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To: GCC Catholic
I do have a dog in this fight. I have an ancestor who fought for The Army of The Potomac. All due respect friend but the matter is simple. The South launched a violent war of secession to preserve an economy based on the use of slave labor. They enshrined that fact in their Constitution. It's popular to say slavery was dying out before the war began. If that was the case then why did the South go to war over it? And here's a question for you:If the South had won the war would they have freed the slaves?
105 posted on 11/20/2018 5:37:51 PM PST by jmacusa (Made it Ma, top of the world!'')
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To: jmacusa
So you said:

I do have a dog in this fight. I have an ancestor who fought for The Army of The Potomac. All due respect friend but the matter is simple. The South launched a violent war of secession to preserve an economy based on the use of slave labor. They enshrined that fact in their Constitution. It's popular to say slavery was dying out before the war began. If that was the case then why did the South go to war over it? And here's a question for you:If the South had won the war would they have freed the slaves?

And also:

As I stated The Founders won their war against the English Crown. The South lost the war they started.The bought only death and destruction on themselves and some 700,000 Americans.

So was the CSA evil because they started a war to preserve slavery or because they started a war and lost?

I propose the second line of reasoning is nonsensical—Would the Confederate cause have become just if 700k died and they emerged victorious? Also, if the blame lies on Lee and Davis, why not also on Lincoln, who could have opted to let the CSA go its own way and spared bloodshed entirely? Would the morality of the American Revolution be different if we had lost?—in fact, from a moral standpoint that willful separation is probably worse because we separated ourselves from an anointed monarch instead of a mutually agreed-upon Republic (unless one were to contend that Charles Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) was the real divine-right monarch of England... but that’s an entire other rabbit hole).

So it really comes down to the CSA’s explicit legal protection of slavery (and some other issues if you know your history... but we’ll just say it’s slavery). Would they have abolished it eventually had ?—I would say yes, considering that the rest of the hemisphere was also by the 1880s. Why did the South go to war over it?—the economy simply wasn’t ready for such a drastic shift (make $15/hr wages mandatory effective now, and you’ll see we can’t weather such a shift today either—but that one was an order of magnitude larger).

Were they right to do it? Probably not (and this would be true even if they won). However, they felt their cause of self-determination to be just—and this was recognized by the magnanimity of Lincoln, when he welcomed them back as fellow Americans, humbled but without need to be further humiliated.

Perhaps if Lincoln’s magnanimity had been fostered better in Reconstruction and beyond, maybe we could have prevented an additional 90 years of virtual African-American enslavement in the Jim Crow era and by the modern Democrat Party.

Perhaps you would do well to find some of that magnanimity that allows us to look at every person, slave or free, who lived and died under the Stars and Stripes or the Stars and Bars to be seen as what they really are: a fellow American.

115 posted on 11/20/2018 8:32:31 PM PST by GCC Catholic (Trump doesn't suffer fools, but fools will suffer Trump. Make America Great Again!)
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To: jmacusa
I do have a dog in this fight. I have an ancestor who fought for The Army of The Potomac.

And as a result of your need to defend the conduct of your ancestor, you cannot speak honestly about what really happened. Your following sentence is an example of this.

The South launched a violent war of secession to preserve an economy based on the use of slave labor.

Lincoln launched a war of conquest to preserve a Union based on legalized slavery. Most of his government was funded by legalized slavery, and he supported an amendment to further strengthen legalized slavery.

So when you accuse the South of supporting slavery, you are deliberately lying about Lincoln and his government's official support for slavery and preserving the slave states as part of the Union.

You distort the truth, because the actual truth is far more ugly for your side. You don't want to talk about legal union slavery, because you can't attack the people who wanted independence from the control of Washington DC/New York power cartel, when your side is just as guilty on the issue of slavery.

The United States had "four score and seven years" of legal slavery, plus another extra six months of legal slavery in the Union after the Confederacy was defeated. The Constitution of the United States explicitly protected the institution of slavery through article IV, section 2, and at the time the constitution was written, the vast majority of all states were slave states.


149 posted on 11/21/2018 6:50:27 AM PST by DiogenesLamp ("of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty.")
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