Did Abolitionist Hatred of the South Cause the Civil War?

PJ Lifestyle ^ | July 5, 2013 | David Forsmark

[2ndDivisionVet]

A Conversation with Thomas Fleming, historian and author of A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.

Thomas Fleming is known for his provocative, politically incorrect, and very accessible histories that challenge many of the clichés of current American history books. Fleming is a revisionist in the best conservative sense of the word. His challenges to accepted wisdom are not with an agenda, but with a relentless hunger for the truth and a passion to present the past as it really was, along with capturing the attitudes and culture of the times.

In The New Dealers’ War Fleming exposed how the radical Left in FDR’s administration almost crippled the war effort with their utopian socialist experimentation, and how Harry Truman led reform efforts in the Senate that kept production in key materials from collapse.

In The Illusion of Victory, Fleming showed that while liberal academics may rate Woodrow Wilson highly, that he may have been the most spectacularly failed President in history. 100,000 American lives were sacrificed to favor one colonial monarchy over another, all so Wilson could have a seat at the peace table and negotiate The League of Nations. Instead, the result of WWI was Nazism and Communism killing millions for the rest of the century.....

[donmeaker]

Free people pick cotton if the price is right.

[donmeaker]

I will admit to misspelling angels, but not to speaking for the Divine.

[donmeaker]

A lot of southern enthusiasm for eugenics was misplaced, being a response to an outbreak of Pellagra, caused not by genes, but by poor nutrition. Eat wrong, and you become an idiot.

[wardaddy]

Actually I think the only a few owned slaves is a canard

Only a few owned a lot of slaves....but I think at least 30-40 percent of white families had at least one slave

One of my great great granfathers only owned one family of slaves....who worked alongside them

A smallish cattle operation in Smith county MS

and again another canard....small slave owners tended to treat them better

They were a bigger investment to them

[JCBreckenridge]

The alternative of peaceful abolition of slavery which occurred elsewhere.

[JCBreckenridge]

Oddly that didn’t seem to restrain Lincoln.

[JCBreckenridge]

“To see that, simply ask yourself this question: who lawfully held the deeds to those properties?”

Apparently not “We the People!”

[JCBreckenridge]

It’s just not controversial to point out that all the major battles save Gettysburg were fought on confederate soil.

[JCBreckenridge]

“only Northern states ever voted “blue” is off the mark, a bit”

Northern states only voting blue is a problem.

[JCBreckenridge]

“only Northern states ever voted “blue” is off the mark, a bit”

Northern states only voting blue is a problem.

[JCBreckenridge]

Not when he met with Lincoln and offered to pay him for all the material in the Forts as well as the southern share of the national debt.

[CougarGA7]

Honestly, I think there was a lot of misplaced enthusiasm for eugenics in general.

[Gaffer]

I don’t look at it so much as a canard than I do a different interpretation of census records from 1860.

Here’s a good resource from someone who’s gone through that data.

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/censusbin/census/cen.pl?year=860

The 6% comes from number of slaves and number of southerners calculation as a whole. The author says this is specious because not all southerners had the means to own slaves. He also notes the age and sex groups. He breaks the southern population into age and sex categories and then comes up with numbers for some states like you cite. MS being the worst at 49% - all this on straight calculation of 1 slave per southerner.

You can Google or Bing all over the web and come up with 5%, 6%, 21%, 25-30 (from “From Slavery to Freedom”, to the numbers cited by the link I provided.

I don’t think we’ll ever know concisely for a number of reasons:

1) This is a question founded on political and ideological beliefs and data can be manipulated thusly,

2) Places like Wikipedia (in various forms) provide ‘answers’ all over the place (from 6% to 30%) - the ‘peoples’ dictionary, and

3) Many organizations that have been through the 1860 US Census data patently recognize the data are somewhat incomplete, brought on by various events around that time (e.g., secession, etc in 1861).

All I know for sure is that no one in my family which I have traced back to that era and before ever owned slaves - they were mainly too poor and were subsistence farmers at best.

[mac_truck]

No accident that Indiana and Oregon, two progressive states, were hotbeds of the KKK.

You don't know the first thing about progressives, the KKK or Indiana, do you?

[0.E.O]

All voted for Obama.

You missed three: Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.

[0.E.O]

Not when he met with Lincoln and offered to pay him for all the material in the Forts as well as the southern share of the national debt.

And when did that happen?

[exit82]

Davis was chosen partly because he was a well-known and experienced moderate who had served in a president's cabinet. In meetings of his own Mississippi legislature, Davis had argued against secession, but when a majority of the delegates opposed him, he gave in.[62] Davis wanted to serve as a general in the Confederate States Army and not as the president, but accepted the role for which he had been chosen.[63] Alexander Stephens was chosen as Vice President. On November 6, 1861, Davis was elected Confederate States President without opposition. He was inaugurated on February 22, 1862. Several forts in Confederate territory remained in Union hands. Davis sent a commission to Washington with an offer to pay for any federal property on Southern soil, as well as the Southern portion of the national debt. Lincoln refused. Informal discussions did take place with Secretary of State William Seward through Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell, an Alabamian who had not yet resigned; Seward hinted that Fort Sumter would be evacuated, but nothing definite was said.[64]

From wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis

Sources annoted at bottom.

[0.E.O]

Davis sent a commission to Washington with an offer to pay for any federal property on Southern soil, as well as the Southern portion of the national debt.

A common claim but inaccurate. Read the letter that Davis sent to Lincoln introducing the commissioners and you will see there is no offer to pay for anything. No offer to negotiate anything that Davis didn't want to talk about. Nothing really but an ultimatum that Lincoln surrender to rebel demands and recognize Confederate independence.

But even if there had been such an offer, isn't that an admission that the Southern actions of seizing property and walking away from debt had been wrong to begin with?

Oh, and the Wiki footnote references the wrong page. It's actually pages 336-337.

[central_va]

Are you suggesting that in the antebellum South ONLY blacks picked cotton?

[Repeal The 17th]

“...A lot of people don’t recall
the hatred of Jeff Davis and Lee
that existed in the south...”
-
You can count me and everyone I have ever known
among those who don’t recall that.
I have ancestors and current relatives who were named after them.