[Your reply] Your buddies complain when people portray the Confederacy as self-interestedly committed to preserving slavery, but you (singular, and often plural) can't resist portraying the other side as wholly self-interested.
I don't know what your kvetch is here. Politicians generally do that. I just quoted you Toombs and Stephens going back and forth about the Tariff, disagreeing between themselves over whether the 1857 Tariff scheme was fair or not, Toombs complaining about the various bounties and protectionist laws, and Stephens replying with examples of other preferences that benefitted the South. Didn't you see that?
And nobody I know objects to portrayal of the leading lights of the Confederacy as being in favor of continuing slavery -- the material is there in black and white, it's incontrovertible. What we object to is the mantra, "it was all about slavery!!," which manifestly it was not, as I showed by posting those speeches and then linking to them again. You'll notice, too, that I refrained from doing what your towel-buddy Non-Sequitur did with me, which was snarkily to insist that I hadn't read a speech, when I had -- and I knew there was more in the speech than either he or ftD had owned up to in discussion, about further causes of secession beyond slavery.
The veteran who lost a limb fighting for freedom, the teacher or doctor who went South after the war to work with the freedmen: were they wholly motivated by a desire to "cripple the South forever"?
Oh, stow it, Harriet. The people who came south after the war were either looking for vulture-capital opportunities, or they were carpetbaggers sent by the federal Government, or by the vindictively partisan Union League clubs in the big Northern Cities. But don't take my word for it -- God knows I wouldn't want you to take the word of an unlettered bumpkin who can't frame an argument and never read a book!!! God, you are a piece of work.....try this:
In the autumn of 1866, and through the winter and summer of 1867 strange men from the North were flocking into the black belt of the South, and mingling familiarly with the negroes, day and night. These were the emissaries of the Union League Clubs of Philadelphia and New York that have been unfairly denied their historic status in the consolidation of the negro vote. Organized in the dark days of the war to revive the failing spirit of the people, they had become bitterly partisan clubs with the conclusion of the struggle; and, the Union saved, they had turned with zest to the congenial task of working out the salvation of their party. This, they thought, depended on the domination of the South through the negro vote. Sagacious politicians, and men of material means, obsessed with ideas as extreme as those of Stevens and Sumner, they dispatched agents to turn the negroes against the Southern whites and organize them in secret clubs. -- Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era, p. 198.
Bowers is obviously biased and not wholly reliable, any more than John Nicolay, whom I also quoted on more than one occasion; and if Bowers overlooks the attempts of planters and the calls of newspaper editorialists in the South to try to immobilize the labor force, Harper's Weekly and other Union-biased sources certainly didn't.
Moreover, even the most tapioca-bland, difference-splitting, manual histories of the United States record the factuality of my statement, such as the material in this short history prepared for the USIA/USIS by epitomization from a number of sources by various authors both conservative and liberal, including Charles Beard, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, Curtis P. Nettels, and Arthur M. Schlesinger:
An Outline of American History (1954) Indeed, before the war was actually over, Lincoln had set up governments in Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Some members of Congress, however, disapproved of this action and wished to impose severe punishment on all the Confederate states. One of these Congressmen, Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives, believed, in fact, that southern planters should be kept under military rule for a period of probation. Others were determined to give the Negro the right to vote immediately. Actually, the chief concern of Congress at this time - rather than the readmission to the Union of the southern states - was the condition of the emancipated Negro, and in March 1865, it established the Freedman's Bureau, which was to assume a position of guardianship over the Negro and direct his first efforts at self-support. In 'addition, Congress also formalized the fact of Negro freedom by proposing the thirteenth constitutional amendment which abolished slavery and was ratified in December 1865. ....
....Throughout the summer of 1865, without consulting Congress, for that body was not in session, Johnson proceeded to carry out, except for minor differences, Lincoln's plan of reconstruction. By presidential proclamation, he appointed a governor for each of the various southern states and freely restored political rights to large numbers of Confederates through the use of his pardoning power. Conventions were held in the southern states which repealed the ordinances of secession, repudiated the war debt, and drafted new constitutions. In time, the people of each state elected a governor and a state legislature, and when the legislature of a state approved the Thirteenth Amendment, Johnson recognized the re-establishment of civil government and considered the state back in the Union.....Under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, those who sought to punish the south refused to seat the [newly elected Congressional] southern delegates, and in the next few months they proceeded to work out a plan of Congressional reconstruction quite different from that which Lincoln had started and Johnson completed.
A mixture of motives caused Congress to reject the Johnson plan. ....In 1865, there was a feeling that the time had come for Congress to curb the executive's exercise of powers which, under the necessities of war, it had tolerated. Furthermore, there was some feeling in the north that the south should be punished with severity. This feeling was encouraged by the radicals in Congress......
In addition, it was claimed that the Negro needed protection. As time passed, the idea gained currency that the Negro be given the right to vote and hold office and that he be given complete social and political equality with white citizens. Others, including Lincoln, favored a more gradual enfranchisement with full citizenship rights being first extended to educated Negroes and those who had served in the Union army. But the southern legislatures, created under the Johnson plan, enacted a variety of laws designed to regulate the privileges and rights of the freedmen. To the southerner, confronted with the problem of 3,500,000 Negroes but recently emancipated from slavery, it seemed necessary that the states regulate their activities closely, and they enacted "black codes" of a restrictive nature. To many in the north, this seemed as if the gains of the war were being undone, and northern radicals seized upon the most obnoxious features of these codes to prove that the south was bent on re-establishing slavery.
Gradually, many in the north came to feel that the President had been too lenient, and there developed a wide popular sympathy for the radicals in Congress. That body proceeded to enact over Johnson's veto a Civil Rights Bill in April 1866, and a new Freedmen's Bureau Bill in July 1866, both of which virtually prevented southern legislation from authorizing discrimination. Finally Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment which stated that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." The immediate intention of its framers, of course, was to insure the conferring of citizenship upon the Negroes.
All of the southern state legislatures, with the exception of Tennessee, refused to ratify the amendment. .... The radicals in Congress proceeded to force their plan upon the south and in March of 1867 passed a Reconstruction Act, ignoring the civil governments which had been established in the south. The act divided the south into five districts and placed them under military rule. It provided an escape from permanent military government by declaring that if the people of Confederate states would take an oath of allegiance, ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and adopt Negro suffrage, they might establish civil governments and be restored to the Union. In July 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified and the next year, to fasten Negro suffrage upon the south beyond the power of repeal by a future Congress, the Fifteenth Amendment was passed by Congress and ratified in 1870 by state legislatures. It provided that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." .....
.... Under the Reconstruction Act, Congress, by the summer of 1868, readmitted to the Union over the President's opposition the states of Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. How representative the new governments of these seven reconstructed states were can be judged from the fact that the majority of the governors, Representatives, and Senators elected were northern men who had come south after the war to make their political fortunes. The Negroes gained complete control of the Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi legislatures. In several other states, though they were a minority in the legislatures, they were a strong voting power. The sprinkling of white southern legislators was unable to hold in check the combination of northerners and newly enfranchised Negroes who, although they undertook valuable work in building roads and bridges and initiating good laws concerning education and charities, were, on the whole, incompetent and wasteful of funds.
In despair, the southern whites who believed their old civilization threatened and could find no legal remedy to stop the new regimes, resorted to extralegal means. The use of violence became more frequent as time passed, and the multiplying excesses and disorders led, in 1870, to the passage of an Enforcement Act [a.k.a. the Force Acts, iirc --LG] which drastically punished those who attempted in any way to deprive the Negro of his civil rights.
The increasing severity of such laws and the steady encroachment of Congress upon the police powers of the individual states impeded the process of spiritual reconciliation with the north so necessary for the restoration of a common love of country. It also arrayed the mass of whites in the south against the Republican Party as the party of the Negro and only increased the solidarity of the Democratic Party in that area. As time passed, it was obvious that the problem of the south was not being solved by harsh laws and continued rancor against former Confederates, And in May 1872, Congress passed a general Amnesty Act restoring full political privileges to all but about five hundred Confederates who had been excluded from the right to hold office and from the franchise, Little by little, state after state elected members of the Democratic Party to office. By 1876, the Republicans remained in power in only three southern states. The election that year, one of the closest in American history and one of the most disorderly, made it plain that the south would know no peace until the troops were withdrawn. The next year, therefore, President Rutherford B. Hayes removed them, admitting the failure of the "radical" reconstruction policy, which had been adopted chiefly because the idealistic wing of the party wished to protect the Negro and because the materialistic wing hoped to hold the south for votes, offices, and power. [Emphasis added; lacunae for brevity only. -- LG]
This recitation from a manual history is completely dispositive of your encaptioned complaint about the statement I made. The final outcome was not, manifestly, what the Radicals in Congress had intended, but the highlighted sections above sufficiently well show their will made manifest, and the political results of that will in the South. The Radical Republicans intended to dominate the South, and for a time they succeeded.
You must specialize in the straw man argument.
No one questions the fact that there were other factors involved in the Civil War.
No one suggested that Stephens did not list them.
However, Stephens was very clear on what he thought was the essential issue of the war, that being slavery.
You actually read it, huh. My, my, my, will miracles ever cease?