Posted on 10/03/2015 1:28:14 PM PDT by Kaslin
Although the American Revolution resulted in independence for the United States and World War II made it an international power, the American Civil War was arguably the most important war in American history. It truly was an American watershed.
In order to appreciate that war’s significance, it must be understood what the Civil War was about. Contrary to all-too-popular opinion, the Civil War was not about states’ rights. Instead it was all about slavery and white supremacy. As shown in my just-released book, The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won, there is compelling evidence that secession and the Confederacy were the result of Southerners’ desire to preserve slavery and white supremacy – not to promote states’ rights.
The evidence of the seceders’ motivations is clear-cut and convincing. Only slave states seceded, and the greater the percentage of slaves and the percentage of slave-owning families the more likely a slave state was to secede. Those states complained that the Federal Government was doing not too much but too little – Southerners wanted the central government to more aggressively enforce slavery, especially to return runaway slaves. They also were upset that other states were passing “liberty laws” to make it more difficult to retrieve runaways. The issue was not who had the power to do what but instead whether their powers were being used to promote slavery. Far from respecting individual states’ rights, they wanted to compel the Federal and other state governments to enforce slaveholders’ rights and preserve slavery.
The strongest evidence of seceders’ motivations is the language they used in their own secession documents. What could be more telling? Six of the seven early seceding states provided clear statements of their reasons for seceding. Their reasons included the election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed extension of slavery into territories; the runaway slave issue; the threat to slavery’s existence with the possible loss of four to six billion dollars in slave property (the largest component of Southern wealth); the perceived end of white supremacy and the resultant political and social equality of blacks and whites, and desperate warnings of the effect all this change would have on Southern Womanhood.
South Carolina’s declaration of the reasons for secession said, “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution [runaway slave return provision].”
As he called for a secession convention, Mississippi’s governor declared, “The existence or the abolition of African slavery in the Southern States is now up for a final settlement.” Citing only slavery-protection reasons, that state’s legislature convened a secession convention. The latter’s declaration of the causes of secession got right to the point in its opening line: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world.”
Not only did their own secession resolutions reveal slavery and white supremacy as their causation, but the seven states who seceded even before Lincoln’s inauguration immediately began an outreach campaign to other slave states. Their correspondence and speeches relied only on slavery-related issues to encourage other slave states’ secession. They only lobbied slave states.
Much other evidence demonstrates that slavery and white supremacy preservation were the causes of secession and even trumped possible Confederate victory in the war. All efforts to avoid war by compromise focused only on slavery issues. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said slavery was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy and Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers had erred in stating that all men were created equal.
Even though it had a tremendous manpower shortage, the Confederacy officially rejected the use of slaves as soldiers (as inconsistent with its white supremacy views) and rejected one-on-one prisoner exchanges for captured black Union soldiers. Just as American colonists needed European intervention to win the Revolutionary War, the Confederates were desperate for British and French intervention; however, they declined to end slavery in order to achieve involvement by the slavery-hating Europeans.
Union victory ended slavery and kept America from being an international pariah. It also resulted in passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments; these provided the legal basis for ending legal segregation and providing blacks with voting and other civil rights.
Despite the compelling evidence of slavery’s and white supremacy’s roles in fomenting secession, the Confederacy, and the Civil War, too many contemporary Americans cling to the myth that somehow states’ rights were at the root of the Civil War. We need to accept the reality of the racial underpinnings of that critical war in order to contemplate, confront, and overcome the continuing racial tensions in America.
the wrong side lost in 1865
Because we’re fittin’ to have another one?
read=reading
fittin’ to!
Here we go again.
Townhall reads like Daily Kos and Huffpost.
, the Civil War was not about states’ rights......stopped read there.
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Me too.
Had the South won then what would the Confederacy be like in your opinion?
To coin a yankee term,for people who harp on the narrow aspect of when they both owned (and sold) slaves, they can pound salt. Wars are fought over money, as was this one!
Sorry, but the South seceded because of slavery. As the article states , that truth was right in the secession documents. States Rights malarkey is revisionist nonsense.
I think the Confederacy would ended up similar to Canada today.
“Because we’re fittin’ to have another one?”
_________________________________________________
I was thinking the same thing!
"Read the book I just wrote which proves that what I think is correct, because it's in that book I just wrote. "
Of course he/she/it left out this important piece of evidence. The Union was going to keep slavery.
So how does he/she/it figure that the Union was fighting a war to end slavery?
“Instead it was all about slavery and white supremacy.”
Baloney. Ask the man who waged the war, Lincoln himself.
http://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation
His views became clear during an 1858 series of debates with his opponent in the Illinois race for U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas, who had accused him of supporting “negro equality.” In their fourth debate, at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, Lincoln made his position clear. “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he began, going on to say that he opposed blacks having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites.
I did too. That's a tell for someone who has decided before the fact that they want to believe the stuff they have been taught all their lives.
Not this stuff again.
We’re going to dig this bag of bones out of the ground again?
We are on the precipice of a nuclear war with Russia, and we are going to drag this up again?
Employment is in the toilet, but we’re going to fight this again?
Have at it, folks. The Democrats can’t wait.
The South had a right to secede for any D@mned reason they please, but it was the North that prosecuted the war.
As the article states , that truth was right in the secession documents. States Rights malarkey is revisionist nonsense.
Why was the North Fighting? Were they fighting to free the slaves? Tell me why the North was fighting. Why did the North send a 35,000 man invasion force into the South? Was it to free slaves?
If you say no, then the 22 Union states were not fighting over slavery, therefore the war was not being fought over slavery.
What percentage of the people in the south were slave owners? - About 1.4%
Who was the first slave owner in America? - An Angolan black man who adopted the European name of Anthony Johnson
Did any blacks own black slaves? Too many to count
In 1830, a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; 8 of them owned 30 or more.
In New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation.
Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana, with over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000.
In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owned 10 or more.
In North Carolina 69 free Negroes were slave owners.
In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the US census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.
The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves.
Even if all slaveholders had been white (and they weren’t), that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).
These statistics show that about 28 percent of free blacks owned slaves — as opposed to less than 4.8 percent of southern whites, and dramatically more than the 1.4 percent of all white Americans who owned slaves.
http://newobserveronline.com/hidden-facts-about-slavery-in-america/
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