On the village greens of cities and towns all over Vermont, you will see monuments honoring those who died to preserve the Union during the Civil War.
Most, like the monument of the Brattleboro Town Common, face south. Legend has it that they were built that way so that the Confederate states don't get any ideas about rebelling again.
The record of Vermonters in the Civil War is a proud one, as this little state delivered more in manpower and money per capita than any other state in the Union.
One hundred and fifty years ago last week, President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation. Lincoln's Republican Party settled the issue of slavery in that bloody war - at least until the 1960s.
That's when the GOP decided to respond to the Civil Rights Movement by aligning itself with the very forces that the party's founders had defeated a century earlier.
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To modern eyes, the Republican Party has transformed itself into the modern equivalent of the Confederacy. In this election's platform, the GOP “stands for the rights of individuals, families, faith communities, institutions - and of the States which are their instruments of self-government.”
That type of freedom is not what our nation was founded upon.
Our Constitution begins with the words “We the People.” And the instrument of self-government that we, the people, use to govern ourselves is a strong national government that operates in the best interests of all its citizens.
The ascendancy of a particularly brutal and anti-democratic American ideal to control one of our two major political parties is no accident.
Historian Michael Lind once wrote that our nation's history, economics, and culture have been dominated by two particular factions of the ruling elite. For most of our history, the faction that held control was the New England Yankee.
The descendants of the Puritan founders of the first colonies, these people were steeped in the idea that those who possess wealth and power are morally obligated to use it for the common good.
On the whole, these were people who valued education, who saw public service in war and peace as noble, and who believed that giving to others is the right thing to do - not to just burnish one's legacy, but also to create a better society for everyone.
Then there is the other faction - the plantation aristocracy of the South.
In the words of AlterNet.org writer and editor Sara Robinson, that ruling class - the 19th-century version of the 1 percent - “has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain 'order,' and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.”
These southern aristocrats have, by and large, always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press - and even today, in many cases, too many still do. A cursory glance at academic achievement puts many of the states of the old Confederacy at the bottom of the list.
These are the people who rejected the Yankee ethos that liberty and authority rested with the community, not individuals. The tradition of the town meeting never caught on in the South.
For the Southern elites, she charges, liberty had a different definition, one that contrasted with the Yankee traditions of balancing personal needs against the greater common good.
To the southern ruling class, Robinson wrote, “the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more 'liberty' you could exercise - which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more 'liberties' with the lives, rights, and property of other people.”
In other words, anything that extends freedom to lower-status people amounts to an infringement of the freedom of the higher-status people to do as they damn well please.
If you are still wondering why so much of the South remains anti-union, anti-education, anti-equal rights, and generally anti-progress, it all can be traced back to the regressive thinking of the aristocrats who owned the plantations in the 19th century. The legacy is continued by those in power who harness the power of modern advertising and public relations spin to dupe their constituents into supporting the very society that once created and fostered a middle class in this country.
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So, ultimately, the Civil War was not just about slavery or keeping the Union intact. It was a struggle between two competing value systems.
And while the North won the war, the philosophical struggle was never fully resolved. The battle for the soul of America shifted to other battlefields, and it took a century after Appomattox before the political, social, and economic values of the South became the political values of the Republican Party, values that have spread to fully half of our nation in these divided and contentious times.
Those same values, sadly, mock the sacrifice of the nearly 6,000 Vermonters who gave - in the words of Lincoln - their last full measure of devotion to the cause of a nation united and free.
Those values are rooted in the retrograde attitudes of people who have been battling the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ever since those words were penned in 1776. They are unworthy of a great nation.