The coming civil war over abortion: This time, it's not over slavery

Roe v. Wade’s overturn would have to consider the right to privacy as underpinning the original USSC decision. In the absence of such an explicit Constitutional (4th amendment) right, R.vW. would appear doomed and the abortion issue would return to the states for a bunch of individual legislative/judicial resolutions...pretty much the way 2nd amendment issues continue to be (hopefully) resolved.

No war. No way.

Yes, the first Civil War was over slavery. No matter how you slice it, had there not been slavery in the South there would not have been a Civil War.

If there had not been people in the South, there also wouldn't have been a civil war. If the South was barren, and the people poor, there also would not have been a civil war.

You are misidentifying the actual dispute of the civil war as being about slavery instead of being about money. The War was fought because the South was going to take 230 million dollars per year out of the New York and Washington DC economy, just for starters.

The lives lost in the War was God’s judgement on the country.

So why didn't God see fit to judge the 13 slave owning colonies when they tried to gain independence from England, which had banned slavery? Why did God wait "four score and seven years" to finally decide that slavery needed to go?

Were the Founders not guilty of exactly the same thing as the Confederates?

I read a very interesting history of South Carolina before the civil war. The upper class feared two things: fires - Charleston burned to the ground twice- and slave revolts.

Controlling a large number of slaves was becoming untenable. Plantation owners were in the process of switching from slavery to a tenant farming model

While there were some cruel masters, the majority of the owners treated blacks decently and like members of the family.

They tried to do it 160 year ago to protect slavery.

Who were they protecting it from?

Please be specific.

Roe v. Wade’s overturn would have to consider the right to privacy as underpinning the original USSC decision. In the absence of such an explicit Constitutional (4th amendment) right, R.vW. would appear doomed and the abortion issue would return to the states for a bunch of individual legislative/judicial resolutions...pretty much the way 2nd amendment issues continue to be (hopefully) resolved.

I agree.

No war. No way.

I don't know about that. Liberals *HATE* and detest us in the manner that Massachusetts Puritans *HATED* Southern slave owners. Liberals see us as literally "untermenschen" with any violence used against us being completely justified in their minds. They have Armies of John Browns ready to assault us.

I read a very interesting history of South Carolina before the civil war. The upper class feared two things: fires - Charleston burned to the ground twice- and slave revolts.

I have read that one of their overriding fears was of slave revolts, and John Brown's attempts to start a massive slave revolt scared the crap out of them. (John Brown was a Wool Merchant who tried to organize Massachusetts Wool merchants. Completely bankrupted twice, Cotton was his nemesis.)

I think it was his raid that convinced them they needed to get out of the Union.

Controlling a large number of slaves was becoming untenable.

Yup

Plantation owners were in the process of switching from slavery to a tenant farming model

I was not aware of that. That is interesting.

While there were some cruel masters, the majority of the owners treated blacks decently and like members of the family.

For years I thought slaves were constantly mistreated and whipped and made to wear chains and such. I believed this because that's all I ever heard of when the subject of slavery was mentioned, and of course they show all the pictures of whip marks on former slaves, so it's reasonable to believe slaves were mistreated if you don't think about it much.

In the last few years, I came to realize that the abolitionists were trying to convince people to support abolition, so they went to a lot of trouble looking for examples of mistreatment so they could parade them in front of the public and thereby win support.

This is not much different from Feminists parading around with coat hangers and bloody signs trying to convince people that if abortion is overturned, women will be subjected to horrific self induced abortions and possibly die.

It's histrionics designed to sway people with emotion, and I now think that is what was happening in the 1850s as well. It's all about manipulating people to gain their support.

A civil war is coming to America ...and while I hope will [sic] all my heart that it will not be a physically violent war...

Of course not. You just said it would be ‘civil.’

It would have waned in the South, same as it did in the North. It would have just taken longer.

I think one reason the Founders punted on the slavery issue was that in the 1780s slavery was looking to be economically unviable. I believe they thought that it would gradually die out without any fuss or bother. But then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and slaves could produce and process enough cotton that more than paid for their expenses. Cotton was so lucrative that rotation of crops was abandoned in favor of the huge returns that cotton brought. That of course led to the exhaustion of the soil and the quest for more land to grow cotton on.

By the 1860s the handwriting was on the wall. Where were future cotton-growing areas to come from? There was even talk of annexing Cuba to continue cotton/slavery. Too much of the south’s capital was invested in its slaves. Hard to imagine their giving that up without some violence.

I think one reason the Founders punted on the slavery issue was that in the 1780s slavery was looking to be economically unviable. I believe they thought that it would gradually die out without any fuss or bother. But then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and slaves could produce and process enough cotton that more than paid for their expenses.

I think you are correct. Those D@mn Massachusettsians are always stirring up troubles, aren't they? :)

That of course led to the exhaustion of the soil and the quest for more land to grow cotton on.

There was no more land on which cotton would grow without irrigation systems that hadn't yet been invented.

There was even talk of annexing Cuba to continue cotton/slavery. Too much of the south’s capital was invested in its slaves. Hard to imagine their giving that up without some violence.

They didn't have to give it up if they had remained in the Union. Lincoln and Northern state representatives were quite willing to guarantee them permanent protection for slavery if they just stayed in the Union.

What they wouldn't allow them to have is enough representation to vote off the taxes that had been put on their income streams, most of which were funding Washington DC, with a big chunk of it getting dropped off in New York.

What they wouldn’t allow them to have is enough representation to vote off the taxes that had been put on their income streams,

The weren’t taxed on their exports (not allowed under Constitution) but they were having to pay taxes on their imports. Ships hauling cotton to England came back filled with superior English-manufactured products. Northern factories couldn’t compete with English so they pressured their Congressmen to pass higher tariffs. Southerners resented paying taxes that they got little in return from. Nice, slow-moving rivers provided their highways, but their taxes were providing for roads in the north and west and subsidizing railroads as well.

The South felt picked on and unloved by the rest of the nation. The fact that more and more Northerners sneered at their “peculiar institution” didn’t help. They saw the election of Lincoln as the last straw. It’s taken well over a century (and the invention of air conditioning) for the South to recover.

The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, now also sold as a moral measure by the sainted Lincoln, in fact freed not a single slave. It applied only in the Southern states, where it was intended to ignite a revolt.
Lincoln himself said, in letter after letter after document after speech and before Congress, over and over and over, that he would not oppose slavery in the South if only it would come back to the Union, and–yes, boys and girls–he wanted to send blacks back to Africa.
IN fact, the North wanted no blacks of any kind, having discovered that sweating European immigrants was more profitable. If you own slaves, you have to feed them and care for them no matter the business climate. This was suited to an agricultural economy. But the North was industrial. It made more sense to pay helpless immigrants almost nothing while they lived in tubercular filth with their children working twelve hours a day and dying of preventable diseases. After all, the next ship in would bring more. In short, it was the moral equivalent of slavery but more cost-effective and without the stigma.

The weren’t taxed on their exports (not allowed under Constitution) but they were having to pay taxes on their imports.

Can you tell me the distinction between taxing the front end of a horse and taxing the back end of a horse? All imports to them were in payment for their exports. Effectively, Imports = Exports.

The South felt picked on and unloved by the rest of the nation. The fact that more and more Northerners sneered at their “peculiar institution” didn’t help. They saw the election of Lincoln as the last straw. It’s taken well over a century (and the invention of air conditioning) for the South to recover.

Exactly correct. The Northern centers of cultural eliteness still look down on them as ignorant hillbilly rednecks. They are "Deplorables."

I've heard it said that the American Civil War was merely a continuation of the previous English Civil War, with the North and South regions being settled by the respective combatants in the English Civil War.

So now it's abortion dividing the same groups of people as the Civil War. Also "Gay Marriage", Feminism, Godlessness, "Diversity", Immigration, and a whole host of other issues.

Pretty much the same regions are still against each other.

All imports to them were in payment for their exports.

Of course they could have avoided tariffs by buying inferior American goods at inflated (because of the tariffs) prices. But either way, from their point of view, their money was going north. But of course, we are speaking about the southern leadership class—the ones who owned the vast majority of slaves. Southern yeomanry wasn’t buying much from England and wasn’t sending much cotton there either. As was said by both sides during “the late unpleasantness” it was rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”.

I had read something the other day alleging that the Southern peasant class would simply vote whatever way the rich Aristocracy directed them to vote. I suspect something like this goes on in every human culture.

Yes, I think that war was really a battle between the elites, but the poor pawns had to fight and die in it. Then the winning side said it was all about slavery, and that's what we've all been subsequently taught.