Posted on 03/03/2008 10:37:49 AM PST by Rebeleye
They will tell you the Civil War was not about slavery. Remind them that the president and vice president of the so-called "Confederate States of America" both said it was. They will tell you that great-great grandpa Zeke fought for the South, and he never owned any slaves. Remind them that it is political leaders - not grunts - who decide whether and why a war is waged. They will tell you the flag just celebrates heritage. Remind them that "heritage" is not a synonym for "good." After all, Nazis have a heritage, too.
(Excerpt) Read more at sltrib.com ...
The South did, however, have an official “black flag” policy where captured black soldiers could be executed as slaves in rebellion
I don't care which side you're on, if you think Robert E. Lee was a lousy field general, then you're a numbskull of the first class.
“The Civil War was about a lot of things, but States’ Rights was not among them.”
Total BS. Get a history book.
I think I have imagined it. I've walked around Monticello, and I've thought about it a lot. You raise all the canards just like a good old abolitionist. But the slave owners couldn't murder their slaves under the laws that existed back then. (Nor would it make any sense to destroy ones property.) It wouldn't really make sense for an owner to whip or otherwise abuse a slave. Since the owner considered the slave as his property, except for the occasional sadist I'm not sure how abusing a slave would enhance the value of the property to the owner. Slaves were fed, clothed, and housed. They were given time off. Sure, families were frequently split apart by sales, but there were families. Think about how things are today for many of their descendants and tell me that some weren't better off and happier than some of their descendants.
You also might read a bit of Exodus (and Numbers). There was a lot of grumbling among the wandering Jews that things were better for them when they were slaves in Egypt.
For the greatness of the life of a coal miner, maybe you could quietly sing a few verses of "16 Tons" to yourself.
As for Fremantle, my understanding is that he was a soldier born into military family. I don't think he was an "aristocrat." Supposedly he was anti-slavery, though I usually take such convenient characterizations with a grain of salt. His observations of the way the slaves he encountered were treated, though, are almost certainly accurate.
ML/NJ
Qualitatively speaking, slavery was a secondary concern, meaning that it was, in and of itself, not the root cause of the war. The war was, at its root, a war between differing economic systems. Slavery was tremendously important to the South, not because the Southerners just loved slavery in and of itself, but because slavery substantiated the type of econonic system upon which the aristocracy's fortunes were built - as they themselves often said.
If the South had not had a cash crop plantation-based agrarian economy, slavery would not have been an issue. If the South had gotten on board the clue train back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and moved towards the sort of shipping-and-manufacturing based economy that the North developed, there would have been little impetus for slavery, whether it was legal or not. This can be surmised from the fact that slavery was legal in even the Northern states early on, but was practically non-existent because those States did not require labour-intensive sharecropping to sustain their economies. The North banned slavery because it didn't NEED slavery.
If the South had had a manufacturing based industry, supplemented with a good supply of shipping income, and an agricultural sector primarily geared towards the less-profitable but more necessary production of cereal crops and vegetables, as the North had, then there would not have been a war between the States in which slavery played any sort of role.
What about using slaves in manufacturing? Not feasible. Though this happened a tiny bit in the negligible industry that the South DID have, slavery could not sustain a large-scale industrial sector. Again, if it could, then the North probably would have used slaves. But manufacturing generally does not produce the sort of engorged revenues that high-dollar cash crops do. You have to manufacture in bulk to make good money on mfg. goods, and even then the profits aren't huge like they are with cash crops. This can be shown by historical export values versus tonnage - cotton makes up something like half the value of total American exports for most of the late ante-bellum years, yet only accounted for a few percentage points of actual tonnage exported. Cotton (and tobacco and sugar) were simply much, much more valuable, and thus would pay for the expense of upkeeping hundreds of mouths to feed, 24/7/365. No factory owner could have made money over the long-run if he had to upkeep hundreds of slaves at the profit margins typical of manufacturing.
Slavery in the South was a means, not an end. The Southerners weren't interested in sustaining slavery because they just thought slavery was a good idea and everybody ought to own one. They wanted to sustain slavery because it, in turn, was what sustained their particular agrarian type of economy. That's the same reason why they were also ticked about the tariffs that they had to pay disproportionately. When you boil it all down, the war was about economics - slavery was a means, not an end.
In a sense, we can think of the Civil War as the ultimate proof test for the Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian visions for America. Hamilton won.
funny too how the noble Yankee with such few blacks had the need to restrict them same as white Southerners who often were living in majority black states until the post WWI exodus.
that same noble Yankee of whom quite a few on this forum in league with the occasional black Republican pot stirrer gang here pointing fingers at us while youse guys continue to live largely rather segregated.
Yankees are no less prejudiced...you just had less of them both as slaves and post slavery.and any place up north where there are large groups of blacks segregated together are arguably worse than down here in Dixie.
So who's the real bigot master?
Who the real hypocrites here is already established.
that poster is a retread....probably been here for many incarnations
I don’t think it’s OPH or Chancellor Palpatine.
Star Wars monikers seem popular here with some moderate black republicans who troll any race tinged thread.
plenty of fight to go around.....I ain’t backing down for them...they are too spoiled by folks doing just that
(no ....not all black freepers play this game but more than a handful do...one I actually like...reminds me of preschool tv..lol)
I'll simply append the word "southern" to drug dealers from now on, without saying that they're all involved.
Don’t reckon it was that bad,Seems the fight has gone out of these boys.
Either that or I’m losing my touch..
In the spring of 1839 a ‘slave owner,’ Mr. John Hoover was arrested for the brutal murder of his own ‘property,’ a young woman named Mira. Convicted of the capital charge by a jury of his peers 12 fellow ‘slave owners,’ as the relevant law then required his appeal to the North Carolina Supreme Court was rejected in the most categorical of terms, and he was hanged for the offense, the following spring. Far from defining a ‘just’ outcome, I examine the case as a legal historical artifact, setting it in the context of the remarkable attending legal culture of its day, recovering it instead as evidence of the beginning steps in the death of antebellum culture in North Carolina.Whatever the intent of the writer, as this vignette demonstrates, murdering slaves was not something that was generally tolerated. I'm not sure why you think there is a contradiction between laws prohibiting murder of slaves and and owner not murdering a slave because he would be destroying his own property.
As for baseball players, yeah they could stop playing baseball and maybe get a job at a gas station. I never suggested that baseball players don't generally have better lives than slaves; only that they are bought and sold (and traded).
ML/NJ
He was widely adored by both sides of the battle. You’re a clueless hack.
If you've never read the Confederate Constitution (and one could draw that conclusion from your comment), I'll be happy to provide a link to that neoConfederate organization, Yale University. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/csa/csa.htm
Or, if you prefer a short summary, the Confederate Constitution (unlike the Yankee one) prohibited the importation of slaves from other parts of the world, permitted, but did not require, laws prohibiting the importation of slaves from the United States, required that slavery be permitted in any new territory, and protected property rights of Confederate citizens as they moved from state to state within the CSA.
More than that there was the Constitutional question. Ratifying an amendment to end slavery, assuming all 15 slave states opposed it, would have required 46 states. I'll let you do the math on that.
I'm not trying to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and the confederacy. All I'm doing is pointing out that the Germans and Japanese started the war, as did the confederacy. The Germans and the Japanese paid a trememdous price for their folly, as did the Southerners. I'm not losing any sleep over either one.
So long as you remember who the owner was. And the owner of Sumter was the federal government. Regardless of secession.
Dp upi thonk that if some southerner had bought a ;arge, en=closed piece of land in the middle of Washington City, ans started stocking it with the necessities for fighting a war agains the Union, that the Federal Govenm,ent would have waited very long before it fired the first shot? I don't.
I don't 'thonk' you understand the difference. Federal property is federal property. Only congress can dispose of it. The fact that the confederacy chose war to gain control of Sumter is their problem. They made their decision, they paid the price.
Tjat's what happened, and that is why the South fired the first shots. Whether you like it or not.
Why the confederacy chose war is their problem. They made the decision, they bear responsibility for the death and destruction that followed.
Oh, come now, little man. You’re squealing like a little girl!
Voluntary emigration was a popular cause and attracted many supporters from James Madison to Robert Lee. Your website fails to mention that, fails to mention that Lincoln also defended runaway slaves during his legal career, and also overlooks the fact that while Lincoln may appear racist by today's standards his views on blacks were still head and shoulders above those of any Southern contemporary you might care to name.
So you're saying that the whole Southern cause was built on lies?
But they weren't smart, were they? Robert Toombs said that firing on Sumter was suicide. He was right.
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