Posted on 12/30/2023 12:56:39 PM PST by Starman417
Well, this week Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley said something that upset people who weren’t going to vote for her anyway. At a Town Hall setting someone asked her “What caused the American Civil War?” It’s not at all a question with great relevance 163 years later, but it is a modern litmus test for many people on the left, i.e. people who likely weren’t going to vote for her anyway.
History is amazing. Like all hindsight, it can be 20-20 in vision and clarity. Over the past 30 years, this is less and less the case. Led by late-night comics and pretend “news” history-when told in partiality and half-truth, is stranger than fiction. It’s entertaining. Political activists, politicians, media, and academia have all since found that telling half of history is a great way to manipulate people. Rather than be steered by what can be learned from studying all of history, they’ll tell us half a story that would lead to a conclusion that would support their activist causes. There is no better example of this, NONE, than the American Civil War.
Those who advocate for studying more “Black History” in school inevitably and emphatically declare that, unlike every war in all human history, the American Civil War was caused by one thing: slavery. Slavery was an aspect of the causes of the American Civil War, but the ultimate proof that it was NOT the cause, is to point out that even if there were no slavery, the war still would have happened.
Those who want to really learn about history-all of it-will study more than just “Black History.” One simply cannot learn with the intent of repeating mistakes, by studying a single facet. These people will remember the first time the United States almost fell to Civil War. In 1832 and 1833 there was an event in American history called, The Nullification Crisis. President Andrew Jackson was trying to balance the Federal budget. At the time, there was no income tax all income came from tariffs on goods. Led by states in the North, the tariffs were raised. This hurt southern agrarian-based economies. Not even 50 years old, people in the South wondered why they should be taxed to help get money to the North. They felt like their representation in Congress was zero. The issue got so hot that the Vice President resigned, and he went to South Carolina to lead the rebellion. There, the state was considering secession based on the idea that higher tariffs were unconstitutional/not for the general welfare, and just for the welfare of the Northern states. President Jackson prepared to personally lead troops into South Carolina and vowed to personally hang anyone who opposed him-including and specifically the former Vice President. The crisis ended when both sides agreed to raise tariffs temporarily, and then gradually lower them back down to about 20%.
Civil War over taxes was avoided.
In the following years, more and more states joined the Union. As they did, an agreement was made that for every state admitted that allowed slavery, another state could be admitted without slavery. The idea was that states where slavery existed would not be outnumbered in the House and Senate, and thus another tariff that would hurt slave/agrarian states would not happen. This worked until The Mexican War happened (1846-1848). After that war, the Federal government needed money again, and so politicians began examining ways to raise tariffs. In Kansas and Missouri, a micro Civil War erupted as wealthy people in the South tried to make both states slave states, and wealthy abolitionists in the North tried to make them both free states. If either group of powerful people had their way, then the balance of power in Congress would be tilted and increased tariffs would pass or fail.
The abolitionist movement in the North grew, but it never became a majority. Its leaders all had far more to gain from raising tariffs than they ever did from freeing slaves. Followers of the movement became increasingly radical. They threatened terrible violence in the South. John Brown, one of the popular followers (more celebrity than leader), went to Kansas and Missouri. There he led violent raids against people who wanted to make the states slave states. One night he and his family broke into some pro-slavery family homes, pulled people out in the middle of the night, and butchered them all. A few years later he and his family tried to seize control of the Federal armory at Harper’s Ferry Virginia (1859). A young Colonel Robert E Lee led a band of US Marines and put down the pathetic attempt to start a slave rebellion.
Slave rebellions were a serious fear in the South. Many believe that the fear of reprisals is what convinced slave owners to stand firm and demand that the US Constitution allow slavery back in 1789. In fact, the year after it was ratified (1792) all the slaves in Haiti rebelled, tortured, and killed everyone who was white or even 1/8 white. There had been several smaller attempts at slave rebellion in the South as well. Given the choice to keep slavery or to risk being butchered in retaliation, most powerful people in the South chose to keep slavery. John Brown’s raid shocked the people in the North, but in the South, it spread terror.
Immediately following John Brown’s raid, Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party began their push for the Presidency. In his highly distributed debate transcripts, Lincoln said the way to handle the debt from the Mexican War was to dismiss the Compromise of 1833 and raise tariffs as high as 45%. This upset people in the South, but in Charleston, Carolina it caused fury. Lincoln was an abolitionist celebrity at the time-though not one pledging violence like most of the abolitionists in 1860. Southern states refused to allow someone like Lincoln to become President so they removed him from the Presidential ballots in the South.
THIS is a lesson today as blue states are doing the same thing to President Trump in an era when people are openly talking about Civil War. People who only study “Black History” and convince themselves that the Civil War was just about slavery, will never learn this important lesson for today and next year.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
The North invaded the Southern states because it wished to impose its will upon them.
To understand Lincoln and his puppet masters simply read his 1st inaugural address. Lincoln was the original neocon in search of perpetual war.
When the southern states seceded they told us why they were seceding. The reasons were given in various declaration of causes documents.
All you need is the ability to read those documents to understand their reasons.
A search for the word slave in this page https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states will demonstrate clearly why they were seceding.
The war’s causes and the importance of slavery among them can be debated, but this article loses much credibility by its historical inaccuracies.
The South maintained slavery because it was integral to the economic and social structure. The author seems to be implying that the South would have voluntarily rid itself of slavery except for fear of slave revolts.
The “micro civil war” that erupted in the 1850s was a result of the doctrine of popular sovereignty that was implemented in the Kansas Nebraska Act. Certainly the goal was to make slavery legal in the newly incorporated Kansas Territory, but it had no effect on Missouri, which was admitted as a slave state via the Compromise of 1820.
I’m sure there are others, but I am not wasting my time reading any more of an article by an author who cannot manage to get basic history correct
at the heart of this entire reasoning is the question of whether or not they had the Right to choose a path different than the other states. States rights vs. federal rights has always been a cactus in the middle of a swarm of balloons.
Virginia was the most important among them. Why did Virginia secede?
Stop letting the minority of 4 states speak for the majority of 11.
And for what it's worth, Columnist Paul Craig Roberts explains *WHY* they specifically mentioned "slavery" as their reasons for secession even though Lincoln and the Republicans voted for the Corwin amendment which would protect slavery indefinitely by US Constitutional amendment.
Governments do not give up their power.
I didn't get that impression from the article at all. That must be your own subjectivity giving you that result.
In 1776 when all the states in the Union were slave states, the abolition of slavery in each state was gradual. It picked up over the years, and the process was inevitably in the direction of abolition. I used to know where a GIF map was that showed the effect.
The point is, had everyone just left it alone, the effect would have eventually reached all the states, and it would have been eliminated peacefully.
I thought Lincoln once said if he could preserve the union by embracing slavery, he would. I can’t recall the source so I could be wrong-I won’t swear to it. Does anybody know?
Nimroda is the new John Kerry
This was the ‘real’ insurrection (unlike J6) the Democrats rebelled against the country because they did not accept Lincoln becoming President...war is politics carried out by other means.
Exactly! When did the “all about slavery” myth start getting pushed and by whom?
It started in Academia (no, we’re not talking about wartime propaganda) in the 80s. The people pushing it were LEFTISTS who went into Academia starting in the 60s. It took time for them to climb the ladder to professor status and then obtain tenure. By the 90s, they were department heads in Universities. They made sure to hire nothing but other LEFTISTS who would regurgitate their dogma. Sound familiar? It should. Everything else in Academia worked that way.
Every side claims every war is about morality or “the principle of the thing”. Anybody who has studied history and who has even a lick of sense quickly sees that at least 90% of the time its about one thing and one thing only.....MONEY. Politicians just don’t like to say that because its not what people want to hear. They want to believe their loved ones died for a noble cause rather than just lining others’ pockets....even though usually, they did die for that.
The Democrat slave owners wanted to keep their slaves. Lincoln, the Republican President, said we’ll go to war over this it. The Democrat slave owners stated the war to retain their slaves.
When the North offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment....when the US congress (AFTER the Southern delegation had withdrawn) passed a resolution stating explicitly that they were not fighting about slavery, it was clear that nobody was fighting about slavery.
“all the slaves in Haiti rebelled, tortured, and killed everyone who was white or even 1/8 white”
And just think: one of their descendants now sits in judgement of the President of the United States, having been christened an “American” by...um...who knows.
Truly unbiased jurisprudence.
Sorry - You missed the point of the discussion. The war was instigated by the North because the North could not exist financially without the Southern tariff revenue. So they had to fight. Even Lincoln could live with Slavery (as stated in the article) - he was fighting to hold the union together.
Correct. And by “hold the union together” what he really meant was keep the cash cows in and keep all that sweet sweet cash flowing Northward to my financial backers.
Today’s Union government is a direct descsendent of that one. Now, instead of tariffs, it’s income tax, forcing ev’s, trying to disarm the populace, jail and no trial for many, killing people in their Ruby Ridge redoubt, burning people in their Waco compound,persecuting and prosecuting political opponents, mandating toilet flushes and certain light bulbs. The list of wrongs is endless. In other words, it’s infinitely worse than it was in 1861.
He stated as much in a publicly published newspaper reply to Horace Greeley, during his Presidency. But don’t be like most people. Please read to the end where he makes the distinction between his purposes of “official duty” and his “personal wishes”. His personal wish was that all men every where could be free.
“As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.
Yours,
A. Lincoln.”
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.