No one would confuse The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War with a comprehensive textbook on the war. But the new volume from H.W. Crocker III does offer a series of facts and anecdotes to correct some popular myths about the participants, events, and motivating forces tied to the war.
Among Crocker’s key arguments is the notion that leaders of the Confederacy had a greater respect than their Northern counterparts for the U.S. Constitution:
What the Confederate Constitution sought to do was to preserve what Southerners believed was the original intent of the Constitution, which the North had tried to overturn. To the framers of the Confederate Constitution, sovereignty resided in the people of the states. That’s how it had been in the colonial period, and how it was under the Articles of Confederation and under the Constitution of the United States. The North, however, had adopted a view not of sovereign states affiliated within a union, but of a sovereign majority of an American people, represented in the federal government.
To Southerners, this interpretation of the Constitution was flat-out wrong. The Constitution, Jefferson Davis pointed out, did not create a new American people; sovereignty continued to reside with the people within their respective states. “The monstrous conception of the creation of a new people, invested with the whole or a great part of the sovereignty which had previously belonged to the people of each State,” Davis argued, “has not a syllable to sustain it in the Constitution.”
Like other volumes in the PIG series, this one certainly strays from the party line.
