Comments Elsewhere

Incidentally, this is one of my major problems with the kind of Old Republic nostalgia that gets peddled at, for example, LewRockwell.com. DiLorenzo and the rest of the gang have convinced themselves that American nationalism and imperialism both effectively started in 1861, and that antebellum pro-slavery blowhards like Calhoun were the true guardians of an imperiled decentralist republic. In fact it was the Southern slavocracy that was the constant driving force behind American expansionism and military adventurism from 1789 up to 1860, including the Louisiana purchase, the war of 1812, the Creek war, the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee, the Seminole Wars, the seizure of Florida, the annexation of Texas, the war on Mexico, and repeated attempts to expand the slave empire into Cuba and other potential Latin American colonies, either through “purchase” or conquest. Just to mention a few. It was those Yankee millenialists like Garrison and Wendell Phillips who consistently opposed the predatory engorgement of the country and who denounced it as a travesty against liberty and republican principles.