I do not need to instruct most of my readers on the meaning of the Latin phrase used as the title of this piece. For the few uninitiated, post hoc, ergo propter hoc is a phrase used to describe a logical fallacy, one of the most common in use. It translates to “after this, therefore because of this.” Better to illustrate by example rather than ‘splain, John Brown, the man who initiated the beginning of the US Civil War by attacking the weapons storage facility at Harpers Ferry, was supposedly superstitious and guided by stars in the heavens to dictate his moves. If they aligned, he moved. The fallacy here is that stars had anything to do with his movements. That translates to after this, therefore because of this.
I worked on John Brown quite a bit, assisted by Kevin Starr, who added much more. My initial trigger was the fact that the armory at Harper’s Ferry on the night of the attack had but one guard on duty, and was in essence left unguarded. That told me that the event was staged, and that both Northern and Southern elements were in on it. Then we learn that Brown was juiced, part of the British peerage, and that it does not take much sleuthing to realize that his public hanging was staged, and that he walked away. It then logically follows that if the trigger event of the Civil War was staged, that the war itself, while costly in terms of lives and property, was a planned event. Lincoln, who would later fake his death, was in on it as well. The object of the war? Another time, another story. Slavery was part of it, but the driving force was a new kind of union of the states, and a major rewriting of our governing document, the Constitution. Power was transferred from the individual states to a new and powerful federal government.*
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