I came across this dull & unremarkable article about the Civil War. This media template comment jumped out at me.
So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy now.
They really are pathetic.
The tax cuts were for all income levels in that the entire federal income tax rates were lowered. Why do "journalists" continue to lie that the 2003 tax cuts were only for the rich?
I don’t want to start anything here but the South was right.
The author is certainly right about the proximate cause of the Civil War, it was about slavery. Reading the words of those states that seceded make that point clear. But, the paragraph above reveals a complete lack of understanding about the eventual fate of the hideous practice. Slavery was gone in the Western Hemisphere and in European societies by the end of the 19th Century. It endures today in Africa and Muslim societies
Economics plays a large role in that fact. Industrialization is a major reason why. As manufacturing and mechanized agriculture began to gain sway, the economic foundation for slavery waned. While the cotton gin was probably an example that demonstrated the opposite effect, over time advances in industrial society would have produced cheaper methods of producing cotton than was possible with slave labor. Slaves were very expensive, and became much more so in the waning years. The Royal Navy had put a halt to the Atlantic Slave trade, so new slaves were only available through natural increase. That wasn't enough and prices as shown in bills of sale, estate papers, and wills reflect the supply and demand problem. With so much wealth tied up in slave labor, the South was not about to freely relinquish their fortunes. Look at what happened in Wisconsin when the Governor tried to get state employees to pay for part of their health. People get very worked up when their family fortune comes under threat.
What is pathetic is a lot of Southern hating anti-Free Republic jerks agree with this.
This article and this author are fairly thick-headed and not historical at all. I descend from mostly non-slaveholding southerners, with a few who were. To try and paint nonslaveholders as ignorant white trash aspiring to the gentry might work for the fools in northern Virginia, but it doesn’t work in North Carolina or anywhere in the inland Piedmont and upland south.
Here, there were numerous groups of religious dissenters who settled, that did not believe in slavery. Quakers, Moravians, Mennonites, they just did not do it, or largely did not in the case of Moravians, who frowned upon the practice and welcomed blacks into their churches, but did not forbid the practice outright.
Those who fought, fought for their State, capitalized. State. It weighed in on a level of equal importance with country in that era. Many believed they were re-fighting the Revolution, and looking at the principles at stake that get completely glossed past in all the finger-pointing over slavery, they were right. You can thank the victors of the Civil War for the Federal leviathan of today.
These simplistic so-called “analyses” are thick on the ground and almost uniformly uninformed. It’s not as if the migratory patterns and the history aren’t available for all who can crack a book or even click a fr***ing button on a computer keyboard.
Propaganda. That’s all it is.
What liberals and blacks have forgotten is that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery...and still is. The Democratic Party counted on blacks to be stupid and they have been.
Or maybe they understand economics better than you do.
Or maybe they are not consumed with envy the way you are.
Or maybe they don't feel entitled so seize other peoples' property the way you do.
What a jackass.
BTW, this author wrote the ridiculously bad book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” of which his is the biggest.
Loewen's main points are common knowledge and generally agreed upon interpretations. The rest is his own personal agenda -- plugs for his book, obligatory Bush bashing. Neither the standard stuff or his own spin is that useful or interesting.