Posted on 05/19/2015 10:33:26 PM PDT by iowamark
Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world.
The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart over the issue, what hope did freedom have? European powers wasted no time in taking advantage of the debacle. France and Britain immediately each sent fleets of warships with the official purpose of observing the imminent war in America. In Paris, A New York Times correspondent who went by the byline “Malakoff” thought that the French and British observers “may be intended as a sort of escort of honor for the funeral of the Great Republic.”
...the French forced Benito Juárez, the republican leader, to flee the capital and eventually installed the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico.
European conservatives welcomed the dismemberment of the “once United States” and the bursting of the “republican bubble” that, beginning with the French Revolution, had inspired revolution and unrest in Europe. Republicanism had been in retreat in Europe since the failed revolutions of 1848, and some predicted that all the wayward American republics would eventually find their way back to some form of monarchy, or seek protection under European imperial rule. When Lincoln, in the darkest days of the war, referred to America as the “last best hope of earth,” he was hardly boasting...
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Thank you for that interesting research.
So it is your position that the Ordinances of Secession specifically say that the reason for secession was slavery.
And yet all those same crops continue to be grown to this day.
and the industrial revolution was making slave labor largely obsolete.
Cotton farming wasn't mechanized until the 1940s. Not coincidentally, that's when sharecropping, the debt-peonage labor system that replaced slavery, began to die out.
Now, if I understand your position, it is that the Ordinances are valid because their were approved by the people, but that the declarations were not approved and therefore cannot be accepted as an accurate statement of the feelings of the people. Is that correct?
“...the ordinances of secession issued by the secession conventions say little more than “we secede” and give no reasons. “
That is exactly right.
Not if the south had anything to say about it.
Now, why are those documents valid as a statement of the people’s will and the declarations of causes not?
The revisionism about the Civil War is entirely from the pro-Confederate revisionists. THE issue was slavery, not something that had happened 30 years earlier. We know this because the secessionists SAID so.
You have admitted and established the fact that some of the original assertions of the early posters on this thread about the Ordinances of Secession were factually wrong.
In addition to the four statements on secession from which many of you draw on to underpin your assertions, you can also retrieve hundreds, or thousands of resolutions, statements, pamphlets, editorials, speeches, letters, and gossip to support your favorite position.
But, the Official Ordinances are not used to lend credibility to that end.
Are you sure one of the Ordinances of Secession said that?
Stephens said that.
People tend to confuse the ordinances, which shed little light, with the declarations issued by the same people at the same time, which shed a great deal of light, as do the debates of the secession conventions.
Now, are you going to explain why your position that "the official statements of the secession conventions were those approved by the people" applies to the ordinances and not the declarations, or will you continue to obfuscate?
Perhaps it would have and perhaps it would not have. I saw with my own eyes, cotton being harvested by hand in the 1960s. But going back 100 years before that, the people who were willing to go to war to support their "Peculiar Institution" sure didn't think it would 'die on the vine.'
How so? Slaves worked the Tredgare Iron Works in Richmond. Slaves built the railroads throughout the south. Slaves mined coal in Virginia, Kentucky and Alabama.
"The European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat...to which the African race is altogether better adapted. The production of rice, sugar, and cotton is no better adapted to slave labor than the digging, washing, and quarrying of the gold mines."
-- Jefferson Davis speech in the US Senate in 1850.
Because of the civil war and so many fatherless boys, Horatio Alger had an influence on a whole generation of young men instilling morals and entrepreneurship.............
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger,_Jr.
“but “until after Fort Sumter” was just a shorthand way of referring to that”
I thought you might have been using such shorthand. I mentioned Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops because others are likely not to know of it and that it provoked the Upper South to secede.
“unless Lincoln called for troops secession of the Lower South would have remained the de facto reality, and if he allowed Fort Sumter to surrender because of lack of provisions the demoralizing affect of that on the North might have caused the attitude of “let the erring sisters depart in peace” to become even more widespread.”
I fail to see what would have been wrong with that choice. The Constitution is silent on secession, and most Americans were aware that the United States were born in secession from the United Kingdom. It isn’t an issue that should have been entrusted to one man, especially in a country founded on a distrust of monarchical power.
Lincoln chose the route of war while Congress was out of session. He took it upon himself to decide the issue of secession and to declare war against several million American citizens- American citizens in his view of unfolding events, Confederate citizens in the view of the people he intended to force his will upon.
The seven state Confederacy would have been the old Texas Republic writ large- the Texas Republic that Abe Lincoln opposed admitting to the Union in the first place but which he now wanted to compel to remain- and the Texas Republic didn’t find its own independence satisfactory. The same would have happened to the small Confederacy over time. That Confederacy would have inconvenienced Mississippi River traffic but would have posed no other threat than perhaps an economic one of lower tariffs.
Had Lincoln not chosen war the issue of the Confederacy would have played out politically instead of in blood. The balance of power in Congress would have shifted dramatically to the North. The Fugitive Slave Act would have been repealed. A program of compensated emancipation like Britain employed could have ended slavery in the remaining US slave states, where slavery was more of an artifact from the past than in the cotton belt of the Deep South.
Only in Haiti and the US was the end of slavery accompanied by a bloodbath. In Haiti it was a slave uprising. In the US it was a political party deciding that secession as practiced by their fathers and grandfathers needed to be crushed by force.
You have it only half right.
The rationale for secession was slavery.
The rationale for the Civil War was preserving the Union by force.
No, the Civil War started because secessionists started shooting.
Lincoln on many occasions said that he was fighting the war to preserve the Union. I’ll take his word for it. You’re welcome to your own version of history.
“No, the Civil War started because secessionists started shooting.”
This is Lincoln’s Proclamation of April 15, 1861 where he calls for 75,000 militia to ‘suppress the combinations’ in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. It’s as close as he came to a declaration of war and he gives his reason for doing so.
Oddly enough he never mentions Fort Sumter, secessionists, nor shooting.
He does call on “all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and existence of our national Union, and the perpetuity of popular government”, the theme of restoring the Union that ran through his Presidency and the war.
http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/35998
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