Thankfully a lot of blacks realized that MLK was a puppet. That is in some measure why Islam has grown so popular among American blacks. They knew they were being duped and manipulated.

Most serious scholars haven't bothered with DiLorenzo's tracts. Those who have would have found them so bad that "ad hominem attacks" were natural and unavoidable. Sooner or later, someone's going to take a long hard look at DiLorenzo's books and the bubble will burst.

DiLorenzo projects a 20th century radical libertarian framework back on the 19th century. He treats all questions in light of economic conflicts between more and less government. For DiLorenzo Lincoln becomes the great proponent of more government, indeed of tyranny, and slaveowners and secessionists turn out to be proponents of liberty. Obviously, if you limit yourself to that point of view you miss a lot about 19th century America and the Civil War.

Spooner wasn't much in his own day. 20th Century Libertarians have retrospectively elevated him to the be the one who was right about everything. Spooner's radical anti-government perspective would have accepted an uprising of slaves against their masters but not a war for the preservation of the union that included an emancipationist program.

Wiki's account of Spooner is likewise twisted. There were other Northerners who supported compensated emancipation. Spooner wasn't the only one who had that idea. But compensated emancipation wasn't acceptable to slaveowners, most of whom believed that slavery still had a future.

Spooner's also wasn't unique in believing that the right of revolution against tyranny evoked in the Declaration of Independence still existed. That was a common idea. The question in 1860 was whether that right applied to the situation of the Southern states, and whether there was some right of secession under the Constitution in circumstances that fell short of the right of revolution against tyranny.

Spooner also took the idea of a right of revolution further and believed that the Constitution was only binding on those who had ratified it, and was therefore not binding in his own day. That's certainly an idea an anarchist can hold, but not one likely to find acceptance among the wider population.

What DiLorenzo's doing isn't actual history. He sets himself up as a judge based on his ideological beliefs. Then he rummages around for a figure like Spooner that he can pin his beliefs on. Spooner lets him be pro-secession and anti-slavery, but Spooner's options are more comforting fantasy than a real possibility.

It would have been much cheaper to just let the South go their way, and to welcome all run-a-way slaves who made it to the north and give them their freedom. This, plus some northern sponsored underground railroad activities in the South, would have, after financial ruin of the South, ended slavery.

600,000 dead soldiers was too high a price, plus, to repeat, southern cracker contamination of our politics makes it even a higher price.

Hahaha!

Richard fell for the old hasbara hoax.

(On the other hand, he's fallen for all the others, so why not this one?)

Quite agree, mah yankee friend. So, would you please let us leave? Where is the voluntary departure program? Oh wait, it's called "secession." LOL!

Hell, even some yankees want to leave:

http://www.vermontrepublic.org/

Face it, maybe y'all screwed the pooch your damned selves. The Bushes ain't Southern — they're New Englanders.

Of course they are. But without all of those southern votes they would never have achieved power. Prescot Bush was as much a fascist that this country has ever produced; without the southern cracker vote he and his evilspawn would have been an irrelevant political force in the north.

Southerners are not running this country, and the South is not the seat of wealth and power. If Southerners tend to vote a certain way, it is because certain politicians try to appeal to them-just like all other groups.