Review: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

It is incorrect to call the forces that injure black Americans, "white supremacy". When you look at the minds, hearts, and habits of the antebellum south, and when you trace a historical line from before the Revolution to the present, then there is only one possible name you can use to describe those forces: The Slave Power. The Slave Power is a dominating force, directly opposed to the individualistic, freedom-loving nature of the American spirit. It is the force that carried Africans over the ocean. It is the force that claimed 3/5ths a vote for an unfree people. It is the force that shoots a black child and plants drugs on their body. It dehumanizes and brutalizes those that challenge it. It is also a pathetic force. It is uninventive, uncreative, and unimaginative. It cannot look forward but instead looks backward. It does not look upward but instead looks outward. In the mind of Slave Power, slavery is an inescapable historical norm. When the Slave Power sees a fork in the river, it sees a plantation, not a city. When it looks at a waste it sees cotton. Give the Slave Power gold for a bushel of cotton, and it doesn't buy a painting, or get a degree, or build a machine. It buys another slave to harvest cotton. In this way, the Slave Power is not the same as "White Supremacy". It leaches and destroys the white people in which it resides. It saps their intellectual ability. It teaches them to be weak, dumb, and dull. Show me a southern Ivy League school. Show me a world-changing Southern scientist. Show me anything culturally interesting about the South. There in the absence of an answer is the chain of Slave Power attached to the Southern white man's soul just as it is chained to the black man's neck and feet. The Civil War is when the Slave Power was brought to heel by the very same forces of Enlightenment that gave America birth: patriotism, justice, liberty, equity, pragmatism, and creativity. Those forces -all explicitly rejected by the Slave Power- are the parts of the Republic's soul that still fight against the Slave Power to this day. Because, again, the Slave Power was never vanquished completely. The cultural trappings and political trends it started continued afterward. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was energized by the Slave Power. The Mexican war was to fulfill the Slave Power's hunger. These two of America's sins- Indian genocide and imperialism- may still have happened had an African slave ship never landed on her shores, but it is hard to believe they would have happened with such ferocity. It is impossible to come away from reading the Battle Cry of Freedom without having a sense of patriotism. When you know that the country that you were raised in is imperfect, it might seem like the opposite of patriotism. But in this beautiful history, you can see America's perfectibility. If Slave Power could be shunted out of office, then it can be driven from our nation's souls forever.