Southerners everywhere salute you!
Posted on 04/25/2011 9:31:58 AM PDT by Iron Munro
I am responding to a column by Leonard Pitts Jr., a noted black columnist for The Miami Herald, entitled, "The Civil War was about slavery, nothing more" (Other Views, April 15).
I found this article to be very misleading and grossly riddled with distortions of the real causes of the War Between the States. I find it so amusing that such an educated person would not know the facts.
I am a proud native of South Carolina. I have spent my entire life in what was once the Confederate States of America. I am currently associated with Southern Heritage causes, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Tampa.
It's been 150 years since brave, patriotic Southerners drove the imperialist Yankee army from Fort Sumter, S.C. It also marked the beginning of the Confederates' fight to expel this foreign army from the entire Southern homeland.
After all these years, there still exists national historical ignorance and lies about this war. The War Between the States was about states' rights — not about slavery.
Remember, the original colonies voluntarily joined the union and never gave up their individual sovereignty. These independent states always retained their right to manage their domestic affairs and to leave this voluntary association at any time.
This voluntary union was for limited reasons such as national defense from the foreign powers, one language, interstate commerce, disputes between the sovereign states and matters of foreign affairs.
When the Southern states tried to leave this union, the Northerners had to put a stop to this. The slavery issue was masterly inserted into the movement of Yankee aggression.
We are a union of independent and sovereign states free to determine our own destiny. This sovereignty is meant to be free of Yankee federal domination and control. This should still be in principle and practice today as it was before the first cannon shots at Fort Sumter.
Slavery of any people is wicked and morally wrong. Domination of one people over another is just as evil and morally wrong.
The facts are that throughout history, just about every race of people has been slaves to another people. Slavery has always been a failed institution and a dark mark in history. One-hundred years before the first slave made it to the auction blocks in Virginia, African kings were running a booming enterprise of selling their own people into slavery. It was also customary that defeated people became slaves.
Slavery as an institution worldwide was coming to an end before the War Between the States. Slavery in America would probably have come to an end within 50 years.
The great eternal lie — that the war was to "free the slaves" — is still being propagandized today by modern spin-makers, schools and even scholars. But the facts are plain and quite evident if you were to take off your Yankee sunglasses.
The Army of the Potomac invaded the South to capture, control and plunder the prosperity of Southern economic resources and its industries. This army also wanted to put a final nail in the coffin of states' rights.
If, and I say this with a big if , the War Between the States was to free the slaves, please answer these simple questions:
Why didn't President Lincoln issue a proclamation on day one of his presidency to free the slaves? Why did he wait so many years later to issue his proclamation? Why was slavery still legal in the Northern states? Before 1864, how many elected members of the imperialist Yankee Congress introduced legislation to outlaw slavery anywhere in America?
The slaves were freed — and only in territories in rebellion against the North — because the Army of the Potomac was not winning the war and Lincoln was fearful of foreign nations recognizing the Confederacy.
The Northern states needed a war to fuel their economy and stop the pending recession. The North needed rebellion in the South to cause havoc in the Confederate states. The North wanted the hard foreign currency being generated by Southern trade.
I hope this year not only marks the celebration of the brave actions of Southerners to evict the Northern Army at Fort Sumter but leads to the truthful revision of history about the war. Future generations should know the truth.
Al Mccray is a Tampa businessman and managing editor of TampaNewsAndTalk.com
It seems I was completely wrong. I thought I read that here and apparently didn’t fact check myself. I just did a quick check and I was wrong on that account. It may have been another State (Missouri?)
The most likely reason a state would secede in present-day America would be due to demographics in the southwestern U.S. In such areas, many illegal immigrants claim the territory was "stolen" from Mexico. With the current birthrate trend, it is likely those states would have a Hispanic plurality in the near future. When spanish-speaking residents outnumber non-spanish speaking residents, there will be strong sympathy for severing ties with the United States and transforming the state into a third world style Latin American republic. The millions of Americans living in those states who do NOT speak spanish would then be forced to learn spanish and assimilate to the culture of Latin America (or more likely) would be expelled from places they were born and lived their whole lives. So if Arizona or Texas decide to "secede" and form La Republica del Norte, I take it you'd be squarely on the side of the "reconquista" crowd that wants to turn the southwestern U.S.A. into Mexico II? Sounds like you and National Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán should have lunch together sometime and discuss your shared contempt for "yankees", the pledge of allegiance (especially the "indivisible" line), and the American flag.
And put it in further perspective there,, lets also say that the 10 western states claimed a Right to enslave about 35 million people they bought fair and square. And lets say that if an escapee slave from the western states that made it back east,, that the Western states demanded that he be arrested and sent back.
Yes,,, we would be looking at war crimes,, and the leaders of the 10 would be the criminals.
I believe history shows that South Carolina started things in 1832 protesting ‘the tariff of abomination’ enacted in 1832. This act promoted a monopoly for the Northern industrialists to raise prices for Southern consumers. The South exported about 3/4’s of its goods and in turn used the money to buy European goods which carried the high import tax. What that meant is that the South felt it was paying the lion’s share of Federal taxes most of which was spent in the North. If the South didn’t buy foreign goods and pay high taxes, the alternative was to buy Northern manufactured goods at excessively high prices. The South Carolina man who directed the first shot fired at Fort Sumter, Eric Ruffin, penned an popular article in 1860 urging secession stating; ‘The Northern states would not have attained half of their wealth, which have been built upon the tribute exacted from the South by legislative policy’. Lincoln was supported by the industrialist of the North. At the heart of his platform was a return to high import taxes, reminiscent of the ‘tariff of abomination’ of 1832. Lincoln paid off the Northern industrialists when he signed the Morrill Tariff act in 1861. It doubled rates of the 1857 tariff to 47% of the valve of imported products. This pretty much shut the door for any reconciliation with the South. Turns out Lincoln was conciliatory in terms of slavery (until his back was against the wall—emancipation policy) but with import taxes he was threatening. Hence the firing by South Carolina at Fort Sumter which was filled with federal troops supporting U.S. Custom officers enforcing Northern policy. At the same time Lincoln was pushing his high tariff through Congress the South’s new constitution was mandating that duties, customs, and trade restrictions would be held to an absolute minimum, meaning the South’s goods could be cheaper than those of the North spelling disaster for Northern industrialists. In Lincoln’s supposedly conciliatory inaugural address there was one remark that is bound to have caught Southern attention. Lincoln promised that there would be “no bloodshed or violence” and “no use of force” against the seceding states; even the mails would be abandoned if they were not wanted. But taxes were another matter. Lincoln would “collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” The South could secede as long as it paid its taxes to the North. An ultimatum of taxes or war. Always follow the money.....
Maybe not tariffed items specifically, but probably their artificially priced domestic counterparts.
That is not exactly correct.
The South insisted upon the Fugitive Slave Act that was part of the Compromise of 1850. They then insisted (with the Kansas-Nebraska Act) upon extending slavery into the territory acquired from the Mexican-American War. This overturned the Missouri Compromise. Finally, the southerners on the SCOTUS issued the Dred Scott Decision overturning slavery prohibitions nationally.
Once the South attacked Fort Sumter, it was civil war.
No problemo. I’ve posted a number of comments on facts as I remembered them, and found out later I was wrong.
I’m fairly familiar with this issue, and AFAIK in 1860 none of the remaining slave holding states were anywhere close to emancipating their slaves.
All Union slaves except those in KY (and a hundred or so in DE) were emancipated by state action before the war ended, but that was pretty obviously a consequence of the war, not something that would have happened anyway.
4. No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Source: http://www.usconstitution.net/csa.html
Which items were priced higher for southerners, or more likely to be purchased by southerners?
Protective tariffs screwed over the people throughout the country to benefit a relatively small number of business owners and workers. Most of these were in the north.
Northern people not in this tiny protected group got screwed every bit as thoroughly as southerners, but southern demagogues somehow managed to turn it into a north vs. south issue.
One of the things I find most intriguing about this whole issue is that a good many of those most opposed to the idea of protective tariffs in the 1850s are all in favor of their modern equivalents.
Southerners everywhere salute you!
I believe that particular clause prevented the Confederate Congress from prohibiting slavery, not an individual state.
How could they be. The argument appears to be the poorer south was affected more.
“Since tariffs were only imposed on imports, I see no reason why Southern states would have been taxed more heavily than Northern states”
The point about the economic causes of the war are not that the South was more directly taxed more heavily, I don’t think. It was that taxes on imports bolstered Northern industry at the expense of the South, since the latter had to pay higher prices than they otherwise would have for manufactured goods. That is, without sharing in the North’s compensatory increased profits and wages.
Which means, I suppose, if not for evil revisionist historians we’d know Southerners were really denouncing Fat Cats and crony capitalists instead of abolitionists. “Abolitionist” was a code word all along, don’t you know.
Damn. Post of the decade.
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html#South%20Carolina
You won't find the word "tarriff" in there. Tarriffs might have been a real bone of contention, but was it foremost in the mind of legislators in December of 1860? Why had they not revolved when pro-industrialist Whigs were elected?
And if you want to talk about "following the money," let's speculate about the costs of chattel slavery versus mere wage slavery. Indeed, this is the point that fascinates me when people point out, correctly, that the average Johnny Reb owned no slaves. Great-- but what about the economic and political elites who led Johnny Reb into the war?
I am content to accept a confession signed in blood.
The South exported cotton to mills in the UK and France. They used the proceeds to buy manufactured good from these countries and import them to the South. So the tariffs fell disproportionately on the South, which was already “contributing” most of the revenue of the Federal Government. This was an attempt to use tax policy to capture this traffic for the North.
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