GOP candidate: Civil war wasn’t about slavery

The Hill ^ | June 25th, 2018 | Lisa Hagen

[Mariner]

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.”

But he said he doesn’t associate slavery with the war.

“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.

[DiogenesLamp]

And you think his biographers want to avoid that?

The Social pressure that makes media people all Liberal, also works on academics.

[DiogenesLamp]

Slavery and the slave hunters was a significant problem.

Why were they a particular problem? An affront, yes, but a problem? I don't see it.

Remember too, the threat of Indian attack was very real.

My family and others had to form the NE Iowa Protection Association that was no less a militia to also protect from marauding thieves and bandits.

Loss of Federal protection would not have been sensible.

The guy who writes at "Curmudgeonly and Skeptical" blog is a freeper, (though I don't know his freeper name) but years ago he offered this pearl of wisdom.

"Why don't all the sane states get together and pull a reverse secession by kicking all the insane states out of the Union? "

Seems like a pretty good idea to me. :)

BTW, I have a friend from Waterloo Iowa.

[rustbucket]

I think it's made up, but it wasn't by me. Blame the Tennessee SCV.

I clicked on your link to the Tennessee SCV. They called the organization the "Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association." The Tennessee SCV did not call them the "International Order of Pole Bearers Association" as you did in post 697. You were correct though to say that you didn't find any mention of the "International Order of Pole Bearers Association," as that was not their correct name. You can find mention of them on the web. Apparently their name was misspelling of "pallbearers." See Link.

I suspect you simply made a typo, typing "International" for "Independent."

I have enjoyed posting back and forth with you over the years. You sometimes bring up interesting pieces of history that cause me to think and research the topic. For that I thank you.

My two books on Forrest (Wyeth's and Lytle's) do not mention Forrest's speech to the Pole-Bearers either, but my two books very largely focus on the war with only a short chapter of what happened to Forrest after the war.

[DoodleDawg]

The Social pressure that makes media people all Liberal, also works on academics.

I had forgotten that you believed that. My bad.

[DiogenesLamp]

Lot of supporting evidence. Just read some Kurt Schlichter sometime. Or Glenn Reynolds.

[gandalftb]

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850:

Any person aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to six months’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.

Slave catchers often acted without restraint much the same as today’s bounty hunters. There was violence.

[DoodleDawg]

Lot of supporting evidence opinions. Just read some Kurt Schlichter sometime. Or Glenn Reynolds.

Fixed it for you

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem: "Comes presently the Committee for the Protection of General Grant's Legacy to note officially that, as a woman, Julia Grant was too whimsical and ignorant to know whether she did or did not own slaves."

Irrelevant whether Julia or Grant owned slaves at some point, because they were Democrats and Democrats often owned slaves.
The relevant question is: when did Democrat Grant first become a Republican?

According to this source it was around the time of his victory at Vicksburg, July 1863.
That was six months after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which as jeffersondem quotes:

"Eliza, Dan, Jule, and John belonged to me up to the time of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation."

So the question remains, can we name a certifiable Republican who still owned slaves as a Republican?

[DiogenesLamp]

Any person aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to six months’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.

Again, why would you want to be a member of that club? At some point don't you think someone should have said "Get them out of the Union!"

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "So what was the 'moral high ground' for the North? What cause justified attacking other people? "

The same moral high ground the US enjoyed in, for example, WWII -- they attacked us, they declared war on us, they waged war against us.
Only somebody blindly devoted to the Lost Cause, to the exclusion of all else, could refuse to see that.

In the Civil War's first 12 months there were 52 larger battles in 13 states of which 30 (the majority) were fought in six Union states & territories, 22 were fought in seven Confederate states.
If you're interested, of those 52 battles, the Union won 24, Confederates won 18 and 10 were inconclusive.
According to this source the entire war included 384 larger battles in 18 Union states & territories and, oh yes, in the 11 Confederate states too.

[DiogenesLamp]

If you would bother to read their opinions, you could find the sources for the evidence. Newsbusters is good. Other people have made studies on the issue. One wouldn't think that the topic of media bias and liberal social cliques would be much disputed on a conservative website.

I think you are the first person I have ran across that does not take media bias and liberal social circles as a given.

Anyone else out there think that media bias is not interrelated with liberal social circles?

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "It was left to constitutional amendment to change.
A lot of people in the North didn't like that path.
They simply wanted the law to be what they preferred, and not what it actually said."

A total lie, except for the small minority of John Browns, almost all Northerners, including the vast majority of Republicans, believed in the Constitution's protections for slavery, in slave states.
No Republican official, not Lincoln nor anybody else ever advocated forced abolition in the South before 1861.
Republicans did want to prevent slavery in the Territories and that's what drove Southern Democrats berserk, insane with rage, wild with anger and Fire Eating secession.

That in turn drove them to wage war against the United States and war was their downfall and the driving force for abolition.

All of which DiogenesLamp well knows but refuses to acknowledge.

DiogenesLamp: "War was a means by which they could get around the Constitutional requirement that was out of their reach, (3/4ths of the states) so they took advantage of their economic based war to enact their liberal preferences into law illegally."

War was the Confederates' choice to start, wage & refuse to end on any terms better than Unconditional Surrender.
The Union would have been foolish not to see the military advantages of emancipating "contraband of war" and the moral imperatives for the 13th, 14th & 15th amendments.

Of course some Lost Causers claim those amendments weren't legitimate, only "might makes right".
But in reality all were ratified by the majority of eligible voters at the time, and not one ratification has ever been revoked since.
The fact is those amendments are today as legitimate as the Constitution itself.

DiogenesLamp: "The 13th amendment represents the power of force.
It does not represent consent as the constitution intended."

The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments absolutely represent the consent of eligible voters at the time, and the will of all voters today who have refused to revoke their ratifications.
The problem for Lost Causers is their ancestors rendered themselves ineligible to vote when they declared & waged war against the United States.

Sorry about that.

[x]

I already provided this. We’re not going to play this little game of you demanding sources 10 times and me spending vast amounts of time trying to satisfy your endless demands.....which you will claim are not satisfied no matter how ironclad the sources I provide actually are. You want citations, references and sources? Go back and read.

We've established that Duncan Kenner went to Europe in 1865 authorized by Davis to promise that the CSA would abolish slavery in exchange for recognition from Britain and France. I pointed out that this wasn't Davis's idea, that Davis rejected the plan when it was first suggested to him, that he didn't involve the Confederate Congress, and that he waited until near the end of the war to agree to the plan and put it into effect.

You claim that it was Davis idea and that Davis had supported emancipation for some time. You have to either offer proof for that or stop saying it. And you haven't done so. Can we agree that you should stop saying it? I think you latch onto half-truths, see part is true, and don't bother to find out if the rest is true. But just because there's a fact in there somewhere doesn't mean the whole thing is true.

[Lincoln] never recanted or changed his position on the fugitive slave laws.

Of course he did. That was what the Emancipation Proclamation was about. If that's not enough, Congress repealed the Fugitive Slave Act on June 28, 1864, presumably with Lincoln's approval and signature.

There were some who supported secession based on the economics alone.

You must have seen the National Parks historian on C-Span 3 this weekend. He said secession was about economics. The economics of slavery. Slaves were worth millions, and slaveowners thought that those millions (and their own lives and well-being) were at risk.

For that time though, the economic interests of the Southern states lay in low tariffs. Being Jeffersonian Democrats they always believed in limited government and balanced budgets. It is no coincidence that that is still the dominant political philosophy in the Southern states today. Southerners have never liked big government.

Even during the New Deal? Not likely. Jeffersonian Democracy had a lot to do with local elites opposing groups that challenged their power.

But back to the point under discussion. Deep South politicians had already been radicalized enough to think that cotton would provide everything they wanted. Politicians in Virginia and Tennessee tended to be more sensible and recognized that the "balanced economy" your source mentioned earlier was the way to go.

It's surprising that you think that Southern politicians were anticipating the end of slavery and thinking of what system of labor control would replace it, but they weren't so far-sighted as to recognize that providing raw materials for foreigners wouldn't serve as a permanent basis for a modern economy. I'm inclined to think that they weren't very farsighted on either issue, however much one wishes they were.

The politicians who campaigned on it lost with very very little support and most of the major papers were not in favor of abolition at all.

Few Americans were in favor of abolition in 1860. But Northerners were as fed with what they saw as gutless surrenders to the South as Southern radicals were with what they understood as capitulations to the Yankees. So there was no guarantee that the Corwin Amendment would have gone through.

Look, 7 states had already left. They wouldn't be ratifying the amendment. It's likely that the US government wouldn't accept those secessions. It would still expect 7 ratifications to put the amendment through, and those amendments weren't coming.

I am really lousy at math, but I think that virtually every one of the remaining states would have to ratify for the amendment to go into effect. Maybe one or two could reject it, but not more than that. It would be different if those 7 states had not left the union or if they were to return to it, but barring that the Corwin Amendment was quite unlikely to be ratified.

Neither they nor the Northern states were fighting over slavery. Both made that quite clear. Revisionists came along after the fact and tried to claim that it was “all about slavery” despite both sides saying it was not.

There is abundant evidence that secession was about slavery. So directly or indirectly, slavery was a factor in causing the war. I haven't seen serious claims that Northerners went to war to free the slaves, though as the war progressed it did free slaves. I wouldn't throw around the term "revisionist" though. That more accurately fits people who try to erase slavery from the history of the war.

The importers of the time were the exporters.

I see that you have been drinking Kool Aid with Diogenes. Bill Gates, Tim Cook, and Bob Iger head companies that bring a lot of dollars from exports to the US. But when you buy a Japanese radio or CD player, you pay the tariff on it yourself.

Keitt said he would support secession on the economic basis alone. He was far from alone in the South in thinking that.

Just because somebody cuts up a quote and puts it on a website designed to make a particular point doesn't mean it corresponds to reality. Laurence Keitt clearly said exactly the opposite of what you claim:

"Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it." Taken from the Charleston, South Carolina, Courier, dated Dec. 22, 1860.

Or try this on for size:

Lawrence Keitt, Congressman from South Carolina, in a speech to the House on January 25, 1860: "African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism."

Later in the same speech he said, "The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States."

If you come across a website full of half-truths and unsubstantiated claims, it's worthwhile to question some of the claims and look for evidence which supports (or refutes) those claims.

[The Great RJ]

The Minnesota counties referenced on this map were actually sites of battles between the Lakota and white settlers in 1862 and had nothing to do with the events of the. Civil War. I am at loss about what battles are shown in North Dakota. At that time the area would have been Indian territory.

[DiogenesLamp]

ghostsniper July 2, 2018, 11:56 AM

I’ve been there, many times, but I won’t tell the story. But I will say that the most amazing thing I ever saw was in the Gettysburg museum and it can’t be appreciated until you see it with your own bare eyeballs. Hundreds upon hundreds of bullets that met in mid-air on display on a wall. And those are just the ones that were found. I’m sure more than that are still in the ground.

Think of that. 2 bullets hitting in mid air is an almost impossibility if you tried to do it. But hundreds upon hundreds of them? The hellfire must have been thick enough to go hiking on. How does anybody survive something like that?

I was born there.
I seen that wall for the first time when I was about 8, and then many times after. It bore right into my skall. I learned everything possible about the civil war and gettysburg in particular and Lincoln was my hero. 40 years later I found out that most of what I learned was a lie. A goddamned lie. It was about then that I started to grow a deep distrust for this rotten assed gov’t. How dare they lie to me that way then, and now? If not for people like me they wouldn’t exist, and they lie to me? Over and over and over? I have no use for it. Any of it. Ever.

A Pennsylvania man has lost his naivete.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "Lincolns big campaign promise and what he really wanted was Henry Clay’s “American system” on steroids.
He wanted high tariffs and lots of government largesse which would inevitably be lavished on Northern business interests and Northern infrastructure as it had always been."

Total nonsense, since the Republican 1860 platform called for less government largess:

Item #6: "6. That the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the Federal Government; that a return to rigid economy and accountability is indispensable to arrest the systematic plunder of the public treasury by favored partisans; while the recent startling developments of frauds and corruptions at the Federal metropolis, show that an entire change of administration is imperatively demanded."

To put it in our terms, Republicans in 1860, just as in 2016 promised to drain the Democrat DC swamp.
That's what infuriated Democrats then, just as it does today -- political power is their drug, without it they suffer severe withdrawal.

DiogenesLamp: "Big government Tax and Spend Liberal, with a huge helping of Crony-Capitalism, just as i've been saying."

No, the Democrat DC swamp was notably smaller in those days, but no less corrupt.

DiogenesLamp: "The era of huge Federal power and super corruption began with Lincoln."

Total lie, the "progressive era" began with Progressive Democrats like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

[x]

I haven't been able to find anything out about Benjamin Burton, but many people in the Border States were caught between the two parties and didn't really fit into either of them. George Fisher, the Delaware Congressman associated with Benjamin Burton was a Unionist elected on a "People's Party" platform. I suspect there were a lot of left-over Whigs and Know-Nothings who didn't want to support the Democrats but weren't wholly committed to the Republicans.

Francis Preston Blair was a slaveowner from Kentucky who came to oppose the expansion of slavery and left the Democrats for the Free Soilers and then the Republicans. His son Montgomery Blair was in Lincoln's cabinet and his other son Francis Jr. went back and forth from Republican to Democrat. One of the Blairs was involved with one of Sumter Commander Robert Anderson's children (married or not is unclear), and that's where the actor Montgomery Clift came from.

[x]

The Northern Newspapers caught on. They were alarmed. Not about slavery, but of the South wrecking their trade and industry by trading with Europe themselves.

Fake news. Maybe not intentional, but business-oriented papers tend to look for economic angles in everything.

The South could import 75% of all the merchandise from Europe. The North could import 25% of the merchandise from Europe.

Money circulates. By your reasoning, Bill Gates can import everything from abroad, while poor you who produces next to nothing can import next to nothing.

Now the North was controlling the South's money, and they were taking their vigorish from it, but if things were allowed to seek their natural level instead of the North being propped up by government favor, the South would have ended up with 75% of all the European imports and trade.

"Government favor"? People who devote their lives to business get very good at making money. It wasn't "government favor" that made Northerners successful. It was because they devoted themselves to banking, insurance, commerce and manufacturing and acquired ability in those fields, while Southerners concentrated on agriculture.

Slavery was just a "SQUIRREL!" issue.

What have your posts been but years of yelling "SQUIRREL!" at the rest of us?

[DoodleDawg]

Comes presently the Committee for the Protection of General Grant's Legacy to note officially that, as a woman, Julia Grant was too whimsical and ignorant to know whether she did or did not own slaves.

When did she make the claim?

[DoodleDawg]

If you would bother to read their opinions, you could find the sources for the evidence.

Opinions, as I said. Part of the grand conspiracy on the part of biographers everywhere to make their subjects look as bad as possible if they were Confederates or Confederate supporters. Or so you would have us believe.