Death by Government: The Missing Chapter by Thomas DiLorenzo

Over the past decade a number of researchers have attempted to document the extent to which various governments during the twentieth century committed acts of mass murder against their own citizens. The millions of deaths catalogued by such researchers as R.J. Rummel, author of Power Kills and Death by Government, and by the authors of The Black Book of Communism, are not deaths caused by foreign armies, but by all those unfortunate souls’ own governments.

The glaring omission is the 300,000 Americans who were killed by the Lincoln regime from 1861–1865. According to some conservative estimates, some 50,000 Southern civilians were also killed. The southern secessionists certainly were a significant opposition to the ruling regime; they absolutely denied the validity of the regime’s absolutist ideology – nationalism and a "mystical" union (as Lincoln called it) that must be held together at all cost; they were certainly dissenting to the Lincoln regime’s goals and its nationalistic ideology; and Lincoln did refer to the original, peaceful acts of secession as a "rebellion." Indeed, the "official" U.S. government title for the War to Prevent Southern Independence is "The War of the Rebellion."

More than half of the 300,000 or so southerners (one out of four adult men) who died, perished from disease. Nevertheless, it was the war, which forced those men to live in conditions where they would be subjected to being exposed to epidemics, that was the root cause of their death.