Posted on 05/20/2014 8:57:04 AM PDT by Sioux-san
Many were also tenant farmers, renting parcels of land from the owners. But there were many blacks who worked on farms as wage laborers because they (as well as many whites) didn't want to bear the risks of a bad crop. The so-called Black Codes enacted after Reconstruction in the South were in part an attempt by white landowners to limit the free flow of black labor among farms in search of higher wages.
“And a generation or two later they would flee the south by the millions.”
In response both to oppressive Jim Crow laws in the South and the prospects of better pay in the industrializing North.
Ah, the Crittenden Amendment. Most of Lincoln’s base was Free Soilers, who didn’t want blacks, free or otherwise, anywhere in their states or territories. He had to oppose that. But it wouldn’t have made any difference if it had passed because even if it had passed the South’s main issues involved the American System (Lincoln’s and Henry Clay’s system of crony capitalism).
There is no mono-causal explanation of the Uncivil War. It is only sanitized schoolbook history that was common into the 70s that tried to force the conflict into the procrustean bed of “slavery vs. abolition”. Liberals historically have loved that narrative, too, although at present they are revising their views in ways intended to inflict ever more unfounded race guilt.
That quote is from before the war. If he had told people what powers he would exercise once the war started, he would have been run out of office.
Regarding Lincoln’s comment on slavery, he is obviously right. It was permitted under the Constitution, although not expressly. But there is nothing in the Constitution that gave him the power to emancipate slaves, smash printing presses and shut papers down, suspend habeas corpus, deport Congressmen, etc. Once the war started, Lincoln ignored the Constitution, even the Jaffaites acknowledge that. My point was NOT that Lincoln didn’t really oppose slavery - he clearly did. What I have said is that ending slavery was at best a secondary issue for him. If it had been, he would have, on principle, refused to support the Corwin Amendment because it represented something reprehensible.
Yea, they weren't very smart, were they?
I can easily find a hundred southern editorials and political leaders saying that secession was all about slavery. How many can you find saying that it was about the American System?
It's possible to find something reprehensible but still recognize that it's protected under the constitution. Lincoln knew that slavery, once confined to its present borders, would die out--or become so problematic that a way out would have to be found. So did the south, which was why they rejected the amendment. Moreover, you'll note in the text of the proposed amendment was that there was nothing there stopping states from ending slavery on their own. Interestingly, the confederate constitution included a provision that did explicitly prevent states from ending slavery within their borders. "States rights" and all that, I suppose.
But it wasn’t the issue. It did nothing on the crony capitalism issues, “non-revenue” tariffs, etc.
The “American System”, which you evidently are not aware of, was Clay’s and Lincoln’s shorthand for a combination of policies promoting high tariffs, crony capitalism, etc. Yes, you can find lots of editorials, speeches, etc. objecting to this. SC nearly seceded over the tariff during Jackson’s presidency. The tariff was lowered and both sides backed down.
I know quite well what the “American System” was. I also know that there was virtually no mention of the American System and its primary elements of tariffs, internal improvements, or a national bank in the “Secession Winter” of 1860-61. What there was was lots of talk about the threat to slavery that Lincoln’s election represented.
It recognizes that slavery was, after the war, an indefensible rationale for secession and war. So it comes up with the notion that 600,000 to 800,000 dead Americans were, however, somehow fully justified because a Mississippi planter didn't want to pay an extra 5% or 10% for luxury imports.
And this ignores the fact that the CSA would still have to pay for its government and military even after winning independence. If they weren't to pay for it using their own eevill tariffs, how were they going to pay for them?
In 1860 the national GDP was ~$4B. The entire federal budget, financing the massive and crushingly oppressive federal government the South felt obliged to flee, was $60,000.000.
That's 1.5% of GDP. To put that into some perspective, at present we're at 40%. It was also down from about 2.5% in 1800. IOW, from 1800 to 1860 the federal government got smaller.
CSA apologists project our genuine problems today with a massive and overweening federal government back to the 1850s, and try to portray secessionists as small government fighters. The problem is that this scenario just doesn't fit the facts. 1860 America was a very different place from the America of today.
As for me I’m convinced that the run~of~the~mill plowboy was utterly indifferent to the potential outcome of emancipation of the darkies but absolutely outraged at the notion that his uber-rich neighbors would have to pay more for their appurtenances, accoutrements, and other fineries.
/sarc
You need to read more widely, and the issues didn’t just arise that winter. They were simmering to boiling for nearly three decades.
Your condescension is noted. Perhaps you need to read more widely and you’ll see that the tensions between north and south went back long before the Nullification Crisis, back to colonial days. The point is that in the immediate run-up to the rebellion, no one was talking about internal improvements or the national bank or even tariffs. They were talking about slavery.Denying that this was the proximate cause of the rebellion is revisionism of the most ludicrous sort.
Of course we can only guess at what Lincoln would have done had he lived longer, although his thinking did appear to change over time.
Frederick Douglass’ view of Lincoln seemed to be a mix of veneration and cynical realism, this below seeming to be the latter:
Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln
Frederick Douglass
April 14, 1876
“...It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.
He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.
In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery.
His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race.
To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government.
The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity...”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/oration-in-memory-of-abraham-lincoln/
It wasn’t a “rebellion”. That is just recycled war rhetoric.
As for causes, you are simply wrong. Very few credible historians today would go anywhere near the position that slavery was “the cause” of the war. Even contemporaries of the war such as Charles Dickens saw and wrote very clearly about what was going on. I have no idea why some people today cling so tenaciously to a theme that is so overly simplistic that it is simply wrong. During and after the war there was a need to maintain the perception of the legitimacy of the federal government in the face of the murderous disaster that the federal government inflicted on the country. The North propagandized through government schools on this issue for years. Nevertheless, we are far enough removed from events, and there are enough available original source materials that it makes no sense to say these things any more. Slavery was completely secure in 1861, but even if we were to take the view that the future of slavery was the primary concern of some or all of the deep south states, other states seceded after and because of Lincoln’s invasion of the South. This aside, you might do well to read, for example, what tax historian, Charles Adams has to say on the subject.
You describe the predicament of the Lost Causer perfectly. Most "credible historians" today recognize that slavery was the sine qua non that set the stage for rebellion. And yes, rebellion was exactly what it was. They may have prevailed if that had sued for partition but they weren't honest enough or patient enough to take a chance on an unfavorable outcome. So they chose the route of the arrogant belligerent.
Slavery was completely secure in 1861...
Not if you read anything by any of the rebel leadership.
Now we see you don’t understand the Constitution and the history of secession movements any more than you do the many factors that led to the war. The only “rebellion” was the Lincoln administration’s rebellion against the Constitution.
Odd..if slavery was the only issue and secession illegal, why were the Northern papers editorializing on behalf of letting the South go and, in many cases, pointing to despotism on the part of the Lincoln administration. Since you are such a scholar of these matters I’m sure you’ve read Howard Cecil Perkins’ analysis of 495 editorials that appeared in Northern papers from late 1860 to early, which found the large majority opposed to forcing states back into the Union. Here’s an example from the New York Tribune from February 5, 1861: [Lincoln’s latest speech] “contained the arguments of a tyrant - force, compulsion, and power...Nine out of ten people of the North” [are opposed to forcing South Carolina to remain in the Union]. “The great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration...that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed.” [Therefore, if the southern states want to secede] “they have a clear right to do so”.
Or, how about the Albany Atlas and Argus of November 1, 1860? : “We sympathize and justify the South because their rights have been invaded to the extreme.” [If they wish to secede] “we would wish them God-Speed.”
You also seem to have an obsession with Pollard’s book. Somewhere I have a copy of Benson Lossing’s history of the “Civil War”. That, in fact, was a seminal source of the post-war propaganda effort to whitewash the federal government’s unlawful aggression. Your repeated sneers about the “Lost Cause” is just a reflection of the influence liberal historians have had. You seem to want a cartoonish view of history. Events are almost always far more complicated than that, even though complexity isn’t emotionally satisfying.
Do you always make such a habit of assuming?
I, on the other hand, know exactly why the Lost Causers continue to flail around, blaming everything but themselves and their willingness to go to war to protect their economic interests in slavery. It was a morally bankrupt position then and remains one now, which is why you seek to distance yourself from it.
Slavery was completely secure in 1861...
"On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States."--South Carolina Declaration of Causes.
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."--Mississippi Declaration of Causes
"For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war."--Georgia Declaration of Causes.
But hey, what did the guys who actually passed the secession acts know about their own motives, right? They'd have to wait for historians to explain it to them.
This aside, you might do well to read, for example, what tax historian, Charles Adams has to say on the subject.
Wow! Amazing! An academic historian of taxes writes book saying everything is all about taxes!
Adams isn’t the only one to make the observation about the role of taxes, and, because you have reading comprehension problems, I have not written that it was all about taxes. It was, however, partly about taxes.
Is the function of the term “Lost Causer” to make you feel absolved from thinking?
Slavery, where it existed, was completely secure legally in 1861. Lincoln was quite willing to make that situation even better for slaveholders as long as he could continue taxing the South and preventing it from becoming a free trade zone. Expanding slavery into federal territories was an entirely different matter, which, if you were to read the legal arguments, goes far beyond the issue of slavery itself in its implications.
Your simple minded analysis of the reasons for the war ignores obvious facts:
1. The most populous states in the Confederacy seceded because of the federal invasion, which violated the Constitution. Those states would have included Maryland, except Lincoln had most of the legislature arrested.
2. Very few Southerners owned even one slave, and the percentage owning a significant number was tiny. Moreover, some of the plantations with large slave holdings were owned by Northerners. The vast majority of the men fighting on the Confederate side had no slaves; they fought, as contemporary records indicate, because the Federals were invading.
3. Trying to ignore, as you do, the 30-40 years of disputes between the North and South over tariffs, internal “improvements”, the lawful powers of the federal government renders your argument “Slavery! Slavery! Slavery!, if you ignore everything else”.
4. Even the Northern papers were acknowledging that there was more at work in secession (before Virginia and the border states left) than slavery. Here is another example: on November 21, 1860, the Cincinnati Daily Press editorialized: “We believe that the right of any member of this Confederacy to dissolve its political relations with the others and assume an independent position is absolute.”
Running throughout the run up to war was a debate about the nature of the union. Lincoln was clear that he would force states to remain, if only as tax vassals. Most in the South and in the North saw this as tyranny. Even the arch abolitionist Horace Greeley rejected Lincoln’s position during the run up to the war. (”We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets”.)
The Lincoln Administration and its utterly corrupt successors needed a “triumphalist moral myth” of “Slavery! Slavery! Slavery!” to sanitize Lincoln’s and his successor’s lawlessness. They knew that people would find the myth more comfortable than the truth.
BTW, do you suppose that “the sole cause” of WWI was the evil “Hun”? It wouldn’t surprise me.
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