Posted on 08/11/2015 1:11:21 PM PDT by iowamark
What caused the Civil War? That seems like the sort of simple, straightforward question that any elementary school child should be able to answer. Yet many Americans—including, mostly, my fellow Southerners—claim that that the cause was economic or state’s rights or just about anything other than slavery.
But slavery was indisputably the primary cause, explains Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
The abolition of slavery was the single greatest act of liberty-promotion in the history of America. Because of that fact, it’s natural for people who love freedom, love tradition, and love the South to want to believe that the continued enslavement of our neighbors could not have possibly been the motivation for succession. But we should love truth even more than liberty and heritage, which is why we should not only acknowledge the truth about the cause of the war but be thankful that the Confederacy lost and that freedom won.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.acton.org ...
The next civil war may be fought over the oppressive yoke of economic slavery that the producers of society (read: white people) suffer so as to support the lazy and the indolent who, btw, hate me for the color of my skin.
“Freedom” didn’t win the Civil War. Federalism did.
Very few Southerners owned slaves, less than 2%. Why would the common people fight and die to defend slavery?
No, it was about stopping Independence for Southern States. Lincoln made it clear that they could keep slavery, they just could not keep independence.
Washington D.C. Must remain their master.
Uh dude, the "Articles of Confederation" were ratified in 1781, and were the predecessor of the US Constitution. They governed the UNION, not the Confederacy.
“Colonel Ty Seidule...settles the debate.”
Um, no, he doesn’t.
Well it would have to apply only to the Northern Soldiers who fought after 1863, because for the first two years, there was no intentions of freeing them at all.
I point this out often in these various civil war discussions. Most apologists can't even grasp the concept. They simply cannot conceive of a 19th century world that is different from their own 21rst century experience.
"It is for us the living, rather..................that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
A. Lincoln
We don't need to look at any of the Southern states reasons for leaving, because that had nothing to do with why troops were sent to invade their states.
The only positions we need to concern ourselves with is why Union troops were invading those states. Lincoln controlled the bloodshed. No one else controlled the bloodshed but Lincoln.
He could order men to fight, or he could order them to stop. The Southern states had no control over the violence, because it was being visited upon them, not the other way around.
What were the Union reasons for invading? That is the only question that matters.
You need a clue.
No president worth his salt would not come back at such an aggression with force. Write it on your hand so that you won't forget.
That's what governments do. That's what governors do when the National Guard or the state police get shot at. Thinking that they wouldn't is crazy talk.
So now the question is why the original attack. Find out what was behind that and you may get closer to the reason for the war.
In any event you don't get to decide on your own what "the only question that matters is" -- nor does anybody else.
Not really. Sure for some individual people here and there but it really was about the South tired of getting the short end of the stick from the North. They decided they wanted to go out on their own. But the North won the war so they get to write the history. Well at least the history that the race baiters agree with........
Depends on which “race baiters” you’re talking about.
I suggest you read some of PeaRidge's postings on this matter. It very much looks as if the Union was launching an invasion at the exact same instant the Confederates started firing on Ft. Sumter.
It smells like they knew what the Union was about, and decided they weren't going to have any of it.
No president worth his salt would not come back at such an aggression with force. Write it on your hand so that you won't forget.
Again, read PeaRidge's postings of the messages and letters leading up to that event. It looks like Lincoln was engaged in a pre-emptive strike.
So now the question is why the original attack. Find out what was behind that and you may get closer to the reason for the war.
Again, read the messages and letters that PeaRidge has posted on the invasion of Ft. Sumter by the Union forces. It looks like they were going to attack in force when the Confederates started firing at Sumter, and I do not believe this was a coincidence.
It makes too much sense that word had been sent to the Confederates regarding the planned invasion by the Union ships and soldiers. They may have made a political blunder by firing first, but militarily it was exactly the right move.
In other words, Lincoln appears to have been the belligerent who cleverly covered up the fact of his belligerency.
I was at the family cemetery the other day in Vermont. Walking around in a spot I had never been, I found ANOTHER great uncle who died in the Civil War at Cold Harbor.
I cannot imagine leaving the northernmost county in Vermont in 1862 and going to get killed in Virgina. I know the type of people these men were. They stick to themselves and don’t let others bother them a lot.
They were not drafted, they all volunteered.
It was either patriotism or moral outrage.
And, while there are a ton of folks on welfare in that part of VT now, it was pretty self sufficient back then. They did not have much use for a Federal government or even the state. So, patriotism does not seem like a viable reason.
That leaves “moral outrage.”
My guess is that times don’t really change much. The reasons to get young men to volunteer for war are often not the real reasons.
The real reasons are often not discussed across the fence.
I honor Almond Priest’s sacrifice. I would have loved a discussion with his three brothers and him.
From the biography *Destruction and Reconstruction* of the War by General Richard Taylor, someone who was there, and in a position to know, from the very beginning of the war until well after it ended.
Aggrieved by the action and tendencies of the Federal Government, and apprehending worse in the future, a majority of the people of the South approved secession as the only remedy suggested by their leaders. So travelers enter railway carriages, and are dragged up grades and through tunnels with utter loss of volition, the motive power, generated by fierce heat, being far in advance and beyond their control. We set up a monarch, too, King Cotton, and hedged him with a divinity surpassing that of earthly potentates. To doubt his royalty and power was a confession of ignorance or cowardice. This potent spirit, at the nod of our Prosperos, the cotton-planters, would arrest every loom and spindle in New England, destroy her wealth...
Extinction of slavery was expected by all and regretted by none, although loss of slaves destroyed the value of land. Existing since the earliest colonization of the Southern States, the institution was interwoven with the thoughts, habits, and daily lives of both races, and both suffered by the sudden disruption of the accustomed tie. Bank stocks, bonds, all personal property, all accumulated wealth, had disappeared. Thousands of houses, farm-buildings, work-animals, flocks and herds, had been wantonly burned, killed, or carried off. The land was filled with widows and orphans crying for aid, which the universal destitution prevented them from receiving. Humanitarians shuddered with horror and wept with grief for the imaginary woes of Africans; but their hearts were as adamant to people of their own race and blood. These had committed the unpardonable sin, had wickedly rebelled against the Lord’s anointed, the majority. Blockaded during the war, and without journals to guide opinion and correct error, we were unceasingly slandered by our enemies, who held possession of every avenue to the world’s ear...
During all these years the conduct of the Southern people has been admirable. Submitting to the inevitable, they have shown fortitude and dignity, and rarely has one been found base enough to take wages of shame from the oppressor and maligner of his brethren. Accepting the harshest conditions and faithfully observing them, they have struggled in all honorable ways, and for what? For their slaves? Regret for their loss has neither been felt nor expressed. But they have striven for that which brought our forefathers to Runnymede, the privilege of exercising some influence in their own government. Yet we fought for nothing but slavery, says the world, and the late Vice-President of the Confederacy, Mr. Alexander Stephens, reëchoes the cry, declaring that it was the corner-stone of his Government...
If it was ALL bout slavery what took Lincoln so long to free them?
And why were all those people fighting who didn’t own slaves? No ancestor in my family ever own a slave yet some of them fought for the south.
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