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 ...
Yankeefa is just not open to anything that contradicts their PC Revisionist dogma - no matter how irrefutable the source.
That wasn't the last time Lincoln offered to strengthen fugitive slave laws.
A system of gradual emancipation might well be adopted, and I will not undertake to judge our Southern friends for tardiness in this matter. I acknowledge the constitutional rights of the States — not grudgingly, but fairly and fully, and I will give them any legislation for reclaiming their fugitive slaves.” Abraham Lincoln
That is in addition of course to offering slavery effectively forever enshrined in the constitution via express constitutional amendment.
I would add: they wanted to keep European powers like Britain and France out. With both having already abolished slavery it would be politically very difficult for either to intervene on behalf of a country, the CSA, which still had slavery.
Also, Lincoln and his corporate fatcat supporters started this war over money. Even a cursory reading of the major Northern Newspapers as well as Lincoln's insistence on collecting duties in Southern ports in his inaugural address makes that quite clear. They thought it would be easy....a mere matter of marching. Remember that they only called for 75,000 volunteers and only for a period of 3 months. Then their little war over money turned extremely expensive and turned into a bloodbath.
Now there are a lot of parents of Northern sons grieving for the loss of their son and even more who came back mangled and crippled for life. What do you tell those people? They are voters! Do you tell them that their loved one was killed or had his arm blown off over......money? Sure its true but those voters are going to be absolutely furious when they hear that. So now Lincoln and indeed the whole Republican Party establishment now need to wrap this bloodbath in the cloak of some noble cause to make it more palatable. They know the voters back home won't look too closely. They desperately want to believe the frightful price they paid was for some noble cause. "dying to make men free" fits the bill nicely. Who cares if anybody who bothers to look at what they were saying in 1860 and 61 can immediately see that its pure BS?
DiogenesLamp: "Yes, it pretty much does.
Any effort to grant states unlimited rights to have slavery pretty much means that the North was *NOT* fighting over the issue of slavery."
We notice first that DiogenesLamp responds not to Confederate secession reasons, but instead he shifts to Northern reasons which he claims had nothing to do with slavery, witness Corwin.
And it's true enough slavery had nothing directly to do with events at Forts Sumter & Pickens, or with the Confederate declaration of War, May 6, 1861, or with Confederate 1861 invasions of Union states, territories & regions.
Throw in Democrat "Compromise" proposals like Corwin and it's pretty fair to say that slavery, having accomplished its purpose in splitting up the majority Democrat party, electing President Lincoln and justifying secession, had nothing directly to do with starting Civil War.
However, slavery became increasingly important during the war, beginning in the spring of 1861, in th forms of:
I find it very telling that good ‘ole DL went from talking about the background of secession to “It doesn’t matter why they seceded, the only thing that matters is that the North invaded.
I also find it very interesting that he has totally ignored why a culture so steeped in personal honor would find it necessary to lie about why they would lie about the most important decision they have ever made.
Lincoln's 1849 proposal was for compensated abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C..
It was passed & became law in 1862, minus the fugitive slave clause.
rustbucket quoting: "Demands for $2 million ‘unanswered’ requisitions had accumulated in the department, with $6 million more due to public creditors in early March. Dix predicted a $21.6 million shortfall by the end of the fiscal year."
In 1860 Federal revenues averaged around $6 million per month.
It's true the previous Democrat administrative had doubled spending & debt, but even then, compared to today's D.C. swamp, the debt numbers were not unmanageable.
Congress authorized enough new debt to handle its short term issues before adjoining in March 1861.
rustbucket: "I have posted before about the large increase in government debt created by the previous two Congresses spending money.
As the New York Day Book reportedly said after noting drastically lower import figures for the port of New York, "Well may Mr. Lincoln ask, 'What will become of my revenue?' "
First, Democrat profligacy went back to the early 1850s.
Second, any president would be a fool not to look at the sources of government revenues, so at the right time & place, Lincoln's alleged words make common sense.
But the claim here is Lincoln used those words inappropriately to justify resupplying Fort Sumter.
That makes no sense and is not reliably confirmed by non-hostile sources.
Third, when war came the Union had little problem raising not millions, not tens of millions, not hundreds of millions, but $billions.
So whatever "crisis" is alleged in early 1861 was just a tempest in a teapot.
rustbucket: "I am not aware of Lincoln saying it to others, but him saying it is consistent with what a number of newspapers were also saying, like this from the New York Herald of March 14, 1861: 'Collecting the Revenue. -- The evacuation of Fort Sumter is an act of necessity on the part of the government at Washington; but the collection of the revenue from the customs in the seceded States is also a matter of necessity. President Lincoln must interpose, or the low tariff of the Confederate States will attract a large portion of the European goods intended for the United States, and thus cut off a considerable slice of the revenues of the latter....' "
Notice this quote specifically decoupled Fort Sumter from the revenue issue and yet our Lost Causers use it to tell us Lincoln's "war fleet" to Sumter was "all about" revenues.
It wasn't.
It’s evident that Occam never stropped his razor on any of DL’s arguments. But I will give him credit for an imaginative fairy tale. And of course his “it’s all about the money” catchall is a true party pleaser!
Personally, I stopped at “I am not aware of Lincoln saying it to others”. The rest of his post was filler.
Because DiogenesLamp has never read even one word of real history, he literally does not know what was going on in 1849 and so easily falls prey to the deceptive words of a master propagandist like rustbucket.
In 1849 Lincoln proposed compensated abolition in Washington D.C..
His plan became Federal law in 1862, minus the fugitive slave provision.
And Lincoln never "urged" Corwin, that is a fantasy, so far as I can tell, all of DiogenesLamp's own concoction.
Right, it's bad enough that DiogenesLamp, 100% unaware of real history, feels uninhibited in projecting his own mindset onto Lincoln, but he's even more unrestrained in projecting onto Confederates what he wishes they would have said & thought at the time.
Of course, Lost Causers do accuse us of "revisionism" for saying it was indeed "all about slavery", when most (Marxist) historians for 100 years said it was all just economics & class warfare.
That's what I was taught in school, but didn't believe it then and don't now.
Slavery was the major political issue of the age, splitting first the old Whigs to make Northern Republicans, and in 1860 the national Democrats to make Republican victory all but inevitable.
So saying events in 1860 were not "all about" slavery is to ignore the 800 lb gorilla in the room.
Careful or you’ll trigger a blizzard of nonsense all posted in ginormous font...
You should read about the history of the Corwin Amendment. I suggest the following: Abraham Lincoln and the Corwin Amendment. Interesting story.
I assume you know that Lincoln said the following in his first inaugural speech [my bold below]:
I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution--which amendment, however, I have not seen--has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
In other words, the Great Emancipator was happy with slavery being made "express and irrevocable." Some emancipator. Apparently he had feet of montmorillonite.
Hey, rockrr. I posted the following to you the after providing documentation about the sad state of the US Treasury when Lincoln came into office:
Do you think the revenue question was not a crucial one for the North and for Lincoln? If you think revenue was not crucial, I'd like to hear your argument supporting your conclusion.
So far, "crickets" from you.
I’ll never forget the time when the Dung Beetle came rushing into one of these CW threads proclaiming the exact same thing in the exact same words. I can easily tell that you two are dipping into the same Lost Causer trough. Do this: reread your post and then tell “us” what the Great Emancipator was actually “happy” (your word) with making express and irrevocable. Hint: it ain’t Slavery.
I’ll never forget the time when the Dung Beetle came rushing into one of these CW threads proclaiming the exact same thing in the exact same words. I can easily tell that you two are dipping into the same Lost Causer trough. Do this: reread your post and then tell “us” what the Great Emancipator was actually “happy” (your word) with making express and irrevocable. Hint: it ain’t Slavery.
Lincoln: I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
If he were unhappy with it, he would have said so. I think he was happy with it. Read the link I provided that discussed Lincoln's apparent involvement with and possible instigation of the Corwin Amendment through Seward.
FIFY (in order to assure its accuracy)
Why do you people insist upon putting words in other people's mouths? Does it come from the same place as your insistence on reshaping historical events to suit your agenda?
There you go putting words into my mouth. Don't do that.
Did you read historian Phil Magness' article I linked to above "Abraham Lincoln and the Corwin Amendment"? From that article:
Notably, Lincoln’s Green Memorandum of the 28th suggested his opposition to a constitutional amendment in abstract terms, contingent on the wishes of “the American people.” Yet it also contained a specific statement of his position on acceptable compromise measures. Lincoln suggested he would favor a proposition nearly identical to what Seward had put forth in the Corwin amendment: “I declare that the maintainance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively.”
Now let's look at Lincoln's letter to Duff Green to which Magness provided a link. Here is the letter [Link to Lincoln letter to Duff Green, which says (my transcription of the handwritten letter):
Copy
Springfield, Ill. Dec. 28th, 1860
Gen. Duff Green
My dear Sir -
I do not desire any amendment of the Constitution. Recognizing, however, that questions of such amendment rightfully belong to the American People, I should not feel justified, nor inclined, to withold from them, if I could, a fair opportunity of expressing their will thereon, through either of the modes prescribed in the instrument.
In addition, I declare that the maintainance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends - and
So ends the first page, which is all I found on that link. However, there is an online link to the words of the entire letter from "Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 4" at the University of Michigan. The "Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln" is copyrighted, so I just provide the University of Michigan link to its content: [Link].
The letter states Lincoln's non interest in an amendment similar to his statement in his inaugural address. But there is more to the story behind the scene (isn't there always). From Magness again [my bold below]:
Yet as Lee thoroughly documents, Lincoln actively lobbied behind the scenes to drum up support for the amendment after he arrived in Washington in late February. A young Henry Adams, who was clerking for his congressman father and Corwin Amendment co-sponsor Charles Francis Adams, affirms this as well, noting that the amendment’s adoption by the narrowest of two-thirds majorities came only because of “some careful manipulation, as well as the direct influence of the new President.”
Some non interest. Yes, I'd say Lincoln was happy with the Corwin Amendment and in fact urged it.
Of course you would. That does not make it true.
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