A very good read. Hits the button!
Why do so many people find this KKK nonsense amusing? Is it because they imagine themselves as Scarlett in Gone With The Wind? Probably the same people who keep reelecting Robert Byrd.
If prosperity was in the South and the North was bankrupt then the South would have won the war, no?
I’m amazed that there are still yahoos out there debating this. She thinks that slavery was a distraction? If she looked at the statements of succession from the states who succeeded, she’ll find slavery listed. Also, the South was not devoted to States Rights. They once tried to get Constitutional protection for slavery, not only for themselves, but the entire nation, including states where it was illegal. They didn’t embrace States Rights until it became clear that the majority of the nation opposed it.
Here’s another fact the author didn’t mention. Abraham Lincoln could not have exploited the South because they succeeded before he even became President. Lincoln tried to appease them. He offered financial restitution for slave owners. He was even willing to tolerate slavery in the Southern states, albeit it reluctantly. They didn’t like the fact that he wanted to outlaw slavery in any future states to join the Union.
When the South succeeded, they had military bases which belonged to the nation they succeeded from. Those bases had not been built with southern money. If the South wanted to possess them, they had to buy them. But they wanted to take them, lock, stock, and barrell. Also, to cover the spark, it wasn’t the Union soldiers at Fort Sumpter who fired the first shot.
There’s a question of what would have happened if the South had won the war? I don’t believe that we would have won the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The United States would have been a second-tier power on the scale of Great Britain, France, and Germany, and the South would have been a Baptist Banana Republic.
There will always be extremists who second guess the obvious. In most other countries, they wouldn’t even have the right to do that.
We learned that war can happen here and that the federal government believes it owns the States.
Very interesting read..........
“What Can We Learn from 1860?”
Free enslaved Americans. Give them equal rights, then secede.
There are two relevant lessons from the Civil War:
(1) The only people who can beat Americans in military terms is other Americans. And it is UGLY. Incredibly UGLY. We killed more of our own than anyone else has killed in any other war.
(2) The side with the larger functional industrial base (esp energy and manufacturing) WINS. Period. Everything else is too equal. That was the North last time. God forbid we end up there again, but if it does, it would be the South this time.
That said, we REALLY don’t want to go there. Sadly, I think many of the statists in DC and the moribund big Northern cities don’t care if we do. They really think that they will win and see it as a shortcut to their marixst state.
Well then I'd say the South has gotten its revenge: more Southern than Northern states get more money back from the federal government than they chip in. I live in NJ, and for every $1 New Jerseyans send to DC, we get between 60 and 65 cents back (sucks to be us).
So the South may have not won the war, but they keep winning from the federal ATM machine.
Info on taxes here
And the losers write the myths, as this post so aptly demonstrates.
ping
mark for later
1) the right of secession
2) property rights
3) right of self defense and self preservation, and self determination
4) right to liberty
5) right to oppose, resist and escape from oppression and tyranny(of the North, Federal, and of the majority)
6) states rights
7) state independence
8) state sovereignty
9) right to withdraw or recall any or all delegated powers from the central government if those powers were used to oppress
10) the principle that the union and the constitution was a compact among the several sovereign states
11) the principle that the states are united in a confederacy
12) the principle that the people have the right to live under the consent of the governed
13) the right to resist the initiation of force
14) the idea of the federal government is an agent of a conditional union
15) free trade
16) limited government
17) preservation of the South’s institutions, culture, society, traditions, and way of life
Nonsense, such a statement was never made. Industrialization - the real engine of prosperity - was already well under way in Europe, as well in the North. It was the South that was clinging to an outmoded aristocratic theory of wealth that only caused the entire region to lag further and further behind the burgeoning economies of the industrializing world, granted that a few rich plantation owners were able to do quite well for themselves; but as a whole, the North was far more prosperous.
as a southerner I'd say never to wage a war just to sue for peace to be left alone
wage war to crush and change the political will of your enemy by force....Forrest knew this, Jackson knew it, Grant and Bill Sherman sure as hell knew it.
we have completely forgotten it..
Documented historical fact. Look it up for yourselves
I did and it's not. Lincoln didn't say that.
There are reports of him saying something similar, "What will become of my tariff?" to John B. Baldwin, who later became a Confederate Colonel, but they aren't confirmed.
Postwar memories can be deceptive, especially if you lost the war.