), then give a rehash of Fogel and Engerman (with a bit more rosiness added on). While this is all useful and interesting information, they try to then claim the CSA would have been a wonderful place to live for all men slave and free. Not a convincing argument. ( )