The Confederate

THERE WAS NO CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA …

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Doc, there was no Civil War in America, it was the War of Northern Aggression!” An American custom bike-building friend of mine from Virginia almost spat those words at me at a Hamsters event in Sturgis. You see, I’d just told him that after Sturgis we were heading down south as our tour group had expressed a desire to visit some Civil War battlefields.

Well, essentially, history is written by the victors. But the losing version of this history is that the war was never centred on freeing the slaves but was brought about because of the secession of eleven Southern states. These states seceded specifically to avoid becoming helpless and exploited agricultural colonies of the Northern capitalists.

In a nutshell, the story is that the majority of the Southern grown cotton was being shipped up to the many Northern capitalists who had been earning fortunes from the Southern cotton-crop, by buying the cotton for their New England textile-mills. When the eleven states that seceded started building their own cotton mills, the Northern mill owners faced financial ruin. In their eyes only one option remained – war!

Regarding freeing the slaves as the reason for war, in an 1862 letter to the editor of the New York Tribune, Honest Abe Lincoln wrote, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it”.

Why bring this up, given that HEAVY DUTY is a motorcycle magazine not a history book? Err yep, that is true, but that conflict is tied up with the very history of the motorcycle pictured here.