Why The War Was Not About Slavery

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org ^ | March 9, 2016 | Clyde Wilson

[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.

[DiogenesLamp]

Why did the South secede?

Money. That's also why the North invaded. Nobody gave a sh*t about the slaves. This as all about who was going to get the money they produced.

If the war had anything to do with the suffering of the black man, Lincoln would not have tried to push the Corwin amendment on the Nation.

The War had nothing to do with it until it became politically advantageous and militarily beneficial to pretend to care about it.

[DiogenesLamp]

1865. At least it got some attention.

[DiogenesLamp]

Nevermind that the West was totally unsuited for Cotton or Tobacco production. So....they were really motivated by the desire to spread slavery and they seceded so that they could spread slavery...even though when they seceded they made utterly no claim to the territory of the US and left only with their own sovereign territory within their own state borders. Their "solution" to the problem of not being able to spread slavery was....to give up any chance of spreading slavery.

Yes, it's circular reasoning bullsh*t. They would immediately see what was wrong with what they are claiming if they weren't so intent on trying to believe it.

[BroJoeK]

Team Cuda: "What changed in 1860?
To my knowledge, there was no bill in Congress to increase tariffs or anything, so why did they wait till 1860 to secede?"

I agree with your comments, but this point needs clarification.
There was indeed a new tariff bill in Congress in 1860, called the Morrill Tariff, supported by Republicans opposed by Democrats, especially Southern Democrats.
Morrill was something President Trump could love because it Put Americans First to Make America Great by protecting American manufacturers -- not just Northern manufacturers, all manufacturers.

Naturally, that drove Democrats crazy, then just as now.
They didn't care about American workers jobs, they just wanted low-cost imports from Europe & China and that was very important to some.

But only to a few -- most Southerners didn't care enough about a reasonable increase in tariffs to want secession over it.
But Southerners certainly would & did care about a serious threat to the institution on which the South's, indeed the Nation's, prosperity depended -- slavery.
So it was Lincoln's "Black Republicans' " threat to slavery that was emphasized to the point of exaggeration in justifying secession.

Today our Lost Causers tell us that slavery was just the "pretext" and conceivably for some small percent of Southern elites that's true.
But the vast majority of Southerners would refuse to secede over anything else and so for them it was indeed the real reason, not just pretext.

[DiogenesLamp]

The Founding Fathers sure believed it was.

It was rebellion when they did it. England had no national charter declaring it to be a right given by God.

The US on the other hand, did make this the core principle of this nation's existence, and therefore it was not rebellion to invoke that right upon which this nation claims it's own sovereignty.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Total cognitive dissonance."

Sadly, DiogenesLamp is incapable of cognitive dissonance -- literally can't see it, won't look at it, fails to understand it, unless, unless it somehow supports his Lost Cause fantasies.

[DiogenesLamp]

What they said was "iron in bars, bolts, rods, slabs, and railroad rails, spikes, fishing plates and chairs used in constructing railroads". And the tariff was 15%.

God! are you both stubborn and stupid sometimes. You simply will not f***ing admit it when you are dead wrong.

That either revenue from these duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the ports must be closed to importations from abroad. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed, the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up. We shall have no money to carry on the government, the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe....allow railroad iron to be entered at Savannah with the low duty of ten percent which is all that the Southern Confederacy think of laying on imported goods, and not an ounce more would be imported at New York. The Railways would be supplied from the southern ports." New York Evening Post March 12, 1861 article "What Shall be Done for a Revenue?"

As I told you before, they f***ing said "RAILROAD IRON"! and you still want to f***ing argue about it!

[DiogenesLamp]

Still just putting out noise BroJoeK. I quit listening to you mostly. All you do is repeat the same old tired talking points you always repeat, and you say "nonsense!" a lot.

[DiogenesLamp]

Another pointless nitpick that ignores the fact the Union kept slavery going until long after the war was over.

[DiogenesLamp]

Read David Dixon Porter's memoirs on the War. You will find that when he went to Pensacola with the Powhatan, he did everything of which he could think to try to start a war with the Confederates. One can only reasonably conclude that Lincoln's secret orders to him granted him the authority to start a f***ing war with the Confederates.

He attempted to fire on the Confederate shore guns immediately upon arriving, (He was stopped by Captain Meigs, and just barely) and he *DID* fire on Confederate ships in the area, all with having absolutely no knowledge that the war had been started in Charleston.

The Civil War would have been started in Pensacola, had it not already started in Charleston, but you and people like you absolutely want to believe the crap you've been told about how the war started, who started it, and why.

Porter started the War in Florida, and he did so by firing first. Lincoln was also responsible for this, and Porter was the backup system for starting the war that Lincoln had already started in Charleston.

[DoodleDawg]

Another pointless nitpick that ignores the fact the Union kept slavery going until long after the war was over.

Facts are stubborn things, so I can understand why you can't stand them.

[Mr Rogers]

“The clear truth is that the Confederates were never going to allow those ships to reinforce that fort.”

The clear truth is the Confederates STARTED THE WAR.

THEY SHOT FIRST!

[DoodleDawg]

As I told you before, they f***ing said "RAILROAD IRON"! and you still want to f***ing argue about it!

You see the problem is that you are quoting from f**ing newspaper editorials while I'm quoting from the f**ing tariff legislation itself. But that's because once again you take f**ing opinion and try to pass it off a fact while I go straight to the f**ing facts themselves.

[x]

Warren thought that Northerners had moral arrogance, what he called the Treasury of Virtue. He thought that because the Yankees had freed the slaves Northerners believed that they were always right and justified in all they did.

That is sort of what you'd expect someone born a century ago in the South would think. With time, Warren did change his mind about segregation, but some feelings and resentments are too deep to get rid of.

Warren died just as the current neo-Confederate wave was starting. I don't think he could imagine how today's propagandists view the South as justified about everything and don't feel as abashed or awkward as he claimed Southerners were in his own day.

[jmacusa]

I’m not gaslighting you dude. Your side lost, didn’t it? How does one ‘’win’’ an argument on the internet by the way?

[FLT-bird]

Read the Constitution of the Confederacy. Where does it grant the President unilaterally authority enter into a treaty without the approval of the Confederate Congress. . Some posters on this forum are glad to point out Abe Lincoln’s foot prints on the United States Constitution, well here is Jefferson Davis’s foot prints all over the Constitution of the Confederacy.

The President can sign and the Senate can ratify treaties. Those carry the force of constitutional law.

[FLT-bird]

You're on.

Deal

[FLT-bird]

Careful. He'll match his legal know-how against yours any time. He said so.

Where was the ruling by the Confederate Supreme Court saying that the President and Confederate Senate couldn't agree to such a treaty?.....and yes I'm perfectly well aware that due the exigencies of war they simply had not had time to appoint justices and get their Supreme Court set up. Ergo any such court would have been presented with a fait accompli.

Besides as almost everyone could see, it was the way the Western world was going anyway. Sharecropping or even a wage system would have served their needs as indeed it did in the post war period when the Southern states kept right on producing cash crops. The whole legalistic argument that the President and Senate "couldn't" have done exactly what they were prepared to do is a nullity. Had Britain and France agreed, they'd have done it and that would have been that.

[FLT-bird]

Yes, it's circular reasoning bullsh*t. They would immediately see what was wrong with what they are claiming if they weren't so intent on trying to believe it.

When the Southern states' solution was to do the very thing the PC Revisionists claim they were fighting to prevent...that ought to have given them a clue that that was obviously not their big motivation.

[FLT-bird]

The funniest part of all is rocksinhishead thinking he knows anything about others here.