Posted on 10/03/2015 1:28:14 PM PDT by Kaslin
Although the American Revolution resulted in independence for the United States and World War II made it an international power, the American Civil War was arguably the most important war in American history. It truly was an American watershed.
In order to appreciate that war’s significance, it must be understood what the Civil War was about. Contrary to all-too-popular opinion, the Civil War was not about states’ rights. Instead it was all about slavery and white supremacy. As shown in my just-released book, The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won, there is compelling evidence that secession and the Confederacy were the result of Southerners’ desire to preserve slavery and white supremacy – not to promote states’ rights.
The evidence of the seceders’ motivations is clear-cut and convincing. Only slave states seceded, and the greater the percentage of slaves and the percentage of slave-owning families the more likely a slave state was to secede. Those states complained that the Federal Government was doing not too much but too little – Southerners wanted the central government to more aggressively enforce slavery, especially to return runaway slaves. They also were upset that other states were passing “liberty laws” to make it more difficult to retrieve runaways. The issue was not who had the power to do what but instead whether their powers were being used to promote slavery. Far from respecting individual states’ rights, they wanted to compel the Federal and other state governments to enforce slaveholders’ rights and preserve slavery.
The strongest evidence of seceders’ motivations is the language they used in their own secession documents. What could be more telling? Six of the seven early seceding states provided clear statements of their reasons for seceding. Their reasons included the election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed extension of slavery into territories; the runaway slave issue; the threat to slavery’s existence with the possible loss of four to six billion dollars in slave property (the largest component of Southern wealth); the perceived end of white supremacy and the resultant political and social equality of blacks and whites, and desperate warnings of the effect all this change would have on Southern Womanhood.
South Carolina’s declaration of the reasons for secession said, “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution [runaway slave return provision].”
As he called for a secession convention, Mississippi’s governor declared, “The existence or the abolition of African slavery in the Southern States is now up for a final settlement.” Citing only slavery-protection reasons, that state’s legislature convened a secession convention. The latter’s declaration of the causes of secession got right to the point in its opening line: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world.”
Not only did their own secession resolutions reveal slavery and white supremacy as their causation, but the seven states who seceded even before Lincoln’s inauguration immediately began an outreach campaign to other slave states. Their correspondence and speeches relied only on slavery-related issues to encourage other slave states’ secession. They only lobbied slave states.
Much other evidence demonstrates that slavery and white supremacy preservation were the causes of secession and even trumped possible Confederate victory in the war. All efforts to avoid war by compromise focused only on slavery issues. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said slavery was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy and Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers had erred in stating that all men were created equal.
Even though it had a tremendous manpower shortage, the Confederacy officially rejected the use of slaves as soldiers (as inconsistent with its white supremacy views) and rejected one-on-one prisoner exchanges for captured black Union soldiers. Just as American colonists needed European intervention to win the Revolutionary War, the Confederates were desperate for British and French intervention; however, they declined to end slavery in order to achieve involvement by the slavery-hating Europeans.
Union victory ended slavery and kept America from being an international pariah. It also resulted in passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments; these provided the legal basis for ending legal segregation and providing blacks with voting and other civil rights.
Despite the compelling evidence of slavery’s and white supremacy’s roles in fomenting secession, the Confederacy, and the Civil War, too many contemporary Americans cling to the myth that somehow states’ rights were at the root of the Civil War. We need to accept the reality of the racial underpinnings of that critical war in order to contemplate, confront, and overcome the continuing racial tensions in America.
So another fifty or sixty or seventy years of slavery was OK with you?
Or even some kind of steam tractor maybe?
At any rate slavery hung over both South and North as a spiritual curse. God isn’t going to smile favorably on cant about freedom that is being constantly violated. Chattel slavery that inhered to future generations was not even a kind of slavery that was mentioned in the bible.
Nobody’s saying it was okay, especially not in the form it was being practiced. Nobody hollers TOO much about the history of indentured servitude even though it is not legal today. But for someone to be slave forever and their children to be slaves, that takes a special kind of evil.
Nevertheless; Lincoln was a mass murderer and a war criminal should should have been hung for crimes against humanity.
By just whose or what law?
The south went to war to protect and expand their Peculiar Institution. The north went to war to save the union and because the south had gone to war against them.
To be fair, the North wasn’t trying to crack down on Southern slavery. Not while it had the same institution itself.
It still was (to use a metaphor) bad karma. If someone can harden their heart badly enough to support that, they are going to overlook a mountain of other blessings too.
“The south went to war to protect and expand their Peculiar Institution.”
The money interests did exactly that and sold it to the common man as “the damn yankees are coming down here to rape your women and deprive you of your rights”.
750,000 dead 1861-1865 for something that would have eventually died out on it’s own within a few years.
You’re correct. The north was vastly more conflicted about slavery than the south. Opinions were all over the map. In the south however things were monolithic - the powers that be were going to have slavery and would willingly defy God himself to keep it.
Is that where the lost cause mythology came from?
Could could it “die out on its own” when the confederates enshrined it in perpetuity in their constitution?
So the South launched their war that led to the deaths of all those hundreds of thousands of people for something that was going to die out in a few years? How dumb is that?
Or “nation building” in our most recent conflict?
Raised in California, old Army wife, moved around a lot.
Few years ago, lived in Greenville, SC for 6 years.
Observing Southern culture was a real education.
Black/white race relations were far more amiable than what I was use to in the West. It raised a lot of questions about black slaves that never left their “owners”, for all that slavery had been they were thankful to in America. “Owners” that freed their slaves before the war.
That led me to ask the question, “Why are we led to believe Americans were the only ones to hold slaves? It’s the evil Americans history? Were there no slaves in Europe?
When I started asking those questions, it opened up the whole history of slavery. Very short conclusion: For most of history, in most of the world, slavery has been the norm for all races.
Ending slavery in Great Britain and America is the real story! Something the world had never experienced on such a scale before.
I’m still waiting on my letters of Marque and Reprisal so I can go a pirating! er, Privateering.
Man did you ever miss the boat!
****How dumb is that? ***
Dumb, since the war wasn’t expected to last three months.
‘Got to...get this...damned fishboat...out of the port!’
Yes, it was the north that made you shoot at fort sumter, wasn’t it...
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