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.
Then why don’t you start with the cause of the war: the democrat southern slavocracy having a temper tantrum over the loss of an election?
“Correlation is not causation.”
Causation is correlation. The secessionists overwhelmingly cited the maintenance of the existing slavery and the denial of slavery in the new territories and states was the principal reason for secession of the Southern states. Tariffs were seldom cited as a cause for secession and then only as a relatively minor reason secondary to the right of slavery.
“Southern States were also supplying 70% of the revenue to the Federal government because the only tariffs that could get through a Senate heavily stacked with tiny northeastern States wanted it that way. The more a State depended upon agriculture, the more they depended upon slavery and the worse disparity was in taxation. It deprived the South of capital for industrial investment and protected northeastern industrial production.”
All of which is yet another fraud and myth. A tariff is a tax paid to the U.S. Government in the form of customs duties on foreign imported goods by foreign exporters and/or domestic importers. Until the adoption of personal income taxes during the Civil War and after 1913, the Federal Government had to rely almost entirely upon tariffs on foreign imported goods to finance all of the Federal Government, including the armed forces responsible for the defenses of the Republic. Southern agricultural goods were not subject to U.S. tariffs, because they were exports and not foreign imports. The Southern states successfully and steadily reduced the tariff rates in the decades preceding the secessions, until they were only 15 percent when the secessions began. Higher tariff rates only became possible at all when the Southern Democrats left the Congress as their states attempted to secede from the United States. The insurrectionist Confederate States of America then proceeded to increase the tariff burdens by making the interstate trade previously free of tariffs subject to the new Confederate Government tariffs.
The only disparity in taxation harmed the Northern industries by forcing them to be economically competitive to the English industries that kept English labor and competing American industrial labor in abject poverty. The tariffs on imported goods deprived the South of no more industrial capital than it did the industry of the North, because the tariff rates were the same for both. If anything, the low tariffs demanded and won by the Southern Democrats deprived industries of the Southern states the protectionist tariffs needed to keep cheap foreign manufactured goods from making Southern manufactured goods too expensive to justify investments.
So, this whole narrative that the tariffs were the cause of the Civil War is false and a fraud. The tariffs were dictated for decades and into the Civil War by the Southern Democrats and were the lowest in U.S. history until the adoption of Federal income taxes in the 20th Century.
The cause of the Civil War was the decision by the secessionists to usurp their legitimately elected governments with unconstitutional and non-representative assemblies, their engagement in hostilities and warfare upon the Federal Government for a period of months before the Federal Government acted to suppress the armed insurrection as mandated by the U.S. Constitution and a number of state constitutions, and their determination to conquer the states and territories of the United States, Cuba, Mexico, and various Latin American states to assemble a Confederate States empire founded upon slavery.
The secessionist hostilities and warfare against the United States began and was sustained for a period of months across many states and territories of the United States before President Lincoln was inaugurated and Fort Sumter was subsequently attacked by the Confederacy in April 1961. Therefore the secessionists began the armed insurrection and warfare against the United States while President Buchanan and not President Lincoln.
“I love my country.”
Evidently you do not lover your country at all; because you deny the Constitution that defines this country, you demonstrate contempt for the moral and legal principles mandated by the Constitution, and you give your enthusiastic allegiance to a failed insurrectionist government founded upon a profoundly racist and grossly inhumane form of slavery and which harbored pretensions of extending that peculiar form of the institution of slavery as an ascendant empire far beyond its existing borders in the United States and into Latin America. Far from loving your country, your words reveal a deep and abiding hate for your country and most of the major principles for which it is founded upon in its Constitution.
“I just want the record set straight about the cause of the war and the adoration of the racist, mass murdering war criminal Abraham Lincoln rightly stopped.”
The only thing you have set straight is how you have no respect for the truth nor the Christian commandment not to bear false witness, otherwise you would acknowledge your adoration of a Confederate insurrection that started the civil war which claimed all of those many lives before Abraham Lincoln was ever inaugurated as the president of the United States of America. You are being dishonest with yourself and with us when you deny the lives lost in the Civil War were lost because the Confederate secessionists knowingly and very deliberately desired and initiated the war in the period before November 1960 to their attack upon the U.S. Army in Fort Sumter. It is also reprehensible how you endorse and celebrate the terrorist assassination of Abraham Lincoln while falsely defaming the man.
Far from loving your country, your above words deny, defy, and revile your country.
What an asshole I bet he posts here
Why’d you pimp him?
What this is is how conservatives like he and Beck and Hannity and to a degree Levin parse against being called bigots
They pivot the incoming towards the old South d
They simply are not honest about the whole evolution from start to finish
They mold it to fit their worldview to deflect being called racist by the media for bring right leaning
Funny considering Beck Hannity and Levins ancestry weren’t even stateside in the Civil War
This author like them simply ignores racism and white supremacy outside the South
It’s a lie basically but it sells to the GOPe and our stupid population
Very few in public stand up to it
White southerners are the only reliable social conservative bloc in this country for many election cycles because we are the most Literalist Christian ...and the most ethnically homogenous and other factors
See who voted for Goldwater while Yankee GOP disowned him
See who voted for the 1965 Immigration Act
Let’s say it’s 1861
Your state is 55% black
Most of whom are illiterate
And in some counties like today still.....they were 80-90%
Would you have just freed them and given them the majority votes to be exploited by Yankees just like today but with a different party?
And hoped for the best?
Knowing what you did about how some behaved towards one another and when on a Nate Turner or Haitian rampage?
Would you risk that for your family?
The south has been stuck with a huge mostly dysfunctional black population since Mr Whitney.....many migrated north for work two generations post Civil War...where today anyone can judge how that turned out in any city in America with a large black population
Now we’ve been living a reverse migration for 30 years blacks returning South to the so called white racist fold
With rare exception they control political power in every major southern city and anyone with a brain can figure it out
This junk like this guy writes is simple poppycock meant to lay blame over an issue no one and I mean no one has the balls to tackle honestly
I travel the country extensively.....a huge white trash sub class is the real issue frankly everywhere in the US
But most folks have zero inkling of living in a large black population enviro and what that means today
But that has never stopped Yankees from preaching about it from their ignorant persoective
The same sort of ignorance in the way we deal with Islam and immigration btw
I hear you.
Yeah, please show me the deed or legal transfer that ceded to the federal government -- in perpetuity -- the land fill that became Ft. Sumter.
Committee on Federal Relations
In the House of Representatives, December 31st, 1836"The Committee on Federal relations, to which was referred the Governor's message, relating to the site of Fort Sumter, in the harbour of Charleston, and the report of the Committee on Federal Relations from the Senate on the same subject, beg leave to Report by Resolution:
"Resolved, That this state do cede to the United States, all the right, title and claim of South Carolina to the site of Fort Sumter and the requisite quantity of adjacent territory, Provided, That all processes, civil and criminal issued under the authority of this State, or any officer thereof, shall and may be served and executed upon the same, and any person there being who may be implicated by law; and that the said land, site and structures enumerated, shall be forever exempt from liability to pay any tax to this state.
"Also resolved: That the State shall extinguish the claim, if any valid claim there be, of any individuals under the authority of this State, to the land hereby ceded.
"Also resolved, That the Attorney-General be instructed to investigate the claims of Wm. Laval and others to the site of Fort Sumter, and adjacent land contiguous thereto; and if he shall be of the opinion that these parties have a legal title to the said land, that Generals Hamilton and Hayne and James L. Pringle, Thomas Bennett and Ker. Boyce, Esquires, be appointed Commissioners on behalf of the State, to appraise the value thereof. If the Attorney-General should be of the opinion that the said title is not legal and valid, that he proceed by seire facius of other proper legal proceedings to have the same avoided; and that the Attorney-General and the said Commissioners report to the Legislature at its next session.
"Resolved, That this House to agree. Ordered that it be sent to the Senate for concurrence. By order of the House:
"T. W. Glover, C. H. R."
"In Senate, December 21st, 1836"Resolved, that the Senate do concur. Ordered that it be returned to the House of Representatives, By order:
Jacob Warly, C. S.
This means that it wasn't South Carolina's to fool with. Pickens knew it (just like you do) but relied on a feckless Buchanan to steal what clearly didn't belong to him.
Anderson was charged with defending several garrisons, including Sumter. It was his responsibility. He was there by order. He didn't "seize anything because the fortification was in his charge. His orders came from Buell on Dec. 11, 1860:
... you are to hold possession of the forts in this harbor, and if attacked you are to defend yourself to the last extremity. The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts, but an attack on or attempt to take possession of any one of them will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you may deem most proper to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.
So, as you can readily understand, the Union troops that occupied Sumter were under orders to do so, and therefore had a perfect "preeminent right" or "duty" to be there. The rebels did not.
sit on it and spin
” Funny considering Beck Hannity and Levins ancestry weren’t even stateside in the Civil War “
Mine were , and long before that . They fought the British in the Carolinas and all the way up into Virginia .They watch Cornwallis stack arms .... We earned the rights that Lincoln stripped away . We did not deserve to be invaded by regiments of foreigners . Who burned our houses , stole our fences , stole our property , killed and slaughtered our livestock , dishonored our women , scared our kids , etc.
Now days , Obama is about to do the same thing over again , except this time the resistance is far less organized . I pity the opposition . It will be a rough row to hoe .
Too funny! Thousands of troops? Such hyperbole! You do know, I assume, that there were more federal troops -- which includes federal naval assets -- in the vicinity of Ft. Sumter than CSA troops, don't you? And I'm talking about formal military troops, not civilians with their dander up.
Whatever.
Again, show me the deed or legal transfer that ceded to the federal government — in perpetuity — the land fill that became Ft. Sumter. I’m not talking about a federal takeover of any land or territory of a sovereign state, I’m talking about that sovereign state agreeing to any transfer.
According to your logic, the majority in Congress in 1860 — which was Northern — could just pass a resolution declaring that the Southern states were to be used as a compost pile for the refuse of the Northern states, and the Southern states could not say anything about it. Have you ever heard of the 9th and 10th Amendments?
Very educational. Always love reading specific historical quotes. Thanks for those. But your point is entirely irrelevant. Those orders were issued in 1860. It wasn't until 1861 that the Confederacy was created. Once it was, that was no longer Federal territory. Union troops abandoned every other fort and post in the South in 1861. Only Ft Sumter remained garrisoned. Only Ft Sumter's soldiers refused the repeated requests to leave this now-foreign territory... while located hundreds of miles from the rest of the Union. The Confederacy gave them MONTHS to leave. They refused. When you take new territory, and armed troops belonging to the former owners refuse to leave, even at threat of violence, then you eventually have to back up that threat.
But nice try at spin there.
Absolutely, categorically untrue.
I’m saving that
For NeoCon pleasures here
Yep
And non whites are the pawns yet again
We both are so excited ‘cause we’re reunited, hey, hey
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