Don't spin the Civil War

Washington Post ^ | 12.27.10 | E.J. DIONNE jR.

[trumandogz]

The Civil War is about to loom very large in the popular memory. We would do well to be candid about its causes and not allow the distortions of contemporary politics or long-standing myths to cloud our understanding of why the nation fell apart.

The coming year will mark the 150th anniversary of the onset of the conflict, which is usually dated to April 12, 1861, when Confederate batteries opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on federal troops occupying Fort Sumter. Union forces surrendered the next day, after 34 hours of shelling.

[Bigun]

I found Non-Sequitur to be infuriating and often in opposition to my own views, but I never doubted his sincerity, and he was a worthy opponent in debate.

Except for his tendency to resort to circular arguments when cornered I would agree.

[Bigun]

I found Non-Sequitur to be infuriating and often in opposition to my own views, but I never doubted his sincerity, and he was a worthy opponent in debate.

Except for his tendency to resort to circular arguments when cornered I would agree.

[Repeal The 17th]

“...don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out...”
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You and your ilk would chase me down, burn my farm, and drag me back, just like your man Lincoln did.

[Repeal The 17th]

You are certainly, and more-so, obviously correct.
He also had nothing to do with the gunfight at the O.K. corral.

[RobbyS]

Lincoln did on thing, and that was bad enough, he started a civil war. But Jefferson Davis was more culpable: he let Lincoln maneuver him into firing the first shot.

[matt1234]

What never made sense to me is that the states had to be readmitted to the union. If they never recognized secession what was the purpose for readmission to the union?

The North needed time to consolidate power, so they delayed readmission. Some Southern states did not have congressional representation until 1870. Texas, Mississippi and Virginia did not participate in the presidential election of 1868.

[x]

What was the degree of merchant and banking/banker/"bankster" motivation in the development of the political issues and parties -- Free Soil, Whig, Republican -- that polarized the country regionally and led to the onset of civil war (using the term "civil war" advisedly)?

Still peddling that Marxist line? Obviously that explains why such hotbeds of finance capitalism as Ripon WI, Jackson MI, Crawfordsville IN, lay claim to being the birthplace of the Republican Party. But wait, so does Exeter NH, and Phillips Academy is there, so you must be right. But of course it was farmers and shopkeepers who set the movement in motion that created the Republican Party, not bankers or "banksters."

The truth is that classes don't act, people do. You can find wealthy abolitionists who contributed to anti-slavery activism, but most merchants, bankers, and manufacturers were terrified of anything that could hurt business. There were more "Cotton Whigs" than "Conscience Whigs" in wealthy circles of New England. The old, established families in Philadelphia and New York felt close to their Southern cousins, and many if not most of them had made their way over to the Democratic Party.

So, no, there wasn't some evil conspiracy to "kill a million people and the Framers' noble American Experiment, and supplant it with a banker's paradise of imperial, centralized, centripetal, gradually totalitarianizing government." Once again, just like a hundred times in the past, you're attributing what you think came about after the war, to someone's intention before the war.

That sort of thing gets repetitive and annoying pretty quickly, but it's similar to what Charles Beard and others were doing a century ago. They hated the bankers and corporations of their day more than anything, so they assumed that all of American history was a struggle against the moneyed interests who descended in a line from the Federalists, through the Whigs to the Republicans. The problem is that there were powerful interests on the other side as well, and not all the oppression or misery in the country could be laid at the door of Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans.

The opposition you see between the Founders and the post-Civil War Republicans, though, is one Beard wouldn't share. For him, Lincoln and what came after was a continuation the elitist schemes of the Founders themselves. Without giving that interpretation Beard's evil spin, there is something to be said for it: it's hard to believe that George Washington really would have been in favor of bickering state elites breaking up the union he had worked so hard to establish.

[carton253]

bump

[Repeal The 17th]

“...Jefferson Davis was more culpable: he let Lincoln maneuver him into firing the first shot...”
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I await your educational comments as to what role Jefferson Davis played at Fort Sumter.

[American Constitutionalist]

" Yes, let’s just stop spinning it, the 3/5ths Compromise, so ignorantly attributed to “racist” southerners and demagogued to infinity, was a compromise insisted upon by northern interests, who did not want slaves counted as fully human in order to prevent Congressional reapportionment from shifting political power to the south. "

And why was the North so afraid to grant slaves as 100% human instead of the 3/5ths of a man compromise ?
Yeah MSM ! YEAH LIBERALS ! YEAH AL SHARPTON ! why was the North so afraid ? could it be ? that the North was afraid to give up it's power ? .... these some how inconvenient facts get's lost on the ignorant liberals and the MSM.

[ASA Vet]

What happened to Non-Sequitur? Romney Zot?

[rockrr]

You forgot the “/sarc”

[rockrr]

He got caught in the cross-fire of the late great FreeRepublic Faggot-bash

[Drennan Whyte]

My goodness, firing up that wacky wayback machine once again, I see, darkly attributing some vaguely Hitlerian concept, a century prior to the advent of Nazism.

Hitler was not not the first to subscribe to a master race belief, he was just the most notorious. Racial supremacy was key to antebellum Southern society. Davis described blacks as "our inferior, fitted expressly for slavery..." Stephens said that the great truth was "...the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition..." William Harris of Mississippi wrote, "This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without slavery, or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us. If we take the former, then submission to negro equality is our fate. if the latter, then secession is inevitable." Ont the list goes on. The South's culture, it's society, it's way of life was built on slavery. Acceptance of slavery, by definition, requires a master race - one does not enslave one's equals otherwise one might be enslaved themselves.

There was no "whole southern society," as if it or anyplace else was some sort of monolith. There were entire regions of the south that did not embrace slavery.

For example?

I suggest you make the attempt to move beyond the bizarre pop history taught in public school and actually read a little.

Any suggestions?

Quakers, Moravians, Republican strongholds in the Appalachians opposed to the point of actually splitting off (West Virginia) or attempting to do so (the abortive attempt to revive the Free State of Franklin) ... all that means nothing when you buy into the whole, oddly hypnotic and historicist "slave power" mythos that was handed to you on a silver platter.

Outsiders from from mainstream of Southern culture, and looked upon as such by Southern society.

You've bought into the revisionism, hook line and sinker, have demonized an entire people on that basis, and have the temerity to prattle about the "master race." Do you ever listen to yourself?

Do you? Apparently to you slavery didn't exist.

[Repeal The 17th]

“...Romney Zot?...”
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No; apparently it was a homo zot.

[ExGeeEye]

popcorn bookmark

[Little Pharma]

No, really, you can leave. The world is full of people who see the USA as the Shining City on the Hill. These people dream of having the freedoms and opportunities that you were blessed with, but refuse to acknowledge.

Like Reagan said, vote with your feet. You don’t like it here, no problem. Leave.

[American Constitutionalist]

The Civil war at first glance was all about states rights, Agriculture ( this was the South before the industrial revolution was in full swing ) and the way of life in the South.
The freedom for the slaves became a wedge issue by the North to give them a moral standing and moral ground to fight the war against the South.... so then, in the end, the issue of slaves is what eventually became the main focus of the war.
If the South was left alone, they too would have accepted the industrial revolution and would not have had any more need for slaves.... they were going to abolish slavery in due time.

[Drennan Whyte]

What never made sense to me is that the states had to be readmitted to the union. If they never recognized secession what was the purpose for readmission to the union?

If you read the Reconstruction acts, what was being readmitted were the delegations to Congress, not the states into the Union. There is no evidence of any enabling act, the formal process of admitting a state to the Union, for any of the Southern states after the Civil War.

[rockrr]

"States rights" to do what other than own human beings?

If the South was left alone, they too would have accepted the industrial revolution and would not have had any more need for slaves.... they were going to abolish slavery in due time.

There's zero evidence to support that claim and plenty of evidence to support the counter-claim. The rebellious states wished not only to strengthen the bonds of slavery, they wished to expand it.