GOP candidate: Civil war wasn’t about slavery

Republican Senate nominee Corey Stewart said that he doesn’t believe that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery, arguing that it was mostly about states’ rights.

In a Monday interview with Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Stewart, who recently won the GOP nomination in the Virginia Senate race, said that not all parts of Virginia’s history are “pretty.”

“I don’t at all. If you look at the history, that’s not what it meant at all, and I don’t believe that the Civil War was ultimately fought over the issue of slavery,” Stewart said.

When “Rising” co-host Krystal Ball pressed him again if the Civil War was “significantly” fought over slavery, Stewart said some of them talked about slavery, but added that most soldiers never owned slaves and “they didn’t fight to preserve the institution of slavery.”

“We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who were fighting at that time and from their perspective, they saw it as a federal intrusion of the state,” he said.

Stewart also said he doesn’t support a Richmond elementary school named after a Confederate general deciding to rename it after former President Obama.

Thanks for the graphic. very instructional. I do not believe that it proves your argument. Consider this, how much of the cotton growing area east of west Texas was actually planted in cotton. Just because cotton will grow in an area does not mean that cotton is being grown there. Some of the land just could not be used, swamps, bayous etc. Someone had to grow food, and that takes land. Some of the cotton growing area had been under cultivation for decades. What condition were the fields in those area, soil depletion would reduce the output and at some time the fields may be abandoned. Edwin Ruffin was experimenting with crop rotation at his plantation on the James River. Some of the things that he learned could help revitalize those worn out depleted fields. Obliviously the cotton growing region in West Texas would not be available for some years. The Confederate Army had to force the Kiowa and Comanche’s to abandon the area. Then fairly lengthy roads or railroads had to be built to get the cotton to the Gulf Coast or to the closest rivers connecting to the Mississippi. I could easily see another twenty or more years where cotton would be the premier crop in the South. So for that period of time, little of that money available would have gone to industrialization. That shift would have started the output of cotton started to drop and the value of the exports dropped due to completion from India, Egypt and Brazil. You are substantially correct when you say that cotton agriculture would be replaced as the South/s economic base. The question is how long would the planters hold on to the past and embrace a future that was not based on the production of cotton. In my opinion Cotton would remain king in the South for another twenty years

No, damn the slaveocracy for sticking with a system that enslaved other human beings.

13 slave states in 1776. 10 or so in 1787. Enslaving other human beings was built into the USA DNA, though people want to pretend that it's just those D@mn Southerners that wouldn't get "enlightened" as quickly as their Northern brethren who's labor needs were easily met by starving Irish coming off the boats.

Liberals declare a new Morality, and then rant and rave because everyone in the Nation doesn't immediately accept whatever new found Moral religion they are pushing.

LGBT is but the latest.

It’s a shame that 350,000 loyal Americans had to die to make that happen.

Lying propaganda. Here we go again with the "They died to make men free!" bullsh*t. They did not. They died because they were forced to fight because the Dictator in Washington DC made them fight. Their options were prison or getting shot, so they fought.

The fighting man of the North did not give a F*** about slaves. They didn't care that slaves were oppressed. They simply didn't. Oh sure, there was the usual liberal kooks in the army that were all about Human Rights, usually from Massachusetts or some other reliably Liberal place, but the rank and file simply didn't care.

They were in the South fighting their brothers because they were caught up in a system that forced them to do it.

You want to talk about evil? What is more evil than murdering your family?

Thanks for the graphic. very instructional.

I have not shown this to you before? I've used that map countless times, and I thought you had seen it.

I do not believe that it proves your argument.

Maybe not conclusively, but it certainly tends to move the "burden of proof" over to the side that argues plantation slavery was a threat to the territories.

I was going to compare modern crop prices in Kansas, but after looking at the data, I decided that was going to be too much work to get it right. Corn would have to be excluded, because it's value is skewed due to Federal mandates for Ethanol.

I would think Farmers will grow what is easiest and most profitable, and they just don't grow much cotton in Kansas, and none in any state above it.

Some of the cotton growing area had been under cultivation for decades.

The Confederate states are still growing it in the same places they have been growing it for centuries. The most valuable crop in Georgia still appears to be Cotton. Same thing in Texas and Alabama.

The question is how long would the planters hold on to the past and embrace a future that was not based on the production of cotton. In my opinion Cotton would remain king in the South for another twenty years

I have been estimating between 20 and 80 years longer, based on the appearance of the first practical cotton picking machine. The social pressure would have never abated, and so practicality might have eventually taken a back seat.

There really are too many factors for the human mind to juggle easily. The period at which they would have given it up would be the conjunction of "comfort wealth" achieved, and the level of social opprobrium tolerable.

My theory on rich people is that they like to hob nob with those whom they consider their peers, and the High Society of New York and Washington would have always been the "in" crowd in whose circles the Southern "Aristocrats" would have wanted to mingle.

Charles Dickens comments in his book, "American Notes", that many of the younger high society class in the South wanted out of Slavery, and were quite embarrassed about having inherited it, but they were also faced with the economic reality, and thus a conundrum. Dickens shows them little sympathy and extols them to simply make an end of it.

This discontent and the social pariah condition would have worked on them over time, and it would have been a steady pressure bothering them away from Slavery.

I've studied the very beginnings of the Abolition movement, and I am quite certain that Thomas Jefferson is most responsible for giving it a massive boost. If you track the geography of abolition, you realize it is a growth pattern over time, encountering resistance where practical economics pushed back more strongly against the moral pressure.

But extrapolation indicates that it would have eventually marched through the whole system.

Complete and utter hog wash. Only 6% of the 2,100,000 men that served in the Union Army over the course of the war were drafted into that army. The rest volunteered.

So why were there riots in New York and Chicago? Also, who is giving us those stats, and are they telling the truth? I recall the incident that led to Lincoln threatening Taney with prison revolved around him using his power as a Judge to get a young man out of being drafted. He had been doing it, and it was raising the ire of the Military officers.

I've read how the Irish were dragooned off of the boats, and they were given a choice to "volunteer", or face immediate repercussions. I recall an incident in which Lincoln chastises some civic leaders in Chicago for trying to beg off of sending him more men. (6,000) and he tongue lashes them severely and tells them to send him those men.

What is the truth, and what is propaganda?

There is also the aspect that the Union Army was probably the single biggest source of jobs in the whole D@mned economy, and impoverished people will do what they must to earn money.

I do not doubt that many volunteered because they literally had no better choices. This still does not mean that they were gung ho for liberating the black man.

I think most of them didn't care. Do you believe most of them cared? Many come from states with laws that were quite oppressive to black people in their states. One would think they would reflect the environment from which they came.

I think both sides probably inflated the numbers of their "volunteers", because it makes them look better.

Davis never mentioned slavery in his inaugural address and said multiple times that that’s not what they were fighting about. He pushed for and eventually got the agreement of the Confederate Congress to empower the Confederate ambassador to Britain/France with plenipotentiary power to enter into a treaty that would abolish slavery in the CSA.

I did not know that. But it's not entirely true either. Davis kept the plan from the Confederate Congress. It wasn't his plan, but Duncan Kenner's, and Davis reluctantly agreed to it. And the offer was that if Britain and France recognized the Confederacy the CSA would abolish slavery. They couldn't do that in a treaty.

And the date was January 1865. Long after any chance of recognition or victory had been lost. Another Hail Mary Pass that did not reflect the true opinions of the man who made it. Davis turned down Kenner when he first proposed the idea in 1864 and Kenner only got to his new posting shortly before Lee surrendered. The way you said it, it's like you wanted people to think that Davis was trying to end slavery in 1861, which isn't true.

Oh but it does matter. Lincoln made it perfectly clear he was no threat to slavery. Many in the South understood that slavery was doomed in the long run anyway. It had already been dying out in several western countries as well as several Northern states, and was already extinguished in several more by the mid 19th century.

Slavery died out in areas where it was unprofitable. In the Deep South it was very profitable. Cotton was King. How did you miss that?

Slavery was not the real issue. Many of the most influential people in the South knew that as evidenced by the statements of numerous politicians and the editorials in the newspapers of the two largest ports in the CSA at the time.

Charleston would have been one of them?

"Here's an editorial from the Charleston Mercury, The Terrors of Submission." A mention of tariffs and all the rest is about slavery. Anyone could easily find more editorials and speeches from the period that give the same impression.

They could always go to some other labor system be it sharecropping or wages and still be quite profitable so long as they could set the terms of their foreign trade for themselves and so long as any tax revenue raised from their trade was spent for their own benefit.

It's easy to say that now in hindsight, but few slaveowners were thinking about alternative labor systems back then. Looking back over just what happened in my own lifetime it's easy to say Gorbachev or GM or Lehman Brothers or Sears could have done this or that to get out of trouble, but that's only because of the wisdom that hindsight brings.

You dredged this up from another thread by the way. I cited my sources.

I'm not sure what this is about. I commented on something you quoted at the end of your post #145 on this thread. If you don't remember what you typed it's not my fault.

Yeah I’m just not buying your argument here.

Yeah, you basically just wave aside any arguments against what you want to believe

And prior to the war not one Congressman or Senator from the northern states - to my knowledge - ever introduced a constitutional amendment to end slavery. Not even Congressman Lincoln.

Of course not. They knew the political math and understood how devoted the slave states were to their "peculiar institution"

Lincoln did introduce a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. It went nowhere. Given that failure, why would he attempt the impossible? It could only inflame Southerners without producing any results.

And the price of abolishing the sale of slaves in the District was accepting the Fugitive Slave Law and the rest of the Compromise of 1846.

P.S. When Arlington and Alexandria returned to Virginia in 1846, schools for African-Americans were closed down, because they were illegal in Virginia -- something I just found out researching this.

Something else I just learned: at the beginning of the war, Lincoln wanted the Virginia side restored to the District but the Senate disagreed.

I did not know that. But it’s not entirely true either. Davis kept the plan from the Confederate Congress. It wasn’t his plan, but Duncan Kenner’s, and Davis reluctantly agreed to it. And the offer was that if Britain and France recognized the Confederacy the CSA would abolish slavery. They couldn’t do that in a treaty.

And the date was January 1865. Long after any chance of recognition or victory had been lost. Another Hail Mary Pass that did not reflect the true opinions of the man who made it. Davis turned down Kenner when he first proposed the idea in 1864 and Kenner only got to his new posting shortly before Lee surrendered. The way you said it, it’s like you wanted people to think that Davis was trying to end slavery in 1861, which isn’t true.

Duncan Kenner did come up with the plan. Davis supported it - not reluctantly. They certainly could have abolished slavery by treaty. The date was 1864, not 1865. Here is the citation with sources.

Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the Confederate army should be freed. Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a “moral and political evil” years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal. Davis even made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken seriously.

Slavery died out in areas where it was unprofitable. In the Deep South it was very profitable. Cotton was King. How did you miss that?

Slavery generally died out in countries that were more industrialized. Firstly the South was industrializing - particularly the Upper South and Slavery was starting to die out there. Secondly profit margins for Cotton were declining as the British Empire started producing cotton in large quantities in India and Egypt. I didn’t miss anything.

Charleston would have been one of them?

“Here’s an editorial from the Charleston Mercury, The Terrors of Submission.” A mention of tariffs and all the rest is about slavery. Anyone could easily find more editorials and speeches from the period that give the same impression.

Here’s another editorial from the Charleston Mercury

“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.” Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election

Here’s one from the New Orleans Daily Crescent:

They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people’s pockets sixty to seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests. These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They, the North, are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it. These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union.” The New Orleans Daily Crescent 21 January 1861

It’s easy to say that now in hindsight, but few slaveowners were thinking about alternative labor systems back then. Looking back over just what happened in my own lifetime it’s easy to say Gorbachev or GM or Lehman Brothers or Sears could have done this or that to get out of trouble, but that’s only because of the wisdom that hindsight brings.

There were plenty of examples of other labor systems at the time including what was effectively wage slavery in several parts of the industrial North.

Yeah, you basically just wave aside any arguments against what you want to believe

You try to dismiss the actual facts with weak arguments based on supposition alone.

Draft riots have little part of this discussion. Confederate draft officials were beat up and in a couple of cases hung in the mountains of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. They were also brutalized in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

I’ve read, I recall. gotta do better than that.

Economics may certainly played a part in the decisions to enlist. It certainly did in the U.S. Navy.
Now as to the armies. I would expect that a poor Ohio farm boy or a poor Alabama farm boy might find $13 dollars a month enticing. But he still has to walk up to the recruiters table and sign the enlistment contract.

Never intimated that anyone enlisted to free the black man.
Few Northern men enlisted in the army shouting “Down with slaver”. Few Southern men enlisted shouting “slavery for every.

Most on both sides cared greatly. They enlisted by the hundreds of thousands, in the first year or so of the war. “We will save the Union”, or We will defend our homes from the vile Yankee scum,” was the sentiment. Later on as the news papers printed the casualties lists from Antietam, Shiloh, Fredericksburg, etc. etc. and the number of heroic veterans were seen walking around on one leg or with one arm, or other horrible wounds, the patriotic fervor of the first years of the war diminished greatly.
I think the numbers are not exact, but close. Few numbers from the Civil War are really accurate. Both the Union and Confederate draft laws granted exemption and procedures to avoid the draft. People on both side used these exemptions to the fullest to avoid service in the Army. Just as we did in the 60s to avoid being into the army and going to Vietnam.

That the North had bigger cities and larger populations is irrelevant. The money in payment for those exports did not belong to the Northern people or cities. It belonged to the Southern producers of the exports for which the imports and European cash were payments.

By some moral right? Cotton planters used the money they acquired to buy goods and services from Northerners who could then use the money to buy foreign goods. You can't spend money and then claim that you are still entitled to it because you had to earn it earlier (leaving aside the question of whether the slave owners actually did "earn" the money to begin with).

Unless you put stuff into the front of the Horse, you won't get anything coming out of the back end of the Horse. It's the same money, it's just gone through the European horse.

Economics is about looking at the whole picture. You think you are looking at the whole picture because you look at exports and imports, but you ignore the transactions within the country.

And a national economy is a lot more complicated than a horse. Or at least it's complicated in different ways. The US earns a lot of money from entertainment and software. Does that mean that Bill Gates or Les Moonves somehow pays most of our remaining import tariffs?

No. The people who buy imported goods pay those tariffs in the sale price of what they buy. Gates and Moonves can keep the money and invest it or use it to buy things for themselves, but they aren't the one's who paid the import tax on your Toyota or Honda.

Here’s one from the New Orleans Daily Crescent

I find in the very same paper and the very same editorial:

But as the Northern States will not leave the Union, as in common decency they ought to do seeing that they are so unhappy about the countenance the Union is supposed to give to the institution of slavery, there is no alternative to the South except to withdraw for herself.

_______

Here’s another editorial from the Charleston Mercury

Same paper, passage immediately before what you quoted:

But we are to delay action further, to see if the Northern Legislatures will not repeal their Personal Liberty Laws. So far as the Cotton States are concerned, these laws, excepting in the insult they convey to the South, and the faithlessness they indicate in the North, are not of the slightest consequence. Few or none of our slaves are lost, by being carried away and protected from recapture in the Northern States. Nor to the frontier States, are they of much consequence. Their slaves are stolen and carried off—not by the agency of these Personal Liberty Laws—but by the combination of individuals in the Northern States. What are these acts as indications of the hostility and faithlessness of the Northern people towards the South (and they are nothing more), when compared with the mighty sectional despotism they have set up over the South in the election of Messrs. LINCOLN and HAMLIN to the Presidency and Vice-Presidency of the United States? Repeal that, and there would be something to invite delay.

It looks like you are relying on cherry picked and canned quotations that somebody chose to present things in a different light than how they really were.

You can find those same two quotes you cited all over the Internet (right down to getting the date wrong on one of them). Maybe because most of the rest of the evidence doesn't support your view.

Everybody knew what the stakes were in 1860. Advocates of secession threw in something about taxes in order to win over waverers, but that shouldn't be taken as the whole story by any means.

It looks like you are relying on cherry picked and canned quotations that somebody chose to present things in a different light than how they really were.

You can find those same two quotes you cited all over the Internet (right down to getting the date wrong on one of them). Maybe because most of the rest of the evidence doesn’t support your view.

Everybody knew what the stakes were in 1860. Advocates of secession threw in something about taxes in order to win over waverers, but that shouldn’t be taken as the whole story by any means.

And you don’t cherry pick those passages which support your arguments? Of course you do.

I’d say exactly the opposite of what you said. Advocates of secession threw in the fact that the Northern states had actually violated the Constitution by their refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the constitution. That actually was unconstitutional.

Their economic arguments were perfectly true and the high tariffs and grossly unequal federal government expenditures did serve to drain money out of the South and direct it to the Northern states but no matter how unfair it was and no matter how much they hated it, it was not unconstitutional. There’s a reason they did not accept the North’s offer of slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. It would have done nothing to address their economic grievances. Indeed their situation was going to get a lot worse since Lincoln’s big campaign promises revolved around raising the tariff and having the federal government dole out corporate subsidies - invariably to Northern companies....especially railroads. He had been the chief counsel and lobbyist to the Illinois Central Railroad after all.

Their economic arguments were perfectly true and the high tariffs and grossly unequal federal government expenditures did serve to drain money out of the South and direct it to the Northern states

In 1860, tariffs were still relatively low and Southern Democrats had voted them into effect.

Federal spending on forts was about equal or even greater in the Southern states.

When it came to other items, more money did go to the North, but that was because the population was larger.

Over 2/3rds of the population lived in the free states, and if I'm not mistaken, about 2/3rds of federal expenditures went there.

If you take only the free population into account, I'd say that Southerners got more than their share of federal funds.

But of course, when people want to complain about something, they find something to complain about -- even if it's not really there.

In 1860, tariffs were still relatively low and Southern Democrats had voted them into effect.

Federal spending on forts was about equal or even greater in the Southern states.

When it came to other items, more money did go to the North, but that was because the population was larger.

Over 2/3rds of the population lived in the free states, and if I’m not mistaken, about 2/3rds of federal expenditures went there.

If you take only the free population into account, I’d say that Southerners got more than their share of federal funds.

But of course, when people want to complain about something, they find something to complain about — even if it’s not really there.

The Morrill tariff had passed the House and was sure to pass the Senate. All that was needed was the standard logrolling to pick off a senator or two. Buchanan signed it and Lincoln had campaigned on it so there’s no question it was going to pass. It immediately doubled tariff rates.

Federal spending was much greater in the North for a variety of things - especially corporate subsidies and infrastructure projects. Meanwhile about 75% of federal revenues were paid by Southerners who were the primary exporters and importers.

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