Yeah. Just forget about the slavery thing.
Dixie Ping
Bookmark for later.
Well that was amusing.
The Great-grandson of 4th Corporal A. P. Bradley, Company G. 12th Mississippi Cavalry thanks you.
ok.. i’ll play
the southern states suceeded one by one without resisitance... until..
the agression driven confederates decided to start a war with the north, and open fire on fort sumpter, not only firing the first shots, but killing the first people in the war that was to come..
the war that did not have to be....
except for southern agression
I read somewhere the Seward advised Lincoln to start a war with Britain and conquer Canada instead of fighting a war with the South over slavery.
I believe it was Gale Norton who said the South fought the good fight for State’s Rights but picked a bad reason - Slavery - to do it for.
That’s a reasonable viewpoint. Clearly the Union was not formed by the State representatives to make themselves all submissives to a Great Central Government which had not previously existed except in the form of the British Crown.
But like she said...they picked a bad issue to make the argument.
And you, like me, were schooled with the “secession is illegal!” absurdity. If it was, what was the Revolution? An illegal secession of the Colonies from its rightful owner, the English psychopath?
Maybe Lincoln was serious about keeping the Union together to preserve the concept of popular sovereignty. But at what cost?
There is no excuse for the vicious war that killed 700,000 men just “four score and seven years...” after the founding of the country.
None at all. Could have been solved with some honest dealing and a bit of cash. A Trillion dollars equivalent would have been worth it to save the lives and preserve the Republic.
By inseparably "packaging" the Slavery Concept with the States' Rights Concept, the Southrons forever foxtrotted the issue of state sovereignty.
Thanks, O Noble Sons of the Olde South. Sure the 90% of outstandingly brave Confederate fighting men who did not own slaves were defending their homes against invasion. Bravo! Best young fellows in the country!
All the rest of your points about Northern Exploitation of the agrarian South, rampant federalism, etc. ad nauseam, are quite accurate, but so what? It was a Rich Man's War and a Poor Man's Fight. The planter boys who ran the Southern show would not even take innumerable reasonable deals offered to sell their slaves for shipment back to Africa, or gradual emancipation with compensation. They were stuck on slavery as the key to their way of life. BTW, the Abolitionists were absolutely stupid bastards about the whole thing, too. But not even Robert E. Lee of Holy Memory believed in slavery.
Different people are in a war for different reasons. Start with Reagan’s favorite movie: Friendly Persuasion.
There were massive numbers of abolitionists (my ancestors) who were non-violent Amish, Mennonite, Quaker. Even many of the Wesleyan and Free Methodist and other abolitionists were mostly non-violent.
But they saw slavery as so evil that war was necessary and they tried to push the Feds into war. They wanted to turn state militias (National Guard) into John Brown on a massive scale.
So these abolitionists eagerly joined the “good war”. Unfortunately, they knew nothing about guns, nothing about violence, nothing about hunting and living off the land.
In contrast, the southern men came from a culture of violence with fellow humans and shooting animals and living off the land. When the two sides met, the Northern idealists died rapidly. The North was left short-handed and resorted to drafting immigrants.
That part of the war is seldom told.
ping
I’ve read a few things over the years about the various state conventions and general campaigning happening in the south during the initial stages of secession.
The impression I got, to be fair looking back from a much more cynical time – is that those that participated desperately wanted to equate themselves with the American Revolution and the constitutional convention. They wanted to cloak themselves in legitimacy as much as possible.
to draw a modern and I’m sure not at all controversial comparison it reads a little too much like the revolutionary resistance carried out by the peace and freedom loving peoples of the donbass, simply trying to preserve their way of life against a fascist central government. – that last part was mainly troll bait no need to get worked up on the comparison if you had an ancestor fight for the confederacy,.
I believe that it was CS General Longstreet who said
‘they say that the South went to war over our differences with the North....the only differences I ever heard were about slavery’
A good thought as CWII is fast approaching.
Liberal Freepers who hate the South and it’s history have begun their attack like the little Eichmann that they are.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Confederacy was just a bunch of good ol' boys sitting around in their garage talking about guns when Lincoln sent the feds in to shoot up the place.
What Clyde doesn't want to admit is that the Confederate government was a government like other governments, aggressive, militarist, imperialist, power-hungry, and intent on achieving objectives that didn't have much to do with welfare of the average (non-slaveowning) citizen, let alone of the enslaved masses.
Instead he wants a victim story about how the rebels were jes' ordinary folks and the federals intervened to create a superstate that wouldn't actually arise until decades later.
The War indeed was an awful calamity inflicted upon the nation for our presumptive sins. Lincoln said as much.March 30,1863. The Sons of the South were Americans before they were pressed to secede. Their Constitution reflects heavily that of the parent Nation. The War was imposed.And Reconstruction was unnecessary and Cruel. The South Was Right by the Kennedy’s ought be required reading perhaps more for the several appendix than for the style itself. Every High School and College ought study those the wounds have not healed much—I suspect the picking at it by all sides -North,South, and hyphenated Americans led by the divisive Democratic Party.
No, actually only the myths are being exposed as myths.