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
“And as a result, to this day,,, if we assert states rights in VERY legitimate situations, such as health care, we are instantly cast as plantation owners.”
To eb fair, they call us plantation owners pretty much whenever we advocate anything.
The geographic shape of the eastern seaboard of the U.S. also gave the North an advantage over the South. Cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston were closer to Europe than their Southern counterparts (Savannah and Charleston, for example), which made them more attractive to any industry involved in international trade.
Well, they weren't, but they thought they were.
Almost all of the industries protected by protective tariffs were located in northern states. Not because southerners were prevented from starting such industries, but because they chose not to.
Only the owners and workers of the protected industries actually benefited directly, of course, with all other northerners paying the higher prices created just as southerners did. But southerners still resented the fact there was a net drain of money from north to south for this reason.
Let's talk about over-taxation for a moment. Total federal budget in 1860 = $60M.
That's <$2 per capita for the whole country, about $6 per capita if the entire amount had fallen on southerners, or about $10 if only white southerners had paid for the whole deal.
That's a remarkably low level of taxation by any standard.
I find it extremely odd that the notion that southerners went to war in order to drop their per capita contribution to the federal budget from $2 to perhaps $1.50 extremely odd. Even stranger is the idea that this was somehow a morally justified cause for war.
Slavery was a symptom of the agrarian economy in the South.
The agrarian Southern economy relied on shipping cotton to mills in the UK and France, and using the proceeds to purchase manufactured goods for transport back.
The North wanted to capture this traffic for itself. By substantially increasing tariffs on manufactured goods being shipped in, they hoped to force the South to divert this traffic to the North.
This backfired horribly when the South seceded. The South controlled the mouth of the Mississippi, which meant that it would control all traffic west of the Mississippi. With lower tariffs (10%) the North faced a vision of empty harbors and grass growing in the streets of New York and Boston.
Of course, it also hurt that the Federal Government raised most of its revenues from the South and was looking at bankruptcy...
That is a good way to put it. They tried to make 'state's rights' trump individual rights.
Defeating slavery by enslaving others. Duh.
Interesting link. Every single declaration of secession by the Confederate States listed Slavery as a main or contributing reason.
“the South violated no laws at the time warranting a war”
Firing on Ft. Sumter was cassus belli, even if there wasn’t a law against it, though there probably was. Anyway, wars are rarely fought over the law, as you well know.
States like VA also explicitly wrote into their Constitutional ratifications their reservation of the right to break from the union upon abuses. I don’t think cherry picking Articles without the context of the discussions and assurances leading to ratification helps the discussion.
Let’s put the outcome of the first Civil War in today’s terms. Suppose that the 11 Western States chose tomorrow to secede from the Union and it was offered to the President that the only likely solution to keep that from happening was a four year war that would end with the accumulated deaths of 10 million Americans(the equivalent number in proportion to our current population). If the President chose that option he would be brought up on war crimes and hung, but Lincoln’s decision, and his subsequent assassination no doubt, got him a permanent station on Mt. Rushmore. If he had paid attention to history he would have recognized that the South was doing exactly what the colonies had done... Four square and seven years previous.
“2. The process and organization of the settlement of the West.”
Why was that an issue? Oh yeah, because the South wanted to expand slavery.
“The nature and regulatory structure of commerce in the United States over long distances between multiple states and territories — mainly the railroads across the West and shipping along the Mississippi River system.”
Foreign trade moreso than that. The “internal improvements” argument was at a stand still prior to the war. While Republicans carried on the Whigs’ Hamiltonian preference for federal direction of the national economy, they didn’t make headway on the issue until after the war started. And if you want to argue they started the war just so they could build railroads, you, sir, are wrong.
Being a “slave state” was about more than just slavery. It was also about how your delegation to Congress would vote, on, say, crippling tariffs, to prevent the South from doing business with the UK and France instead of with the North.
Lincoln oversaw the deaths of a half million Americans to prevent the very thing that the colonies had been lauded for only four score and seven years previous. His prize? A permanent place among the pantheon of greats on Mt. Rushmore. Lincoln was an abysmal failure as a Pres. and as a human being. His answer should have been: I hate slavery(he didn’t) and I will allow our brothers of the South to keep their sovereignty and evil practice, and suffer their punishment from our just God alone.
Now that's funny. The US had no large standing army till after WWII. In 1939 the US Army was 175,000 men, something like 25th in the world and smaller than Bulgaria's, if I remember aright. Similarly, the postwar US Navy was a joke until the "New Navy" started being built in 1882, and didn't become "large" for quite some time thereafter.
You can blame US militarism, if you believe in such, on a number of factors, but not realistically on the civil war, after which the Army and Navy were both drawn down rapidly.
Habeas Corpus proved itself expendable in times of trouble.
As the Constitution provides. "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
“I defy anyone to tell me how candidate Abraham Lincoln proposed to change the balance of power between the several states and the federal government. I haven’t seen it.”
He didn’t. After John Brown, all Southerners could picture when they heard the word “Republican” were hoards of firebreathing abolitionists arming negroes, burning mansions, and raping their wives. They were a bit paranoid, to put it mildly. The idea that Lincoln was secretly planning to overturn the Constitution, ignore all opposition, and come for their slaves seemed perfectly rational.
“Abraham Lincoln can’t be blamed for the Civil War because the southern states had already succeeded before he had been inagurated.”
Inaugurated, yes, but not elected.
Say what? You got a reference for that remarkable "fact?"
Mississippi was explicit about it:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
But it's amazing, the lengths to which some people will go to ignore what actually happened, in service of what they merely wish had happened.
“The North didn’t rely on slavery to the same extent as the South mainly because they simple didn’t need slavery. Due to the massive wave of immigration in the mid-1800s — mostly to Northern cities — the North had a plentiful source of cheap workers who weren’t much better off than slaves.”
It didn’t take until the 1830s, when immigration really took off, for slavery to decline in the North. It never, ever really took hold, at least like it did in the South, actually. Which is not to say it didn’t exist, just that it wasn’t as fundamental.
Whether this was because of climate, culture, or what have you doesn’t matter for the present conversation. You’re right that it was due to factors beyond the moral goodness of Northerners. They but for the grace of God went them. I’m, just saying it had nothing to do with Micks and Dutchies.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.