The "Civil War" was Fought to Impose Political Slavery

Lysander Spooner, a lawyer and entrepreneur from Athol, Massachusetts, was an ardent Abolitionist who believed that slavery was unconstitutional, supported John Brown, and influenced Frederick Douglass.  He also advocated violence against slaveholders:

We specialty advise the flogging of individual Slave-holders. This is a case where the medical principle, that like cures like, will certainly succeed. Give the Slave-holders, then, a taste of their own whips. Spare their lives, but not their backs.  (A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery)

Those who have been indoctrinated to believe that the War Between the States was a moral war, prosecuted by patriotic and benevolent Abraham Lincoln to end slavery, would be surprised at the summation of the Northern principle behind the War that was penned by this vigorous Abolitionist during Reconstruction.  In 1867, in his introduction to No Treason, No. 1, Spooner wrote:

On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.

The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.

No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle --- but only in degree --- between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and [*iv] asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.

Previous to the war, there were some grounds for saying that --- in theory, at least, if not in practice --- our government was a free one; that it rested on consent. But nothing of that kind can be said now, if the principle on which the war was carried on by the North, is irrevocably established.

If that principle be not the principle of the Constitution, the fact should be known. If it be the principle of the Constitution, the Constitution itself should be at once overthrown.

Spooner was absolutely right. The Southern Cause was a righteous pursuit of liberty and constitutional self government fueled by the founding principles that are forever embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The North successfully engaged in a war to overthrow those principles and impose political slavery upon all of the people of the country.  The legacy of Northern victory includes: a shadow government of elites and corporations that control and manipulate a government that ignores the Constitution, continual interventionism, grinding wars that never end, pervasive taxation, fiat currency, rampant inflation, endless regulations enforced by a bureaucratic leviathan, voluminous legislation that provides the highest prison rate in the world, constant surveillance, and persistent meddling in the lives and affairs of "citizens".  On the other hand, wrong does not make right, defeat does not alter truth, and the Southern Cause is as just as ever.  Deo vindice.