Posted on 07/18/2022 1:02:13 PM PDT by Dr. Franklin
Your comment reminds me of what William Buckley wrote of Jack Welch’s insinuation that Eisenhower was a communist: “paranoid and idiotic libels.”
San Antonio. Not originally though - I escaped from the Peoples Republic if New Jersey a bit over 20 years ago.
“The Confederacy was rightfully destroyed.”
That is an interesting comment.
Can you provide an argument supporting your personal preference?
Perhaps wrong about the misunderstanding of the 1860s, but right enough about the USSR to have garnered a Soviet diplomatic complaint early in the Reagan Administration as “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
While I agree that in Ike’s youth the country and people’s motivations and perceptions were quite different from now, and that Ike had his own particular background, the question remains: what about that quote from Ike about Lee and his character is incorrect? Yes, Lee was an imperfect man who sometimes made bad choices (just like every other human being who ever lived), he also did quite a number of things right…and that was, IMHO, what Ike was discussing.
Eisenhower may have been right that Lee was a great man, and maybe a great American, in the way that Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull or Tecumseh or Chief Joseph were great Americans, but the doctor still had a point that his picture shouldn't have been on the president's wall.
1859 - Charles Darwin published his racist masterpiece On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (yes there's a reason we're not told the full title). It basically pushed scientific racism, particularly given that an attack on God's existence during the Christian abolitionist movement in English speaking countries as tantamount to an attack on abolition itself. Just to make sure people understood that natural selection applied to people as much as animals (in Darwin's view), Darwin wrote his observance of red ants using black ants as slaves and his belief that if not for slaves the red ant colony would cease to exist. The so-called "enlightenment" movement's new hero was making the case for putting blacks back in chains in England and keeping them in chains elsewhere. (Years after the civil war Darwin wrote his sequel The Descent of Man in which was all about connecting the dots between natural selection and treating non-whites as 2nd class people.)
1860 - In the U.S. the Christian abolitionist party, known as the Republican Party, won not just the WH but also retained control of the House (Dims won the Senate, though that changed after the the CSA states seceded leaving a Republican majority).
1861 - The Dim controlled southern states seceded and confederate Dim leaders in South Carolina began attacks on Fort Sumter's supply ships in January (while Dim president Buchanan was still in the WH because Lincoln wasn't inaugurated until March). One could argue the civil war begin as Dim president Jefferson Davis of the CSA vs Dim president Buchanan of the USA. Before Lincoln took office, Davis ordered the full attack on Fort Sumter (though the attack didn't take place until Lincoln was in office).
You bring up the 1830's. A pastor named Theodore Weld was an awesome abolitionist. If you want to give one name to the 19th century abolitionist movement who had no political power, it'd be him. He was basically Calhoun's antagonist. Weld wrote The Bible Against Slavery and made the case that slavery in the Old Testament, as grotesque as the OT seems to us NT believers, was nicer to slaves than the chattel slavery of the U.S. because at least in the OT slaves had rights. The abolitionist movement faced horrible censorship in the south, most notably with Dim postmasters. Weld realized that not even Dims would dare to block Christian ministers from communicating with each other. Thus, Weld's books and speeches would be directed mainly toward Christian leaders in the north, knowing that those leaders had communication with Christian leaders in the south. He also earned the nickname "the most mugged man in America" by giving speeches in the "south" (which meant Ohio and Pennsylvania, because he'd probably be killed for giving abolitionist speeches further south). He founded the Abolitionist Society and they built a building in Philadelphia across from Independence Hall (not "across" towards the Liberty Bell, across 90 degrees to the right I believe). Ever been to the abolitionist society bldg when touring Philadelphia? Neither have I because it was torn down by Dim sympathizers after Weld and his wife married in the building. To this day a lot of Catholic historians credit the abolitionist movement mainly to Protestant leaders, while most atheist historians hope we forget the "enlightenment" crowd's scientific racism.
One final piece of trivia nobody thinks about. Imagine being born in Texas around year 1800 and living there your entire life, if you were blessed to live at least 70 years. Your citizenship would change many times over. Born a citizen of Spain (Texas was "northern frontier" territory of the Spanish empire), then became a citizen of the new nation of Mexico in the 1810's when Mexico seceded, then a citizen of the Republic of Texas in the 1830's when Texas seceded from Mexico, then a U.S. citizen in the 1940's when Texas joined the U.S., then a citizen of the Confederate States of American when Texas joined the CSA, then back to being a U.S. citizen at the end of the civil war. LOL
Leep, here's how the 1/3 of the south had slaves numbers work.
A) In Alabama it's somewhere between 30% to 40% of white families had slaves (so yes, about 1/3).
B) A family is counted as owning the slave even if only one person did (i.e. the husband/father). I guess that's fair, like today saying our family owns our house even if it's in only my name and not my spouse's too and certainly not owned in my now grown kids' names.
C) A family is counted as owning slaves in all generations even if the family tried it for just a few years and decided it wasn't their cup of tea and freed the slaves (or their fortunes changed and they had to sell the slaves). This happened a lot. My family in Alabama never owned slaves (my mother's the descendent of sharecroppers from another state and my father is from a northern part of Alabama where slavery was practically non-existent even in farming communities like the farm my father grew up in). But let's pretend I had one ancestor who owned a slave or two for about 3 or 4 years and decided he didn't like it and freed the slave, and that was the only slave anybody in my family ever owned. That one event by one person would make my family counted as a "white family that owned slaves" even if almost the entirety of my family's existence we didn't own slaves nor wanted to. It'd be analogous to defining a family today as a "bank robbing family" if only one person in the family robbed a bank in the 1830's and it was only once in his life.
So think about that from now on when you point out or hear that 1/3 of white southern families had slaves. That's accurate, but within context that's not like what it sounds.
Supposition from known reality: public schools were not common in the wilderness: Even my grandfather (born 50 years after the CW only had a 6th grade education).
Sure the leaders and commanders were educated, but the common soldier was most likely not.
While it’s possible that 30% of the Southern population were slaves, that is not the same as saying that 30% of Southerners owned slaves.
Was that really much of a factor though? It seems like it would be much easier to take a snapshot based on the census records for one year than to run through multiple censuses or other records.
Also, the more common experience, might have been to pass slaves on to relatives. Slaves were also rented out. So two families, one which had no slaves at home and one which owned no slaves might both be in a sense slaveowners. Families or individuals who had owned slaves once and expected to own them again might be more common than those who had sworn off slaveholding forever.
Children didn’t own slaves. In most cases married women didn’t own slaves. The figures are for families, and I believe the 30% figure didn’t apply to the South as a whole, but to the Deep South states, where the percentage of slaveowning families was sometimes even higher (as was the percentage of enslaved people).
That did happen, a lot. But again, a lot of slave owning was still a temporary thing even with inheritance extending the practice. This is both from the fortunes of families changing and also from the sentiment of slave owning changing. For example, do you know people today who grew up poor, then go through a temporary phase when they make really great income, then go through a phase the rest of their working life where they have average income? Or maybe they kept making great income the rest of their life but their kids had "meh" income because they didn't pursue a career like the rags-to-riches parent did. I've known plenty of families like those, and their spending habits eventually change as their income changes. That's not a new phenomenon. That happened a lot in slave owning days just like it happens a lot now. And the owning of slaves would change with the income (particularly if we're talking about house slaves where the benefit of a slave is more of a luxury than a money making "necessity" like a field slave). It's the same with the ever changing sentiment of slavery. For example, if there was a growing abolitionist sentiment in a slave owning family, if it reached the point of the slaves being freed that would often happened at the point of inheritance (the next generation hated slavery so they freed the slaves as soon as they inherited slaves). That happened a lot, often within only one or two generations of the first slave owners in the family. Another thing that would happen as far as passing on slaves in inheritance was if the slave owner himself wanted to free the slaves but couldn't because of laws. For example, Thomas Jefferson wanted to free the slaves he inherited but couldn't because Virginia law said that nobody with debts could free their slaves until the creditors were paid off. Keep in mind that Jefferson had a lot of debt from his new project of making a new country. An exception to that Virginia law was the slave owner could free his slaves in his will, which Jefferson did. Thus, the slaves Jefferson inherited (just as the situation you stated) were freed on his deathbed (just as in the situation I stated). I honestly don't know how many generations before Jefferson his family owned slaves.
Mr. Lucky: "West Virginia was added to the Union on June 20, 1863."
At the time of West Virginia's admission, it's constitution required gradual abolition, as was done in other northern States.
West Virginia officially abolished slavery on February 3, 1865, 10 months before ratification of the 13th Amendment.
So it was Lincoln that added a slave state to the U.S. after the Emancipation Proclamation. That is not the answer I would have expected from a president that was “fighting to free the slaves.”
The slaves in the southern states, generally speaking, were freed immediately upon coming under control of Union forces; but slaves under control of Union forces in Union states were not freed, even though it is said Lincoln was “fighting to free the slaves.” The North continued to cling to slavery.
Perhaps there were economic and political considerations that overrode the oft-stated northern moral imperatives.
“Supposition from known reality: public schools were not common in the wilderness . . .”
I hope this link works; provides additional information.
West Virginia was admitted to the Union in 1863 as a gradual abolition state, using similar procedures as other northern States had previously.
In February 1865 West Virginians changed that to full, immediate and uncompensated abolition.
Iirc, they were one of only three Southern States to voluntarily abolish slavery on their own.
With his wife, Jefferson had two daughters who survived childhood. They married relatives who also came from slaveowning planter families. His elder daughter objected to slavery but went on owning slaves.
Slaveowning was a sign of status that it was hard to do without if one aspired to a social position and upper class acceptance. Families that once had slaves often wanted to become slaveowners again, and they could often hope that an enterprising son would restore their fortunes on the frontier. Individuals with misgivings about slavery were often in families and communities that didn't share such doubts so they didn't act on their convictions.
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