Personally, I don’t care if everyone in the ante-bellum South owned slaves - although just as the casualties of the Civil War grow by leaps and bounds (what is it up to now? 700,000?) so do the slave owners grow by leaps and bounds. These may be accurate statistics or may be cooked statistics to make southerners feel guilty all day long. Perhaps another extension of cultural Marxism and I say Phooey! to that.
Ben Shapiro was recently on TV debating four or five lefties. They were using all the usual lefty tactics in substitution for honest debate when one of them played the feelings card ("you're not respecting my feelings"). Ben replied saying,
"The truth doesn't care about your feelings."
It was brash and blunt and utterly true. I can assure you that, despite the liberal tactic that some choose to employ of asserting that any criticism of the confederacy is a condemnation of southerners, none of us are here to "make southerners feel guilty". Actually the notion is rather preposterous - how can an event that took place 150 years ago and in which not a single one of us participated cause you guilt?
The reason why I replied to you a month ago and then reminded you on this thread is because of the importance of intellectual honesty that we not pull the numbers out of our nethers. It's wrong whether Michael Medved does it, I do it, or you do it.
It's not about shame, or guilt, or "cultural marxism" - it's about striving for the truth.
miss marmelstein:
"...although just as the casualties of the Civil War grow by leaps and bounds (what is it up to now? 700,000?) so do the slave owners grow by leaps and bounds." There are some numbers from that time which are very solid, others reasonable estimates, and some what we used to call SWAGs:
- You can depend on numbers which come from the official 1860 census, and those include the white and black populations of each state, as well as the numbers of slave-holders and slaves.
US census' also give us numbers on the values of various categories of financial & physical assets.
From those we know that throughout the South their number one asset was the land they owned, followed closely by the value of their highly profitable slaves.
Indeed, Southern slaves were worth more, combined, than all the industry and railroads in the North.
So, at huge risk of political incorrectness, you could correctly say that slaves were the South's original "black gold" and, sadly, slaves gave Southerners a bit of gold fever.
- Estimates based on the census of household sizes of average slaveholders give us the figure of roughly five whites per slaveholding family and about five slaves per family.
That's where estimates come from showing as high as 50% for South Carolina of white families holding slaves.
But if you tell me "five per family is too many", then I would argue it's way too small, since large families with many children were the rule in those days, and a prosperous household would also include grandparents and single aunts or uncles.
So I don't think these estimates can be understated by any significant factor.
- As for numbers of soldiers killed by Civil War, those estimates are highly variable depending on who & how they're counted.
For example, there's a significant difference between "killed in battle" versus "died in service" usually meaning of sickness or injury.
And if a soldier is wounded in battle, but dies two years after the war was over, how is that counted?
The answer is that many scholars have scoured the numbers to arrive at estimates which include everyone according to their criteria -- circa 700,000 total, maybe 1/3 of those killed in battle.
- Finally, there is the question of civilian deaths, about which there are no accurate numbers, and estimates which vary all over the board, again depending on just who you count and how.
But bottom line is, actual records of civilian war-caused deaths are very sparce -- a few hundred maybe, and any other numbers are just gross speculation, imho.
Does that help?