Posted on 09/27/2011 6:38:35 AM PDT by decimon
The tiny Mediterranean island of Caprera, near Sardinia, was not the sort of place to find an American diplomat in the late summer of 1861, but that’s precisely where Henry Shelton Sanford landed late in the afternoon of Sept. 9. It had been a long, involved trip: he came from Brussels to Genoa by train, secretly chartered a ship to avoid public notice and, on the night of Sept. 8, sailed through the Ligurian Sea to Sardinia. Landing late the next day, he hired a small boat to take him to Caprera, then walked more than a mile on a narrow path across the rocky, windswept island.
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The conversation began promisingly. “I will be very happy to serve a country for which I have so much affection,” Garibaldi replied to preliminary inquiries. He had lived in exile in New York and considered himself a citizen of what he fondly referred to as his “second country.” But what he wanted to hear, and what Sanford could not tell him, was that this would be a war against slavery.
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(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Abolition of slavery as a war aim of the Union really didn’t come until ‘63. By that time, it was clear that, whatever else one’s sentiments on slavery, destroying the enemy’s chief labor source simply made strategic sense.
In Garibaldi’s mind, victory over the Southern slaveholders would come swiftly; “the enemy is weakened by his vices and disarmed by his conscience,” he told his comrades. From there they would go on to vanquish the slaveholders of the Caribbean and Brazil, where millions of “miserable slaves will lift their heads and be free citizens.”...
It was much more than that, for Garibaldi’s question anticipated a fundamental problem the Union confronted in trying to explain its cause to a puzzled world. Was this only a civil war, a purely domestic conflict in a quarrelsome democracy? Was the Union’s goal nothing more than to put down rebellion and protect its sovereignty? Or was there something of real consequence to the world at large? The Union would have to find answers before other powers of the world decided to include the South among the family of nations.
Secession and the Confederacy were entirely about slavery. Read the secession statements if you doubt this. However, for Unionists, the war was initially about preserving the Union. US opinion was very divided on slavery and race.
Yep.
“Secession and the Confederacy were entirely about slavery.”
Nope.
Although the case for abolishing slavery had been made since the founding it was still not clear that Washington had the authority to do so under the Constitution. Until the war.
slavery was the symptom, seccession the disease. nothing happened abotu slavery until the seccession started.
The political elite in the South may have made statements to the effect that the war was about slavery, but I doubt the average Confederate soldier volunteered with the idea "I want to help defend slavery."
The “states rights” mantra came about as former confederates searched for something noble to justify their failed struggle to preserve slavery. Slavery was the driving issue. The federal tariff that had earlier had severely impacted the market for southern cotton was clearly a state rights issue. Yet no one was going to war over a tariff, not even a hint of it. The South went to war over the later perceived threat to slavery on which the South depended for its economy and the southern self-fashioned nobility depended for their lifestyle. That’s why the secession declarations highlighted slavery. Face it and move on.
I dunno about that. Liberals seem to be doing just fine in the cultural war.
Read “Killing Lincoln”. He was as likely to be assassinated by a Northerner who opposed a war to end slavery as a Southern Sympathizer.
I find it puzzling that the Dems are ‘re-enslaving” the “minorities” (and a bunch of us that aren't) by state dependency. It is not happening voluntarily but by subjection.
Is that also slavery? In my mind it is and it was evil in the 1860’s and it is even more so today.
Slavery by bureaucracy.
Arguing about whether slavery or states’ rights caused the Civil War is like arguing whether it’s the fall that kills you or the sudden stop.
Slavery’s existence created a false but cherished sense of equality in the South. Leading slave holders like Thomas Dew of Virginia spoke of the purest equality of color. Unlike the north where class was evolving from wealth or its lack, the south enjoyed a society where the poorest white could feel kinship to the wealthy through their common race. The slaveholding class did little to tarnish this image. Also, some slaves were considerably more skilled than poor whites, as they were trained in trades necessary to running a self sustaining plantation. In a free competition many whites would be left behind by freedmen. Finally, many poor whites were paid to join the slave patrols and had a monetary stake in slavery’s survival.
Not really. It was perfectly clear Congress had no such power under the Constitution. An amendment would have been required, and of course that could not possibly happen as long as the slave states were in the Union. 3/4 state vote and all that.
The mania for secession had complicated motivations, but it’s clear the underlying issue was one of needing to protect the wealth (capital) represented by the slaves.
I just recently found an outstanding site with statistics that make it easy to understand the importance of slavery to the economy of the South.
http://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php
As far as I can tell, the authors are merely try to be accurate, they’re not trying to push a political POV.
The most fascinating part for me was the value of slaves in the total southern economy. They composed about 60% of all wealth in the South.
Our economy has gone into a tail spin in the last few years and lost something around 10% of the total wealth in this country, which is on the order of $200T.
It is not all unreasonable that the South resisted those (abolitionists) who wanted to confiscate 60% of their region’s wealth.
Look at how violently many on this site resist the very notion of a few percent increase in tax rates. How do you think they’d react to proposed confiscation of 60% of their accumulated assets?
Anyway, take a look at the site. It’s really cool.
IOW, white skin conferred not only freedom but also rank in society.
“Free persons of color” usually didn’t have an easy time of it in the South (most were poor, although there were some who were prosperous enough to be slaveholders themselves, and the Creoles of New Orleans who had some African ancestry may be an exception to the pattern elsewhere). It wasn’t any better in the North—Alexis de Tocqueville thought that racial prejudice was even stronger in areas where slavery had been abolished.
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