Sam Francis’ final salvo before his death in 2005 was the production of Race and The American Prospect, a collection of writings by some of the biggest names in white advocacy.

Smack dab in the middle is Sam Dickson’s essay Race and the South [Online at American Renaissance], a reading of which could have helped Nikki Haley out there on the campaign trail.

Asked at a town hall what the Civil War was about, Haley fumbled that it was ”basically, how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could, and couldn’t do.”

Nope.

The Civil War was about slavery.

It was, in Dickson’s words, ”the primary cause of both secession, and the ensuing war.  States' rights played a very secondary role at all in the secession itself.”

Contrary to the assertion of some ”neo-Confederates,” Dickson writes, ”history reveals the uncomfortable fact that the South was quite happy with a strong central government and prepared to use that government's powers so long as the government was the protector and defender of the institution of slavery.  Right down to the collapse of the Union, Southerners, who had dominated the federal government until Lincoln's election, had availed themselves of federal power to protect slavery.”

Note well that Dickson wasn't himself defending slavery, which he believes debased whites as well as oppressed blacks.  Slavery defenders (including some of his own ancestors) were making the same arguments that importers of non-white immigration from the Third World do today.  They were ”quite willing to burden America and its white posterity with rival, sullen and hostile racial aliens so that these interests can obtain cheap labor at the expense of white Americans.”

In other words, it was a disaster, and we're still dealing with it.  And attempts to defend the South by proclaiming it to be ”multiracialism and magnolias” are futile because they're not true, and distract from the real issue—the dispossession of whites.

Race and The American Prospect is still available on Amazon and AbeBooks.