Spare me, Clyde. You never was that complex. It was fun finding the mistakes in your earlier article a few years back. And this one is just making a straw man argument and torturing and publicly burning the straw man ("an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument") of his own making .
Of course, there are different reasons why wars break out - grievances always travel in flocks or herds - but if you're looking for one chief reason why North and South drew apart, a seven-letter word beginning with "s" is a good place to start (and finish)
That was the opinion of Horatio Seymour, Democratic governor of New York. In a public address he pointed to the enormity of making war on Southern fellow citizens who had always been exceptionally loyal Americans, but who had been driven to secession by New England fanaticism.
Seymour was pretty clear that the "fanaticism" he disapproved of was about the abolition of slavery. Seymour blamed the North for rejecting the Crittenden Compromise. In other words, the North had been offered a chance at saving the Union if it caved on slavery, and Northern Republicans rejected it. So by the logic familiar to us here, the war must have been about slavery after all.
A statement in which Lincoln is said to favour voting rights for black men who were educated or had been soldiers has been shown to be fraudulent.
By whom? What's your reference Clyde? Whether John Wilkes Booth was in the audience is questionable but so far as I know the statement was legitimate.
Within a few days of his death he was still speaking of colonization outside the U.S.
That is Ben Butler's version, recounted years after Lincoln's death. It has long been regarded as spurious. We'll never know for sure, but it shouldn't be cited as a proven fact.
The South, supposedly fighting for slavery, did not respond to any of these offers for the continuance of slavery. In fact, wise Southerners like Jefferson Davis realized that if war came it would likely disrupt slavery as it had during the first war of independence.
Where's the evidence? A quote from Davis would be nice here. Of course, war would "disrupt" many things, but Davis was willing to risk war and started one. He felt that continued union with the North would "disrupt" slavery more than secession and war would.
As the war began, the famous abolitionist Theodore Weld declared that the South had to be wiped out because it is “the foe to Northern industry—to our mines, our manufactures, our commerce.” Nothing said about benefit to the slaves.
That is the problem with cut-and-paste history. Weld was indeed a famous abolitionist who had written whole books about slavery. To know just what he was thinking in 1861, one would have to do more than cite one sentence that doesn't mention slavery and conclude that a man who'd been speaking out against slavery for decades didn't care about slavery.
Ditto with his other quotes. Clyde recirculates the fiery quotes somebody picked out of the letters of Northern officers and their wives without really thinking about what else there is in the letters or what Southern officers and their wives were writing at the same time.
How about these curiosities from the greatest of Northern intellectuals, Emerson. He records in his journals: “But the secret, the esoteric of abolition—a secret, too, from the abolitionist—is, that the negro and the negro-holder are really of one party.” And again, “The abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man.”
Emerson had a rich sense of irony and paradox. And he wasn't very much in favor of the abolitionist cause when he wrote that in his journals. I do notice that his attitude here points to deeper complexities in Northern attitudes. Emerson was not above examining his own motives and those of his peers. Clyde likes to repeat things like this but apparently thinks he is above (or below) questioning attitudes in his own region.
A historian quotes a Northern observer of U.S. Army activities in occupied coastal Carolina in 1864. Generals declared their intention to recruit “every able-bodied male in the department.” Writes the Northern observer: “The atrocious impressments of boys of fourteen and responsible men with large dependent families, and the shooting down of negroes who resisted, were common occurrences.”
A name and a title would help here. Otherwise this is just a wild rumor. Where are the other accounts of such incidents?
Howard White and I recently put out a book about the war. Careful, well-supported essays, by 16 serious people. Immediately it appeared on amazon, someone wrote in: “I’m so tired of the Lost Cause writing. Don’t believe the bullshit in this useless pamphlet.” He could not have had time to actually read the book. It can be dismissed unread because he has the righteous cause and we do not. This is not historical debate.
This is the strawman technique. Clyde picks a particularly unrevealing comment and tries to make it look like the typical response of those who disagree him to his useless pamphlet -- or like it's not a typical comment people make to everything on Amazon.com. There are more intelligent critiques that one could make of Clyde's dismal pamphlet. But it seems like nobody bothered to read it.
Nice work!
Thanks.