Posted on 08/11/2015 1:11:21 PM PDT by iowamark
What caused the Civil War? That seems like the sort of simple, straightforward question that any elementary school child should be able to answer. Yet many Americans—including, mostly, my fellow Southerners—claim that that the cause was economic or state’s rights or just about anything other than slavery.
But slavery was indisputably the primary cause, explains Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
The abolition of slavery was the single greatest act of liberty-promotion in the history of America. Because of that fact, it’s natural for people who love freedom, love tradition, and love the South to want to believe that the continued enslavement of our neighbors could not have possibly been the motivation for succession. But we should love truth even more than liberty and heritage, which is why we should not only acknowledge the truth about the cause of the war but be thankful that the Confederacy lost and that freedom won.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.acton.org ...
Who'd a thunk it, Handydandy and Churchill. GMTA
That's what I want to hear! ;-)
Nearly all Southerners know that today. They love Lincoln. They love that he freed the slaves. They love that he freed the slaveholders from their culture of dependency. And, most of all, they love that he preserved the integrity of the greatest nation in history.
There isn't any group of people more patriotic than the people of the South. They love the USA.
We're all so lucky to be here together. It's like Sarah Palin says, "One nation, under God, indivisible."
And, it's going to stay that way!!
Forty years later, when the centenary of Lincoln's birth was celebrated in 1909, a border state official reflected on the assassination of Lincoln, "Confederate veterans held public services and gave public expression to the sentiment, that 'had Lincoln lived' the days of reconstruction might have been softened and the era of good feeling ushered in earlier". A century later, Goodrich concluded in 2005, "For millions of people, particularly in the South, it would be decades before the impact of the Lincoln assassination began to release its terrible hold on their lives". The majority of Northerners viewed the assassin as a madman or monster who murdered the savior of the Union, while in the South, many cursed the assassin for bringing upon them the harsh revenge of an incensed North instead of the reconciliation promised by Lincoln.
I would say that admiration for Lincoln will continue to grow, but the fact is that it is more or less universal now. I have seen his image all over the world.
And, of course, the vast majority of Confederate soldiers did not think of themselves as fighting to perpetuate slavery. They were told that they were fighting to defend their "home" and their neighbors.
It was a relative handful of bigshots, many of them slaveholders, who concocted this whole theory about "secession" and a God-given right to own people. Of course, the whole theory is preposterous when we think about it now.
But, you know, even those people, the people who had become dependent upon slaves to take care of them, were victims of their history. For generations, their families had been cared for cradle to grave by slaves. Quite naturally, they had lost confidence in their ability to take care of themselves. They even confess their dependency in Mississippi's declaration of "secession." They talk about how they could no longer work outdoors like those of the "black race." Slavery for them was "not a matter of choice, but of necessity." We can see a similar "culture of dependency" developing today in neighborhoods where generation after generation of families live on the dole and have (they believe) lost the ability to work or to take care of themselves. Lincoln freed them of all that. The descendants of these slaveholders have rediscovered the ability to care for themselves. Humans are remarkably flexible and resourceful.
I hope that someday, more people will learn to be more sympathetic to the memory of these Southern slaveholders. They didn't choose to be born into a system which led to such dependency. It was a culture that developed naturally and over a long period of time.
As you point out, though, it would have all gone much more smoothly had Lincoln not been murdered. Thanks again for sharing.
Explain.
Howsoever, in my prior post I had quoted a certain "Goodrich". Apparently he has written a book, "Darkest Dawn Lincoln, Booth, and the Great American Tragedy" By Thomas Goodrich
See below, from a review:
"Goodrich tells the well-worn story of Booth's assassination of Lincoln, and his subsequent capture and death. He also traces the response of major political leaders like Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, on whose authority hundreds of citizens-many of whom had nothing to do with the assassination-were arrested and imprisoned in a climate of anger and suspicion. But what makes the book particularly valuable and interesting is the author's focus upon the emotional and often violent reactions of ordinary people. In locales North and South, citizens expressing sympathy with Booth or satisfaction with Lincoln's assassination were likely to find their lives quickly ended by griefstricken, angry fellow citizens. Among the many acts of summary retribution were shootings and bayonettings by aggrieved Federal soldiers. But ordinary citizens were no slower to shoot, hang, drown, or even butcher those who lacked the proper attitude of respect and mourning. In some locales, mobs descended on the homes of those not exhibiting sufficient ccoutrements of mourning in their windows."
As for the excuse by slaveholders that they couldn't work outdoors, they would have had no explanation for the fact that most white Southerners were in fact working outdoors. It's just that, as a class, the slaveholders had over time lost confidence in their ability to work outdoors. Dependency leads to indolence and the governing (slaveholding) class had become almost entirely dependent upon their slaves for their daily needs. There were some exceptions and some exceptional people (e.g., Robert E. Lee), but for the most part the South's leadership was weak and the decision-making poor.
And, history shows little mercy for the weak.
To you at any rate.
I told you that Abe was a powerful dude. ;’)
He was a very persuasive man. His second inaugural address called for an end to bitterness and disunion:
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
It is said that Jefferson Davis spent many of his final years studying the speeches and writings of Lincoln. And, it is clear that in the end Abe won him over. In 1887, Davis spoke the following words:
"The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes, and its aspirations. Before you lies the future, a future full of golden promise, a future of expanding national glory, before which all the world shall stand amazed. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation to be wished—a reunited country."
It was as if Davis was channeling Lincoln. What a wonderful country we have - "one nation, under God, indivisible".
I never thought much of davis - I’m glad to read that he came around to reality ;’)
"The withdrawal of a State from a league has no revolutionary or insurrectionary characteristic. The government of the State remains unchanged as to all internal affairs. It is only its external or confederate relations that are altered. To term this action of a Sovereign a 'rebellion' is a gross abuse of language."
"Obstacles may retard, but they cannot long prevent the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice, and sustained by a virtuous people ."
"Secession belongs to a different class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are Sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again, when a better comprehension of the theory of our Government, and the inalienable rights of the people of the States, will prevent any one from denying that each State is a Sovereign, and thus may reclaim the grants which it has made to any agent whomsoever."
"The contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered upon a new and enlarged arena." Jefferson Davis, address to the Mississippi legislature - 16 years after the wars end.
"The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form."
"The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes, and its aspirations. Before you lies the future, a future full of golden promise, a future of expanding national glory, before which all the world shall stand amazed. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation to be wished—a reunited country." - Jefferson Davis (1887)
Just as Lincoln and Davis predicted, the country reunited - "One nation, under God, indivisible."
And, slavery is gone - gone for good!
Sic semper tyrannis.
The Illinois Butcher™ Over 600,000 carved.
Not so much for blacks. The Lincoln plan was to send blacks to Liberia, Haiti and Panama.
Just because you don't agree with what Davis said when he got older and more mature doesn't mean that you don't still have his earlier statements to cherish. Maybe the time has come for you to wander through your ideas and bury the dead ones, just like Davis suggested:
" Before you lies the future, a future full of golden promise, a future of expanding national glory, before which all the world shall stand amazed." - Jefferson Davis (1887)
Seize that future, that golden promise. It's part of your American heritage! ;-)
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
As I pointed out to you earlier, the Dred Scott case, and the other cases I cited did not have any relation to the fugitive slave clause. Dred Scott was not a fugitive slave!
Prior to the Scott decision State courts in Slave States did in fact award freedom to slaves in cases identical to Scott's. Taney ignored that president and then went even further overturning the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise, and then somewhere divining that the Framers did not intend people of African descent to become citizens even though those framers themselves recognized such people as citizens.
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