Al Mccray is a Tampa businessman and managing editor of TampaNewsAndTalk.com.
Al Mccray is a Tampa businessman and managing editor of TampaNewsAndTalk.com.
Sweet. I’ll go grab the popcorn!
IMHO slavery was a symptom, secession was the disease. at the onset of hostilities, Lincoln’s priority was saving the union.
Americans don’t want to believe that 100s of thousands of Americans died over tariffs.
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html#South%20Carolina
Game, Set, and Match.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south." Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1858, Address to the Republican Convention
Question: Would the South have seceded if they weren’t afraid that Lincoln would free the slaves, something that he admitted that he did not have the Constitutional authority to do?
I'll take a whack at it.
Why didn't President Lincoln issue a proclamation on day one of his presidency to free the slaves?
Because the Constitution gave him no power to do so, and because he thought southern Unionists would still prevail in the Upper South and Border states?
Why did he wait so many years later to issue his proclamation?
Lincoln took office March 1861. He issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. Since when is 18 months "so many years?"
Why was slavery still legal in the Northern states?
Because of frantic resistance by border state slaveowners and the fact that it takes time to get such legislation through? Despite this, all "northern," actually southern Unionist, states other than KY freed their slaves by state action before the end of the war.
Before 1864, how many elected members of the imperialist Yankee Congress introduced legislation to outlaw slavery anywhere in America?
August, 1861: Congress frees slaves being used in the Confederate war effort.
Slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia in April 1862. The same month, at Lincoln's request, Congress pledges financial aid to any state that undertakes gradual emancipation.
June, 1862: Congress abolishes slavery in the territories.
July, 1862: Congress frees the slaves of persons engaged in rebellion. Militia Act frees slaves who join the Union forces (and their families).
December, 1863 a bill for an amendment freeing all slaves was introduced.
The Army of the Potomac invaded the South to capture, control and plunder the prosperity of Southern economic resources and its industries.
I'm not sure what "prosperity" this guy is talking about. By any objective measure, the South was predominantly agrarian and substantially poorer than the North in the years leading up to the Civil War. In fact, when Frederick Douglass escaped from the South and made his way to Massachusetts, one of the eye-opening revelations he had was that lower-class black laborers in the town of New Bedford had a higher standard of living than the owner of the Maryland plantation where Douglass had lived and worked as a slave.
I'm still not exactly sure how fighting over a tariff regime, for example, would somehow mitigate the Southern states' culpability for the morally atrocious institution of slavery.
South Carolina (and others, of course) were most certainly correct that federal interference in the matter of fugitive slaves was indeed an encroachment on the states' rights, and a clear overstepping of constitutional authority. But the issue of slavery is inseparable from the rights argument.
For those of us descended from Confederates or their sympathizers, there is no need to be reflexively defensive on the matter. It was what it was.
Oh goody. I’m reading Lincoln Unmasked.
Oh goody. I’m reading Lincoln Unmasked.
“African kings were running a booming enterprise of selling their own people into slavery. It was also customary that defeated people became slaves. “
I think if they won’t sold into slavery, they were killed. Anybody know if this true?
Leonard Pitts Jr. another dunderhead who doesn’t know history...
Abraham Lincoln can’t be blamed for the Civil War because the southern states had already succeeded before he had been inagurated.
ping
I am an historian to the extent that I teach American History at the college level and as with all discussion of the war’s causes and purposes, there remains the important conjecture that it likely would have not occurred when it did had a candidate other than Lincoln prevailed in the election of 1860. He was the only candidate (among many) in that contest that viewed slavery in a moral (rather than political) context.
Maybe it’s just that democrats don’t take well to coming out on the short end of the voting process so they decided to flee.