So you do not like the Civil War. do you feel the Democrat Southern States should have been left alone to Practice Slavery.
Are you being ceral?
You are reading to much into Fieldmarshaldj's argument there.
I remember we talked about this incident before after I mentioned I wished someone would pull a Preston Brooks on some congressional rat (I forget who) and half seriously lamenting that today that would land you in prison. I don't remember the details of the discussion unfortunately.
It's true slavery wasn't the reason Brooks beat him half to death it's cause he made fun of his relative Senator Butler mocking his stroke addled speech and the like. It was then spun into an attack on anti-slavery free speech. I don't know if that's what Sumner wanted (someone to attack him so he could use it) but got more than he bargained for obviously due to the severity of the attack.
We all agree with Sumner that slavery was a great moral evil. I can't speak about his 'honor' or that or Butler since I don't know enough. I can say though if I was a politician at the time I would have worked to avoid the Civil War and end slavery through peaceful means (but still speaking against it and aiding escaped slaves) rather than deliberately fanning the flames of war (that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths as well as the first income tax and the first draft and ultimately left most former slaves not that much better off due to the failure and abandonment of reconstruction). If I understand correctly that's what DJ doesn't like about Sumner.
If I was a slave though I'm probably feel a war was a great idea if it meant my freedom.
*I’m pinging LS to this discussion, as he is a historian. I don’t know his take on this particular incident, but I thought he might find it of interest.
I’ve made my point several times on this over a long period, that my stance wasn’t either pro-Southern or pro-Northern, but anti-hypocrisy. I find slavery abhorrent and wish it had been outlawed (or at the very least, phased out) in the Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution. I had no intention of even discussing slavery when it came to this particular episode, since slavery is the way it has been spun by liberal historians, when the facts of the matter AS IT OCCURRED are something else entirely. This was a point of personal honor, something too many people don’t understand today. You had people fighting duels that were in high positions of power over this, the “issues” discussed had little to do with it.
My main beef here is that how I was taught about this incident and how it continues to be described is in the terms of some heroic man with a halo thundering in righteous fury about the evil institution and some troglodytic caveman burst into the Senate and struck down this Messiah-like figure. It’s about as big a load of bull$hit as they come. I’m not the only person who came to the conclusion that Sumner was no heroic figure...
Sumner’s own biographer, David Donald summed him up as follows:
“Distrusted by friends and allies, and reciprocating their distrust, a man of “ostentatious culture,” “unvarnished egotism,” and “’a specimen of prolonged and morbid juvenility,’” Sumner combined a passionate conviction in his own moral purity with a command of nineteenth-century “rhetorical flourishes” and a “remarkable talent for rationalization.” Stumbling “into politics largely by accident,” elevated to the United States Senate largely by chance, willing to indulge in “Jacksonian demagoguery” for the sake of political expediency, Sumner became a bitter and potent agitator of sectional conflict. Carving out a reputation as the South’s most hated foe and the Negro’s bravest friend, he inflamed sectional differences, advanced his personal fortunes, and helped bring about national tragedy.”
That is a helluva indictment of this individual, who at the time of his slanderous tirade was all of 45 years old and not even a full 6 years in Washington, DC. I submit that Sumner knew precisely what he was doing and was expecting to provoke a response (and I believe that initially he was expecting a challenge to fight a duel — for which he not only would NOT fight, but for which he would get someone else to fight on his behalf, in keeping with his character of cowardice). To Senator Andrew Pickens Butler’s credit, he himself knew that Sumner was a mere blowhard and was apparently even content to let the incident pass, and not give Sumner’s spectacle any mind at all. That certainly speaks volumes to Butler’s character and sense of tolerance.
I’ll add in conclusion as well that absent types like Sumner (whom I will add post-war by 1872 was supporting the Democrat candidate for President, Horace Greeley, and he lost a great deal of his power and died less than a year and a half after the election) we might’ve gone a long way into finding a moderate solution to have averted war and bloodshed (well worth noting, too, that Sumner, once he got his great war, he himself didn’t go charging off to serve — indeed, he never put on the uniform once. Contrast that with Congressman Laurence Keitt who was with Preston Brooks during the incident with Sumner, who unapologetically put on the uniform and died for his cause. Brooks would have as well had he not died before the war).
I’ll throw in one last point as well where it comes to North vs. South, something I’ve also mentioned before, that being always the claim of Northern moral superiority, which after spending some time paying closer scrutiny to that didn’t quite pass the smell test. While Northerners were quite content to click their tongues at the savagery of the South and their proliferating of this peculiar institution, they were always quite willing to tell the South what they should do with themselves and with Blacks, but when it came time for them to do something themselves, the message was loud and clear: keep those Africans south of the Mason-Dixon line. Indeed, confronted with the prospect of gargantuan numbers of freed slaves migrating North to live amongst the more “tolerant Whites” would’ve provoked a response of terror by these morally superior folks the likes of which would never have been seen before (the NYC Draft Riots would’ve looked like a Sunday picnic).
Again, this is not to claim Southerners as morally superior, either (having that peculiar institution go on as long as it did, let alone Jim Crow, is testament to that), only that it is very easy for people far removed from a problem or situation to sit in moral judgment over others when they themselves don’t have to face said problems or situations close-up (or outright refusing to face the situation or washing their hands of it entirely). Look at the state of Oregon, which to this day has a very small Black population (like its New England counterparts), and that wasn’t by accident, the “enlightened, morally superior” folks there saw to it that Free Blacks were barred from moving there. Anyway, you get my point here.