Posted on 01/25/2022 7:57:23 AM PST by Beave Meister
The South leaving and remaining out of the control of the corruptocracy was going to wreak financial havoc on the then power class of the USA.
So they weren't going to allow that to happen.
All speculation, of course. But the defeat of the Yankee industrial and financial elite would have had consequences, not all good.
The reasons for a war tend to change as the war evolves. For the Confederacy, secession was motivated by wanting to protect slavery, with the Civil War beginning as a fight for one's state and but then becoming a fight for honor. loyalty, and in part for the larger cause of an independent Confederacy. Yet occasional talk of emancipation by Confederates for the sake of winning the war were roundly rejected. As one letter to the editor in a Virginia newspaper complained about wartime emancipation proposals in Virginia, "If the war isn't about keeping our ni**ers, then why are we fighting?"
For the North, the war began as a fight against secession and for the Union, but it gradually transformed by incorporating the great cause of the era -- Emancipation -- in order to justify the immense cost and sacrifice that the war entailed.
Saying that the Civil War was about contemporary political issues simply makes no sense because it puts effects before causes.
When I look at the history of the world since the Civil War, I wonder how it could have turned out worse than it did.
WWI was a nexus point. So much bad came out of that war that it is hard to see how world history could have possibly been worse in the absence of that war.
Now you may say "What would the Civil War have to do with the outcome of WWI?" and so I offer one speculative history.
A divided USA/CSA would have been less likely to throw it's weight around the way it did. The Spanish American War was probably off. American involvement in WWI was also probably off.
A USA staying out of WWI would have probably resulted in a standstill and an eventual armistice. It was America that tipped the balance to the British.
Would the Germans have sent Lenin back to Russia without the announcement of the US entering the war? Maybe not.
So much bad flowed out of WWI, i'm thinking that anything which could have changed that result would have likely been a better history than the one we have now.
No WWII. No Holocaust. No Atom Bomb. No Chinese Communism. Possibly no Russian communism.
100 million souls now dead might have been spared. The most insidious and evil doctrines might never have taken root.
What is the European powers maintaining colonies in the Americas to all that other disaster? The Central and South American countries could have hardly done worse than they have done on their own.
More like doesn't want to discuss the weather when the focus should be on numbers and calculations. Numbers and Calculations such as the South producing 72% of the total trade with Europe while 60% of that money went to New York and Washington DC instead of to the producers.
Slavery is a red herring which has been used to distract from the money because the people who benefited from the result would prefer that people not look at what really happened.
For the North, the war began as a fight against secession...
Why would they have a moral right to oppose secession? They were all in favor of seceding from England, and Massachusetts and Connecticut asserted a right to secede from the US again and again. (Look up the Hartford convention.)
Have you noticed that when 230 million dollars was going to be removed from their income streams, suddenly they found a reason to be against secession?
but it gradually transformed by incorporating the great cause of the era -- Emancipation -- in order to justify the immense cost and sacrifice that the war entailed.
Well that's what we have been told, but considering how many lies i've found about what we've been told, I no longer just simply accept a narrative, especially when it benefits the people who kept the money.
Here is another possibility. When the war started, the North thought it would whip the South quickly. The first Battle of Bull Run was to be an entertaining affair. Dignitaries and well to do people packed a picnic lunch for the occasion of watching the rag tag Southern forces get their @$$ beat.
It turned into a rout, and the Northern dignitaries had to run in fear of their lives.
Over time, their confidence about beating the South turned into violent hatred at the people who were thwarting the will of the rich wealthy elite who controlled Washington DC. They became bitter and merciless, and they finally decided the best way to hurt the people of the South was to destroy 5 billion of their capital. The way to make them grovel was to take away their economic engine that gave them so much money in the first place.
You think freeing the slaves was done for moral reasons, but I now suspect it was done out of hatred for the people who defied them.
Sure, the 3% or so of the nation that was dedicated abolitionists kept proclaiming it to be a great moral cause, but you must remember the actual Northern powers voted to keep the black people enslaved forever with their Corwin amendment. The people in power didn't care about the slaves, they cared about hurting and destroying those people who dared defy them and dared to take money away from them.
Just think of how much modern liberals hate conservatives today, and realize that is exactly how much the Northern liberals of that era hated the Southern states for defying them.
Actually, during the Civil War, the Confederate government acquired considerable power for the sake of the war effort.
Who tweets? /
As Stephens stated:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the White man; that slavery as subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Stephens' speech was widely seen at the time as a definitive statement of the reason for secession and the formation of the Confederacy. After the Civil War though, he and other Confederate leaders substituted an elaborate economic rationale and claims of victimization by the North as the reason for the Confederacy and the War. This myth of the Lost Cause eased their and the South's sense of guilt and shame over slavery and the war.
I suggest that defending the Confederate cause today in economic terms and denying the central role of slavery in its formation puts one on the side of the single most wrong, foolish, and destructive episode in American history. That is not a good place to be.
Recall Lincoln’s explanation that his goal was to save the Union. If saving the Union required preserving slavery, he would so so. If saving the Union required ending slavery, he would so.
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