Posted on 10/03/2019 4:59:09 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
LOL! Keep telling yourself that.
I think their main complaint against DiLorenzo are the claims he makes, evidence or not.
I don’t know about his crtics but my copy is heavily footnoted and has an extensive bibliography to support his contentions. The bottom line for me is whatever the causes I can’t see the loss of 600-700,000 lives in pursuit of a political theory ...”preserve the union”. Should’ve been a peaceful separation and not a bitter murderous divorce. Slavery was on it’s last legs and the coming industrial revolution would have ended it.
What price would you be willing to pay to defend the country? Were the 25,000 dead from the Revolutionary War a fair price to pay for independence? How about the 400,000 from the Second World War? An armed rebellion was forced on Lincoln and he fought it to its conclusion. Your complaint seems to be not that he fought, but that he won.
Should’ve been a peaceful separation and not a bitter murderous divorce.
No argument there. But the Confederacy went out of its way to ensure that didn't happen. They walked out without discussion, walked away from all national obligations like debt and treaties, took every piece of property they could get their hands on, and when the U.S. took a stand then they resorted to war.
Slavery was on it’s last legs and the coming industrial revolution would have ended it.
It's easy to say that 150 years after the fact. But in 1860 you would be hard-pressed to find someone in the Confederacy who believed that. And even with the sudden end to slaver it still took until the 1930's to develop a practical mechanical cotton harvester. And even today mechanical tobacco harvesters are less efficient than manual harvesting.
“Were the 25,000 dead from the Revolutionary War a fair price to pay for independence? “
Well, Lincoln...like King George ...was willing to expend as many lives as necessary to PREVENT independence of the South.
They weren't getting screwed by the North. They grew cotton (or had slaves grow it for them). They got money for it from the North and from abroad. But they didn't make all the things they wanted, so they had to pay somebody else to make them. The money from the cotton sales went into buying things. Also, there were a lot of investment opportunities elsewhere so the planters kept money invested outside the region. And while there were banks and shipping firms and insurance companies in the South, many slaveowners relied on Northern or foreign shippers and banks and insurance companies and resented that reliance bitterly, thinking that the outsiders were taking advantage of them.
Tariffs were relatively low in the 1840s and 1850s. Southern Democrats had much power in Washington DC and kept tariffs low. After the economic downturn in the late 1850s tariffs were going to be raised. But if Southerners had stayed in Congress they could have limited the amount of the increase. They could have used their bargaining power to get most of what they wanted out of Congress. Certainly, nobody expected tariffs to go as high as they eventually did - to pay for the war. If it had all been about tariffs, there wouldn't have been secession or war. There had to be something else involved.
What you leave out: 1) Southern slaveowners were scared of slave uprisings and escapes. They wanted a federal government that would support slavery, and feared that the Republicans would undercut the power of slaveowners. 2) There was a lot of pride involved. If you have power in the country and fear you're losing it, it can scare you. If somebody tells you that your economic system is based on a great evil, it can sting. It might make you even more committed to the system and ready to break off relations with the critics and even fight them.
What the crap are you talking about? The south had no intentions of invading the north. None. They left the union and simply wanted to govern themselves without being screwed by the north. The north couldn't live with the south leaving because they had too good a deal going robbing them.
Both were faced with armed rebellion. The difference between the two is that the Founding Fathers were willing to suffer what ever it took to win while the Confederates were not.
They were given this chance with the Corbin Amendment and they STILL left. Explain that will you.
Starting an armed rebellion is a funny way to go about it them. Sorry it didn't turn out the way you wanted.
The north couldn't live with the south leaving because they had too good a deal going robbing them.
What the crap are you talking about?
Easy for anyone who has a remote understanding of the history of the period. The Corwin amendment was passed out of the House and Senate AFTER the original 7 Confederate states left and AFTER they had adopted a constitution that protected slavery to an extent the Corwin amendment never imagined. So are you suggesting the the Confederate states were supposed to call off their secession and return to the half-a-loaf that the Corwin Amendment was offering? Really?
The slavers had more brass than brains?
It’s easier to dismiss the man than the arguments he makes.
There are plenty of examples where people have shown his arguments to be flawed.
First, secession resolutions had already been passed in seven states before Lincoln took office. Whatever proponents of the amendment might have hoped, those states weren't going to come back. They'd already burned their bridges.
At one point in the American Revolution, the British offered the colonials a pardon and a guarantee of no taxation without representation. The revolutionaries rejected it. That doesn't mean that they didn't care about taxation and representation though. It was just that the offer came too late to be accepted. Hostile feelings were too strong. Same thing with the secessionists and slavery. Many of them had already made their decision and nothing would change their minds.
Second, who's to say that the Corwin amendment didn't win over some slave owners. I suspect it didn't, but four states had rejected slavery before secession (only to embrace it after Fort Sumter was attacked). There were also the four border states which didn't support secession. How do we know that the Corwin amendment didn't have some effect there?
Third, there were other compromise attempts that would have been more acceptable to Southerners that were rejected earlier by Republicans. Maybe the Corwin Amendment wasn't the guarantee that slaveowners really wanted. And indeed it wasn't.
Fourth, there were a lot of things that the federal government could do to disadvantage slavery and slave owners, short of outright abolition. More free states would come into the union. That could mean looser fugitive slave regulations, more anti-slavery judges, more debates in Congress about slavery, schemes for compensated emancipation, an end to restrictions on the distribution of abolitionist materials through the federal mails, an end to slavery in the District of Columbia, stricter controls on the movement of slaves through free states and territories.
Fifth, the very idea of "unamendable amendments" was questionable and would have been questioned by the courts. Or simply this - some day the "unamendable amendment" would just be amended like any other. Or maybe a new Constitution would have to be created if the country wanted to get rid of slavery. In any case, an "unamendable amendment" may not have been an iron-clad guarantee. It certainly wasn't "iron-clad" enough for the slaveowners.
Sixth, who's to say the Corwin amendment would have been ratified? If the amendment came close to being ratified by enough states it would probably have caused a split in the Republican party - and possibly in the country. The more antislavery Republicans accepted slavery where it existed but they might feel uncomfortable giving slaveowners a permanent guarantee.
The amendment was a last minute "Hail Mary Pass" - a desperate attempt to hold the country together. It would be a mistake to think that it was a clear and inviolable guarantee to slaveowners, or that rejecting it, meant that they didn't care about slavery.
This is what typical liberals do when they can't make an argument which makes sense. So far, I've been told that the war was fought to avenge the "attack" on Fort Sumner, that it was fought to "end" slavery when clearly, once the south was gone, the issue of slavery was done with in the north. Lincoln provoked the south into action from a self-defense basis yet that provocation goes unmentioned. Sorry, it doesn't wash. The south wanted out because the north was abusing them financially and the north couldn't give up the good thing it had going for itself so it FORCED a war upon the south. 700,000 young men in the prime of their lives were stolen from their loved ones so big money folks up north could keep their gravy train going. You can attempt to paint this story in whatever rosy color you wish but it will still smell like shit. By the way, this isn't an "argument". It is fact.
How about standing with the US Constitution against a Neo Fascist click of Democrat politicians illegal conducting a hidden trial against a duly elected US President?
When do you gutless cowards finally stop hiding from the real evil running the Democrat Party and finally get off your knees?
If we let the political class remove Trump without serious repercussions, they will know they can do anything they want to us.
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