Posted on 08/16/2017 1:08:55 PM PDT by PeaRidge
"History, by apprising [citizens] of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views." ---Thomas Jefferson
From the time of the middle of the 19th Century, the deep Southern States’ governments and the Southern people have been depicted as being totally preoccupied with the survival of slavery, while Northern people were to become the defenders of universal freedom.
Those reading many of the dominant post-era authors of the history of this period are often led to the absolute conclusion that the controversies which arose between the states, and the war in which they culminated, were caused largely by efforts on the one side to extend and perpetuate human slavery, and on the other side to resist it and establish human liberty.
Generations of Southern people and many historians would vigorously disagree with these views. Based on records of the time, that construct is substantially devoid of important historical facts, and fails to include the issues, which produced the secession, and those that caused President Lincoln to send Federal troops to the harbors in Charleston and Pensacola to initiate war.
This is a great disservice to generations of Americans who have not been urged to study the records of the period produced by authors writing at the actual time of the events. However, having been consistently presented in modern schoolbook, film, and television media accounts of the American Civil War, these notions have now spread to become the commonly accepted thesis of that era in US history.
The prevailing views of the practice of slavery in the US have been fashioned by authors and historians primarily from the accounts of first and second-hand observers of the slave South. Since such observers lacked the hard data needed to determine the scope and nature of this relationship, they could only convey their impressions. Unfortunately, these impressions are far from uniform, and incorrectly stereotype the people of the time.
With the acceptance of the media driven concept of slavery, it has then become logical to argue that it was necessary for the US government to wage a four-year war to abolish slavery in the United and Confederate States, one that ravaged half of the country and destroyed a generation of American men.
At the beginning of the history of the country, the founding fathers were opponents to empire, a policy that Lincoln and the incoming Republican Party’s platform turned on its head less than 150 years later. In 1860 Southern economic interests understood the effects of these policies and decided to leave the union.
The war was clearly tied to slavery, but in the sense that Republican tariffs would have squeezed the profitability out of the slave-based cotton plantation economy to the benefit of Northern industry, especially Union textiles and iron manufacturing.
Lincoln claimed the war was to "save" the Union, but this was only true in a geographic sense. The country ceased being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign states, and sovereign people bound together by common interests and a Constitutional republican form of government.
Instead, America became an "amalgam" of states dominated by a powerful and centralized federal government. Although the war freed four million slaves into poverty, it did not bring about a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln later claimed in the Gettysburg Address.
As the thirteen colonies, did when they seceded from Britain, the South sought separation to attain peace and security, not warfare among the people. The Confederacy had no intent to occupy or attack the Union states.
Violence was brought to the soil of the South by the only human being of the time that had the power to do so, Abraham Lincoln.
It is happening all over again.
This is not about defending the Confederacy.
Its existence
Rebellion works for me.
Nope. It is the opening, warm-up act. The main event starts soon.
slaves
If all those young northern boys who marched off to war had known that this country would turnout the way it has, most of them would have stayed home.
Just as the first casualty in War is Truth, the victors write the history books. The South lost, attempts to reconcile peacefully were destroyed. Even to the impeachment of President Anderson. The South got what every defeated nation gets. Destroyed. After decades some pretense of apology was made for what the South endured in Reconstruction by allowing monuments. Now they and their families are dead and so the monuments are being destroyed. Like the Aussie said, “If you didnt’ want to be called a Yank you should have fought a little harder.”
The Confederacy hasn’t existed in more than 150 years. It takes a special kind of pathetic loser to think a Confederate flag or a statue of Robert E. Lee is a threat — or even just a bothersome nuisance — of any kind.
Japan was treated better after losing, after the atrocities they perpetrated upon prisoners, civilians, etc.
Oh the humanity!
“slaves”
You mean the slaves that were legal until 1865 ?
At least not as U.S. president.
I often wonder if my family member who is buried at Gettysburg would consider it “worth it” to see what we have become.
Nice the old way if you were John C. Calhoun or Jefferson Davis and had a "sovereign and separate" state government to play around with.
Not so nice if you were a slave. And there were a lot of slaves.
What really changed for most people in the 19th century was the frontier filled up and it got harder move away from one's problems and make a new start.
What changed was subsistence farming didn't satisfy people's needs or wants and they had to start working in an economy that was increasingly dominated by far-away corporations.
Those were the big changes to America in the 19th century.
Look at some of the comments, defenses, even aggressive threats here on FR, look at the video posted overnight here on FR by the White Supremacist group, which should be removed from FR. These are modern day racists, idiots, and they cause anyone defending the Confederacy and its flag, its monuments, etc. to be tarred with the same evil they represent and promote.
Being willing to go to war over not seeing the handwriting on the wall. All the other western countries that had slavery managed to get rid of it without a war, some people were mad, but they saw the direction of the wind.
Ah, but Japan had secrets we wanted about biowarfare so the atrocities were “forgiven”.
Um, let’s go with Slavery!
Not necessarily. That war would have ground on and on until somebody collapsed and whatever country lost would be subject to the same kind of demagoguery, violence, and dictatorship that we saw in the 20s and 30s. The result probably would have been another war.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.