For What is the Confederacy to be Blamed?

Self | 8/16/17 | Self

[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.

[jmacusa]

Who was President Anderson? Do you mean Johnson?

[wastoute]

Nothing to be gained from what ifs. Life is like golf. Play the ball where it lays.

[marron]

It is an interesting question, but both sides quite openly stated that the issue was the western territories. As it was we fought campaigns all over the west to pacify the tribes. Had two countries competed for control of the west, it would have been even more interesting than it already was.

And had the confederacy competed in the Caribbean, that also might have led to conflict. It would make an interesting “alternate history”, maybe a whole series. I’d like to see a good writer take this on.

In any case, I don’t think we escape without war. War seems to be a common thread wherever people compete. This would be particularly true with two energetic countries so closely matched who proved subsequently to be quite ready to fight.

[wastoute]

Yeah. Getting old.

[IrishBrigade]

Same sort of stuff that Lincoln believed, but he had better PR.

yeah, except he didn’t file Articles of Secession over it, and place himself in open rebellion due to it...

for the record, I believe the Confederacy was perfectly entitled to secede from the Union if that was its idiotic desire...just as it were perfectly entitled to its ultimate reward for shelling a fort of the entity from which it had seceded...

[DiogenesLamp]

It could have been ended flat out with no more than an abortive revolt like Shay’s Rebellion at plenty of points...but probably not after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and certainly not by 1860. There were too many 1%ers with their entire fortunes invested in slavery, and too many of Bob Averages who loved to lord it over every poor negro they came across.

That, and the fact that Washington DC and New York was addicted to that slave produced money stream. The reason they kept offering the South "Permanent slavery" in the form of the Corwin Amendment and other statements by Lincoln was that they wanted to resume getting them some of that sweet sweet slave produced money.

When it became apparent that the South was never going to willingly rejoin the Union and therefore that Slave produced income was beyond their grasp, there was no benefit to them in continuing slavery, and so freeing them would make a wonderful revenge on those Southern Bastards that caused them such a fuss.

That, and they could immediately make all the newly freed slaves into voters that would vote completely for big city liberals, and thereby lock in more political power in the Congress of the United States. Of course they took away the right to vote of all the White people because they knew they weren't going to get any of their votes.

This stuff is not so far different from what the big city liberals have been trying to do today, what with all the enfranchisement of illegal aliens and the extremely liberal immigration policies, especially from third world countries who can be reliably counted on to vote for big city Liberals.

Same Urban power Barons in charge today, and more or less the same tactics they used before.

[jmacusa]

Me too. We’re not so much as getting but ‘’seasoned’’.

[WVMnteer]

Obviously the West would be an ongoing issue. But I think that would have been more likely to have been an ongoing rerun of Bloody Kansas.

Latin America is what is fascinating to me. There were plenty of men in the Confederacy who wanted a slave empire to the South. And there’s not a hell of a lot that could have stopped them. At the end of the day, I wounder where they would really throw their resources to build their fantasy agrarian kingdom - Arizona or Cuba? Nevada or Mexico?

[DiogenesLamp]

uhh, the Confederates bombarded Sumter, regardless of the fact that it was obvious that Anderson’s position was untenable due to lack of supplies...the glory seeker Beauregard was only too willing to initiate the bombardment, which was a one sided affair...

You obviously haven't read the details on this incident. Beauregard had a series of respectful exchanges with Major Anderson (I bet you didn't know that Anderson was Beauregard's artillery instructor at West Point.) It was when another ship of the War Fleet that Lincoln has sent was sighted, that the order to begin bombarding the fort occurred.

The Confederates knew this war fleet was coming, and they waited until the Ships had began their rendezvous 10 miles off the Coast of the Charleston Lighthouse. Beauregard knew that after the next Ship was sighted at the rendezvous point, it wouldn't be much longer before the Ships came into cannon range and started firing at him, per Lincoln's orders.

Bearegard's orders were as follows.

MONTGOMERY, April 10, 1861.

General BEAUREGARD, Charleston:

If you have no doubt of the authorized character of the agent who communicated to you the intention of the Washington Government to supply Fort Sumter by force you will at once demand its evacuation, and if this is refused proceed, in such manner as you may determine, to reduce it. Answer.

L. P. WALKER. (Walker was the CSA secretary of War

When that ship showed up, that was the signal that convinced Beauregard that he had to act.

but how stupid of the Confederates in SC to allow Lincoln the justification for mobilization of troops and the prosecution of war, when all they had to do was starve the minimal garrison at the fort into submission...

I believe I have read an account from Anderson saying that if another day had elapsed, he was going to order his force to evacuate Sumter.

It was those ships showing up to attack the Confederates that triggered the war.

[IrishBrigade]

‘Modern America still echos Civil War era America in it’s voting patterns.’

you insist on looking foolish, and I know you really aren’t...but the democrats haven’t carried anything in the Confederate states (Florida excepted) since 1976, (when native son Carter ran)...in 1860, you might be lynched if you were anything other than Democrat...

[DiogenesLamp]

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.

That doesn't explain why the Union attacked them. They were a slave holding area of the Country when they belonged to the Union, and so saying the Union attacked them because they had slavery was like saying an abusive husband was justified in beating and dragging back his wife that was leaving him, because she was a drug addict.

Yeah, you knew she was a drug addict when you married her. Pretty much a lie that you beat the sh*t out of her because she was an addict, and far more likely you beat the sh*t out of her because she had the gall to leave you.

[IrishBrigade]

‘It was those ships showing up to attack the Confederates that triggered the war.’

you really are quite amusing...you mean all it took to trigger the Confederates to start a bombardment was the sight of supply ships on the horizon...? what a bunch of snowflakes...

’ it wouldn’t be much longer before the Ships came into cannon range and started firing at him, per Lincoln’s orders.’

you’re surmising what Lincoln’s orders were; you have no idea...if you do, please reproduce them here, and I’ll be happy to say I’m wrong...

but why all the speculation about who would have attacked whom if this or that had been the case...the history states categorically that the Confederacy initiated the proceedings...

[x]

King George III could have utterly crushed the USA had he been as vicious as Lincoln.

Doubtful. It was a different world. Less industrialized, more decentralized. Armies were smaller, weapons less destructive.

Washington could lose and would lose national capital after national capital. Congress moved something like six or seven times during the war. It didn't make a difference.

Lee was fighting a different kind of war -- maybe because it was a different world. For him it was Richmond or nothing and if he lost Richmond he lost the war.

Could Lee have fought something more like a guerrilla war? Would that have won the war for him?

As it was, the British were quite vicious enough during the Revolution.

Don't let your knee-jerk hatred of Abraham Lincoln blind you to real historical factors and real historical questions.

[DiogenesLamp]

The political leadership was very open and unashamed in its defense of slavery. Read the articles of secession for the various seceding states. The key issue isn’t tariffs, it isn’t exactly slavery per se, it is the right to extend slavery into the western states.

Cotton only grows in West Texas, Nevada and California through an irrigation system that wasn't possible until about the 1940s. What were these slaves supposed to be doing in these Western States?

There was clearly no threat that slavery was ever going to be significant in any of these states, so what was this idea of "expansion" supposed to achieve?

I'll tell you what it was supposed to achieve. It was supposed to achieve political power in Congress through coalition voting. It is exactly why it was opposed by the power blocks in the North East. They had the upper hand, and they did not want the South to get the political power necessary to challenge their interests. (Meaning the ability for the South to reduce the taxes they were paying to Washington, which was then using some of the money to subsidize Northern Industries and "infrastructure.")

Nobody in this political chess game really gave a sh*t about slaves. They were just a symbol of where the political battle lines were arrayed, because in practical terms, there was no realistic value in having slaves in any of the states beyond the ones in which they already existed.

Look at the map. "Expansion" was a political game and nothing else.

[Lee'sGhost]

Which has no relevance to the rightness of both rebellions. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Mmogamer]

Its ok there dio. Once they desyroy the southern past...they will remove yours too.

[x]

Modern America still echos Civil War era America in it's voting patterns.

I think you mean it's something like the reverse, but look at the maps for 1976 or 1992. They give a very different picture.

[DiogenesLamp]

They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility,

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us...

[YogicCowboy]

It is a scapegoat.

[ByteMercenary]

Your comment brings to mind an analysis put forth several years ago by a group of authors that were very non-partisan and somewhat removed from the subject of slavery.

Basically even if the North had not imposed the economic pressures on the South (tariffs, etc) slavery would likely have disappeared on its own by the turn of the century. The reason? Technological advances! The cotton gin had already been invented. Rudimentary tractors were showing up in fields. The ‘1%’ you mention would have realized that using and maintaining farm equipment was far, far cheaper than feeding and housing people. Slavery would have disappeared because of simple economics.