Posted on 02/10/2004 6:16:00 AM PST by stainlessbanner
This is true, but a half truth (or more likely, a 1/10th truth). The Republicans were more like antislavery-light, focusing only on expansion into the territories.
#4 is especially cute.
Neither side treated prisoners very well, but the problem really started when the North stopped prisoner exchange when it became an advantage for them not to exchange. This caused the big buildup of prisoners, overcrowding of prisons, food supply problems, easily transmitted sickness, and death.
I got interested in the subject some years ago because my wife's great grandfather died as a prisoner at Point Lookout Prison in Maryland, the prison mentioned in the article that started this thread.
In early 1864 after the North stopped exchanging prisoners, the South offered to let Northern surgeons come through the lines with medicines to treat Federal prisoners in Southern prisons, act as commissaries to the prisoners, and report on prisoner treatment. This offer was turned down at very high levels in the Lincoln Administration and consequently thousands of prisoners died. The South offered to purchase medicines at two or three times their cost and let Northern doctors use them to treat Federal prisoners in Southern prisons (the blockade had stopped much of the flow of medicines). The North wouldn't do it.
The North basically sacrified a large number of their soldiers in Southern prisons to keep exchanged Southern prisoners from going back into the Confederate army. The North had an excess of manpower, the South didn't. One could argue that refusing to exchange prisoners shortened the war. However, Walt Whitman complained about it and rightly laid the blame for Federal prisoners dying in Southern prisons on the Lincoln Administration.
The South eventually released a large batch of prisoners in Savannah including 5,000 well prisoners without demanding prisoners in exchange.
Various arguments were put forth by the Feds as to why they wouldn't exchange troops any more. The quote I cited by Grant was one. Another was that since the South wouldn't exchange blacks, there wouldn't be any exchange. The South (Robert E. Lee, as I remember) argued back that they did exchange free black soldiers, but they would not exchange any former Southern slaves that had escaped from their masters and gone into the Federal army. They would be returned to their Southern masters. After all, it was still US law that escaped slaves must be returned to their owners.
The black prisoner exchange argument was specious. Federal General "Beast" Butler, Commissioner of Exchange for the North, admitted being prepared to keep preventing exchange on one pretext or another even if the South agreed to all demands of the North. They didn't want the South to get the extra manpower.
I'm not as familiar with the Japanese.
That was the South's argument, anyway. Lincoln wasn't the first President they tried it on. They also tried it on Andrew Jackson, who told them to get stuffed and they came a'runnin'. Lincoln, for some reason, didn't worry them.
Bad move.
Strictly speaking, the South fired at Fort Sumter and its troops, not the ships. The troops in Fort Sumter had trained their guns at South Carolina and represented a threat. Because of bad weather, the Federal ships you mention couldn't get over the Charleston bar to be shot at. The shallower-draft Northern tugs that the Feds had hired to take the food and supplies in to the fort from the Federal ships had been scattered by the weather and were not present.
The South did fire a few shots at The Star of the West a few months months earlier when it invaded Southern territory loaded with 200 troops and munitions. The harbor that the Star entered certainly belonged to South Carolina.
About a week before initiating the war, southern batteries fired on a merchant ship, the Rhoda Shannon, that had wandered into Charleston and committed no crime other than flying the Stars and Stripes. Southern hostile intentions were evident for some time.
Or kind of like maintaining a base in Cuba after they had asked us to leave? By your logic, then, Castro should have shelled Guantanamo Bay into surrender and you would have supported him on it?
Okay. So the first amendment is *really* code for the right to be offensive. To say insulting and unpopular things. To only use your free speech in the most hurtful and destructive way possible, not to ever say anything truthful and edifying. Good logic.< /sarcasm>
You see the trouble starts when you start presuming to know the heart motivation of someone. Slavery was sinful, but it was economically doomed anyway. The South knew this, but they wanted to retain the right to determine the issue (and any other issue not constitutionally mandated to Washington) for themselves.
But the tenth amendment protected much more than slavery from the purview of the central government.Amendment X was a huge barrier to the Federalists among us, and they apparently had no problem with hundreds of thousands of slaughters to get rid of it. It was a power play against the states, more than anything else.
There were duties on tobacco, cotton, and naval stores. All industries important to the south, and enjoying protections like those enjoyed up North. In fact, those same protections were kept in the southern tariff passed in May 1861, in spite of anti-protectionist clauses in the confederate constitution. So I guess protectionism is OK if it's your industries.
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