Posted on 01/18/2009 8:58:52 PM PST by GonzoII
I didn't say that the South was power mad. But the men behind the secession were certainly greedy for increasing the power of their own interests. The secessionists and their greed for power and material gain through slavery expansion into the territories dragged the rest of the South into the war. Although too many southerners should have known better, the southern revolution was one of the politicians and not the people as North Carolina Confederate governor Vance later admitted. Lee and the many Confederate who had to choose would never had been faced with the choice had the generally worthless pro-secession politicians of the South left well enough alone.
It was the North that was “power mad”. The South was simply defending their homeland from invasion!
Some might say that the Northern army was liberating the South from the misrule and heavy-handed big government of the slavery promoting power in the saddle in Dixie. I know in my family during the war, all of my Southern relatives that were murdered and harassed in those years were victimized by the Confederates and by not the liberating Union army.
The South was not the Confederacy and the Confederacy was not the South. I think Southern people would do well do look beyond the "hooray for Dixie" pro-Confederate myths and examine the low quality of public morals among the people that ran the political Confederacy.
The tariffs were not inequitable. Tariff rates were uniform and legal as the Constitution provided. Such well used complaints from apologists for the Confederacy reminds one of the whining by the antebellum pro-slavery loudmouths that they would be discriminated against if they couldn't take their slave "property" into the territories. No discrimination there-Yankees couldn't take slave property into the territories either! :)
Well, Colonel, I don't claim to be an expert in these matters, but I would think it's rather obvious that tariff rates can be "uniform" but the net effect can still be punitive depending on the industry and circumstances.
Obama may provide us with an example in the coal industry.
Tariffs would be an irritant. I think the tariff policy was a weakness of our early Republican party. But I don’t think that was a legitimate Union breaker. After all, most Southerners were no more hurt by the tariff than the farmers in the Midwest who were overwhelmingly pro-Union. Confederate admirers like to point out that most Southerners did not own slaves. If this was the case, what’s the difference between a dirt farmer in Alabama and one in Minnesota with respect to the tariff issue? That’s one reason that I think tariffs had a minor role in bringing about secession.
Yes, I believe Arnold was a traitor, because he betrayed all he professed to believe in. He was slighted, and he sought revenge in treason for that slight or perceived slight.
You make a technical distinction I don’t agree with — that treason requires the traitor to be on active duty at the time. By that definition, civilians can never commit treason. I flat disagree with that assessment.
Lee did change allegiance and of course you are accurate in stating that he technically committed treason and in fact he was brought up on charges, as Washington too would have been hung for treason, had the British captured him during the war.
Both Lee and Washington committed treason and were “traitors”. But I won’t label either a traitor as I refuse to adhere to the technical definitions in the case for either of them. Both of them were principled, moral men who adhered rigidly to their moral principles. I can’t apply the term “traitor” to them, any more than I can apply the term “traitor” to those German Generals who sought to assassinate Hitler in WWII for love of country, but technically they were “traitors” as well.
So I surrender the argument, since technically you are correct in that Lee was a “traitor”, as was Washington, and all of the other founding fathers who betrayed the British Crown. I can’t win the argument on those grounds, so I concede. Lee was a “traitor”. I for one would never convict him for remaining morally true to his core principals and the love he had for his state and his countryman. You see a traitor. I see a patriot.
Where do these Lee detractors get off judging a 19th century man by 21st century standards? It’s as bad as the “living constitution” arguments. They both need to be judged in their contemporary contexts.
If you are correct that southern farmers were no more hurt than midwestern farmers, why did the South pay 87% of the total tariffs in 1860? The South out-produced the midwest and the north combined?
I don't know about Southerners' purchasing 87% of the goods imported into the USA. But there's no difference between the situation of a Minnesota farmer and a non-slaveowning farmer in Georgia. Both were subsistence farmers insulated from the market, mainly growing what they had to survive on. I saw a copy of the will of my great great grandfather in Georgia and there's no possessions there that would have been imported from any farther than the iron works in Richmond.
To admit that tariffs were a factor in secession is to admit that the slave owning minority who grew almost all the export cash crops had an influence beyond their numbers. The question then becomes whether the poor southern masses fought for the rich man's slavery or for the rich man's personal prosperity. In either case, the idea of the poor masses fighting for the rich class's narrow well-being is a grotesque violation of both common sense and American ideals. This contradiction is why the Confederacy folded up so quickly under duress where a legitimate revolution of the people would have persevered.
Hmmm. You a student of Hegel?
I'm not very well educated in philosophy, but what little I know of Hegel and his relationship to Marxist dialectic materialism, I don't think I like that!!! :)
But beyond philosophy, there was little change in immediate personal prospect for most Southerners no matter who one. The one big exception was the fear of slave insurrection which the Dixie movers and shakers exploited greatly. The power of this fear can be seen in the absence of support for the Confederacy in regions lacking significant slavery such as mountainous East Tennessee and regions in Northern Alabama. They had very little fear of militant slaves there so they correctly saw that Confederacy offered nothing compared to remaining united with the greatest government in human history.
Did you ever see the movie, "Gettysburg"? If not, I highly recommend it. At the end of the movie a Union soldier asks his prisoner, "If you don't own slaves, why do you fight?" To which the Confederate replies, "For our raaghts."
Thanks.
I have a bad habit of asking those who condemn slavery if they believe in a “woman’s right to choose.” Don’t get me wrong, I think they are both forms of evil. Depriving people of freedom and murdering babies are both forms of evil. In an attempt to try to make people understand how 19th Century Americans could rationalize slavery, I try to frame it in modern terms how modern Americans can rationalize abortion. Of course, in every case, they say “but that’s different”.
Yet my point still stands. Modern Americans can see so clearly that slavery was evil and condemn the entire generations that slavery was practiced, as evil people — slave-owner and non-slave owner alike. Yet they can’t for the life of them see that murdering babies in the womb is evil.
To date I have not changed one mind with this tactic. The only people who can see it are those who are already against abortion, and they see both my points very clearly — that both slavery and abortion are evil, and that intelligent people in both eras are capable of blind, ignorant support of that evil, even as they rationalize and justify it at every turn.
I try to make people understand that there was a serious train of thought in the days of slavery that slaves were like children or pets and NEEDED guidance and couldn’t be left alone idle or they would harm themselves and others. Even this train of thought was easily seen as false, as t here were plenty of successful black men in the early days of this nation, who by their very success proved that black skin alone did not determine intelligence. But again, the people then let themselves believe that blacks were inferior and were better off as slaves because they needed direction, discipline, a watchful eye and a full day of hard work to keep them out of trouble.
But indeed your point is factual. Modern Americans act as if they know what was going through the minds of men in the early 1800s, when most are regurgitating their school brainwashing or divulging their knee-jerk attitudes based on minimal knowledge and study.
Tariffs were a major factor in causing the civil war.
In fact, the “Tarrifs of Abomination” passed in 1828, itself almost caused a civil war between north and south. As the article linked below explains, tariffs hurt the south more, “because the higher tariffs meant higher prices for the manufactured products they didn’t produce themselves, while southerners also felt Great Britain and France would retaliate on items like cotton, forcing the region into poverty.”
So on the one hand, the tariffs would be disproportionately paid by the south because the north could supply themselves of the products that the south had to import from abroad. On the other hand, the south feared that Great Britain would respond with cotton tariffs that would kill their export business.
The article goes on to say, “The tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were seen as symbols of Southern oppression.”
Tariffs were most definitely among the reasons for secession by the southern states, along with slavery (the #1 reason for the war), and a feeling of oppression that their State’s rights were being trampled on by a power-hungry federal government, a fact proved true long ago as rampant federal power has been destroying state’s rights ever since.
http://www.buyandhold.com/bh/en/education/history/2003/tariff_of_abominations.html
As for “whether the poor southern masses fought for the rich man’s slavery or for the rich man’s personal prosperity. In either case, the idea of the poor masses fighting for the rich class’s narrow well-being is a grotesque violation of both common sense and American ideals”, I would say many poor minority Americans have fought in many wars caused by or for rich American industrialists, bankers or power-brokers. That is no so uncommon, or are you that naive?
The poor southern masses fought for their freedom and rights, which was co-incident with the financial interests of the rich plantation owners of the south. Modern Americans are still fighting for freedom and patriotism, and still fueling huge profits for the modern bankers and power-brokers and other profiteers in wartime.
I will not broadly denigrate the motives of Confederate soldiers. I suspect a great many fought for honorable causes, for freedom and rights as you say. But what freedom and rights would they have had in greater measure under the Confederacy than they would have had under the old Constitution? They were too poor to take slaves into the territories, so that dubious freedom was irrelevant to them. They were too close to subsistence to worry about tariffs on imported goods. It might even be argued that their freedom and rights were safer under the old government than under the new Confederacy which was plainly the slaveowners’ government. It’s not without reason that many southern communities regarded the advanceing Union armies as liberators bringing deliverance from a southern born tyranny.
Of course you know I know you are right. I was making the larger point that the CSA was to the USA what the USA was to the British Empire, with the difference that one rebellion was successful but the other was not.
My great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier, but I never got a chance to ask him his motives for fighting. I think he was too poor to own any slaves.
That's right, and it tends to take the focus off ones character, i.e. how one acted on his convictions, and the sacrifices he makes in spite of inner struggle.
The same can be said of many of the founding fathers, including Washington, who looked on British rule as an impediment to their personal acquisition of additional lands to the west.
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