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.
My past is illiterate Sicilians, one of whom was fleeing a murder charge.
Have at it. You would probably be doing me a favor.
You don’t declare war on rebels. That would mean recognizing the confederacy as a legitmate foreign government.
I’m not arguing with your silly distortions again.
No one gets this.
The Cotton Gin made slavery more important than ever. Slavery was important prior to the cotton gin. After the cotton gin, slavery became an absolute economic necessity at least in the Deep South. And it turned slaves in the Upper South into incredibly valuable commodities.
As for technology, agriculture in the South didn’t become fully automated until nearly the 40s, as Johnny Cash would have been happy to tell you.
Finally, ending slavery was forbidden by the Confederate Constitution.
Oh you want the rightness of the rebellion. OK, let's see. The colonist rebelled over taxation without representation and the South rebelled over slavery. In addition to wanting their cause enough to fight and win, I would say our founding fathers had the edge in the rightness category as well.
Please don't tell me you are that ignorant of this subject matter and yet you wish to have input into this conversation.
During the Civil War, there were five Northern Slave states. They were Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky and I believe New Jersey.
Only two of them ended slavery before the Civil War came to an end.
In 1862, the General Assembly replied to Lincoln's compensated emancipation offer with a resolution stating that, "when the people of Delaware desire to abolish slavery within her borders, they will do so in their own way, having due regard to strict equity." And they furthermore notified the administration that they regarded "any interference from without" as "improper," and a thing to be "harshly repelled."[5]
And I suppose that means the South didn't lose? They just decided the bloodshed wasn't worth it?
King George III could have utterly crushed the USA had he been as vicious as Lincoln.
And you wander back to fantasyland.
The problem was that economic thinking by that point had been skewed for generations. Multiple writers of the era made mention of the fact that a white master would spend far more effort finding slaves to do something for free than he would have had to just to it himself. It’s somewhat the same problem with illegal immigration - even with the resulting crime and social degradation businesses hear the words ‘cheap labor’ and their brains (and loyalty) just go flying out the damn window.
The South would have hung on to slavery well after it had started to become economically impractical out of simple habit, the mental addiction of ‘mastery’ over others and an unwillingness to send their slaves back at their own expense. Also they had a severe lack of industry to MAKE tractors in the first place, because of their insane focus on a single cash crop. Ask Cuba how that ends.
Thank you. I didn’t know the 2nd or 3rd points and those are very relevant.
Yet more proof that it would NOT have ‘died out on its own’. We might as well hope for abortion to do the same!
What complete crap.
From your first sentence (beyond the jefferson quote) to your 2nd to last this reads like an junior high student defending why he got caught stealing the milk money.
Beyond the embarrassingly insipid slavocracy apologia it does NOTHING to bind any wounds, raise any awareness, or bring conservatives together at a crucial time.
Grow up.
That conjecture is not readily apparent. You will have to explain your theory on this.
And also, North America would still have had slavery in the 20th Century.
That is very likely true, but most assuredly North America would still have had slavery in the 20th century had the South remained in the Union. It required a 3/4ths majority of states to pass a constitutional amendment, and just the 11 confederate states alone would have required a Union with 44 states, and that would not have been possible till 1896 when Utah was admitted as what would have been the 44th state. If you add the other five slave states to the opposition vote, it would require a Union with 64 states in it, so it would still not be possible in the 21st century.
The Lincoln government got around this problem by forcing the states occupied by his military forces to vote for the measure, which made it a vote under duress, but they pretended that it was an expression of the will of these states.
Life is full of trade-offs.
Would this alternative timeline of the French and Greeks going communist have included the 30 or million so soldiers killed in World War II, plus the concentration camp victims, the Mao purges, and all the other victims that made up about 100 million casualties from socialism in the 20th century?
Cause I think if you get Hitler out of the picture, a lot of these mega deaths don't happen. How is that for a trade off? Seems like the world would have been better had things gone the other way. In fact, given the mass murders that occurred in the 20th century, it's hard to see how it could have gone much worse than it did.
Also don't forget the deaths caused by we Americans carrying the Spanish Flu into Europe. (20-40 million people)
There’s a (much) better than 50/50 chance that a slavocracy win would have resulted in Great Britain conquering and subsuming the would-be nation. With northern industrialists more favorable to the idea of torching their factories rather than aiding their oppressors, who would the slavers turn to for their arms?
The Confederate state legislatures passed declarations about why they were leaving the Union. They very precisely spelled out their rationale.
The Union attacked the Confederate States to force what Lincoln regarded as an open rebellion into submission. Firing on Fort Sumter started it and Appomattox Courthouse finished it.
In ths instance, the wife had filed for divorce and then she told the husband to get out and the husband said that he wasn’t going anywhere. The wife then hit the husband with a frying pan for twelve straight hours and the husband responded by punching her in the stomach. Then all the in-laws and relatives got involved in a free for all.
Earlier New England asked for and was given 20 more years for slave trading....it was a money maker for wealthy New Englanders...."In Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, for example, opponents of the Constitution objected to the implicit acceptance of slavery's , represented by the three-fifths clause and the twenty-year extension of the slave trade.
Abolition was preordained by the South and the North because it was wrong. A bit more history: " Many knew Lincoln had little love for enslaved blacks and didn't wage war against the South for their benefit. Lincoln made that plain, saying, "I will say, then, that I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races ... I am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." The very words of his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation revealed his deceit and cunning; it freed those slaves held "within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States." It didn't apply to slaves in West Virginia and areas and states not in rebellion. Like Gen. Ulysses Grant's slaves, they had to wait for the 13th Amendment"
Slavery was a fact and it was ended in America long before other nations outlawed it. Today human trafficking is rampant along out border with Mexico. I don't hear these johnny-come-lately's to the civil war denouncing that NOR are they denouncing slavers in Africa and other places run by Muslims and thugs....The talking heads are spewing false history...protesters are falsely protesting icons of America, blaming the South fir all their woes...Does anyone care?
‘During the Civil War, there were five Northern Slave states’
nice try, my compliments, but you know as well as I do these states are referred to as ‘border states’, not ‘northern states’...because they didn’t secede does not make them ‘northern states’, a term that actually has no meaning; there were slave states, and free states...
you were quite clever in using ‘northern’ to attempt to buttress your weak argument, but in the end, you failed...and by the way, you’re wrong about Jersey; slavery until 1804...
The southern elite state quite clearly the reasons for secession. It was a different time. People whose fortunes depended upon slavery simply refused to see it as evil. As a result, they were not shy about slavery as their primary motive for secession. In fact, they were quite proud of it.
On the other hand, its interesting to study the founding of GOP. Christians abandoned the Whigs in droves on exactly that question, and in a single decade slavery was gone.
Republicans should never help Democrats defend their history. Let Democrats defend their own history. Slave economics, race repression, lynch mobs, fire hoses, and modern race obsession and ethnic politics is their history, and while I don’t blame them for trying to rewrite their history, I see no reason to help them do it.
The emergence of the Industrial Revolution was posing a threat to the slave system of the south. Machines were going to replace the obsolete agricultural reliance on human labor. Slaves were going to go the way of the horse and buggy. The problem was, these southern land owners were out of touch with the realities of their situation. They had little comprehension of the impact on agriculture that machines would have on human labor and the economics that sustained that human labor.
Those who put all of their efforts on the use of slave labor would soon wake up and find that they would be outperformed by farmers who had the latest tractor and harvest machines. What would they do with all their slave labor then? If the ownership of slaves had to be ended because of ethical reasons, there was another reason. It was time to turn in their slaves and their horse and buggies for the Age of the Machines.
The ending of slave labor did not satisfy the ethical question. Men who were once slaves now became competition for the few jobs left after the machines took away jobs. A racist culture emerged to suppress black competition and that culture embedded itself very deep and it was evil. That culture persists today.
As a side note: World War I was a result of the Industrial Revolution creating a big competition for resources.
Very good piece. I liked it. It seems the cookie cutter public school 5 minute history of the civil war i.e South bad North good is all most people have been taught. It is sad.
You nailed it! I said the same thing in my post. The Industrial Revolution was going to render slave labor as obsolete as the horse and buggy. The social impact would be tremendous.
How does that scenario EVER happen? LOL.
Delaware Maryland Kentucky and Missouri all had slaves unaffected by Lincolns illegal Emancipation EO.
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