Posted on 03/22/2011 12:32:41 AM PDT by iowamark
In 2009, Professor Rahe published two books: Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty, which has as its subtitle War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic, and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. He can be reached at www.paularahe.com."
Sucession was wasted on the CSA.
Some of their cultist devotion to slavery just seems bizarre even by their standards.
How many ships flagged by Southerners?
How sad that even Dr. Rahe is unable to recognize the emptiness of his conclusion. Abraham Lincoln worked hard to justify a "repudiation of the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence." Did that indicate it was necessary for the Union?
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.Plus, he misses how economic and legal factors don't rely upon the justification. We often find legal decisions that are not just to a third party, for example.
I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.]
[...]
I give [Douglas] the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes. [Continued laughter and applause.]
I will add one further word, which is this, that I do not understand there is any place where an alteration of the social and political relations of the negro and the white man can be made except in the State Legislature---not in the Congress of the United States---and as I do not really apprehend the approach of any such thing myself, and as Judge Douglas seems to be in constant horror that some such danger is rapidly approaching [...]--Abraham Lincoln
Not so many, actually.
While the slave trade was legal internationally, much of the Middle Passage was sailed by foreign-flagged vessels -- England, Spain, Portugal.
U.S.-flagged vessels (including slavers) were owned mostly by New England shipping interests.
What the chart also does not show is that the preponderance of the trade was carried into the Carribbean and South American sugar plantations, not to North America.
Oops -- my mistake. The chart DOES show that.
I need to get a larger display or better glasses.8{)
The New Englanders realized it was to cold up there..for slavery..they sold their slaves to the South..built slave ships..rum distilleries, planted grain to make the rum..imported White slave labor from Ireland..
We know the story..
The root causes are much more diverse, but I believe that nearly every cause can somehow be linked back to slavery and land -- the South's dependence on expansion of those two resources, and their realization of the trap they had set for themselves with the Compromise of 1850, put them in desperate realization that they were ultimately facing checkmate.
Once the North had gained the majority in the Senate, and with the ensuing melee over Kansas statehood, the South realized that expanding slavery into new territories would not happen. At that point, the only thing that would have prevented the Civil War would have been the tractor.
Rich man's war, poor man's fight.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, large numbers of Union soldiers wrote home to protest that ending slavery wasn't the reason they joined, either.
A common misconception is that throughout the North, people embraced the noble cause of fighting for the liberation of their fellow man.
You'd think so-called "Lost Causers" were the only ones clinging to a myth, wouldn't you?
While Southerners offered various reasons for supporting slavery, ranging from the guiltily paternalistic to the hideous "justification" that Africans were created to be the slaves of Europeans (there were indeed Southern ministers who preached the "two creations" theory), deep down inside it was that the slave was simply the fuel for a slave economy.
I once heard a lecturer in New Orleans make a great comparison: it would be as if the government had suddenly said that farmers could not use deisel fuel and therefore could not run their farm equipment, and offered them no compensation for the fact that they would immediately no longer be able to operate their farms and in fact that their regional entire economy would collapse overnight. The economy of the major slave states was entirely a slave economy, and regardless of what theoretical justifications they gave, it was basically that the slave labor of these millions of Africans was the fuel for their economy.
So perhaps the invention of the tractor would have solved the problems. A slave economy is the least efficient of all, and in fact one of the reasons slavery collapsed in Europe after the fall of Rome (initially being replaced by feudalism) was simply that it was cumbersome and costly, both in terms of the ultimate cost of the labor and in terms of the need for security when you had to force millions of slaves to keep laboring to support a tiny handful of masters.
Lincoln observed a large population in the southern states, but what wasn’t admitted was a large part were there after being sold (or chased out) by the north to the southern folk over the preceding 30 years. (dirty little secret of the Civil War)
http://www.slavenorth.com/denial.htm
Geez, I hope this doesn’t get out. All of the textbooks in our schools will have to be re-written. According to existing text, all of the slave ships belonged to the ancestors of George Bush from Texas and every slave captured by the Texas Rangers in Africa came to the market in South Carolina. /s
Amen.
A not very accurate analogy because nobody was talking about doing away with slavery where it existed. The intent was to keep it from spreading.
I recently read an economic analysis that suggested that the cost of the U.S. government buying and liberating all slaves in the U.S. would have been roughly equal to the cost of the Civil War (without the long-term negative effects).
I don't have the source at hand, but am trying to re-locate it.
Just like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, I guess somebody needs to keep rehashing the same ol’ crap to pay the bills. Unlike the South, the yankees just won’t let it go.
Emancipation meant doing away with slavery where it existed. The slaves were not going to stay on the property after they were emancipated, and in fact they didn’t: they flooded into cities where there was a need for labor, since few of the male former slaves had any skills. This was the source of the many black-majority cities in the South.
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