Posted on 05/03/2019 7:54:25 AM PDT by NKP_Vet
Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of 1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of history as a quest for the understanding of human action.
Two generations ago, most perceptive historians, much more learned than the current crop, said that the war was “about” economics and was “caused by” economic rivalry. The war has not changed one bit since then. The perspective has changed. It can change again as long as people have the freedom to think about the past. History is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.
I was much struck by Barbara Marthal’s insistence in her Stone Mountain talk on the importance of stories in understanding history. I entirely concur. History is the experience of human beings. History is a story and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are. History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.” Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.
Let’s consider the war and slavery. Again and again I encounter people who say that the South Carolina secession ordinance mentions the defense of slavery and that one fact proves beyond argument that the war was caused by slavery. The first States to secede did mention a threat to slavery as a motive for secession. They also mentioned decades of economic exploitation.
(Excerpt) Read more at abbevilleinstitute.org ...
Trick question. The confed constitution (such as it was) "enshrined" slavery but the US Constitution did not.
Wrong - again.
“Well they did appoint an ambassador to Britain and France with plenipotentiary power to agree to a treaty that would have seen the CSA abolish slavery so they were willing to abolish it during the war.”
The did so only in Nov 1864. By that time most of the Western Confederacy was in the hands of the Union Army.
Lee was penned up in Petersburg. 95% of Southern ports were closed to shipping because of the blockade. Parts of the Confederacy was on the verge of starvation.
The offer to end slavery in exchange for recognition was a last ditch desperate effort to save a Confederacy that clearly was losing the war. The British and French Governments saw was it for what it was, an act of desperation brought on by their immanent collapse of the Confederate house of cards.
The Confederate Government did not have the authority to abolish slavery without an amendment to the Confederate Constitution.
Obviously it wasn't the Buchanan administration only. The complaints about partisan sectional legislation had been longstanding. The Tariff of Abominations and the Nullification Crisis were a generation earlier. There had been constant sparring between the regions over a range of issues.
Would they have seceded if Breckenridge had been elected?
No trick. The US Constitution had a fugitive slave clause, allowed for the slave trade for 20 more years, and had the 3/5s compromise. The Northern dominated Congress passed and Lincoln offered a constitutional amendment which would have expressly protected slavery.
Nope. You're wrong and I'm right.
The Hidden History of Slavery in NY.
https://www.thenation.com/article/hidden-history-slavery-new-york/
In 1991 excavators for a new federal office building in Manhattan unearthed the remains of more than 400 Africans stacked in wooden boxes sixteen to twenty-eight feet below street level. The cemetery dated back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its discovery ignited an effort by many Northerners to uncover the history of the institutional complicity with slavery. In 2000 Aetna, one of Connecticut’s largest companies, apologized for profiting from slavery by issuing insurance policies on slaves in the 1850s. After a four-month investigation into its archives, Connecticut’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant, apologized for selling advertisement space in its pages for the sale of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And in 2004 Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, established the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to investigate “and discuss an uncomfortable piece” of the university’s history: The construction of the university’s first building in 1764, reads a university press release, “involved the labor of Providence area slaves.”
Now another blue-blooded institution–the New-York Historical Society–has joined this important public engagement with our past by mounting an ambitious exhibition, “Slavery in New York.” To all those who think slavery was a “Southern thing,” think again. In 1703, 42 percent of New York’s households had slaves, much more than Philadelphia and Boston combined. Among the colonies’ cities, only Charleston, South Carolina, had more.
So you say but the fact remains that they offered to abolish slavery during the war. Oh, and the war was still very much ongoing and hordes of Yankees still got mowed down before it came to an end.
President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress were obviously of a different opinion.
Not even close PeeWee
Who knows? I would guess not but its impossible to say since history did not unfold that way.
“Lincoln offered a constitutional amendment which would have expressly protected slavery.”
Wrong, Lincoln couldn’t offer up an amendment, he was not a member of the Congress of the United States.
Not close. Spot on. I'm right about that and you are wrong.
I’m sorry, I thought I was replying to an adult. It now appears however that I am not.
Past your bedtime, sweetie. Night night.
Wrong. Everybody understood Lincoln's feigned ignorance was just that. What he was extending in his inaugural address was an offer. The quid pro quo was slavery effectively forever in exchange for the original 7 states re-entry into the union. They turned it down.
and by the way, it had already passed the House and the Senate with the necessary 2/3rds supermajority AFTER the Southern delegation had withdrawn.
Still did not offer it up in the Congress. He wasn’t in Congress.
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