This commentary induced by the recent PBS series on the Civil War, is the first really disappointing piece I have read on Powerline.

It is bellicose in tone and ignorant in content. I won't bother to refute Deacon's comments point by point but I will use a couple for illustration. He mentions a certain "Marshall Twitchell, a union officer who installed himself in upper Louisiana after the Civil War, became a wealthy planter, saw most of his family killed by a white gang, and lost both arms in an assassination attempt before escaping to the North. PBS found the great-great grandson of the leader of the gang that drove Twitchell out. This guy couldn't suppress his pride in his ancestor or his glee in Twitchell's fate. I couldn't help wondering whether there was any way to prosecute this yahoo for his great-great grandaddie's crimes."

Whoa! This type of namecalling and anger toward "this yahoo" is more in line with how liberals view the world than the conservatives on Powerline. What Deacon casually ignores is: How did a union officer "install himself"? Was it legal? Or was Twitchell just another crook using the cover of war to enrich himself? That he "installed himself" AND became a "wealthy planter" suggests that Mr. Twitchell was no saint. Perhaps he richly deserved what the yahoo's ancestor dished out.

Deacon's treatment of Andrew Johnson is also execrable, referring to him as "the racist egomaniac Andrew Johnson". While Johnson will never rate high on anyone's list of great presidents, he in fact carried out much of Lincoln's plan for the South. To make anything out of the fact that he was "racist" is absurd. Virtually every white person on Earth was racist in that time. Abe Lincoln himself was racist. When judging the people of the 1860's, one can not superimpose modern day feelings about race. In the time he lived, Johnson was a moderate who sided with the Union in spite of being a border state Democrat.

Finally, Deacon exhibits a pollyanna mentality when viewing the "white Northerners" of the Civil War period. Read any good book on the presidency of Lincoln, and you will find that "white Northerners" darn near drove him over the edge. Nothing Lincoln did made more than about 30% of the "white Northerners" happy at any one time. You had the abolitionists who demanded that Lincoln free the slaves NOW!, regardless of how many border states that action might deliver to the Confederacy. You had the other extreme, who demanded he NOT free the slaves because they believed the North would be flooded with Negroes (although that is not the "n" word they typically used). And there was a middle ground that disliked slavery, and wanted it contained to the South, but were unwilling to accept blacks as anything approaching equal.

The Civil War was brought about by stupidity and greed. On both sides. The vision of Lincoln was to preserve the Union, heal the wounds and get back to "normal" as soon as possible. Lincoln understood that it was slavery and the South's leaders who were rotten, not the common people. Cut off the corrupt head and the average people could be brought back into the fold.

What liberals (and seemingly Deacon) want, is to forever re-fight the war. Continue to punish the South and rub its defeated nose in the dirt. Pretend that the North was all sweetness and light, and the South was all venal and greedy.

Perhaps the most puzzling thing is why Deacon would swallow PBS's version of any serious subject matter in the first place.