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
Save the Union from all those Southern States that wanted to have an seperate POLITICAL iteration... Yes!!! Kill them all!!! Monty Python couldn’t have created a more absurd skit than the Civil War. The South WAS the Union, as was the North. You don’t kill your wife because she wants someone who doesn’t cheat. Think man!!!
That's because this discussion isn't about morality; it's about constitutionality and thats the context of this thread. If you want to discuss morality, start a new thread. (I understand the liberal mentality has a hard time separating the two but give it a try.)
And focusing on the opening passages referring to 1852 does not erase the multiple occurrences of the words "slave" and "slavery" later in the document. Nope, you have to ignore them in order to make your case that it was "only" about States Rights.
Likewise, focusing on the word 'slavery' does not erase the multiple occurrences where constitutional violation or states rights is discussed.
When you read the Constitution, do you skip over Amendments 13-15???
Are you aware that the 13th was passed after secession and after the yankee invasion and that the 15th wasn't passed until well after the end of the war?
While we are on the text of the original constitution, can you please make a moral case for making items of "property" worth 3/5 of a free person for the purposes of apportioning congressional seats and electoral votes?
A) Morality isn't the issue in this argument and,
B) you'll have to ask your yankee forefathers why a antebellum black man was only worth 3/5's of a free white man. (FWIW, your yankee forefathers didn't want blacks to count at all.)
You unreconstructed excuse makers are frankly pathetic.
You PC liberal revisionists are the pathetic crowd. Denial must be genetic north of the Mason/Dixon.....
simply refuse to own up to the monstrousness of the "peculiar" institution and the blood stain it has.
Stop it! You're gonna make me cry!
Blood stain?!? How about 600,000+ dead, a whole section of the country destroyed, the Constitution trampled on for the yankee myth? How do you like that 'blood stain'?
The sick part is that the descendants of the slaves that you yankess perpetually wring your hands about are still on the 'plantation'. But I guess the yankee method of slavery is much more palatable for you mythologists.
And because I have the temerity to call out your ancestors for their sins,
While conveniently leaving out the much worse sins of your ancestors and your present day yankee brethern.
you then accuse me of being some politically correct hack.
If it walks like a duck....
You don't know me sir-- or you would realize that I am anything but politically correct.
You can't prove that by the bilge that you've posted on this thread.
No, you just want to plug your ears
What I've done, and many others are doing, is opening our eyes to the blatant yankee lies that have been perpetuated for the last 145+ years and the disgraceful way that you have indoctrinated multiple generations of Americans with your union/government controlled public schools.
The Confederate Government didn't order that black prisoners of war were to be sold into slavery (with no regard to their pre-war status) and that their white officers could be shot out of hand, did they? Ooops-- they did, didn't they? No, and before the war, the Missouri Border Ruffians illegally trying to vote in Bleeding Kansas were just trying to bring the joys of mint julips and grits to the Yankees there, right?
Do you want an apology, barack?
You go first: apologize for Sherman's disgraceful and criminal march through the South, murdering non-combatants, raping women of all ages and races and destroying and stealing private property.
chirp, chirp, chirp........
Get over yourself
I would suggest you do the same thing but I'm all too familiar with the denseness of the yankee gray matter.
--and Appomattox Court House.
No sir. Not until the yankee mythology, lies and revisionism is completely exposed and stamped out.
Or we, the South, successfully secede. Again.
Myths are what we were taught in the 6th grade, where Lincoln and Washington were the twin Gods of the American mythology. I have since learned that Lincolnl was a master politician, but he doesn’t compare to Washington in any sense. His great goal was to not be the President in power when America divided itself. The truth is that if it had done so, it probably would have reunified within a few years. Regardless, the American experiment would have continued along with it’s new border, and the North and the South would have been friends in much the same way that Canada is now our friend... and 500K Americans would not be DEAD.
Southron revisionism at its finest. Bravo!
Your problem is making factual claims that don't hold up to scrutiny. Your pattern then is to tell us what you REALLY meant, and when that doesn't stand up either, to drop the subject and move on to the next one. Tell us again about when the Hartford Convention issued it's report.
He twisted my point that the slave trade was alive and well through the end of the war, life expectancy increased after the cotton gin, and that storks weren't the only reason for the growth of the slave population as meaning i didn't learn about the birds and the bees and "slaves can't reproduce on their own". What that has to do with the civil war discussion, I fear we'll never know.
Spin, spin, spin. Here's what you said: ""There's no way to increase the slave population (aka "expansion") except by bringing more into the country." Your point was that the only way that the slave population increased from one million to three million after the slave trade was banned was by illegal smuggling.
Not sure about the psychic comment
I was referring to your argument that the delegates to the Hartford Convention should have somehow known that a treaty had been signed in Europe ending the War of 1812 before they issued their report, even though word of the treaty didn't reach the US until over a month later. Have you forgotten that one already? At first you claimed that the report came out years after the war ended, then months, until finally you reached that point. Of course, you also claimed that there was a ceasefire in the war preceding the conference, never quite telling us when that was instituted.
And I assume the last point was on Pickens, in the context of the whole "starting the war"/armistice thing. Again, 800 combined posts, and no one's shown a thing about Pensacola. (again, /sarc)
So are you going to explain how the US army attacked a fort that they possessed?
Okay, so you're saying that the United States and the rebelling states were at war. When did that start?
(Written is still the exception to the rule throughout history, and Vietnam provided several more recent examples of unwritten armistices - which N.Korea violated, at which point we "shelled" them.)
Wait, what? North Korea violated an armistice in Vietnam? When was that?
It's not the correct term anyway, since it implies an existing war.
Ah, so you do read your own posts. But why, then, did you call it an armistice? You're the one who introduced the word in this discussion.
Yeah, your desire for the courts to speak on issues that haven’t actually come before it is well established.
They didn't want to count slaves, since slaves were not part of the body politic. Free blacks were always counted as a full person for purposes of representation.
Thank you so much for the ping. What a brave man to write this article.
This is the history of the war of northern aggression that I learned at the feet of my Poly Sci professor...in California.
I had always wondered why Lincoln didn’t sign the Emancipation Proclamation until two years into the war.
Though slavery was certainly not the only driving issue (for example, disagreement and strife over the character of the westward expansion was certainly a factor) one need only review the Confederacy's founding documents, as well as the words and records of its prominent political leaders, to realize that the Civil War had a whole hell of a lot to do with the absurd belief that Slavery was tenable under the American system.
Inasmuch as slavery was totally incompatible with the notion of human freedom and inalienable rights, and, as such, substantially violated the spirit of the Declaration of Independence as well as Rights recognized in the Constitution, the issue had to be addressed sooner or later. Given sufficient courage and conviction, the issue quite possibly could have been resolved much earlier in our history, and at a much lower cost in human life and freedom.
That is this Rebel's humble opinion, based on admittedly limited, yet sufficiently diligent research...
You see, this is the kind of lying bilge that makes it impossible to have a serious debate with you people.
Your lying yankee forefathers didn't want to count slaves at all because they wanted to reduce/eliminate Southern influence on the federal level; but they did finally agree to the 3/5's compromise, fully indicating that they considered slaves 'part of the body politic'. Just not a whole part.
Also, how do you explain the contradiction that free blacks were counted as a whole because they were 'part of the body politic' based on their emancipated state even though they couldn't vote?
"[R]ace prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known." --Alexis De Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”
The cause was States Rights.
The occasion was slavery which became the albatross around the neck of the Confederacy.
My apologies for the misunderstanding; my intent was to say that the deciding factor for secession by the Southern states was slavery. The other cited factors do not even come close.
/it’s finals time, so forgive my addled brain
bookmark
yousound as if we both read the same books.
Booker T. Washington:
"Though I was but little more than a youth during the period of Reconstruction, I had the feeling that mistakes were being made, and that things could not remain in the condition that they were in then very long. I felt that the Reconstruction policy, so far as it related to my race, was in a large measure on a false foundation, was artificial and forced. In many cases it seemed to me that the ignorance of my race was being used as a tool with which to help white men into office, and that there was an element in the North which wanted to punish the Southern white men by forcing the Negro into positions over the heads of the Southern whites. I felt that the Negro would be the one to suffer for this in the end. Besides, the general political agitation drew the attention of our people away from the more fundamental matters of perfecting themselves in the industries at their doors and in securing property. "
James Henley Thornwell:
"The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and slaveholders, they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground, Christianity and Atheism the Combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake."
if there had been no slavery, there would have been considerably less agitation in teh north, and therefore less pressure on the south to seccede. with no secession, no civil war.
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