Posted on 10/02/2021 2:19:06 AM PDT by knighthawk
From Georgia
“The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects. Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal deficiency. The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slave-holding States. Wielding these great States it held great power and influence, and its demands were in full proportion to its power. The manufacturers and miners wisely based their demands upon special facts and reasons rather than upon general principles, and thereby mollified much of the opposition of the opposing interest. They pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.
But when these reasons ceased they were no less clamorous for Government protection, but their clamors were less heeded-- the country had put the principle of protection upon trial and condemned it. After having enjoyed protection to the extent of from 15 to 200 per cent. upon their entire business for above thirty years, the act of 1846 was passed. It avoided sudden change, but the principle was settled, and free trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures was the verdict of the American people. The South and the Northwestern States sustained this policy. There was but small hope of its reversal; upon the direct issue, none at all.
All these classes saw this and felt it and cast about for new allies. The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support, but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon……”
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"The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism." Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election
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"They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty to seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests. These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They, the North, are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it. These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union." The New Orleans Daily Crescent 21 January 1861
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On November 19, 1860 Senator Robert Toombs gave a speech to the Georgia convention in which he denounced the "infamous Morrill bill." The tariff legislation, he argued, was the product of a coalition between abolitionists and protectionists in which "the free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists." Toombs described this coalition as "the robber and the incendiary... united in joint raid against the South."
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"Before... the revolution [the South] was the seat of wealth, as well as hospitality....Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in regions north of the Potomac: and this in the face of the fact, that the South, in four staples alone, has exported produce, since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? ... Under Federal legislation, the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue.....Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction - it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this." ----Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton
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[To a Northern Congressman] "You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue laws, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange, which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of Northern Capitalist. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and our institutions." Rep. John H. Reagan of Texas
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"Northerners are the fount of most troubles in the new Union. Connecticut and Massachusetts EXHAUST OUR STRENGTH AND SUBSTANCE and its inhabitants are marked by such a perversity of character they have divided themselves from the rest of America - Thomas Jefferson in an 1820 letter
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"Neither “love for the African” [witness the Northern laws against him], nor revulsion from “property in persons” [“No, you imported Africans and sold them as chattels in the slave markets”] motivated the present day agitators,"…... “No sir….the mask is off, the purpose is avowed…It is a struggle for political power." Jefferson Davis 1848
The Republican party wasn't formed until 1856.
So?
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“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate
Since you insist on flooding FR with selective text that doesn't show the whole context, I must include it in my reply.
That's exactly what you've been doing with the same handful of quotes and exactly how I've responded to you - but with vastly more quotes from more sources.
It went on to say blah blah blah
Yes, Georgia's declaration did talk about slavery. The Northern states' violation of the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution WAS actually unconstitutional and provided Georgia with a perfectly valid legal argument as to why they were the aggrieved party. The fact that they went on at such length about their economic exploitation by the Northern states which was NOT unconstitutional shows where their real concerns lay. Remember they were offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment and turned it down. It was independence they wanted in order to not be taxed at an exorbitant rate to benefit others - the very reason the founding fathers seceded from the British empire a couple generations earlier.
On November 19, 1860 Senator Robert Toombs gave a speech to the Georgia convention in which he denounced the "infamous Morrill bill." The tariff legislation, he argued, was the product of a coalition between abolitionists and protectionists in which "the free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists." Toombs described this coalition as "the robber and the incendiary... united in joint raid against the South." Anti-tariff sentiments also appeared in Georgia's Secession Declaration of January 29, 1861:
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The conqueror's policy is to divide the conquered into factions and stir up animosity among them...It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties." -General Patrick Cleburne
Finally South Carolina Senator/Congressman Robert Barnwell Rhett aka "the Father of Secession" wrote the Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States, boohooing about how the South was expected to pay taxes to the federal government.
No, if you had actually read what he wrote it was that the Southern states were being exploited by the Northern states and taxed for the benefit of the Northern states and not their own....that their economic growth was being stunted in favor of Northern economic growth - and the North wasn't even generating much by way of exports. They were simply leeching off of the Southern states. This is exactly what the Founding Fathers had seceded from the British Empire for.
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"The people of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests. Long and angry controversies grew out of these attempts, often successful, to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. And the danger of disruption arising from this cause was enhanced by the fact that the Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control." Jefferson Davis Address to the Confederate Congress April 29, 1861
A woman can only have so many children in any given time period. It's not like the South had the technology to create an octomom in the 1860s.
There were a lot of farmers around back then. They knew all about how to breed livestock. Is that what they did? No. Generally, Blacks got married. Females were not tied down waiting to be impregnated by designated studs in order to sell the offspring for profit. That's a breeding program. That's how livestock are handled. It wasn't like that at all.
Which is exactly what the slave holding states did, so thanks for admitting I'm right.,/p>
Except that its not. You're welcome for showing once again that you were wrong.
What difference does it make where they got it from? Their constitution was brand new, so they could have written it without protections for slavery if they had intended to.
They mostly carried over what they inherited - just as the Founding Fathers did when they wrote the Constitution. They did not as you claimed design the Confederate Constitution from the ground up to protect slavery. That was just more of your typical BS. They simply carried over most of the constitution they inherited.
I'll grant they were being patriotic by choosing to fight for the Union, but that doesn't prove they weren't fighting for abolition.
Many of them made it abundantly clear from the start that they were not fighting for abolition. The greatest desertion crisis in the Union army was after the EP precisely because many said this had converted the cause from nationalism to one of abolitionism which they did not support.
Poor comparison. The loyalists were already in what would become the US and didn't have to leave their homeland to fight for the crown, but the Southerners who left to fight for the North did.,/p>
Hardly. Its an apt comparison. The Loyalists fought for the existing order. So did those Southerners who headed north. That hardly "proves" they were fighting for abolitionism which was not supported by very many at all North or South prior to the war.
I never called you a Nazi, although I'm beginning to wonder. My point was the allied bombers, like John Brown, were called terrorists, criminals, or something similar, but it was the side doing the complaining that was committing the real evil. Of course you can't answer that so you hide behind your Nazi excuse.
I didn't say you called me a Nazi. I said you made numerous fatuous claims trying to compare the Confederacy to the Nazis. They were not remotely comparable. There is zero doubt John Brown set out to murder and did in fact murder innocent people. He was by any definition a terrorist...he wanted to use terror to effect political change. Allied bombers were not comparable. That was a standard practice in war at the time. The Axis side had indiscriminately bombed population centers first. And the bombing of civilian population centers did have military objectives - to destroy industrial capacity. Oh, and finally they were uniformed soldiers at war following the orders of their officers. John Brown was a terrorist who set out to murder at a time of peace. Pitiful attempt at analogy.
Once again, you accuse me of calling you a Nazi because you can't answer my real point, which is that the bad guys always deny what they're doing. In this case we have JD denying secession was about preserving the right to slave labor, which was similar to Hitler claiming he didn't want war.
Once again, I did not say you called me a Nazi. You tried to compare the Confederacy to the Nazis....and President Davis to Hitler. The bad guys always deny what they're doing....like Lincoln starting an unconstitutional war for money and empire?
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They did not secede over slavery. When offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment, they turned down that offer. The Upper South did not even choose to secede until Lincoln chose to start an unconstitutional war of aggression for money and empire.
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if you're intelligent enough to read the statements above from their own documents, then I have done you the favor of saving you from having to post any more PC Revisionist propaganda. You're welcome.
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb,.....Repeat snipped.
Davis insisted "the Confederates were not battling for slavery" and that "slavery had never been the key issue" (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 524).
That is false. They turned down nothing. It was never ratified even though the states had the time to do it if they had intended to.
Nope! They turned down Lincoln's offer of slavery forever by express constitutional amendment.
Yes, we know there were accounts of blacks serving in the Confederacy's military, although most were just serving the Confederacy as ordered by their masters. That's a big difference from the 100,000 plus who escaped from the Confederacy and volunteered to serve in the Union's military.
"As ordered by their masters". Hardly. These were thousands and thousands of armed men. They obviously were not serving against their will. Given that they had arms and in some cases horses, they could easily have deserted or gone over to the other side. Yet they fought for the CSA.
I know you'll say "but Frederick Douglas". Yes, he expressed his disgust with blacks who would serve in the Confederacy's military in the quote you posted.
Even he admitted there were plenty of Black Confederates fighting in the Confederate army.
And what did the Confederacy they were fighting for think of them? Let's ask them directly....repeats snipped
Well gosh....Free Blacks served in the Confederate Army. Slaves were promised emancipation for themselves and their families for their service in the Confederate Army and the Confederate government empowered their ambassador to agree to a treaty that would have abolished slavery. Seems that based on the undeniable facts, were perfectly willing to get rid of slavery to gain their independence.
I know you're going to come back with more spam of the Southern leaders saying "but we didn't mean any of this", so I hope FR has invested in more disk space.,/p>
It was simple enough just to cite the facts - they refute your PC Revisionist claims.
I identify with the Republicans who freed the slaves. I don't NOT identify with the Republicans who got us addicted to communist slave labor any more than I identify with the slave owners.
I must identify with both sides because that is part of America's history. We have to admit the bad along with the good. America's done some great but also some terrible things. A rational citizen who actually knows the country's history should be able to come to terms with this.
In reply to my point that "Wait, I forgot, leftist plant. You're siding with the slave owners on our behalf. No thanks.", you replied "I'm siding with both since both were American and slavery was part of the country's history. We must acknowledge that. Of course I wouldn't expect somebody with the mentality of a child - like you - to be able to grasp that point." Side with the slave owners on your, the Democrats, behalf, but keep me out of it.
Do you identify with the Constitution? It was mostly written by a slave owner. How about the Declaration of Independence? Another slave owner. The father of the country? Yep. Another slave owner. Most of the Founding Fathers were in fact slave owners. Ben Franklin was quite happy to take advertisement money in his papers from slave owners seeking their escaped slaves. John Adams was extremely zealous in insisting on the return of the escaped slaves who had served in the British Army (the Brits to their credit, refused). Then there is that long history and all that money generated from the lengthy New England slave trade.
If you identify with America and you have the slightest knowledge of American history and the slightest bit of intellectual honesty, you are identifying with people who were directly implicated in slavery. Guess what. You're also identifying with people who committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. You're also identifying with people who did lots of other extremely shitty things. You have to take the bad with the good - that goes for every country. Only people with the mentality of little kids have to think their country pure as the driven snow in order to love it or identify with it. Leftists can't manage that. Haven't you noticed? They simply cannot forgive America for failing to live up to their ridiculous notions of perfect morality or utopia.
At this point you regurgitated all of the quotes you posted about all of the nasty things the North said or are reputed to have said. I won't waste FR's bandwidth posting the same replies. I'll just point to our prior discussion on this in posts 539 and 547.
You've long since run out of new quotes about the South and have long ago resorted to regurgitating the same few.
Why is that my problem? You're the one who cited him, and he was the Confederacy's VP. If his comments contradict your narrative, that's your problem. Don't expect me to reconcile your contradictions for you.,/p>
You've cited him in the past. I merely pointed out that A) he was powerless and B) his view was directly contradicted by several others including President Davis. But hey, if you want to cite him, then we also have to note what he said about the North - ie that they were fighting for money and to centralize power.
Once again, you resort to laws and policies that were never implemented to make your case, and it's clear why. All of the policies that were ratified like abolition support my position, so your only recourse is to hide behind policies that weren't ratified.
We are talking about intentions and motivations here. The fact that the North offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment and the fact that the Southern states turned that offer down as well as the fact that the Southern states offered to abolish slavery to gain their independence all go to show that slavery was clearly not their big motivation. Independence was. But of course, its very inconvenient for you to admit the undeniable facts here since it does not fit your dogma.
You keep framing this around "the North". I never said everyone in the North was with the good guys, but you can't refute my real point so you keep falling back to this strawman.
Hardly. The facts refute your main point. The North did not even attempt to abolish slavery and abolition did not have any significant political support until very late in the war. That's just the historical reality.
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Nope! That's not why they wanted decentralized power and limited government and balanced budgets. They wanted that long before slavery became a contentious political issue. They and their descendants have wanted that long after slavery had long since been abolished. They obviously want these things for their own sake.
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Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the Confederate army should be freed. Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a "moral and political evil" years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal. Davis even made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken seriously.
Let's ask the Confederate leadership what they were fighting for.....Repeat snipped
Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the Confederate army should be freed. Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a "moral and political evil" years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal. Davis even made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken seriously.
As five states had already ratified it, that in itself PROVES the other states had the time to ratify it. They didn't, even with the threat of secession and a cival war. FACT.
So? States have not always ratified a constitutional amendment as soon as they possibly could. In fact I can think of hardly any instance in American history when they did. Some states take longer. The fact that they did not ratify an amendment on day 1 is not proof that they never would have as you are trying to claim. FACT.
It was nothing. It was never made law, and never would become law. It was a last ditch effort by the Democrats to preseve slavery, and by a minority of Republicans to prevent secession and a civil war. FACT.
It would never become law because the original 7 seceding Southern states rejected it. It was a primarily Republican effort. FACT
The quotes you keep posting were politicking.
You have zero evidence for this claim. There is nothing to support the idea that this is not what the Republicans supported at the time. There are no secret closed door quotes or diary entries or anything else supporting the idea that they were only saying they did not support abolition publicly when they really did secretly support it privately. Every indication is that they did not support abolition until very late in the war.
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Posts like this are why I question your intelligence or honesty. You make false claims about what I've said while at the same time trying to advance the PC Revisionist anti Southern argument. The PC Revisionists are of course dyed in the wool Leftists.
If you want to make the point that blacks were willing to defend the Confrederacy because it wasn't about slavery, make that case in a black church, and what's left of you can tell us how that went.
I've made the case by citing the undeniable historical evidence that there were many thousands of Blacks who fought in the Confederate army - much of it from Union sources so you couldn't claim it was just Southerners trying to invent the evidence. You can't refute the overwhelming evidence.
Because the migration started well before then.
The Great Migration did not start until that time. You're entitled to your own opinions. You are not entitled to your own facts.
That must be Confederacy Amen Corner Speak for "I won't post anything from that link because it has already been refuted."
I've already refuted all of your Leftist Revisionism.
Numbers, from sources other than the Confederacy amen corner?
I've already posted them. I even posted a direct quote from the Sec. of the Treasuring lamenting the fact that so many of the federal agents he sent to the Southern states were just crooks.
I never said it differed from the US Constitution in that repect, but you can't answer my real point so you throw up a strawman. I said, the Confederacy's constitution was written from the ground up to protect slavery. Whether they carried that over from the US Constitution or made it up after a night of wild partying is beside the point. They wrote it to protect slavery. That differs from the US Constitution in that the Republicans inherited those protections and abolished them.
They didn't write anything as it pertains to slavery. They merely carried over what was in the US Constitution on that issue. They therefore did not "write it from the ground up to protect slavery" as you falsely claim. The US of course had the original US Constitution and they did nothing to abolish slavery even though they easily could have until very late in the war.....yet you're not troubled in the least by that.
The founders of the Republican party were abolitionists. Lincoiln said the nation can't be "half slave and half free".
While it may have been founded by abolitionists, the vast vast majority of Republican politicians and voters were not abolitionists as they went to great pains to make clear. Lincoln himself orchestrated the Corwin Amendment and publicly said he would strengthen fugitive slave laws.
The Republican platform in 1858 called for the abolition of slavery in all national terrirtory, [sic] not territories. Their stand was that the institution of slavery violated the meaning of the Constitution. Of course they had to pass abolition to make thata reality, which they did seven years later after having been blocked by the Democrats the previos [sic] year. Words backed with actions, unlike the poilicies [sic] that were never implemented that you keep spammming FR with.
The Republicans were of course referring to the Western Territory which was not at that time organized into states. They did not propose to abolish slavery where it existed. I could post dozens of quotes from Lincoln saying exactly this. All the other prominent Republicans said the same. You are clinging to a myth here.
And what did the Confederacy say about this? Let's find out, shall we? Repeat snipped
Yes, let's
“In any case, I think slave property will be lost eventually.” Jefferson Davis 1861
Beginning in late 1862, James Phelan, Joseph Bradford, and Reuben Davis wrote to Jefferson Davis to express concern that some opponents were claiming the war "was for the defense of the institution of slavery" (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, pp. 479-480, 765). They called those who were making this claim "demagogues." Cooper notes that when two Northerners visited Jefferson Davis during the war, Davis insisted "the Confederates were not battling for slavery" and that "slavery had never been the key issue" (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 524).
Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the Confederate army should be freed. Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a "moral and political evil" years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal. Davis even made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken seriously.
"The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism." Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election
"They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty to seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests. These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They, the North, are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it. These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union." The New Orleans Daily Crescent 21 January 1861
"Before... the revolution [the South] was the seat of wealth, as well as hospitality....Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in regions north of the Potomac: and this in the face of the fact, that the South, in four staples alone, has exported produce, since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? ... Under Federal legislation, the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue.....Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction - it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this." ----Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton
[To a Northern Congressman] "You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue laws, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange, which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of Northern Capitalist. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and our institutions." Rep. John H. Reagan of Texas
"Northerners are the fount of most troubles in the new Union. Connecticut and Massachusetts EXHAUST OUR STRENGTH AND SUBSTANCE and its inhabitants are marked by such a perversity of character they have divided themselves from the rest of America - Thomas Jefferson in an 1820 letter
"Neither “love for the African” [witness the Northern laws against him], nor revulsion from “property in persons” [“No, you imported Africans and sold them as chattels in the slave markets”] motivated the present day agitators,"…... “No sir….the mask is off, the purpose is avowed…It is a struggle for political power." Jefferson Davis 1848
“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate
Georgia’s declaration of causes does talk about slavery a lot. It also talks about economics. To wit:
“The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects. Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal deficiency. The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slave-holding States. Wielding these great States it held great power and influence, and its demands were in full proportion to its power. The manufacturers and miners wisely based their demands upon special facts and reasons rather than upon general principles, and thereby mollified much of the opposition of the opposing interest. They pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.
But when these reasons ceased they were no less clamorous for Government protection, but their clamors were less heeded-- the country had put the principle of protection upon trial and condemned it. After having enjoyed protection to the extent of from 15 to 200 per cent. upon their entire business for above thirty years, the act of 1846 was passed. It avoided sudden change, but the principle was settled, and free trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures was the verdict of the American people. The South and the Northwestern States sustained this policy. There was but small hope of its reversal; upon the direct issue, none at all.
All these classes saw this and felt it and cast about for new allies. The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support, but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon……”
The conqueror's policy is to divide the conquered into factions and stir up animosity among them...It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties." -General Patrick Cleburne
Finally South Carolina Senator/Congressman Robert Barnwell Rhett aka "the Father of Secession" wrote the Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States, which the convention adopted on December 25, 1860 to accompany its secession ordinance.
"The Revolution of 1776, turned upon one great principle, self government, and self taxation, the criterion of self government. Where the interests of two people united together under one Government, are different, each must have the power to protect its interests by the organization of the Government, or they cannot be free. The interests of Great Britain and of the Colonies, were different and antagonistic. Great Britain was desirous of carrying out the policy of all nations toward their Colonies, of making them tributary to their wealth and power. She had vast and complicated relations with the whole world. Her policy toward her North American Colonies, was to identify them with her in all these complicated relations; and to make them bear, in common with the rest of the Empire, the full burden of her obligations and necessities. She had a vast public debt; she had a European policy and an Asiatic policy, which had occasioned the accumulation of her public debt, and which kept her in continual wars. The North American Colonies saw their interests, political and commercial, sacrificed by such a policy. Their interests required, that they should not be identified with the burdens and wars of the mother country. They had been settled under Charters, which gave them self government, at least so far as their property was concerned. They had taxed themselves, and had never been taxed by the Government of Great Britain. To make them a part of a consolidated Empire, the Parliament of Great Britain determined to assume the power of legislating for the Colonies in all cases whatsoever. Our ancestors resisted the pretension. They refused to be a part of the consolidated Government of Great Britain.
The Southern States, now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States, that the Colonies did towards Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British parliament. "The General Welfare," is the only limit to the legislation of either; and the majority in Congress, as in the British parliament, are the sole judges of the expediency of the legislation, this "General Welfare" requires. Thus, the Government of the United States has become a consolidated Government; and the people of the Southern State, are compelled to meet the very despotism, their fathers threw off in the Revolution of 1776.
And so with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress, is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.
There is another evil, in the condition of the Southern toward the Northern States, which our ancestors refused to bear toward Great Britain. Our ancestors not only taxed themselves, but all the taxes collected from them, were expended among them. Had they submitted to the pretensions of the British Government, the taxes collected from them, would have been expended in other parts of the British Empire. They were fully aware of the effect of such a policy in impoverishing the people from whom taxes are collected, and in enriching those who receive the benefit of their expenditure. To prevent the evils of such a policy, was one of the motives which drove them on to Revolution. Yet this British policy, has been fully realized towards the Southern States, by the Northern States. The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three fourths of them are expended at the North. This cause, with others, connected with the operation of the General Government, has made the cities of the South provincial. Their growth is paralyzed; they are mere suburbs of Northern cities. The agricultural productions of the South are the basis of the foreign commerce of the United States; yet Southern cities do not carry it on. Our foreign trade, is almost annihilated…… To make, however, their numerical power available to rule the Union, the North must consolidate their power. It would not be united, on any matter common to the whole Union in other words, on any constitutional subject for on such subjects divisions are as likely to exist in the North as in the South. Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest. If this could be made the criterion of parties at the North, the North could be united in its power; and thus carry out its measures of sectional ambition, encroachment, and aggrandizement. To build up their sectional predominance in the Union, the Constitution must be first abolished by constructions; but that being done, the consolidation of the North to rule the South, by the tariff and slavery issues, was in the obvious course of things.
"The people of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests. Long and angry controversies grew out of these attempts, often successful, to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. And the danger of disruption arising from this cause was enhanced by the fact that the Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control." Jefferson Davis Address to the Confederate Congress April 29, 1861
"I love the Union and the Constitution,'' he said, ``but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it." Jefferson Davis
I don't care what else the Democrats running the Confederacy said the war was about, because they came right out and said it was about preserving slavery.
So go ahead and keep posting your Democrat generated propaganda about how they said it wasn't about slavery, because they themselves said it was and their actions prove it. Why should anyone believe them when they said it was and they would go to any lengths to preserve it?
So?
JD made those comments before the Republican party was even formed. I know you'll reply "But the North blah blah blah..." but I never said everyone in the North was the good guys. On the contrary, I have acknowledged that the North had slavery in a few states, and abolition was blocked by Democrats in the North before they were replaced with enough Republicans to abolish slavery.
None of that obligates anyone to believe JD when he said secession wasn't about slavery, when he and the declarations of secession said they were.
That's exactly what you've been doing with the same handful of quotes and exactly how I've responded to you - but with vastly more quotes from more sources.
You've done nothing but regurgitate the same Democrat propaganda for the past year. The Democrats tried to distance themselves from slavery then just as they're trying to do now, and you've done nothing but help them.
I couldn't care less how many quotes you post or how many times you regurgitate them, because they are all lies. The Democrats came out and said "That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity.", and there is no reason to believe they wouldn't lie in addition to waging war for that cause.
There were a lot of farmers around back then. They knew all about how to breed livestock. Is that what they did? No. Generally, Blacks got married. Females were not tied down waiting to be impregnated by designated studs in order to sell the offspring for profit. That's a breeding program. That's how livestock are handled. It wasn't like that at all.
The definition is "reproduction of rare species controlled by humans in a closed environment, such as a zoo".
Were the slaves considered another species, IOW animals, by their masters? Yes, except for when their daughters were being raped.
Were they in a closed environment, meaning the couldn't marry and have families outside of their plantation? Yes.
Were their children sold like animals to other slave owners? In many cases, yes.
Will FLT-bird regurgitate the same denials he/she/it has been posting? Well see.
They mostly carried over what they inherited - just as the Founding Fathers did when they wrote the Constitution. They did not as you claimed design the Confederate Constitution from the ground up to protect slavery. That was just more of your typical BS. They simply carried over most of the constitution they inherited.
You're admitting I'm right and you can't even see it. The writers of the Confederacy's Constitution were under no obligation to add the protections for slavery. They could have left the protections out without forcing abolition, which would have given them the flexibility in the future to abolish as you keep saying they offered. It was their intention to ensure the right to slave labor was protected, so they, the Democrat leaders of the Confederacy who wrote the constitution, added these protections:
Sec. 9. (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Sec. 2. (3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
Many of them made it abundantly clear from the start that they were not fighting for abolition. The greatest desertion crisis in the Union army was after the EP precisely because many said this had converted the cause from nationalism to one of abolitionism which they did not support.
Absolute nonsense. Many abandoned because of the incompetence of the early Union generals, and the desertion rate was a larger problem in the Confederacy although more Union soldiers deserted overall.
I found the reasons for desertion in the Confederacy interesting. I'll let you read and validate the source for yourself.
American Civil War Desertions in the Union and Confederate Armies
Hardly. Its an apt comparison. The Loyalists fought for the existing order. So did those Southerners who headed north. That hardly "proves" they were fighting for abolitionism which was not supported by very many at all North or South prior to the war.
Let's just ignore that most states in the Union had abolished slavery at the state level, or that you just admitted to the large numbers of Southerners left to join Union forces. The loyalists were already here, while the Southerners had to leave their homes to fight for the Union.
I didn't say you called me a Nazi.
From post 760, "All you have is the standard 3rd grader argument "everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi"."
I said you made numerous fatuous claims trying to compare the Confederacy to the Nazis. They were not remotely comparable.
I only compared certain actions, such as Hitler in 1945 denying he wanted war in 1939 and Germany accusing the Allies of war crimes for the Dresden bombings. You can't answer that, so you hide behind "You called me a Nazi".
That was a standard practice in war at the time. The Axis side had indiscriminately bombed population centers first. And the bombing of civilian population centers did have military objectives - to destroy industrial capacity. Oh, and finally they were uniformed soldiers at war following the orders of their officers.
I agree. It was the Germans who called this a war crime, much like the slave holding states branded abolitionists as terrorists.
I know you're going to fall back to calling on me to give examples even though I already have, so I'll post them again.
Oh, and the Confederates killed black soldiers at a higher rate than white soldiers.
John Brown was a terrorist who set out to murder at a time of peace. Pitiful attempt at analogy.
The Germans saw Dresden as a war crime, and the slave holders saw abolitionists as terrorists. As shown above, the Confederacy saw other abolitionists as terrorists.
The bad guys always deny what they're doing....like Lincoln starting an unconstitutional war for money and empire?
What a stupid argument. How much profit did he make for freeing the slaves. On the contrary, it cost him his life at the hands of a southerner who hated him for freeing the slaves.
I know you'll regurgitate your "he did it over the meanness of Lincoln", so here's the reference again.
Who Assassinated Abraham Lincoln?
Repeat snipped.
They did not secede over slavery.
When offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment, they turned down that offer.
That's because they were never offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. They were offered an amendment that all but five Union states rejected.
"As ordered by their masters". Hardly. These were thousands and thousands of armed men. They obviously were not serving against their will. Given that they had arms and in some cases horses, they could easily have deserted or gone over to the other side. Yet they fought for the CSA.
Black Confederates: Truth and Legend
There's more below.
Well gosh....Free Blacks served in the Confederate Army.
And over 100,000 Southerners left the Confederacy to join Union forces.
And the desertion rate among the Condeferacy was higher than that of the Union.
Slaves were promised emancipation for themselves and their families for their service in the Confederate Army...
Confederate Law Authorizing the Enlistment of Black Soldiers, as Promulgated in a Military Order
"IV. The enlistment of colored persons under this act will be made upon printed forms, to be furnished for the purpose, similar to those established for the regular service. They will be executed in duplicate, one copy to be returned to this office for file. No slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman, and which will be filed with the superintendent."
and the Confederate government empowered their ambassador to agree to a treaty that would have abolished slavery. Seems that based on the undeniable facts, were perfectly willing to get rid of slavery to gain their independence.
And even more bandwidth wasted on a policy that never came close to ratification.
It was simple enough just to cite the facts - they refute your PC Revisionist claims.
Speech of Jefferson Davis before the Mississippi Legislature, Nov. 16, 1858
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
Constitution of the Confederate States; March 11, 1861
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
Do you identify with the Constitution? It was mostly written by a slave owner. How about the Declaration of Independence? Another slave owner...
I was ready to write that off as a rant, but those were good questions. Yes I know many of them had slaves. I can accept the good that came without absolving the bad that came with it. I can accept the legacy of freedom, justice, and opportunity for all while condemning the times they were denied.
The difference is that while the Union was guilty of many of these crimes, they also led in abolishing them. The Confederacy never abolished slavery and fought to preserve it, so that is their only legacy.
And notice I said the Confederacy, and not the South. Many in South opposed slavery, and many others left the South to fight against the Confederacy.
You've long since run out of new quotes about the South and have long ago resorted to regurgitating the same few.
How many do I need? The Democrats said secession was about preserving slavery, and they backed it with their actions. The fact that they managed to pour out propaganda to the contrary doesn't refute this.
You've cited him in the past. I merely pointed out that A) he was powerless and B) his view was directly contradicted by several others including President Davis. But hey, if you want to cite him, then we also have to note what he said about the North - ie that they were fighting for money and to centralize power.
Absolute nonsense. He may have correctly stated that secession was about slavery as did JD in 1858 and the declarations of secession, but that doesn't obligate me to accept his accusations against the North.
Hardly. The facts refute your main point. The North did not even attempt to abolish slavery and abolition did not have any significant political support until very late in the war. That's just the historical reality.
There you go with "the North" again. I know everyone in the North wasn't on the right side on this issue. The Democrats in particular blocked abolition for as long as they had the votes to do it, but that ended in 1865. The Republicans passed abolition as soon as they had the votes they needed.
Nope! That's not why they wanted decentralized power and limited government and balanced budgets. They wanted that long before slavery became a contentious political issue. They and their descendants have wanted that long after slavery had long since been abolished. They obviously want these things for their own sake.
Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery.
That's because it's a lie. JD never came close to abolishing slavery, even if he had "offered" it in return for military aid.
In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a "moral and political evil" years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232).
No dispute there. As I've said numerous times, not everyone in the South supported slavery.
So? States have not always ratified a constitutional amendment as soon as they possibly could. In fact I can think of hardly any instance in American history when they did. Some states take longer. The fact that they did not ratify an amendment on day 1 is not proof that they never would have as you are trying to claim. FACT.
The whole problem with your argument is that the Corbomite Maneuver was a desperate attempt to prevent secession and the CW, and there was enough time for five states to ratify it. That proves the rest of the states had the time, if they had intended to ratify it. They didn't even though they could have and even though it meant secession and a possible CW. FACTS.
It would never become law because the original 7 seceding Southern states rejected it. It was a primarily Republican effort. FACT
False. It was never ratified, and it was passed by a majority of Democrats, while a majority of Republicans opposed it. I know you'll reply "but Lincoln and Corwin", but the big difference between this and all of the other policies you keep posting again and again and again is that they were never made law while abolition was. FACT.
You have zero evidence for this claim. There is nothing to support the idea that this is not what the Republicans supported at the time. There are no secret closed door quotes or diary entries or anything else supporting the idea that they were only saying they did not support abolition publicly when they really did secretly support it privately. Every indication is that they did not support abolition until very late in the war.
1864 when they almost had enough votes, and 1865 when they finally had enough votes. And they had spoken about abolition publicly, but they had to deal with parts of the population that wanted to hear the opposite. You insist on judging the situation by today's standards, but abolition was a radical idea to many back then, and the Republicans had to walk the line between the abolitionists who were growing frustrated with the lack of action, and the Democrats who wanted to preserve slavery. Frederick Douglas acknowledged this, even after he was one of those expressing frustration.
Posts like this are why I question your intelligence or honesty. You make false claims about what I've said while at the same time trying to advance the PC Revisionist anti Southern argument. The PC Revisionists are of course dyed in the wool Leftists.
If you're going to accuse me of this, at least include the comments you are accusing me of. I don't post "repeat snipped" and reply without posting what I'm replying to.
I've made the case by citing the undeniable historical evidence that there were many thousands of Blacks who fought in the Confederate army - much of it from Union sources so you couldn't claim it was just Southerners trying to invent the evidence. You can't refute the overwhelming evidence.
The evidence is anecdotal and most certainly deniable.
The Great Migration did not start until that time. You're entitled to your own opinions.
I said quote "the migration", not "the great migration".
You are not entitled to your own facts.
And you're not entitled to your own interpretation of the English Language. Who do you think you are, Lia Thomas?
I've already posted them. I even posted a direct quote from the Sec. of the Treasuring lamenting the fact that so many of the federal agents he sent to the Southern states were just crooks.
I meant from sources other than those that have the Confederacy Amen Corner's seal of approval, so I can review the entire context rather than cherry picked excerpts.
They didn't write anything as it pertains to slavery. They merely carried over what was in the US Constitution on that issue. They therefore did not "write it from the ground up to protect slavery" as you falsely claim. The US of course had the original US Constitution and they did nothing to abolish slavery even though they easily could have until very late in the war.....yet you're not troubled in the least by that.
Sec. 9. (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Sec. 2. (3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
While it may have been founded by abolitionists, the vast vast majority of Republican politicians and voters were not abolitionists as they went to great pains to make clear.
They "made that clear" to audiences who wanted to hear that. When they got the votes they needed to pass abolition, they did.
Lincoln himself orchestrated the Corwin Amendment and publicly said he would strengthen fugitive slave laws.
More wasted bandwidth on policies that were never ratified, unlike abolition which was ratified. In fact, just about your entire case is built on policies that were never ratified. The Corbomite Naneuver, strengthening fugitive slave laws, and abolishing slavery in return for military aid were never ratified. On the other hand the only policy that was ratified, abolition, is the policy you keep trying to avoid.
The Republicans were of course referring to the Western Territory which was not at that time organized into states.
"Resolved: That, with our Republican fathers, we hold it to be a self-evident truth, that all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction"
All persons. This was the context for the word territory, not territories as you keep trying to force.
They did not propose to abolish slavery where it existed. I could post dozens of quotes from Lincoln saying exactly this. All the other prominent Republicans said the same. You are clinging to a myth here.
You can post clips of comments made to audiences that wanted to hear those comments. I never denied that. But eight years after the Republican party was formed, they voted to abolish slavery in all states, but were blocked by Democrats who saw slavery as a states' rights issue. They following year, they had the numbers and voted to abolish slavery.
So go ahead and regurgitate all of your quotes. I'll give you the same response.
More Democrat lies about how secession wasn't about slavery snipped.
I don't care what they said, how many times they said it, or how many times you post it. What they said is not evidence, any more than what Hitler said in 1945 not wanting war in 1939. The evidence is in what they did. They seceded and went to war to preserve slavery as they said, and never abolished it until after they were defeated.
I know you'll reply with "but Lincoln and the Republicans said nasty things like blah blah blah", but they had to deal with parts of the Union that wanted to hear that, in addition to the impatient abolitionists. They did, and when they got the votes they needed, they passed abolition. Those are the only facts that matter.
repeats snipped
I don't care what else the Democrats running the Confederacy said the war was about, because they came right out and said it was about preserving slavery.
So go ahead and keep posting your Democrat generated propaganda about how they said it wasn't about slavery, because they themselves said it was and their actions prove it. Why should anyone believe them when they said it was and they would go to any lengths to preserve it?
As has already been explained to you at least 50 times, of the original 7 seceding states only 4 issued declarations of causes. Of those 4, all of them listed the Northern states violation of the constitution in refusing to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the constitution. 3 of them listed things that were not unconstitutional - namely exploitative tariffs and unequal federal expenditures. When offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment and strengthened fugitive slave laws, they turned it down. Their actions plainly demonstrate they did not secede over and were not fighting over, slavery.
and that was just the lower South. The Upper South did not secede until Lincoln chose to start a war for money and empire to impose a government upon the original 7 seceding states that they did not consent to.
JD made those comments before the Republican party was even formed. I know you'll reply "But the North blah blah blah..." but I never said everyone in the North was the good guys. On the contrary, I have acknowledged that the North had slavery in a few states, and abolition was blocked by Democrats in the North before they were replaced with enough Republicans to abolish slavery.
No. Abolition was never even brought up by Republicans in the North until very late in the war. Its not that Democrats blocked it. Its that Republicans weren't interested - as they openly said many many times.
You've done nothing but regurgitate the same Democrat propaganda for the past year. The Democrats tried to distance themselves from slavery then just as they're trying to do now, and you've done nothing but help them.
False as usual. I have brought in facts, quotes and sources for which you have no answer. So you keep spamming the board with the same 3 quotes/links no matter how irrelevant they are to whatever specific point is being discussed.
I couldn't care less how many quotes you post or how many times you regurgitate them, because they are all lies. The Democrats came out and said "repeats snipped", and there is no reason to believe they wouldn't lie in addition to waging war for that cause.
I don't care how many times you cite the language of the 4 declarations of causes which pointed out how the Northern states had violated the constitution by their refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. It was clear from their actions, from the words of the leading newspapers as well as from Jefferson Davis and numerous other leading Southerners that they were seceding over the partisan sectional economic legislation of the federal government which screwed them over. Then they refused slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. Case closed.
The definition is "reproduction of rare species controlled by humans in a closed environment, such as a zoo".
No, the definition is: "A breeding program is the planned breeding of a group of animals or plants, usually involving at least several individuals and extending over several generations."
Were the slaves considered another species, IOW animals, by their masters? Yes, except for when their daughters were being raped.
LOL! Everybody knew they were not a different species. Otherwise they could not have interbred with Whites.
Was there PLANNED breeding...as in the owner selects which ones, extending over several generations? No, clearly there was not.
YOU.
WERE.
WRONG.
Will FLT-bird prove me wrong again? Well see.
FIFY. Why yes. Yes I have.
You're admitting I'm right and you can't even see it. The writers of the Confederacy's Constitution were under no obligation to add the protections for slavery. They could have left the protections out without forcing abolition, which would have given them the flexibility in the future to abolish as you keep saying they offered. It was their intention to ensure the right to slave labor was protected, so they, the Democrat leaders of the Confederacy who wrote the constitution, added these protections: (repeats snipped)
Nope! You have proven me right but don't want to admit it. They no more designed the Confederate Constitution from the ground up to protect slavery than the US Constitution was designed from the ground up to protect slavery. They simply adopted what had come before with a few modifications in the areas of protecting state's rights more explicitly and limiting the power of the central government to spend money. Those were the only areas they changed much because those were their real concerns.
Absolute nonsense. Many abandoned because of the incompetence of the early Union generals, and the desertion rate was a larger problem in the Confederacy although more Union soldiers deserted overall.
Wrong. It was true. Union army desertion rates went up after the EP. Desertion was an ongoing problem in both armies. It did not go up significantly in the Confederate Army until late in the war due to the Confederate army not being adequately fed and due to soldiers wanting to go home to protect their families from attack by union army thieves, rapists, etc.
Let's just ignore that most states in the Union had abolished slavery at the state level, or that you just admitted to the large numbers of Southerners left to join Union forces. The loyalists were already here, while the Southerners had to leave their homes to fight for the Union.
"Large numbers" is of course open for debate. The point is you claimed Southerners who fought for the Union did so out of a commitment to abolitionism. I find that claim extremely dubious and without any support.
From post 760, "All you have is the standard 3rd grader argument "everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi"."
Yes. I stand by that. That is your standard fallback. Look how many times you have desperately tried to compare Jefferson Davis to Hitler or the CSA to the Nazi regime.
I only compared certain actions, such as Hitler in 1945 denying he wanted war in 1939 and Germany accusing the Allies of war crimes for the Dresden bombings. You can't answer that, so you hide behind "You called me a Nazi".,/P>
Answer what? Your ridiculous failed Nazi/Hitler analogies? The leaders and governments were not remotely analogous. There's your answer.
I agree. It was the Germans who called this a war crime, much like the slave holding states branded abolitionists as terrorists.
Well, given people like John Brown who were terrorists by any definition......
I know you're going to fall back to calling on me to give examples even though I already have, so I'll post them again. Oh, and the Confederates killed black soldiers at a higher rate than white soldiers.
Nat Turner was a terrorist and a murderer by any definition. Vesey was found to be after an investigation as well.
The Germans saw Dresden as a war crime, and the slave holders saw abolitionists as terrorists. As shown above, the Confederacy saw other abolitionists as terrorists.
1) yet another absolutely pitiful Hitler/Nazi analogy attempt that fails miserably. 2) No, it was not that every abolitionist was a terrorist. It was that abolitionist terrorists and murderers like John Brown or Nat Turner were terrorists. They were. Their actions leave no room for debate.
What a stupid argument. How much profit did he make for freeing the slaves. On the contrary, it cost him his life at the hands of a southerner who hated him for freeing the slaves.
How much profit did Northern political supporters of Lincoln/the Republicans make from keeping the Southern states as cash cows? Quite a lot! I've already posted numerous quotes and editorials from leading Northern papers saying exactly that.
repeats snipped
“And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest.” Union Colonel James Jaquess
“No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.” Jefferson Davis
Davis rejects peace with reunion https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/jefferson-davis-rejects-peace-with-reunion-1864/
That's because they were never offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. They were offered an amendment that all but five Union states rejected.
That's a lie. They were offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. That amendment had already passed in several Union states and Lincoln would have seen to it that it passed in enough others to be ratified had they accepted it. Instead they rejected it.
Black Confederates: Truth and Legend There's more below.
The chief inspector of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Dr. Lewis Steiner, reported that he saw about 3,000 well-armed black Confederate soldiers in Stonewall Jackson’s army in Frederick, Maryland, and that those soldiers were "manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army." Said Steiner, “Wednesday, September 10--At four o'clock this morning the rebel army began to move from our town, Jackson's force taking the advance. The movement continued until eight o'clock P.M., occupying sixteen hours. The most liberal calculations could not give them more than 64,000 men. Over 3,000 negroes must be included in this number. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in rebel ranks. Most of the negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabres, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy Army. They were seen riding on horses and mules, driving wagons, riding on caissons, in ambulances, with the staff of Generals, and promiscuously mixed up with all the rebel horde. (Report of Lewis H. Steiner, New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1862, pp. 10-11)
* Union colonel Peter Allabach, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 131st Pennsylvania Infantry, reported that his forces encountered black Confederate soldiers during the battle of Chancellorsville:
Under this disposition of my command, I lay until 11 o'clock, when I received orders from you to throw the two left regiments perpendicular to the road, and to advance in line of battle, with skirmishers in front, as far as to the edge of the wood bordering near the Chancellor house. This movement was explained to me as intended to hold the enemy in check long enough for the corps of Major-Generals Couch and Sickles to get into another position, and not to bring on an action if it could be avoided; and, should the enemy advance in force, to fall back slowly until I arrived on the edge of the wood, there to mass in column and double-quick to the rear, that the artillery might fire in this wood. I was instructed that I was to consider myself under the command of Major-General Couch.
In obedience to these orders, at about 11 o'clock I advanced with these two regiments forward through the wood, under a severe fire of shell, grape, and canister. I encountered their skirmishers when near the farther edge of the wood. Allow me to state that the skirmishers of the enemy were negroes. (Report of Col. Peter H. Allabach, 131st Pennsylvania Infantry, commanding Second Brigade, in Official Records, Volume XXV, in Two Parts, 1889, Chap. 37, Part I – Reports, p. 555, emphasis added)
None other than African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass complained that there were “many” blacks in the Confederate army who were armed and “ready to shoot down” Union soldiers. He added that this was "pretty well established":
It is now pretty well established, that there are at the present moment many colored men in the Confederate army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down loyal troops, and do all that soldiers may. . . . (Douglass' Monthly, September 1861, online copy available at http://radicaljournal.com/essays/fighting_rebels.html)
In 1895 a former black Union soldier, Christian A. Fleetwood, who had been a sergeant-major in the 4th U.S. Colored Troops, acknowledged that the South began using blacks as soldiers before the Union did:
It seems a little singular that in the tremendous struggle between the States in 1861-1S65, the south should have been the first to take steps toward the enlistment of Negroes. Yet such is the fact. Two weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, the Charleston Mercury records the passing through Augusta of several companies of the 3rd and 4th Georgia Regt. and of sixteen well-drilled companies and one Negro company from Nashville, Tenn. The Memphis Avalanche and The Memphis Appeal of May 9, 10, and 11, 1861, give notice of the appointment by the "Committee of Safety" of a committee of three persons "to organize a volunteer company composed of our patriotic freemen of color of the city of Memphis, for the service of our common defense."
A telegram from New Orleans dated November 23, 1S61, notes the review by Gov. Moore of over 28,000 troops, and that one regiment comprised "1,400 colored men." The New Orleans Picayune, referring to a review held February 9, 1862, says: "We must also pay a deserved compliment to the companies of free colored men, all very well drilled and comfortably equipped." (Christian A. Fleetwood, The Negro as a Soldier, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Print, 1895, pp. 5-6, emphasis added)
In a Union army battle report, General David Stuart complained about the deadly effectiveness of the black Confederate soldiers whom his troops had encountered. The “armed negroes,” he said, did “serious execution upon our men”:
Col. Giles Smith commanded the First Brigade and Col. T. Kilby Smith, Fifty-fourth Ohio, the Fourth. I communicated to these officers General Sherman’s orders and charged Colonel Smith, Fifty-fourth Ohio, specially with the duty of clearing away the road to the crossing and getting it into the best condition for effecting our crossing that he possibly could. The work was vigorously pressed under his immediate supervision and orders, and he devoted himself to it with as much energy and activity as any living man could employ. It had to be prosecuted under the fire of the enemy’s sharpshooters, protected as well as the men might be by our skirmishers on the bank, who were ordered to keep up so vigorous a fire that the enemy should not dare to lift their heads above their rifle-pits; but the enemy, and especially their armed negroes, did dare to rise and fire, and did serious execution upon our men. The casualties in the brigade were 11 killed, 40 wounded, and 4 missing; aggregate, 55. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, D. STUART, Brigadier-General, Commanding. (Report of Brig. Gen. David Stuart, U. S. Army, commanding Fourth Brigade and Second Division, of operations December 26, 1862 - January 3, 1863, in Official Records, Volume XVII, in Two Parts. 1886/1887, Chap. 29, Part I - Reports, pp. 635-636, emphasis added)
In a letter published in the Indianapolis Star in December 1861, a Union soldier stated that his unit was attacked by black Confederate soldiers:
A body of seven hundred [Confederate] Negro infantry opened fire on our men, wounding two lieutenants and two privates. The wounded men testify positively that they were shot by Negroes, and that not less than seven hundred were present, armed with muskets. This is, indeed a new feature in the war. We have heard of a regiment of [Confederate] Negroes at Manassas, and another at Memphis, and still another at New Orleans, but did not believe it till it came so near home and attacked our men. (Indianapolis Star, December 23, 1861)
Union soldier James G. Bates wrote a letter to his father that was reprinted in an Indiana newspaper in May 1863. In the letter Bates assured his father that there were black Confederate soldiers:
I can assure you [his father,] of a certainty, that the rebels have Negro soldiers in their army. One of their best sharp shooters and the boldest of them all here is a Negro. He dug himself a rifle pit last night [16 April 1863] just across the river and has been annoying our pickets opposite him very much to-day. You can see him plain enough with the naked eye, occasionally, to make sure that he is a "wooly-head," and with a spy-glass there is no mistaking him. (Winchester Journal, May 1, 1863)
A few months before the war ended, a Union soldier named James Miles of the 185th N.Y.V.I. wrote in his diary, “Saw several Negros fighting for those rebels" (Diary entry, January 8, 1865).
A Union lieutenant colonel named Parkhurst, who served in the Ninth Michigan Infantry, reported that black Confederate soldiers participated in an attack on his camp:
The forces attacking my camp were the First Regiment Texas Rangers, a battalion of the First Georgia Rangers . . . and quite a number of Negroes attached to the Texas and Georgia troops, who were armed and equipped, took part in the several engagements with my forces during the day. (Lieutenant Colonel Parkhurst’s Report, Ninth Michigan Infantry, on General Forrest’s Attack at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, July 13, 1862, in Official Records, Series 1, Volume XVI, Part 1, p. 805)
In late June 1861, the Illinois Daily State Journal, a staunchly Republican newspaper, reported that the Confederate army was arming some slaves and that in some cases slaves were being organized into military units. Interestingly, the newspaper also said that the North was not fighting to abolish slavery, and that the South was not fighting to protect slavery:
Our mighty armies are gathering for no purpose of abolition. Our enemies are not in arms to protect the peculiar institution [slavery]. . . .
They [the Confederates] are using their Slave property as an instrument of warfare against the Union. Their slaves dig trenches, erect fortifications, and bear arms. Slaves, in some instances, are organized into military companies to fight against the Government. (“Slaves Contraband of War,” Illinois Daily State Journal, June 21, 1861)
After the battle of Gettysburg, Union forces took seven black Confederate soldiers as prisoners, as was noted in a Northern newspaper at the time, which said,
. . . reported among the rebel prisoners were seven blacks in Confederate uniforms fully armed as soldiers. (New York Herald, July 11, 1863)
During the battle of Gettysburg, two black Confederate soldiers took part in Pickett’s charge: Color Corporal George B. Powell (14th Tennessee) went down during the advance. Boney Smith, a Black man attached to the regiment, took the colors and carried them forward. . . . The colors of the 14th Tennessee got within fifty feet of the east wall before Boney Smith hit the dirt ---wounded. Jabbing the flagstaff in the ground, he momentarily urged the regiment forward until the intense pressure forced the men to lie down to save their lives. (John Michael Priest, Into the Fight: Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, White Mane Books, 1998, pp. 128, 130-131)
During the battle of Chickamauga, slaves serving Confederate soldiers armed themselves and asked permission to join the fight—and when they received that permission they fought commendably. Their commander, Captain J. B. Briggs, later noted that these men “filled a portion of the line of advance as well as any company of the regiment” (J. H. Segars and Charles Barrow, Black Southerners in Confederate Armies, Atlanta, GA: Southern Lion Books, 2001, p. 141)
One of the last Confederate charges of the day included the Fourth Tennessee Calvary, which participated dismounted in the assault. Among the troopers of the regiment were forty African Americans who had been serving as camp servants but who now demanded the right the participate in the last combat of the day. Captain J. B. Briggs gave his permission for them to join his command on the front line. Organized and equipped under Daniel McLemore, the personal servant of the colonel of the regiment, the black troops had collected dropped weapons from battlefields during the regiment’s campaigns. . . . (Steve Cottrell, Civil War in Tennessee, Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2001, p. 94)
After the war, hundreds of African Americans received Confederate veterans’ pensions from Southern state governments (Segars and Barrow, Black Southerners in Confederate Armies, Atlanta, GA: Southern Lion Books, pp. 73-100).
Down in Charleston, free blacks . . . declared that “our allegiance is due to South Carolina and in her defense, we will offer up our lives, and all that is dear to us.” Even slaves routinely expressed loyalty to their homeland, thousands serving the Confederate Army faithfully. (Taking A Stand: Portraits from the Southern Secession Movement, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: White Mane Books, 2000, p. 112)
In the July 1919 issue of The Journal of Negro History, Charles S. Wesley discussed the issue of blacks in the Confederate army:
The loyalty of the slave in guarding home and family during his master’s absence has long been eloquently orated. The Negroes’ loyalty extended itself even to service in the Confederate army. Believing their land invaded by hostile foes, slaves eagerly offered themselves for service in actual warfare. . . .
At the outbreak of the war, an observer in Charleston noted the war-time preparations and called particular attention to “the thousand Negroes who, so far from inclining to insurrections, were grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of shooting the Yankees.” In the same city, one of the daily papers stated in early January that 150 free colored men had offered their services to the Confederate Government, and at Memphis a recruiting office was opened. In June 1861 the Legislature of Tennessee authorized Governor Harris to receive into the state military service all male persons of color between the ages of fifteen and fifty and to provide them with eight dollars a month, clothing, and rations. . . . In the same state, under the command of Confederate officers, marched a procession of several hundred colored men carrying shovels, axes, and blankets. The observer adds, “they were brimful of patriotism, shouting for Jeff Davis and singing war songs.” A paper in Lynchburg, Virginia, commenting on the enlistment of seventy free Negroes to fight for the defense of the State, concluded with “three cheers for the patriotic Negroes of Lynchburg.”
Two weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, several companies of volunteers of color passed through Augusta, Georgia, on their way to Virginia to engage in actual war. . . . In November of the same year, a military review was held in New Orleans, where twenty-eight thousand troops passed before Governor Moore, General Lowell, and General Ruggles. The line of march extended beyond seven miles and included one regiment comprised of 1,400 free colored men. (In Segars and Barrow, Black Southerners in Confederate Armies, pp. 2-4)
"Negroes in the Confederate Army," Journal of Negro History, Charles Wesle, Vol. 4, #3, [1919,] 244-245 - "Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies of free men of color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia."
"The part of Adams' Brigade that the 42nd Indiana was facing were the 'Louisiana Tigers.' This name was given to Colonel Gibson's 13th Louisiana Infantry, which included five companies of 'Avegno Zouaves' who still were wearing their once dashing traditional blue jackets, red caps and red baggy trousers. These five Zouaves companies were made up of Irish, Dutch, Negroes, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Italians." - Noe, Kenneth W., Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle. The University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, KY, 2001. [page 270]
The 85th Indiana Volunteer Infantry reported to the Indianapolis Daily Evening Gazette that on 5 March 1863: "During the fight the [artillery] battery in charge of the 85th Indiana [Volunteer Infantry] was attacked by [*in italics*] two rebel negro regiments. [*end italics*]."
After the action at Missionary Ridge, Commissary Sergeant William F. Ruby forwarded a casualty list written in camp at Ringgold, Georgia about 29 November 1863, to William S. Lingle for publication. Ruby's letter was partially reprinted in the Lafayette Daily Courier for 8 December 1863: "Ruby says among the rebel dead on the [Missionary] Ridge he saw a number of negroes in the Confederate uniform." Federal Official Records, Series I, Vol XVI Part I, pg. 805: "There were also quite a number of negroes attached to the Texas and Georgia troops, who were armed and equipped, and took part in the several engagements with my forces during the day." Federal Official Records Series 1, Volume 15, Part 1, Pages 137-138
"Pickets were thrown out that night, and Captain Hennessy, Company E, of the Ninth Connecticut, having been sent out with his company, captured a colored rebel scout, well mounted, who had been sent out to watch our movements." Federal Official Records, Series I, Vol. XLIX, Part II, pg. 253
April 6, 1865: "The rebels [Forrest] are recruiting negro troops at Enterprise, Miss., and the negroes are all enrolled in the State." Federal Official Records, Series I, Vol. XIV, pg. 24, second paragraph -
In his book, Black Confederates and AfroYankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin I. Jordan, a black historian, says that in June 1861 Tennessee became the first Confederate State to authorize the use of black soldiers. These soldiers were to be paid $18 a month and be provided with the same rations and clothing as white soldiers. Two regiments, he says, of blacks had appeared by September.
“They – the enemy – talked of having 9,000 men. They had 20 pieces of artillery, among which was the Richmond Howitzer battery manned by Negroes. Their wagons numbered sixty. Such is the information which our scouts gained from the people living on the ground where the enemy encamped. Their numbers are probably overrated, but with regard to their artillery, and its being manned in part by Negroes I think the report is probably correct.” Col John W. Phelps 1st Vermont Infantry commanding Aug. 11, 1861. The War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol IV page 569
“We are not likely to use one Negro where the Rebels have used a thousand. When I left Arkansas they were still enrolling negroes to fortify the Rebellion.” Major General Samuel R Curtis 2nd Iowa Infantry Sept 29, 1862 The War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol XIII page 688
Question by the Judge Advocate: “Do you know of any individual of the enemy having been killed or wounded during the siege of Harpers Ferry?”
Answer I have strong reason to believe that there was a negro killed, who had wounded 2 or 3 of my men. I know that an officer took deliberate aim at him and he fell over. He was one of the skirmishers of the enemy and wounded 3 of my men I know there must have been some of the enemy killed.
Question “How do you know the negro was killed?”
Answer “the Officer saw him fall.”
Lt Col Stephen Wheeler Downey (3rd Maryland Infantry Potomac Home Brigade Oct 1862) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol XIX part I page 617
And more recently the Confederate legislature of Tennessee have passed an act forcing into their military service all male free persons of color between the ages of 15 and 50, or such numbers as may be necessary, who may be sound in body and capable of actual service; and they further enacted that in the event a sufficient number of free persons of color to meet the wants of the state shall not tender their services then the Governor is empowered through the sheriffs of different counties to impress such persons until the required number is obtained. Lt Col William H Ludlow (Agent for exchange of prisoners 73rd New York Volunteer Infantry June 1863) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series II, Vol VI page 17
[Excerpt from letter to Abraham Lincoln] “I do and have believed we ought to use the colored people, after the rebels commenced to use them against us.” Thomas H Hicks, Senator, Maryland Sept 1863) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series III, Vol 3 page 768
“We pursued them closely for 7 miles and captured 4 privates of Goldsby’s company and 3 colored men, mounted and armed, with 7 horses and 5 mules with equipments and 20 Austrian rifles.” Brigadier General Alexander Asboth US Army District of West Florida Aug 1864) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol 35 page 442
“We have turned up 11 bushwhackers to dry and one rebel negro.” Captain P.L. Powers 47th Missouri Infantry, Company H November 1864) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol 41 page 670
“The Rebels are recruiting negro troops at Enterprise, Mississippi, and the negroes are all enrolled in the state.” Major A.M. Jackson 10th US colored heavy artillery April 1865) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol 49 page 253
And the desertion rate among the Condeferacy was higher than that of the Union.
See above. That did not happen until late in the war when food supplies were inadequate and people's homes were under attack.
Confederate Law Authorizing the Enlistment of Black Soldiers, as Promulgated in a Military Order "IV. The enlistment of colored persons under this act will be made upon printed forms, to be furnished for the purpose, similar to those established for the regular service. They will be executed in duplicate, one copy to be returned to this office for file. No slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman, and which will be filed with the superintendent."
As has been pointed out to you before, that was the Confederate Congress. Various Confederate states allowed both free Blacks as well as slaves to serve in their forces. What was the Confederate Army composed of? State units. IOW, the Confederate Congress had no power to stop Blacks both slave and free from serving in the Confederate Army and many thousands did exactly that.....as the numerous quotes from union sources above all attest.
and even more bandwidth wasted on a policy that never came close to ratification.
Even more bandwidth well spent refuting your BS and lies.
repeats snipped.
"I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination." - President Jefferson Davis The Atlantic Monthly Volume 14, Number 83
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: repeats snipped
Beginning in late 1862, James Phelan, Joseph Bradford, and Reuben Davis wrote to Jefferson Davis to express concern that some opponents were claiming the war "was for the defense of the institution of slavery" (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, pp. 479-480, 765). They called those who were making this claim "demagogues." Cooper notes that when two Northerners visited Jefferson Davis during the war, Davis insisted "the Confederates were not battling for slavery" and that "slavery had never been the key issue" (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 524).
I was ready to write that off as a rant, but those were good questions. Yes I know many of them had slaves. I can accept the good that came without absolving the bad that came with it. I can accept the legacy of freedom, justice, and opportunity for all while condemning the times they were denied.
That's my point. I accept the bad with the good. They're both part of the American legacy. The fact that people in the past did not live lives that were perfectly in keeping with our current views does not make what they did illegitimate....ie just so many "dead white males" as the Wokeratti would have it. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were laudable. They were amazing affirmations of freedom and the rights of man even if, yes, they were not perfect. Compared to anything else in the world at the time, they were simply amazing.
The difference is that while the Union was guilty of many of these crimes, they also led in abolishing them. The Confederacy never abolished slavery and fought to preserve it, so that is their only legacy.
That's ridiculous. The Confederacy was not fighting to preserve slavery. That's just a lie. As for abolishing slavery or granting women the vote or any of the other changes that have taken place in the last 150 years, the CSA never had the chance to do those things. That's hardly something that is fair or reasonable to blame it for.
And notice I said the Confederacy, and not the South. Many in South opposed slavery, and many others left the South to fight against the Confederacy.
Very few in the South or the North opposed slavery until very late in the war.
How many do I need? The Democrats said secession was about preserving slavery, and they backed it with their actions. The fact that they managed to pour out propaganda to the contrary doesn't refute this.
You keep citing three. I've cited far more than that demonstrating that secession was not about slavery and their actions demonstrate that they were perfectly willing to sacrifice slavery in order to gain their independence. They were fighting for Independence obviously. Your PC Revisionist lies about it being "all about slavery" have been easily refuted multiple times.
Absolute nonsense. He may have correctly stated that secession was about slavery as did JD in 1858 and the declarations of secession, but that doesn't obligate me to accept his accusations against the North.
LOL! So you count him when its convenient for you, but discount him when his views are not convenient for you just as you try to discount the fact that President Davis and others said many many times that secession and the war were not about slavery. Hell, even Lincoln and the US Congress said openly that the war was not about slavery.
There you go with "the North" again. I know everyone in the North wasn't on the right side on this issue. The Democrats in particular blocked abolition for as long as they had the votes to do it, but that ended in 1865. The Republicans passed abolition as soon as they had the votes they needed.
There you go again trying to claim the Democrats had long blocked abolition. No they hadn't. They didn't need to. Hardly anybody was for abolition until very late in the war. The Republicans never even tried to push abolition until them. In fact, they openly denounced it again and again. Its not that "everyone in the North wasn't on the right side of this issue". Its that hardly anybody was until late in the war. No matter how much it clashes with your view of morality, yours was a fringe view until at least 1864.
Repeats snipped
The usual regurgitated quote of the 3 you habitually cling to, in no way refutes that the South has always favored decentralized power, limited government and balanced budgets. You obviously don't know how to respond to that so you try falling back on one of the 3 quotes you know. You have nothing else.
That's because it's a lie. JD never came close to abolishing slavery, even if he had "offered" it in return for military aid.
Nope. Its true. Read the quote again. "were prepared to....."
The whole problem with your argument is that the Corbomite Maneuver was a desperate attempt to prevent secession and the CW, and there was enough time for five states to ratify it. That proves the rest of the states had the time, if they had intended to ratify it. They didn't even though they could have and even though it meant secession and a possible CW. FACTS.
The problem with your argument is that it does not matter that the Corwin Amendment was "a desperate attempt to prevent secession". The fact is that Lincoln and the Northern dominated Congress were prepared to support slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. The fact that some states did not ratify it as soon as they possibly could have does not mean they never would have. That's a ridiculous claim as any examination of the passage of other constitutional amendments will show. Some states have always taken longer than the first opportunity to pass an amendment. Many many states have passed several amendments later than the first possible opportunity.
False. It was never ratified, and it was passed by a majority of Democrats, while a majority of Republicans opposed it. I know you'll reply "but Lincoln and Corwin", but the big difference between this and all of the other policies you keep posting again and again and again is that they were never made law while abolition was. FACT.
False. REPUBLICANS wrote it and introduced it to both the House and the Senate. Lincoln the de facto leader of the Republican party orchestrated it. The only reason it did not pass was that the original 7 seceding states rejected it. FACT.
1864 when they almost had enough votes, and 1865 when they finally had enough votes. And they had spoken about abolition publicly, but they had to deal with parts of the population that wanted to hear the opposite. You insist on judging the situation by today's standards, but abolition was a radical idea to many back then, and the Republicans had to walk the line between the abolitionists who were growing frustrated with the lack of action, and the Democrats who wanted to preserve slavery. Frederick Douglas acknowledged this, even after he was one of those expressing frustration.
See the date you used? 1864. That's what I've said all along. Republicans did not support abolition until very late in the war.
The evidence is anecdotal and most certainly deniable.
Its deniable? You were there and can refute their eyewitness testimony? Your favorite PC Revisionist professor was there and knows that those union army eyewitnesses should believe their PC Revisionist dogma instead of their lyin' eyes?
And you're not entitled to your own interpretation of the English Language. Who do you think you are, Lia Thomas?
The Great Migration refers to a specific event at a specific time - that was the 1890s when Southern Blacks moved North in large numbers. They did not do so a generation earlier because the Northern states would not allow them to do so a generation earlier.
I meant from sources other than those that have the Confederacy Amen Corner's seal of approval, so I can review the entire context rather than cherry picked excerpts.
Like the eyewitness accounts of Black Confederates from union army sources, I posted numerous statements from Union sources including the carpetbaggers themselves as well as the Secretary of the Treasury.
repeats snipped
See? Standard example. I say the Confederates did not design their constitution from the ground up to protect slavery, they merely carried over those portions of the US Constitution and that the changes they made were in other areas such as more explicitly protecting states' rights and limiting the power of the central government to spend money. You citing the language of the Confederate Constitution as it pertains to slavery (which was the same as the US Constitution) does not refute what I said. You could cite it a million more times and it still would not address that fact. The US Constitution was the same wrt slavery.
They "made that clear" to audiences who wanted to hear that. When they got the votes they needed to pass abolition, they did.
They made it clear because by all accounts, they meant it. There is nothing to support your implication/claim that they were super secretly abolitionists at heart and were just telling the Northern public what it wanted to hear. And in answer to your inevitable response, passing abolition years later does not in any way prove this is what they wanted before. Circumstances and sentiments had obviously changed by late in the war.
More wasted bandwidth on policies that were never ratified, unlike abolition which was ratified. In fact, just about your entire case is built on policies that were never ratified. The Corbomite Naneuver, strengthening fugitive slave laws, and abolishing slavery in return for military aid were never ratified. On the other hand the only policy that was ratified, abolition, is the policy you keep trying to avoid.
more bandwidth well spent because it refutes your PC Revisionist claims. The Corwin Amendment shows both that the North/Republicans were perfectly willing to protect slavery effectively forever and that the original 7 seceding states rejected it. The offer by the Confederate government to abolish slavery in exchange for military aid once again shows - as President Davis said numerous times - that they were not fighting for slavery. They were fighting for independence. The US passing the 13th amendment years later in no way disproves any of what happened before.
"Resolved: That, with our Republican fathers, we hold it to be a self-evident truth, that all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction"
All persons. This was the context for the word territory, not territories as you keep trying to force.
False. If that were so, then one prominent Republican after another including Abraham Lincoln would not have stood up and said repeatedly that they were not abolitionists and did not support abolition. They would not have support slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment. They would not have supported a Congressional resolution which said expressly that the union was not fighting to abolish slavery. Yet those things did pass.
You can post clips of comments made to audiences that wanted to hear those comments. I never denied that. But eight years after the Republican party was formed, they voted to abolish slavery in all states, but were blocked by Democrats who saw slavery as a states' rights issue. They following year, they had the numbers and voted to abolish slavery.
You have nothing at all to prove any claim that Republican politicians such as Abraham Lincoln were just telling audiences what they wanted to hear and that those Republicans were really super secret crypto abolitionists. All indications are that Lincoln meant exactly what he said in public and in private that he was not an abolitionist and did not support abolition. The same was true of the other leading Republicans until years later when it was very late in the war.
I don't care what they said, how many times they said it, or how many times you post it. What they said is not evidence, any more than what Hitler said in 1945 not wanting war in 1939. The evidence is in what they did. They seceded and went to war to preserve slavery as they said, and never abolished it until after they were defeated.,/p>
I don't care how many times you try your playground attempts to analogize the South/Jefferson Davis with Hitler and the Nazis. I will always laugh at and dismiss such fatuous attempts at argument. They seceded to gain their independence, not for slavery. They knew perfectly well that they would be far better off if they were independent. They were perfectly willing to abolish slavery in order to gain independence as was clear from their actions.
I know you'll reply with "but Lincoln and the Republicans said nasty things like blah blah blah", but they had to deal with parts of the Union that wanted to hear that, in addition to the impatient abolitionists. They did, and when they got the votes they needed, they passed abolition. Those are the only facts that matter.
I know you'll keep trying to fall back on "anything that suits my argument which any Southerners said was 100% true while anything Republicans/Northerners said which runs contrary to my argument was just said for sake of expediency. They were just politicians and had to get elected. They didn't really mean it." The problem for you is that you have zero evidence to support this ridiculous claim. Their words in public and in private and their actions show that they were perfectly willing to protect slavery in order to keep the Southern states in. The Southern states by contrast were willing to sacrifice slavery in order to leave as was shown by their actions.
I don't care how many times the Democrats lied about their other reasons for secession or how many times you regurgitate their propaganda. They said it was about preserving slavery. As late as 1865 the arguments against allowing blacks to enlist were based on preserving slavery. Their votes against abolition were based on "states' rights", their words. They never freed the slaves until after they were defeated, and as you keep implying they wouldn't have.
And they were never offered explicit protection for slavery. Like all of the other policies you base your arguments on it was never ratified.
Repeats of Democrat lies snipped.
No. Abolition was never even brought up by Republicans in the North until very late in the war. Its not that Democrats blocked it. Its that Republicans weren't interested - as they openly said many many times.
They had only formed in 1856, and were blocked from passing abolition by the Democrats as late as 1864.
Repeats snipped.
False as usual. I have brought in facts, quotes and sources for which you have no answer. So you keep spamming the board with the same 3 quotes/links no matter how irrelevant they are to whatever specific point is being discussed.
I use the Democrats' own documents to prove my points. You use a bunch of cherry picked quotes from Confederacy Amen Corner approved sources, and policies that were never ratified.
Repeats snipped.
LOL! Everybody knew they were not a different species. Otherwise they could not have interbred with Whites.
Of course everyone knows that, but that doesn't prove the Democrats running the Confederacy saw it that way.
Was there PLANNED breeding...as in the owner selects which ones, extending over several generations? No, clearly there was not.
Were they allowed to breed outside of the plantation? No.
Were their children born free instead of treated like beasts of burden or sold as property? Maybe in a few cases, but as a rule no.
Nope! You have proven me right but don't want to admit it. They no more designed the Confederate Constitution from the ground up to protect slavery than the US Constitution was designed from the ground up to protect slavery. They simply adopted what had come before with a few modifications in the areas of protecting state's rights more explicitly and limiting the power of the central government to spend money. Those were the only areas they changed much because those were their real concerns.
What a pathetic reply that does nothing to answer my point, which was that they could have left the explicit protections out if they had intended to without abolishing slavery, but it was their intention to protect slavery.
And here's what the Democrats meant by "protecting states' rights".
Wrong. It was true. Union army desertion rates went up after the EP. Desertion was an ongoing problem in both armies. It did not go up significantly in the Confederate Army until late in the war due to the Confederate army not being adequately fed and due to soldiers wanting to go home to protect their families from attack by union army thieves, rapists, etc.
American Civil War Desertions in the Union and Confederate Armies
"Large numbers" is of course open for debate. The point is you claimed Southerners who fought for the Union did so out of a commitment to abolitionism. I find that claim extremely dubious and without any support.
You have yet to offer a viable alternative.
Yes. I stand by that.
Then you admit you did accuse me of calling you a Nazi.
That is your standard fallback. Look how many times you have desperately tried to compare Jefferson Davis to Hitler or the CSA to the Nazi regime...Answer what? Your ridiculous failed Nazi/Hitler analogies? The leaders and governments were not remotely analogous. There's your answer.
I haven't. I have only pointed out similarities in their actions. You can't answer that so you hide behind your "Mommy, TwelveOfTwenty called me a Nazi again" whining.
Well, given people like John Brown who were terrorists by any definition......Nat Turner was a terrorist and a murderer by any definition. Vesey was found to be after an investigation as well.
I see the slave owners who paid someone to kidnap humans and sell them as slaves as the real terrorists, but I guess it depends on which side you support.
How much profit did Northern political supporters of Lincoln/the Republicans make from keeping the Southern states as cash cows? Quite a lot! I've already posted numerous quotes and editorials from leading Northern papers saying exactly that.
Lincoln? None. He was assassinated by someone who was triggered by the idea that the blacks were freed.
The Republicans? I suppose you think paying for the CW, freeing the slaves, and reconstruction all came without cost.
“And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest.” Union Colonel James Jaquess “No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.” Jefferson Davis
More Democrat propaganda. Union Colonel James Jaquess was probably flabbergasted that JD would make such an outrageous claim after he had gone on record saying secession was the proper response to the election of abolitionists.
The rest of your Democrat propaganda snipped.
More eyewitness accounts of blacks serving in the Confederacy's military, even though I never said there weren't. What I doubt are the numbers you keep throwing at me, especially since many in the South were hesitant to allow them to enlist.
Confederate Law Authorizing the Enlistment of Black Soldiers, as Promulgated in a Military Order
Ratified in March 1865.
"IV. The enlistment of colored persons under this act will be made upon printed forms, to be furnished for the purpose, similar to those established for the regular service. They will be executed in duplicate, one copy to be returned to this office for file. No slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman, and which will be filed with the superintendent."
and the Confederate government empowered their ambassador to agree to a treaty that would have abolished slavery. Seems that based on the undeniable facts, were perfectly willing to get rid of slavery to gain their independence.
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
Oh, about your quotes from Illinois Daily State Journal, in 1861 Illinois was technically still one of those slave holding states you like to talk about. By 1865, they became the first state to ratify the 13th Amendment.
I know you're going to say "See, I told you, they were opposed to abolition, then they voted for it.", but that only proves my point that this was what the Republicans had to work with to get abolition done. That they were overwhelmingly successful in only nine years is evidence enough of their intentions.
As has been pointed out to you before, that was the Confederate Congress. Various Confederate states allowed both free Blacks as well as slaves to serve in their forces. What was the Confederate Army composed of? State units. IOW, the Confederate Congress had no power to stop Blacks both slave and free from serving in the Confederate Army and many thousands did exactly that.....as the numerous quotes from union sources above all attest...Its deniable? You were there and can refute their eyewitness testimony?
The whole problem with the numbers game you keep playing is that during the fog of war it's almost impossible the get accurate counts until well after, and that was especially true of the Confederacy's military. They can't even say how many served, much less how many were black. Here's more.
I don't dispute that some blacks served in the Confederacy's military. I just doubt the numbers were that high, especially when the slaves needed their masters' permission to serve.
(Later) Your favorite PC Revisionist professor was there and knows that those union army eyewitnesses should believe their PC Revisionist dogma instead of their lyin' eyes?
Are you referring to a former slave who escaped, and noted with disgust that blacks would serve in the military of a nation that had written this into its constitution?
Sec. 9. (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Sec. 2. (3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
I know you'll come back with "but the North also had slavery" and some states did, but the blacks who served in the Union's military understood they were fighting for their freedom, and against a regime that wanted to capture and enslave them.
Even more bandwidth well spent refuting your BS and lies.
Are these my BS and lies?
Speech of Jefferson Davis before the Mississippi Legislature, Nov. 16, 1858
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
Constitution of the Confederate States; March 11, 1861
Sec. 9. (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Sec. 2. (3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
All you have to answer this with are policies that were never ratified.
"I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination." - President Jefferson Davis The Atlantic Monthly Volume 14, Number 833
They didn't fight until extermination. On the contrary, many left to fight for the Union.
Compared to anything else in the world at the time, they were simply amazing.
That they were. Even with their own faults, they built the framework that would result in the abolition of those faults.
LOL! So you count him when its convenient for you, but discount him when his views are not convenient for you just as you try to discount the fact that President Davis and others said many many times that secession and the war were not about slavery.
I am under no obligation to accept any of this when their actions proved it was about preserving slavery.
I know you'll come back with another policy that was never ratified, so I'll answer it now. Abolition for military aid was never ratified.
Hell, even Lincoln and the US Congress said openly that the war was not about slavery.
We can see why with states like Illinois in the Union. They had to keep everyone in the fight until they had the votes to pass abolition. Both sides were talking out of both sides of their mouths, but their actions show which sides of each was telling the truth.
There you go again trying to claim the Democrats had long blocked abolition.
There you go, defending your party's actions again.
They made it clear because by all accounts, they meant it. There is nothing to support your implication/claim that they were super secretly abolitionists at heart and were just telling the Northern public what it wanted to hear. And in answer to your inevitable response, passing abolition years later does not in any way prove this is what they wanted before. Circumstances and sentiments had obviously changed by late in the war.
I hate to use up more bandwidth on this, but if FreeRepublic is willing to give you a forum to defend the Democrats from their own history, then I guess I'll need to.
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
From Georgia.
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slaveryin reference to that property...
In 1820 the North endeavored to overturn this wise and successful policy and demanded that the State of Missouri should not be admitted into the Union unless she first prohibited slavery within her limits by her constitution.
Mr. Jefferson condemned the restriction and foresaw its consequences and predicted that it would result in the dissolution of the Union. His prediction is now history. The North demanded the application of the principle of prohibition of slavery to all of the territory acquired from Mexico and all other parts of the public domain then and in all future time. It was the announcement of her purpose to appropriate to herself all the public domain then owned and thereafter to be acquired by the United States. The claim itself was less arrogant and insulting than the reason with which she supported it. That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists.
The Presidential election of 1852 resulted in the total overthrow of the advocates of restriction and their party friends. Immediately after this result the anti-slavery portion of the defeated party resolved to unite all the elements in the North opposed to slavery an to stake their future political fortunes upon their hostility to slavery everywhere. This is the party two whom the people of the North have committed the Government. They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated. They entered the Presidential contest again in 1860 and succeeded.
The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.
It would appear difficult to employ language freer from ambiguity, yet for above twenty years the non-slave-holding States generally have wholly refused to deliver up to us persons charged with crimes affecting slave property.
The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party.
While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then...
The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support, but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon. Time and issues upon slavery were necessary to its completion and final triumph. The feeling of anti-slavery, which it was well known was very general among the people of the North, had been long dormant or passive; it needed only a question to arouse it into aggressive activity.
That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity.
From Mississippi
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.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery;
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
From Texas
They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture...
She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
From South Carolina
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
The Great Migration refers to a specific event at a specific time - that was the 1890s when Southern Blacks moved North in large numbers. They did not do so a generation earlier because the Northern states would not allow them to do so a generation earlier.
I said MIGRATION.
I know you'll keep trying to fall back on "anything that suits my argument which any Southerners said was 100% true while anything Republicans/Northerners said which runs contrary to my argument was just said for sake of expediency. They were just politicians and had to get elected. They didn't really mean it." The problem for you is that you have zero evidence to support this ridiculous claim.
Evidence? I have something you don't, which is a policy that was ratified. When the Republicans had the votes they needed, they passed abolition and sent it to the states for ratification, only nine years after the party was formed. The Democrats wrote explicit protections for slavery into their Constitution, and never abolished slavery until defeated. That's what counts, not the policies you keep citing that were never made law.
I don't care how many times the Democrats lied about their other reasons for secession or how many times you regurgitate their propaganda. They said it was about preserving slavery. As late as 1865 the arguments against allowing blacks to enlist were based on preserving slavery. Their votes against abolition were based on "states' rights", their words. They never freed the slaves until after they were defeated, and as you keep implying they wouldn't have.
and I don't care how many times you try to lie by denying that they TURNED DOWN the Corwin Amendment or that they listed their economic exploitation by the Northern states or that they offered to abolish slavery in exchange for military aid from Britain and France, it is clear they did not secede over slavery.
And they were never offered explicit protection for slavery. Like all of the other policies you base your arguments on it was never ratified.
And they were offered explicit protection for slavery. You are just lying here. The Corwin Amendment passed the Northern dominated Congress with the necessary 2/3rds supermajority and was ratified by several Northern states
They had only formed in 1856, and were blocked from passing abolition by the Democrats as late as 1864.
They openly said they were not abolitionists and did not support abolition until very late in the war. How many times do you need to read that?
I use the Democrats' own documents to prove my points. You use a bunch of cherry picked quotes from Confederacy Amen Corner approved sources, and policies that were never ratified.
I use the Republicans' own documents to prove my points. You use the same 3 cherry picked quotes that don't even apply to what is being discussed more than half the time.
Of course everyone knows that, but that doesn't prove the Democrats running the Confederacy saw it that way.
In other words you have NOTHING to back up your BS claims.
Were they allowed to breed outside of the plantation? No. Were their children born free instead of treated like beasts of burden or sold as property? Maybe in a few cases, but as a rule no.
They were property. That does not mean there was a breeding program as you falsely claimed.
What a pathetic reply that does nothing to answer my point, which was that they could have left the explicit protections out if they had intended to without abolishing slavery, but it was their intention to protect slavery.
It was their intention to carry on as before with the key changes being about limiting the power of the central government, requiring a balanced budget and specifically recognizing the sovereign rights of the states. Nobody has ever said they intended anything different - except you.
You have yet to offer a viable alternative.
False. They fought for nationalism....just as the Loyalists did a couple generations earlier.
Then you admit you did accuse me of calling you a Nazi.?
I admit the fact that you made numerous completely frivolous comparisons to the Nazis and the CSA, yes. I admit you did that because.....you did.
I haven't. I have only pointed out similarities in their actions. You can't answer that so you hide behind your "Mommy, TwelveOfTwenty called me a Nazi again" whining.
You desperately tried to make laughable comparisons to the Nazis - the standard tactic of infantile Leftists.
I see the slave owners who paid someone to kidnap humans and sell them as slaves as the real terrorists, but I guess it depends on which side you support.
Those who use violence and terror to effect political change are by definition, terrorists.
Lincoln? None. He was assassinated by someone who was triggered by the idea that the blacks were freed. The Republicans? I suppose you think paying for the CW, freeing the slaves, and reconstruction all came without cost.
Who were the Republicans' main financial backers? The same corporate fatcats who were making a LOT of profit by keeping the Southern states as cash cows.
More Democrat propaganda. Union Colonel James Jaquess was probably flabbergasted that JD would make such an outrageous claim after he had gone on record saying secession was the proper response to the election of abolitionists.
It wasn't propaganda. It was said to a union officer during the war. It was entirely consistent with Davis' numerous statements that neither secession nor the war were "about" slavery made both in public and like this one, in private.
More eyewitness accounts of blacks serving in the Confederacy's military, even though I never said there weren't. What I doubt are the numbers you keep throwing at me, especially since many in the South were hesitant to allow them to enlist.
"The South" was not hesitant to allow them to enlist. The Confederate Congress was hesitant. But the Confederate Congress did not have control over the units the Confederate states sent to form the Confederate Army. Confederate states had no hesitation about enlisting Blacks and did so right from the start.
Confederate Law Authorizing the Enlistment of Black Soldiers, as Promulgated in a Military Order Ratified in March 1865. "IV. The enlistment of colored persons under this act will be made upon printed forms, to be furnished for the purpose, similar to those established for the regular service. They will be executed in duplicate, one copy to be returned to this office for file. No slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman, and which will be filed with the superintendent."
As I've already outlined above, this was largely irrelevant. The regiments sent by states most definitely had Blacks in them and did from the start.....as all those eyewitness accounts attest.
Repeats snipped
“Wednesday, September 10--At four o'clock this morning the rebel army began to move from our town, Jackson's force taking the advance. The movement continued until eight o'clock P.M., occupying sixteen hours. The most liberal calculations could not give them more than 64,000 men. Over 3,000 negroes must be included in this number. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in rebel ranks. Most of the negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabres, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy Army. They were seen riding on horses and mules, driving wagons, riding on caissons, in ambulances, with the staff of Generals, and promiscuously mixed up with all the rebel horde. (Report of Lewis H. Steiner, New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1862, pp. 10-11)
Union colonel Peter Allabach, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 131st Pennsylvania Infantry, reported that his forces encountered black Confederate soldiers during the battle of Chancellorsville:
Under this disposition of my command, I lay until 11 o'clock, when I received orders from you to throw the two left regiments perpendicular to the road, and to advance in line of battle, with skirmishers in front, as far as to the edge of the wood bordering near the Chancellor house. This movement was explained to me as intended to hold the enemy in check long enough for the corps of Major-Generals Couch and Sickles to get into another position, and not to bring on an action if it could be avoided; and, should the enemy advance in force, to fall back slowly until I arrived on the edge of the wood, there to mass in column and double-quick to the rear, that the artillery might fire in this wood. I was instructed that I was to consider myself under the command of Major-General Couch.
In obedience to these orders, at about 11 o'clock I advanced with these two regiments forward through the wood, under a severe fire of shell, grape, and canister. I encountered their skirmishers when near the farther edge of the wood. Allow me to state that the skirmishers of the enemy were negroes. (Report of Col. Peter H. Allabach, 131st Pennsylvania Infantry, commanding Second Brigade, in Official Records, Volume XXV, in Two Parts, 1889, Chap. 37, Part I – Reports, p. 555, emphasis added)
"It is now pretty well established, that there are at the present moment many colored men in the Confederate army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down loyal troops, and do all that soldiers may" Frederick Douglass
A telegram from New Orleans dated November 23, 1861, notes the review by Gov. Moore of over 28,000 troops, and that one regiment comprised "1,400 colored men." The New Orleans Picayune, referring to a review held February 9, 1862, says: "We must also pay a deserved compliment to the companies of free colored men, all very well drilled and comfortably equipped." (Christian A. Fleetwood, The Negro as a Soldier, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Print, 1895, pp. 5-6)
In a Union army battle report, General David Stuart complained about the deadly effectiveness of the black Confederate soldiers whom his troops had encountered. The “armed negroes,” he said, did “serious execution upon our men”:
Col. Giles Smith commanded the First Brigade and Col. T. Kilby Smith, Fifty-fourth Ohio, the Fourth. I communicated to these officers General Sherman’s orders and charged Colonel Smith, Fifty-fourth Ohio, specially with the duty of clearing away the road to the crossing and getting it into the best condition for effecting our crossing that he possibly could. The work was vigorously pressed under his immediate supervision and orders, and he devoted himself to it with as much energy and activity as any living man could employ. It had to be prosecuted under the fire of the enemy’s sharpshooters, protected as well as the men might be by our skirmishers on the bank, who were ordered to keep up so vigorous a fire that the enemy should not dare to lift their heads above their rifle-pits; but the enemy, and especially their armed negroes, did dare to rise and fire, and did serious execution upon our men. The casualties in the brigade were 11 killed, 40 wounded, and 4 missing; aggregate, 55. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, D. STUART, Brigadier-General, Commanding. (Report of Brig. Gen. David Stuart, U. S. Army, commanding Fourth Brigade and Second Division, of operations December 26, 1862 - January 3, 1863, in Official Records, Volume XVII, in Two Parts. 1886/1887, Chap. 29, Part I - Reports, pp. 635-636)
Oh, about your quotes from Illinois Daily State Journal, in 1861 Illinois was technically still one of those slave holding states you like to talk about. By 1865, they became the first state to ratify the 13th Amendment.
uhhh, Illinois? A slaveholding state?
I know you're going to say "See, I told you, they were opposed to abolition, then they voted for it.", but that only proves my point that this was what the Republicans had to work with to get abolition done. That they were overwhelmingly successful in only nine years is evidence enough of their intentions.
No. That they later favored abolition is not evidence that they favored abolition earlier. The war changed people's minds about it.
The whole problem with the numbers game you keep playing is that during the fog of war it's almost impossible the get accurate counts until well after, and that was especially true of the Confederacy's military. They can't even say how many served, much less how many were black. I don't dispute that some blacks served in the Confederacy's military. I just doubt the numbers were that high, especially when the slaves needed their masters' permission to serve. (Later) Your favorite PC Revisionist professor was there and knows that those union army eyewitnesses should believe their PC Revisionist dogma instead of their lyin' eyes? Are you referring to a former slave who escaped, and noted with disgust that blacks would serve in the military of a nation that had written this into its constitution?
The quotes and sources - Northern sources - I posted indicated THOUSANDS. They were actually there. They saw. The PC Revisionist history Prof I was referring to is James McPherson. BTW, there were plenty of free Blacks in various Southern states. In Virginia it was about 25%. Louisiana had a fairly large free black and a fairly large mixed population.
Repeats snipped I know you'll come back with "but the North also had slavery" and some states did, but the blacks who served in the Union's military understood they were fighting for their freedom, and against a regime that wanted to capture and enslave them.
And plenty of the Black Confederates were fighting for their freedom....as well as their homes.
Are these my BS and lies? Repeats Snipped
No, those are the same 3 quotes you repeat endlessly even when they don't remotely address the points being discussed.
Plenty of other things you say are lies and BS.
Repeats Snipped
In a letter published in the Indianapolis Star in December 1861, a Union soldier stated that his unit was attacked by black Confederate soldiers:
A body of seven hundred [Confederate] Negro infantry opened fire on our men, wounding two lieutenants and two privates. The wounded men testify positively that they were shot by Negroes, and that not less than seven hundred were present, armed with muskets. This is, indeed a new feature in the war. We have heard of a regiment of [Confederate] Negroes at Manassas, and another at Memphis, and still another at New Orleans, but did not believe it till it came so near home and attacked our men. (Indianapolis Star, December 23, 1861)
Union soldier James G. Bates wrote a letter to his father that was reprinted in an Indiana newspaper in May 1863. In the letter Bates assured his father that there were black Confederate soldiers:
I can assure you [his father,] of a certainty, that the rebels have Negro soldiers in their army. One of their best sharp shooters and the boldest of them all here is a Negro. He dug himself a rifle pit last night [16 April 1863] just across the river and has been annoying our pickets opposite him very much to-day. You can see him plain enough with the naked eye, occasionally, to make sure that he is a "wooly-head," and with a spy-glass there is no mistaking him. (Winchester Journal, May 1, 1863)
A few months before the war ended, a Union soldier named James Miles of the 185th N.Y.V.I. wrote in his diary, “Saw several Negros fighting for those rebels" (Diary entry, January 8, 1865).
A Union lieutenant colonel named Parkhurst, who served in the Ninth Michigan Infantry, reported that black Confederate soldiers participated in an attack on his camp:
The forces attacking my camp were the First Regiment Texas Rangers, a battalion of the First Georgia Rangers . . . and quite a number of Negroes attached to the Texas and Georgia troops, who were armed and equipped, took part in the several engagements with my forces during the day. (Lieutenant Colonel Parkhurst’s Report, Ninth Michigan Infantry, on General Forrest’s Attack at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, July 13, 1862, in Official Records, Series 1, Volume XVI, Part 1, p. 805)
In late June 1861, the Illinois Daily State Journal, a staunchly Republican newspaper, reported that the Confederate army was arming some slaves and that in some cases slaves were being organized into military units. Interestingly, the newspaper also said that the North was not fighting to abolish slavery, and that the South was not fighting to protect slavery:
Our mighty armies are gathering for no purpose of abolition. Our enemies are not in arms to protect the peculiar institution [slavery]. . . .
They [the Confederates] are using their Slave property as an instrument of warfare against the Union. Their slaves dig trenches, erect fortifications, and bear arms. Slaves, in some instances, are organized into military companies to fight against the Government. (“Slaves Contraband of War,” Illinois Daily State Journal, June 21, 1861)
After the battle of Gettysburg, Union forces took seven black Confederate soldiers as prisoners, as was noted in a Northern newspaper at the time, which said,
. . . reported among the rebel prisoners were seven blacks in Confederate uniforms fully armed as soldiers. (New York Herald, July 11, 1863)
During the battle of Gettysburg, two black Confederate soldiers took part in Pickett’s charge: Color Corporal George B. Powell (14th Tennessee) went down during the advance. Boney Smith, a Black man attached to the regiment, took the colors and carried them forward. . . . The colors of the 14th Tennessee got within fifty feet of the east wall before Boney Smith hit the dirt ---wounded. Jabbing the flagstaff in the ground, he momentarily urged the regiment forward until the intense pressure forced the men to lie down to save their lives. (John Michael Priest, Into the Fight: Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, White Mane Books, 1998, pp. 128, 130-131)
During the battle of Chickamauga, slaves serving Confederate soldiers armed themselves and asked permission to join the fight—and when they received that permission they fought commendably. Their commander, Captain J. B. Briggs, later noted that these men “filled a portion of the line of advance as well as any company of the regiment” (J. H. Segars and Charles Barrow, Black Southerners in Confederate Armies, Atlanta, GA: Southern Lion Books, 2001, p. 141)
One of the last Confederate charges of the day included the Fourth Tennessee Calvary, which participated dismounted in the assault. Among the troopers of the regiment were forty African Americans who had been serving as camp servants but who now demanded the right the participate in the last combat of the day. Captain J. B. Briggs gave his permission for them to join his command on the front line. Organized and equipped under Daniel McLemore, the personal servant of the colonel of the regiment, the black troops had collected dropped weapons from battlefields during the regiment’s campaigns. . . . (Steve Cottrell, Civil War in Tennessee, Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2001, p. 94)
After the war, hundreds of African Americans received Confederate veterans’ pensions from Southern state governments (Segars and Barrow, Black Southerners in Confederate Armies, Atlanta, GA: Southern Lion Books, pp. 73-100).
Down in Charleston, free blacks . . . declared that “our allegiance is due to South Carolina and in her defense, we will offer up our lives, and all that is dear to us.” Even slaves routinely expressed loyalty to their homeland, thousands serving the Confederate Army faithfully. (Taking A Stand: Portraits from the Southern Secession Movement, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: White Mane Books, 2000, p. 112)
In the July 1919 issue of The Journal of Negro History, Charles S. Wesley discussed the issue of blacks in the Confederate army: The loyalty of the slave in guarding home and family during his master’s absence has long been eloquently orated. The Negroes’ loyalty extended itself even to service in the Confederate army. Believing their land invaded by hostile foes, slaves eagerly offered themselves for service in actual warfare. . . .
At the outbreak of the war, an observer in Charleston noted the war-time preparations and called particular attention to “the thousand Negroes who, so far from inclining to insurrections, were grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of shooting the Yankees.” In the same city, one of the daily papers stated in early January that 150 free colored men had offered their services to the Confederate Government, and at Memphis a recruiting office was opened. In June 1861 the Legislature of Tennessee authorized Governor Harris to receive into the state military service all male persons of color between the ages of fifteen and fifty and to provide them with eight dollars a month, clothing, and rations. . . . In the same state, under the command of Confederate officers, marched a procession of several hundred colored men carrying shovels, axes, and blankets. The observer adds, “they were brimful of patriotism, shouting for Jeff Davis and singing war songs.” A paper in Lynchburg, Virginia, commenting on the enlistment of seventy free Negroes to fight for the defense of the State, concluded with “three cheers for the patriotic Negroes of Lynchburg.”
Two weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, several companies of volunteers of color passed through Augusta, Georgia, on their way to Virginia to engage in actual war. . . . In November of the same year, a military review was held in New Orleans, where twenty-eight thousand troops passed before Governor Moore, General Lowell, and General Ruggles. The line of march extended beyond seven miles and included one regiment comprised of 1,400 free colored men. (In Segars and Barrow, Black Southerners in Confederate Armies, pp. 2-4)
"Negroes in the Confederate Army," Journal of Negro History, Charles Wesle, Vol. 4, #3, [1919,] 244-245 - "Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies of free men of color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia."
"The part of Adams' Brigade that the 42nd Indiana was facing were the 'Louisiana Tigers.' This name was given to Colonel Gibson's 13th Louisiana Infantry, which included five companies of 'Avegno Zouaves' who still were wearing their once dashing traditional blue jackets, red caps and red baggy trousers. These five Zouaves companies were made up of Irish, Dutch, Negroes, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Italians." - Noe, Kenneth W., Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle. The University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, KY, 2001. [page 270]
The 85th Indiana Volunteer Infantry reported to the Indianapolis Daily Evening Gazette that on 5 March 1863: "During the fight the [artillery] battery in charge of the 85th Indiana [Volunteer Infantry] was attacked by [*in italics*] two rebel negro regiments. [*end italics*]."
After the action at Missionary Ridge, Commissary Sergeant William F. Ruby forwarded a casualty list written in camp at Ringgold, Georgia about 29 November 1863, to William S. Lingle for publication. Ruby's letter was partially reprinted in the Lafayette Daily Courier for 8 December 1863: "Ruby says among the rebel dead on the [Missionary] Ridge he saw a number of negroes in the Confederate uniform." Federal Official Records, Series I, Vol XVI Part I, pg. 805: "There were also quite a number of negroes attached to the Texas and Georgia troops, who were armed and equipped, and took part in the several engagements with my forces during the day." Federal Official Records Series 1, Volume 15, Part 1, Pages 137-138
"Pickets were thrown out that night, and Captain Hennessy, Company E, of the Ninth Connecticut, having been sent out with his company, captured a colored rebel scout, well mounted, who had been sent out to watch our movements." Federal Official Records, Series I, Vol. XLIX, Part II, pg. 253
April 6, 1865: "The rebels [Forrest] are recruiting negro troops at Enterprise, Miss., and the negroes are all enrolled in the State." Federal Official Records, Series I, Vol. XIV, pg. 24, second paragraph -
In his book, Black Confederates and AfroYankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin I. Jordan, a black historian, says that in June 1861 Tennessee became the first Confederate State to authorize the use of black soldiers. These soldiers were to be paid $18 a month and be provided with the same rations and clothing as white soldiers. Two regiments, he says, of blacks had appeared by September.
“They – the enemy – talked of having 9,000 men. They had 20 pieces of artillery, among which was the Richmond Howitzer battery manned by Negroes. Their wagons numbered sixty. Such is the information which our scouts gained from the people living on the ground where the enemy encamped. Their numbers are probably overrated, but with regard to their artillery, and its being manned in part by Negroes I think the report is probably correct.” Col John W. Phelps 1st Vermont Infantry commanding Aug. 11, 1861. The War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol IV page 569
“We are not likely to use one Negro where the Rebels have used a thousand. When I left Arkansas they were still enrolling negroes to fortify the Rebellion.” Major General Samuel R Curtis 2nd Iowa Infantry Sept 29, 1862 The War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol XIII page 688
[Excerpt from letter to Abraham Lincoln] “I do and have believed we ought to use the colored people, after the rebels commenced to use them against us.” Thomas H Hicks, Senator, Maryland Sept 1863) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series III, Vol 3 page 768
“We pursued them closely for 7 miles and captured 4 privates of Goldsby’s company and 3 colored men, mounted and armed, with 7 horses and 5 mules with equipments and 20 Austrian rifles.” Brigadier General Alexander Asboth US Army District of West Florida Aug 1864) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol 35 page 442
“We have turned up 11 bushwhackers to dry and one rebel negro.” Captain P.L. Powers 47th Missouri Infantry, Company H November 1864) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol 41 page 670
“The Rebels are recruiting negro troops at Enterprise, Mississippi, and the negroes are all enrolled in the state.” Major A.M. Jackson 10th US colored heavy artillery April 1865) War of the Rebellion a compilation of official records of Union and Confederate Armies Series I, Vol 49 page 253
All you have to answer this with are policies that were never ratified.
A constitutional amendment that was never ratified because the Southern states rejected it.
They didn't fight until extermination. On the contrary, many left to fight for the Union.
They fought very hard for over 4 years despite being way outnumbered and undersupplied. They managed to kill significantly more of their attackers than they lost.
Repeats snipped
On November 19, 1860 Senator Robert Toombs gave a speech to the Georgia convention in which he denounced the "infamous Morrill bill." The tariff legislation, he argued, was the product of a coalition between abolitionists and protectionists in which "the free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists." Toombs described this coalition as "the robber and the incendiary... united in joint raid against the South." Anti-tariff sentiments also appeared in Georgia's Secession Declaration of January 29, 1861:
I am under no obligation to accept any of this when their actions proved it was about preserving slavery.
Except their actions proved it was not about preserving slavery. They sent an ambassador with plenipotentiary power to agree to a treaty to abolish slavery. This was after they rejected slavery forever by express constitutional amendment.
I know you'll come back with another policy that was never ratified, so I'll answer it now. Abolition for military aid was never ratified.
and I'll point out that slavery forever by express constitutional amendment was not ratified BECAUSE THEY REJECTED IT. And of course they were willing to agree to abolish slavery in exchange for military aid. The other parties were not willing. Remember we are talking about intent here. They clearly were not fighting with the intent of preserving slavery. They could have had that without firing a shot.
We can see why with states like Illinois in the Union. They had to keep everyone in the fight until they had the votes to pass abolition. Both sides were talking out of both sides of their mouths, but their actions show which sides of each was telling the truth.
The problem for you is that no matter how desperately you want to believe that they intended to abolish slavery the whole time, they never said so. In fact they said the exact opposite. Nowhere even in their private utterances or in their diaries did prominent Republicans indicate a desire to abolish slavery until late in the war. Yours is an ex post hoc ergo propter hoc argument.
There you go, defending your party's actions again.
Not my party, I wasn't alive then. I am setting the record straight from your lies and BS though.
I hate to use up more bandwidth on this, but if FreeRepublic is willing to give you a forum to defend the Democrats from their own history, then I guess I'll need to. Repeats snipped.
Another example of you posting the same quotes you've posted tons of times before that do not remotely address the question. You have provided no evidence at all for your BS claim that Republicans intended to abolish slavery until late in the war. Their repeated utterances were directly contrary to that.
in 1861, Congress passed a resolution stating that the war "is not waged on our part...for interfering with the rights, or established institutions of these [the Confederate] States"...meaning slavery
There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that— I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them. - Abraham Lincoln first inaugural address.
"Lincoln remained unmoved. . . . 'I think Sumner [abolitionist Charles Sumner] and the rest of you would upset our applecart altogether if you had your way,' he told the Radicals. . . . 'We didn't go into this war to put down slavery . . . and to act differently at this moment would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause, but smack of bad faith.' Vindication of the president's view came a few weeks later, when the Massachusetts state Republican convention--perhaps the most Radical party organization in the North--defeated a resolution endorsing Fremont's proclamation." (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, pp. 75-76, emphasis added)
“When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists, and it is very difficult to get rid of in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would possibly be to free all slaves and send them to Liberia to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me that this would not be best for them. If they were all landed there in a day they would all perish in the next ten days, and there is not surplus money enough to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all and keep them among us as underlings. Is it quite certain that this would alter their conditions? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not. We cannot make them our equals. A system of gradual emancipation might well be adopted, and I will not undertake to judge our Southern friends for tardiness in this matter. I acknowledge the constitutional rights of the States — not grudgingly, but fairly and fully, and I will give them any legislation for reclaiming their fugitive slaves.” Abraham Lincoln
Evidence? I have something you don't, which is a policy that was ratified. When the Republicans had the votes they needed, they passed abolition and sent it to the states for ratification, only nine years after the party was formed. The Democrats wrote explicit protections for slavery into their Constitution, and never abolished slavery until defeated. That's what counts, not the policies you keep citing that were never made law.,/p>
Ex Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc.
and I don't care how many times you try to lie by denying that they TURNED DOWN the Corwin Amendment
Five states ratified it. That means the rest had the time if they had intended to ratify it. Even with secession and the threat of civil war, they didn't. There was nothing to turn down. Like everything else you try to prove your case with, it went nowhere and did nothing.
Repeats snipped.
or that they listed their economic exploitation by the Northern states or that they offered to abolish slavery in exchange for military aid from Britain and France, it is clear they did not secede over slavery.
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
From Georgia.
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property...
In 1820 the North endeavored to overturn this wise and successful policy and demanded that the State of Missouri should not be admitted into the Union unless she first prohibited slavery within her limits by her constitution.
Mr. Jefferson condemned the restriction and foresaw its consequences and predicted that it would result in the dissolution of the Union. His prediction is now history. The North demanded the application of the principle of prohibition of slavery to all of the territory acquired from Mexico and all other parts of the public domain then and in all future time. It was the announcement of her purpose to appropriate to herself all the public domain then owned and thereafter to be acquired by the United States. The claim itself was less arrogant and insulting than the reason with which she supported it. That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists.
The Presidential election of 1852 resulted in the total overthrow of the advocates of restriction and their party friends. Immediately after this result the anti-slavery portion of the defeated party resolved to unite all the elements in the North opposed to slavery an to stake their future political fortunes upon their hostility to slavery everywhere. This is the party two whom the people of the North have committed the Government. They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated. They entered the Presidential contest again in 1860 and succeeded.
The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.
It would appear difficult to employ language freer from ambiguity, yet for above twenty years the non-slave-holding States generally have wholly refused to deliver up to us persons charged with crimes affecting slave property.
The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party.
While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then...
The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support, but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon. Time and issues upon slavery were necessary to its completion and final triumph. The feeling of anti-slavery, which it was well known was very general among the people of the North, had been long dormant or passive; it needed only a question to arouse it into aggressive activity.
That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity.
From Mississippi
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.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery;
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
From Texas
They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture...
She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
From South Carolina
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
From the Confederacy's Constitution, written by the contemporary leaders of the Confederacy.
Sec. 9. (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Sec. 2. (3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
They openly said they were not abolitionists and did not support abolition until very late in the war. How many times do you need to read that?
I don't need to read it at all. Anyone who knows history knows what they had to work with. On one hand even you point out that there were still slave states in the Union, but then you ignore that the Republicans had to work with them. I don't care how many times you waste FR bandwidth posting it.
I use the Republicans' own documents to prove my points.
You use a bunch of cherry picked comments from your Confederacy Amen Corner's approved reading list.
You use the same 3 cherry picked quotes that don't even apply to what is being discussed more than half the time.
You mean like the declarations of secession, JD's remarks that secession was the answer to abolition in 1858, and the Confederacy's own constitution?
There are a lot more than three quotes in these links backing my claim. I wish I didn't have to keep flooding FR with excerpts from them, but as long as FR is willing to allow you to defame the Republicans who freed the slaves, I'll keep posting them.
In other words you have NOTHING to back up your BS claims.
Introduction to Captive Breeding
They were property. That does not mean there was a breeding program as you falsely claimed.
It's interesting that you said "They were property", not "The slave owners saw them as property". If you're not tryng to make Conservatives look bad, then the alternative is that you really believe this.
Getting back to your comment, they were only allowed to reproduce within their own plantation, and their children were sold as if they were animals.
It was their intention to carry on as before with the key changes being about limiting the power of the central government, requiring a balanced budget and specifically recognizing the sovereign rights of the states. Nobody has ever said they intended anything different - except you.
Here's what the Democrats meant by "protecting states' rights".
13th Amendment ratified, last paragraph
False. They fought for nationalism....just as the Loyalists did a couple generations earlier.
The side they fought for abolishing slavery was just a coincidence, right?
I admit the fact that you made numerous completely frivolous comparisons to the Nazis and the CSA, yes. I admit you did that because.....you did.
So what's wrong with comparing certain actions that are similar between the two? If JD denied the CW was about slavery in the same way Hitler denied he wanted war in 1939, what's wrong with pointing that out?
You desperately tried to make laughable comparisons to the Nazis - the standard tactic of infantile Leftists.
You should know, being one yourself.
Those who use violence and terror to effect political change are by definition, terrorists.
So the people who were captured and sold into slavery against their will, and who fought back against their oppressors, are terrorists fighting for "political change" to you? I suppose you think the resistance during WWII were also terrorists fighting for "political change".
And yes, I understand the implications of what I'm saying. It means a lot of our founders fit into that category. They could be excused by some as being products of their time, but by 1861 all but five Union states had abolished slavery, and JD understood how his nation's institution looked to others by offering to abolish it in return for military aid, an offer he never made good on.
Who were the Republicans' main financial backers? The same corporate fatcats who were making a LOT of profit by keeping the Southern states as cash cows.
Sounds like the free traitors of today, only the plantations are in China instead of the Confederacy.
It wasn't propaganda. It was said to a union officer during the war.
And we have to believe him why?
It was entirely consistent with Davis' numerous statements that neither secession nor the war were "about" slavery made both in public and like this one, in private.
Of course it was, but that doesn't mean we have any obligation to believe them. By offering to abolish slavery in return for military aid, it was clear JD could see how slavery looked to others, yet even though he could see this he never made good on his offer. You haven't given me one good reason why I should see it as anything other than failed PR.
"The South" was not hesitant to allow them to enlist. The Confederate Congress was hesitant. But the Confederate Congress did not have control over the units the Confederate states sent to form the Confederate Army. Confederate states had no hesitation about enlisting Blacks and did so right from the start....As I've already outlined above, this was largely irrelevant. The regiments sent by states most definitely had Blacks in them and did from the start.....as all those eyewitness accounts attest.
As I said, I don't dispute that blacks served in the Confederacy. I just doubt the accuracy of the numbers you keep throwing my way, especially when the Confederacy can't say how many served. I know you'll repeat "eyewitness accounts" but in the heat of battle, who was going to stop long enough to count how many of their attackers are black?
snipped
uhhh, Illinois? A slaveholding state?
Yes, they abolished it in 1848, but the final emancipation didn't occur until 1863.
No. That they later favored abolition is not evidence that they favored abolition earlier. The war changed people's minds about it.
My answer above covers this, but all but a few states in the Union had already abolished slavery. The Republicans just couldn't do it on a national level until they had the votes.
The quotes and sources - Northern sources - I posted indicated THOUSANDS. They were actually there. They saw.
Thousands of words maybe, but I don't dispute blacks served anyway. I just doubt the numbers.
The PC Revisionist history Prof I was referring to is James McPherson.
So what? Are you now going to circle back to wasting more bandwidth on another discussion of him?
BTW, there were plenty of free Blacks in various Southern states. In Virginia it was about 25%.
Only a Democrat posing as a Conservative to make all Conservatives look bad would defend Virginia by saying 25% of blacks in Virginia were free as if it was a good thing. BTW, the numbers I found listed a higher percentage of free blacks in Virginia, but your goal is to make Conservatives look bad anyway so that would be beside the point.
Louisiana had a fairly large free black and a fairly large mixed population.
None of that does anything to refute the fact that secession and the CW were about preserving slavery, and all blacks weren't free until the Republicans freed them.
And plenty of the Black Confederates were fighting for their freedom....as well as their homes.
Nobody doubts that blacks served in the Confederacy's military. The question is how many?
For example, on the of the quotes you keep spamming us with is "“They – the enemy – talked of having 9,000 men." There is nothing solid about that statement, but even if you accept it and added to all of your other estimates, you still have less than 10% of the number of blacks who served in the Union forces, and less that 20% the number of slaves who escaped the South and joined the Union forces.
They fought very hard for over 4 years despite being way outnumbered and undersupplied. They managed to kill significantly more of their attackers than they lost.
I don't see slave owners in the 1860s as victims of anything, but there's no denying their military leaders were far more competent than their early Union counterparts.
On November 19, 1860 Senator Robert Toombs gave a speech to the Georgia convention in which he denounced the "infamous Morrill bill." The tariff legislation, he argued, was the product of a coalition between abolitionists and protectionists in which "the free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists." Toombs described this coalition as "the robber and the incendiary... united in joint raid against the South." Anti-tariff sentiments also appeared in Georgia's Secession Declaration of January 29, 1861:
Is this the same Senator Robert Toombs who owned 49 slaves in two plantations at one point in time, supported legal slavery in the expansion territories, and was a Democrat?
And I should believe a Democrat slave owner who says it wasn't about slavery why?
The problem for you is that no matter how desperately you want to believe that they intended to abolish slavery the whole time, they never said so. In fact they said the exact opposite. Nowhere even in their private utterances or in their diaries did prominent Republicans indicate a desire to abolish slavery until late in the war. Yours is an ex post hoc ergo propter hoc argument.
From 1858, "Resolved: That, with our Republican fathers, we hold it to be a self-evident truth, that all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction"
in 1861, Congress passed a resolution stating that the war "is not waged on our part...for interfering with the rights, or established institutions of these [the Confederate] States"...meaning slavery
Thanks for your interpretation of this resolution, but it didn't do anything and was repealed in December 1861 anyway. Like everything else you make your case with, it was nothing.
In 1864, the Republicans voted for the only policy we've discussed that actually became law, abolition, but were blocked by the Democrats. The following year they passed abolition and sent it to the states for ratification. Nine years after they said they would do it and after the Democrats seceded over it, they did it.
huh?
Five states ratified it. That means the rest had the time if they had intended to ratify it. Even with secession and the threat of civil war, they didn't. There was nothing to turn down. Like everything else you try to prove your case with, it went nowhere and did nothing.
States frequently take their time to pass various amendments. Just because they do not do so at first opportunity doesn't mean they never would have.
repeats snipped
it is clear they did not secede over slavery.
Repeats snipped
“In any case, I think slave property will be lost eventually.” Jefferson Davis 1861
Beginning in late 1862, James Phelan, Joseph Bradford, and Reuben Davis wrote to Jefferson Davis to express concern that some opponents were claiming the war "was for the defense of the institution of slavery" (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, pp. 479-480, 765). They called those who were making this claim "demagogues." Cooper notes that when two Northerners visited Jefferson Davis during the war, Davis insisted "the Confederates were not battling for slavery" and that "slavery had never been the key issue" (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 524).
Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the Confederate army should be freed. Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a "moral and political evil" years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal. Davis even made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken seriously.
"The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism." Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election
"They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty to seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests. These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They, the North, are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it. These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union." The New Orleans Daily Crescent 21 January 1861
I don't need to read it at all. Anyone who knows history knows what they had to work with. On one hand even you point out that there were still slave states in the Union, but then you ignore that the Republicans had to work with them. I don't care how many times you waste FR bandwidth posting it.
You obviously don't care about their direct open statements made over and over again that they were not abolitionists. You don't have any private writings on the part of any of them to the effect that they did not mean exactly what they said publicly - which is that they were not abolitionists.
You use a bunch of cherry picked comments from your Confederacy Amen Corner's approved reading list.
Nope! I use direct quotes and sources.
You mean like the declarations of secession, JD's remarks that secession was the answer to abolition in 1858, and the Confederacy's own constitution? There are a lot more than three quotes in these links backing my claim. I wish I didn't have to keep flooding FR with excerpts from them, but as long as FR is willing to allow you to defame the Republicans who freed the slaves, I'll keep posting them.
Of course you leave out the fact that the declarations of causes were only made by 4 states AND that violating the fugitive slave clause of the constitution actually was unconstitutional. When offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment, they turned it down. As long as you keep spreading PC Revisionist propaganda, I'll keep refuting it with facts, quotes and sources.
It's interesting that you said "They were property", not "The slave owners saw them as property". If you're not tryng to make Conservatives look bad, then the alternative is that you really believe this.
No, I am citing the fact that by law at the time, they were property. You have of course failed to prove there was a "breeding program" as you falsely claimed.
Getting back to your comment, they were only allowed to reproduce within their own plantation, and their children were sold as if they were animals.
Yes. That's what it meant to be a slave. That does not mean there was a breeding program as you falsely claimed.
Here's what the Democrats meant by "protecting states' rights".
What they meant was explicitly recognizing the rights of states, letting states remove officials of the central government, and placing strict limits on the ability of the central government to tax and spend money as well as requiring it to have a balanced budget.
The side they fought for abolishing slavery was just a coincidence, right?
They weren't fighting to abolish slavery. They said so many many times. Abolishing slavery was the result of the war. It was not what they went to war for.
So what's wrong with comparing certain actions that are similar between the two? If JD denied the CW was about slavery in the same way Hitler denied he wanted war in 1939, what's wrong with pointing that out?
You know who was far more similar to the Nazis? The union. They too loved centralized power. They too were vehemently opposed to state's rights. They too trampled on civil liberties. They too started wars of aggression for money and empire. What's wrong with pointing that out?
You should know, being one yourself.
this is an example of confession through projection. It is you who is spouting Leftist PC Revisionist dogma.
So the people who were captured and sold into slavery against their will, and who fought back against their oppressors, are terrorists fighting for "political change" to you? I suppose you think the resistance during WWII were also terrorists fighting for "political change".
Those who used terror to effect political change are by definition terrorists. I suppose you think John Brown was not a terrorist? I suppose murdering babies was OK with you if it served the political cause?
And yes, I understand the implications of what I'm saying. It means a lot of our founders fit into that category. They could be excused by some as being products of their time, but by 1861 all but five Union states had abolished slavery, and JD understood how his nation's institution looked to others by offering to abolish it in return for military aid, an offer he never made good on.
You've finally admitted that the Southern states had not changed very much from 1776 to 1861. They were fighting for the same things their fathers and grandfathers fought for - independence from distant rules who taxed them for others' benefit rather than their own.
<>i>Sounds like the free traitors of today, only the plantations are in China instead of the Confederacy.,/p>
Yep. They even brought in tons of cheap labor at the time from Europe to fill their factories and drive labor costs down.
And we have to believe him why?,/p>
Because he has no reason to lie to a union officer at the time. What benefit would he gain by saying they were not fighting over slavery just as the US federal government had said it was not fighting over slavery?
Of course it was, but that doesn't mean we have any obligation to believe them. By offering to abolish slavery in return for military aid, it was clear JD could see how slavery looked to others, yet even though he could see this he never made good on his offer. You haven't given me one good reason why I should see it as anything other than failed PR.
Davis was perfectly willing to make good on his offer which he proved by vesting his ambassador with plenipotentiary power. President Davis says the CSA was not fighting over slavery. You choose not to believe him and claim they were. Lincoln, the Republicans and even the US Congress say they were not fighting over slavery and you choose not to believe them too and claim that they were. It seems like you are not willing to believe what anybody at the time was saying and trust instead in your amazing mind reading abilities. You don't have any evidence to back up your claims.
As I said, I don't dispute that blacks served in the Confederacy. I just doubt the accuracy of the numbers you keep throwing my way, especially when the Confederacy can't say how many served. I know you'll repeat "eyewitness accounts" but in the heat of battle, who was going to stop long enough to count how many of their attackers are black?
Not all of those accounts were from the heat of battle and they attest to there being thousands of Black Confederates.
My answer above covers this, but all but a few states in the Union had already abolished slavery. The Republicans just couldn't do it on a national level until they had the votes.
They had no desire to do so before that as they themselves said in public and in private.
Thousands of words maybe, but I don't dispute blacks served anyway. I just doubt the numbers.,/p>
Take it up with the eyewitnesses.
So what? Are you now going to circle back to wasting more bandwidth on another discussion of him?
No, just pointing out it was McPherson.
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863, which freed no slaves because it exempted all territories under Union control, there was a massive desertion crisis in the Union army. Union soldiers ‘were willing to risk their lives for Union," McPherson writes, "but not for black freedom." James McPherson For Cause and Comrades; Why Men Fought in the Civil War.
Only a Democrat posing as a Conservative to make all Conservatives look bad would defend Virginia by saying 25% of blacks in Virginia were free as if it was a good thing. BTW, the numbers I found listed a higher percentage of free blacks in Virginia, but your goal is to make Conservatives look bad anyway so that would be beside the point.
I might well accuse you of trying to make Conservatives look bad by posing as one while being an idiot. I cited the % of freedmen in Maryland and Virginia to show that industrialization was spreading southward and as it was doing so it was killing slavery - as it had done elsewhere. That wasn't a value judgment. It was a simple observation of fact.
None of that does anything to refute the fact that secession and the CW were about preserving slavery, and all blacks weren't free until the Republicans freed them.
None of that refutes the fact that secession and the were were not about preserving slavery. Slavery was not threatened in the US.
Is this the same Senator Robert Toombs who owned 49 slaves in two plantations at one point in time, supported legal slavery in the expansion territories, and was a Democrat? And I should believe a Democrat slave owner who says it wasn't about slavery why?
The same Robert Tombs who went out of his way to specifically cite the tariff and the economic exploitation of the Southern states, yes. Why should you believe him when he said that this was a chief grievance? Because he had no reason to lie about it. He was a slave owner himself. Had he thought it was "all about slavery" he had no reason to say otherwise. Yet he did say otherwise and quite explicitly too.
From 1858, "Resolved: That, with our Republican fathers, we hold it to be a self-evident truth, that all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction"
So they repeated the Declaration of Independence. Great. That doesn't prove your claim.
Thanks for your interpretation of this resolution, but it didn't do anything and was repealed in December 1861 anyway. Like everything else you make your case with, it was nothing.
Its not my interpretation. They clearly stated that they were not fighting over slavery. Deal with it.
In 1864, the Republicans voted for the only policy we've discussed that actually became law, abolition, but were blocked by the Democrats. The following year they passed abolition and sent it to the states for ratification. Nine years after they said they would do it and after the Democrats seceded over it, they did it.
The Republicans didn't even try to abolish slavery until very late in the war. As they themselves had said many times before that, they were not abolitionists.
I just did the same thing you did.
States frequently take their time to pass various amendments. Just because they do not do so at first opportunity doesn't mean they never would have.
They didn't have any time, in the sense that secession was already happening and a civil war was coming. If they were going to pass this, they would have in the same amount of time that the five states did. They didn't. Your could haves and ifs don't prove anything.
Repeats on the GNDN Corbomite Maneuver snipped.
it is clear they did not secede over slavery.
Why FR allows you to waste their bandwidth defending Democrats like this is beyond me, but here you are again.
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
From Georgia.
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property...
In 1820 the North endeavored to overturn this wise and successful policy and demanded that the State of Missouri should not be admitted into the Union unless she first prohibited slavery within her limits by her constitution.
Mr. Jefferson condemned the restriction and foresaw its consequences and predicted that it would result in the dissolution of the Union. His prediction is now history. The North demanded the application of the principle of prohibition of slavery to all of the territory acquired from Mexico and all other parts of the public domain then and in all future time. It was the announcement of her purpose to appropriate to herself all the public domain then owned and thereafter to be acquired by the United States. The claim itself was less arrogant and insulting than the reason with which she supported it. That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists.
The Presidential election of 1852 resulted in the total overthrow of the advocates of restriction and their party friends. Immediately after this result the anti-slavery portion of the defeated party resolved to unite all the elements in the North opposed to slavery an to stake their future political fortunes upon their hostility to slavery everywhere. This is the party two whom the people of the North have committed the Government. They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated. They entered the Presidential contest again in 1860 and succeeded.
The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.
It would appear difficult to employ language freer from ambiguity, yet for above twenty years the non-slave-holding States generally have wholly refused to deliver up to us persons charged with crimes affecting slave property.
The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party.
While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then...
The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support, but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon. Time and issues upon slavery were necessary to its completion and final triumph. The feeling of anti-slavery, which it was well known was very general among the people of the North, had been long dormant or passive; it needed only a question to arouse it into aggressive activity.
That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity.
From Mississippi
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.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery;
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
From Texas
They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture...
She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
From South Carolina
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
From the Confederacy's Constitution, written by the contemporary leaders of the Confederacy.
Sec. 9. (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Sec. 2. (3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
Repeat snipped.
More democrat nonsense about how the Confederacy and JD were about to abolish slavery although they never did snipped.
You obviously don't care about their direct open statements made over and over again that they were not abolitionists.
That's right, I don't care. I understand what they had to work with. You understand it too, but you're either unable or unwilling to connect the dots, even as many others including Fredrick Douglas could and did.
Of course you leave out the fact that the declarations of causes were only made by 4 states
From Virginia, "and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States."
Besides, what difference does it make that other slave holding states didn't advertise their goal to preserve slavery? They understood they were on the wrong side of history, so why would they go around advertising it.
AND that violating the fugitive slave clause of the constitution actually was unconstitutional.
Rescuing Jews from Hitler's concentration camps was also illegal.
I know you're going to cry to your mommy about how I called you a Nazi again, but the fact remains that the injustices (to put it mildly) both entities were committing were legal according to laws they passed.
As long as you keep spreading PC Revisionist propaganda the Democrat's own statements that matched their actions, I'll keep refuting it with facts, quotes and sources spamming FR with what the Democrats said.
FIFY.
No, I am citing the fact that by law at the time, they were property.
Everything Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did was legal too.
You have of course failed to prove there was a "breeding program" as you falsely claimed.
Introduction to Captive Breeding
Yes. That's (only allowed to reproduce within their own plantation) what it meant to be a slave. That does not mean there was a breeding program as you falsely claimed.
According to this, that's the definition of a breeding program. Your rebuttal only proves the point.
What they meant was explicitly recognizing the rights of states, letting states remove officials of the central government, and placing strict limits on the ability of the central government to tax and spend money as well as requiring it to have a balanced budget.
The rights of states to own humans as property, and a balanced budget except for paying for the war to preserve their right to said property.
Let me save you some effort. "It is clear they did not secede over slavery."
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
Repeats snipped.
You know who was far more similar to the Nazis? The union. They too loved centralized power. They too were vehemently opposed to state's rights. They too trampled on civil liberties. They too started wars of aggression for money and empire. What's wrong with pointing that out?
What's wrong with pointing that out is that it's all lies written by the slave holding Democrats to cover the fact that they were fighting to preserve slavery. As they themselves said, "That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity."
I would say that lying falls withing the bounds of "the last extremity".
Those who used terror to effect political change are by definition terrorists. I suppose you think John Brown was not a terrorist? I suppose murdering babies was OK with you if it served the political cause?
Killing babies is a tragedy under any circumstances, but what about the babies who grew up to die as slaves. Oh wait, they were black and they were legally considered property by the slave holding states, so I guess you don't care about them.
And I just love how you write off emancipation as a political cause. If you aren't a leftist plant, then that shows what you really think.
Yep. They even brought in tons of cheap labor at the time from Europe to fill their factories and drive labor costs down.
So now you want to regurgitate that argument. We've discussed this in posts 677, 681, and 684
Take it up with the eyewitnesses.
No need. If we take the statement "They – the enemy – talked of having 9,000 men." as actual fact and add it to all of your other estimates, you still have less that 1/5 of the number of escaped slaves, and less than 1/10 of the total number of blacks, who served in the Union's military. I can concede all of your numbers and still be correct.
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863, which freed no slaves because it exempted all territories under Union control, there was a massive desertion crisis in the Union army. Union soldiers ‘were willing to risk their lives for Union," McPherson writes, "but not for black freedom." James McPherson For Cause and Comrades; Why Men Fought in the Civil War.
IMHO, he and you have something in common. Both of you are leftists who are trying to associate slavery with the Republicans. Neither of you are succeeding.
I might well accuse you of trying to make Conservatives look bad by posing as one while being an idiot. I cited the % of freedmen in Maryland and Virginia to show that industrialization was spreading southward and as it was doing so it was killing slavery - as it had done elsewhere. That wasn't a value judgment. It was a simple observation of fact.
So what you're saying as a Conservative is that it was justifiable for the slave holding states to keep their slaves until they didn't need them anymore. Thanks but no thanks. That's not what modern Conservatism is about, so take your propaganda back to DU or where ever you're from.
The same Robert Tombs who went out of his way to specifically cite the tariff and the economic exploitation of the Southern states, yes. Why should you believe him when he said that this was a chief grievance? Because he had no reason to lie about it. He was a slave owner himself. Had he thought it was "all about slavery" he had no reason to say otherwise.
He had every reason to lie about it, the same as the rest of the Democrats running the Confederacy. Slavery had already been abolished in all but a few Union states as well as the countries the Confederacy was trying to bribe into helping them by promising to abolish slavery. They knew how their defense of slavery looked to others and tried to distance themselves from it, just as they are trying today by associating slavery with the modern right. I'll bet they appreciate all of the help you've given them.
So they repeated the Declaration of Independence. Great. That doesn't prove your claim.
"the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction"
Its not my interpretation. They clearly stated that they were not fighting over slavery. Deal with it.
All they did was abolish it, "but we didn't mean to".
The Republicans didn't even try to abolish slavery until very late in the war. As they themselves had said many times before that, they were not abolitionists.
They didn't have the votes. When they had the votes the voted to abolish it.
I hadn't noticed. I edited my previous reply and it screwed it up somehow.
They didn't have any time, in the sense that secession was already happening and a civil war was coming. If they were going to pass this, they would have in the same amount of time that the five states did. They didn't. Your could haves and ifs don't prove anything.
As you said, there wasn't much time. The fact that they did not jump on it immediately does not mean they never would have passed it as you are claiming.
Why FR allows you to waste their bandwidth defending Democrats like this is beyond me, but here you are again. Why FR allows you to waste their bandwidth defending Leftist big government supporters like this is beyond me. But here you are again:
“In any case, I think slave property will be lost eventually.” Jefferson Davis 1861
Beginning in late 1862, James Phelan, Joseph Bradford, and Reuben Davis wrote to Jefferson Davis to express concern that some opponents were claiming the war "was for the defense of the institution of slavery" (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, pp. 479-480, 765). They called those who were making this claim "demagogues." Cooper notes that when two Northerners visited Jefferson Davis during the war, Davis insisted "the Confederates were not battling for slavery" and that "slavery had never been the key issue" (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 524).
Precious few textbooks mention the fact that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the Confederate army should be freed. Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a "moral and political evil" years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal. Davis even made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken seriously.
"The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism." Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election
"They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty to seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests. These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They, the North, are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it. These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union." The New Orleans Daily Crescent 21 January 1861
On November 19, 1860 Senator Robert Toombs gave a speech to the Georgia convention in which he denounced the "infamous Morrill bill." The tariff legislation, he argued, was the product of a coalition between abolitionists and protectionists in which "the free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists." Toombs described this coalition as "the robber and the incendiary... united in joint raid against the South."
"Before... the revolution [the South] was the seat of wealth, as well as hospitality....Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in regions north of the Potomac: and this in the face of the fact, that the South, in four staples alone, has exported produce, since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? ... Under Federal legislation, the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue.....Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction - it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this." ----Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton
[To a Northern Congressman] "You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue laws, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange, which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of Northern Capitalist. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and our institutions." Rep. John H. Reagan of Texas
"Northerners are the fount of most troubles in the new Union. Connecticut and Massachusetts EXHAUST OUR STRENGTH AND SUBSTANCE and its inhabitants are marked by such a perversity of character they have divided themselves from the rest of America - Thomas Jefferson in an 1820 letter
"Neither “love for the African” [witness the Northern laws against him], nor revulsion from “property in persons” [“No, you imported Africans and sold them as chattels in the slave markets”] motivated the present day agitators,"…... “No sir….the mask is off, the purpose is avowed…It is a struggle for political power." Jefferson Davis 1848
“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate
Georgia’s declaration of causes does talk about slavery a lot. It also talks about economics. To wit:
“The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects. Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal deficiency. The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slave-holding States. Wielding these great States it held great power and influence, and its demands were in full proportion to its power. The manufacturers and miners wisely based their demands upon special facts and reasons rather than upon general principles, and thereby mollified much of the opposition of the opposing interest. They pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.
But when these reasons ceased they were no less clamorous for Government protection, but their clamors were less heeded-- the country had put the principle of protection upon trial and condemned it. After having enjoyed protection to the extent of from 15 to 200 per cent. upon their entire business for above thirty years, the act of 1846 was passed. It avoided sudden change, but the principle was settled, and free trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures was the verdict of the American people. The South and the Northwestern States sustained this policy. There was but small hope of its reversal; upon the direct issue, none at all.
All these classes saw this and felt it and cast about for new allies. The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support, but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon……”
The conqueror's policy is to divide the conquered into factions and stir up animosity among them...It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties." -General Patrick Cleburne
Finally South Carolina Senator/Congressman Robert Barnwell Rhett aka "the Father of Secession" wrote the Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States, which the convention adopted on December 25, 1860 to accompany its secession ordinance.
"The Revolution of 1776, turned upon one great principle, self government, and self taxation, the criterion of self government. Where the interests of two people united together under one Government, are different, each must have the power to protect its interests by the organization of the Government, or they cannot be free. The interests of Great Britain and of the Colonies, were different and antagonistic. Great Britain was desirous of carrying out the policy of all nations toward their Colonies, of making them tributary to their wealth and power. She had vast and complicated relations with the whole world. Her policy toward her North American Colonies, was to identify them with her in all these complicated relations; and to make them bear, in common with the rest of the Empire, the full burden of her obligations and necessities. She had a vast public debt; she had a European policy and an Asiatic policy, which had occasioned the accumulation of her public debt, and which kept her in continual wars. The North American Colonies saw their interests, political and commercial, sacrificed by such a policy. Their interests required, that they should not be identified with the burdens and wars of the mother country. They had been settled under Charters, which gave them self government, at least so far as their property was concerned. They had taxed themselves, and had never been taxed by the Government of Great Britain. To make them a part of a consolidated Empire, the Parliament of Great Britain determined to assume the power of legislating for the Colonies in all cases whatsoever. Our ancestors resisted the pretension. They refused to be a part of the consolidated Government of Great Britain.
The Southern States, now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States, that the Colonies did towards Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British parliament. "The General Welfare," is the only limit to the legislation of either; and the majority in Congress, as in the British parliament, are the sole judges of the expediency of the legislation, this "General Welfare" requires. Thus, the Government of the United States has become a consolidated Government; and the people of the Southern State, are compelled to meet the very despotism, their fathers threw off in the Revolution of 1776.
And so with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress, is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.
There is another evil, in the condition of the Southern toward the Northern States, which our ancestors refused to bear toward Great Britain. Our ancestors not only taxed themselves, but all the taxes collected from them, were expended among them. Had they submitted to the pretensions of the British Government, the taxes collected from them, would have been expended in other parts of the British Empire. They were fully aware of the effect of such a policy in impoverishing the people from whom taxes are collected, and in enriching those who receive the benefit of their expenditure. To prevent the evils of such a policy, was one of the motives which drove them on to Revolution. Yet this British policy, has been fully realized towards the Southern States, by the Northern States. The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three fourths of them are expended at the North. This cause, with others, connected with the operation of the General Government, has made the cities of the South provincial. Their growth is paralyzed; they are mere suburbs of Northern cities. The agricultural productions of the South are the basis of the foreign commerce of the United States; yet Southern cities do not carry it on. Our foreign trade, is almost annihilated…… To make, however, their numerical power available to rule the Union, the North must consolidate their power. It would not be united, on any matter common to the whole Union in other words, on any constitutional subject for on such subjects divisions are as likely to exist in the North as in the South. Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest. If this could be made the criterion of parties at the North, the North could be united in its power; and thus carry out its measures of sectional ambition, encroachment, and aggrandizement. To build up their sectional predominance in the Union, the Constitution must be first abolished by constructions; but that being done, the consolidation of the North to rule the South, by the tariff and slavery issues, was in the obvious course of things.
"The people of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests. Long and angry controversies grew out of these attempts, often successful, to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. And the danger of disruption arising from this cause was enhanced by the fact that the Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control." Jefferson Davis Address to the Confederate Congress April 29, 1861
more statements about how the Republicans actually were abolitionists but never said so publicly or even in private but that you are going to cling to that little fantasy anyway because its convenient for you snipped.
From Virginia, "and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States."
Yes and? This is a clear statement that Virginia left among other reasons because the federal government was oppressing the Southern states.
Besides, what difference does it make that other slave holding states didn't advertise their goal to preserve slavery? They understood they were on the wrong side of history, so why would they go around advertising it.
LOL! "what difference does it make that other states did not say they had the goal of preserving slavery which was not threatened anyway? I want to believe that because its convenient for me so I'm going to simply assume it."
Rescuing Jews from Hitler's concentration camps was also illegal.
"Everybody I don't like is Hitler".....like a toddler on the playground. Refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Clause of the US Constitution WAS unconstitutional. There's no question about it. If that offends your 21st century sense of morality so much, then the Northern states never should have entered into a compact in which they would be required to return escaped slaves. Failing that, if they later just couldn't live with the deal they themselves agreed to, then they should have simply let the Southern states depart in peace. But of course, that's not what they were actually fighting over.
I know you're going to cry to your mommy about how I called you a Nazi again, but the fact remains that the injustices (to put it mildly) both entities were committing were legal according to laws they passed.
I'm going to point out that like a little toddler, you cannot conceive of the fact that people who lived in a different era had entirely different views on a number of things. No matter what you or I may think of the immorality of slavery today, the fact remains that it was legal then. The Northern states (which got rid of it after the Constitution was ratified) agreed as part of the constitution to return escaped slaves. Then they broke the deal they themselves made. If you want to argue the morality of doing so, fine, but they DID break the deal they made. As such they were in the wrong. If they felt that strongly about it, they should have been willing to let the Southern states depart in peace.
But if course it was never really about slavery. Their own political leaders were quite willing to protect slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment AND to strengthen federal fugitive slave laws. Slavery was something the Northern states were perfectly willing to live with - so long as they got their cut of the profits.
As long as you keep spreading PC Revisionist propaganda, I'll keep refuting it with facts, quotes and sources.
I just fixed that for you.
Everything Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did was legal too.
actually murder was not legal in those countries when they each murdered millions.
Introduction to Captive Breeding
Does not prove there was a breeding program. You've only demonstrated that they were slaves which was never in dispute.
According to this, that's the definition of a breeding program. Your rebuttal only proves the point.
Nope! A breeding program would be a program that was designed by the owners to breed livestock. That was not the case here. You've only proven that they were captive which once again, was never in dispute.
The rights of states to own humans as property, and a balanced budget except for paying for the war to preserve their right to said property.
The right of states to allow slavery was never in dispute and was never threatened. That they were willing to engage in deficit spending in a war of national survival proves they were like every other country on earth in that regard.
On Black Confederates.....Repeats snipped.
The chief inspector of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Dr. Lewis Steiner, reported that he saw about 3,000 well-armed black Confederate soldiers in Stonewall Jackson’s army in Frederick, Maryland, and that those soldiers were "manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army." Said Steiner, “Wednesday, September 10--At four o'clock this morning the rebel army began to move from our town, Jackson's force taking the advance. The movement continued until eight o'clock P.M., occupying sixteen hours. The most liberal calculations could not give them more than 64,000 men. Over 3,000 negroes must be included in this number. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in rebel ranks. Most of the negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabres, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy Army. They were seen riding on horses and mules, driving wagons, riding on caissons, in ambulances, with the staff of Generals, and promiscuously mixed up with all the rebel horde. (Report of Lewis H. Steiner, New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1862, pp. 10-11)
* Union colonel Peter Allabach, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 131st Pennsylvania Infantry, reported that his forces encountered black Confederate soldiers during the battle of Chancellorsville:
"Under this disposition of my command, I lay until 11 o'clock, when I received orders from you to throw the two left regiments perpendicular to the road, and to advance in line of battle, with skirmishers in front, as far as to the edge of the wood bordering near the Chancellor house. This movement was explained to me as intended to hold the enemy in check long enough for the corps of Major-Generals Couch and Sickles to get into another position, and not to bring on an action if it could be avoided; and, should the enemy advance in force, to fall back slowly until I arrived on the edge of the wood, there to mass in column and double-quick to the rear, that the artillery might fire in this wood. I was instructed that I was to consider myself under the command of Major-General Couch."
"In obedience to these orders, at about 11 o'clock I advanced with these two regiments forward through the wood, under a severe fire of shell, grape, and canister. I encountered their skirmishers when near the farther edge of the wood. Allow me to state that the skirmishers of the enemy were negroes." (Report of Col. Peter H. Allabach, 131st Pennsylvania Infantry, commanding Second Brigade, in Official Records, Volume XXV, in Two Parts, 1889, Chap. 37, Part I – Reports, p. 555, emphasis added)
In a Union army battle report, General David Stuart complained about the deadly effectiveness of the black Confederate soldiers whom his troops had encountered. The “armed negroes,” he said, did “serious execution upon our men”:
Col. Giles Smith commanded the First Brigade and Col. T. Kilby Smith, Fifty-fourth Ohio, the Fourth. I communicated to these officers General Sherman’s orders and charged Colonel Smith, Fifty-fourth Ohio, specially with the duty of clearing away the road to the crossing and getting it into the best condition for effecting our crossing that he possibly could. The work was vigorously pressed under his immediate supervision and orders, and he devoted himself to it with as much energy and activity as any living man could employ. It had to be prosecuted under the fire of the enemy’s sharpshooters, protected as well as the men might be by our skirmishers on the bank, who were ordered to keep up so vigorous a fire that the enemy should not dare to lift their heads above their rifle-pits; but the enemy, and especially their armed negroes, did dare to rise and fire, and did serious execution upon our men. The casualties in the brigade were 11 killed, 40 wounded, and 4 missing; aggregate, 55. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, D. STUART, Brigadier-General, Commanding. (Report of Brig. Gen. David Stuart, U. S. Army, commanding Fourth Brigade and Second Division, of operations December 26, 1862 - January 3, 1863, in Official Records, Volume XVII, in Two Parts. 1886/1887, Chap. 29, Part I - Reports, pp. 635-636, emphasis added)
What's wrong with pointing that out is that it's all lies written by the slave holding Democrats to cover the fact that they were fighting to preserve slavery. As they themselves said, repeats snipped.
The problem for you is that that's a lie. The union did centralize power. It was against states' rights and decentralized power. It did fight a war of aggression. It did trample on civil liberties to do so. It did so against a democratic country that sought no territorial aggrandizement and which was willing to live in peace with its neighbors.
Killing babies is a tragedy under any circumstances, but what about the babies who grew up to die as slaves. Oh wait, they were black and they were legally considered property by the slave holding states, so I guess you don't care about them.
We're discussing the definition of terrorism - not the definition of slavery. Killing babies is not merely a tragedy, when it is done for political purposes it is terrorism. As indeed, the murder of innocent people for political purposes is. That's the very definition of terrorism. Note, we are not discussing slavery here no matter how desperate you are to inject slavery into absolutely everything.
And I just love how you write off emancipation as a political cause. If you aren't a leftist plant, then that shows what you really think.
Emancipation was a political cause at the time. What else could it be but that? You trying to deny it shows you are massively ignorant of history - or are simply lying.
No need. If we take the statement "They – the enemy – talked of having 9,000 men." as actual fact and add it to all of your other estimates, you still have less that 1/5 of the number of escaped slaves, and less than 1/10 of the total number of blacks, who served in the Union's military. I can concede all of your numbers and still be correct.
You cannot claim there were not substantial numbers - as in many thousands - of Black Confederates. That's the only point I was making. You tried to deny it.
IMHO, he and you have something in common. Both of you are leftists who are trying to associate slavery with the Republicans. Neither of you are succeeding.
LOL! You obviously haven't read much history. He's the chief PC Revisionist. He spent most of his career pushing the "all about slavery" myth as well as the myth of the virtuous North.
So what you're saying as a Conservative is that it was justifiable for the slave holding states to keep their slaves until they didn't need them anymore. Thanks but no thanks. That's not what modern Conservatism is about, so take your propaganda back to DU or where ever you're from.
I'm saying it was LEGAL at the time. And it was. It was a different time and people had different views on a lot of things that we today would disagree with. Unlike you, I try not to be so arrogant as to pretend that everybody all throughout history should have had the exact same moral values I have having been born much later and in a completely different society.
He had every reason to lie about it, the same as the rest of the Democrats running the Confederacy. Slavery had already been abolished in all but a few Union states as well as the countries the Confederacy was trying to bribe into helping them by promising to abolish slavery. They knew how their defense of slavery looked to others and tried to distance themselves from it, just as they are trying today by associating slavery with the modern right. I'll bet they appreciate all of the help you've given them.
Except they weren't defending slavery. Slavery was not threatened in the US. Cobb had no reason to lie about the chief concerns of Southerners being their economic exploitation by the Northern states. The vast majority of Southerners did not own any slaves. I bet the Leftist PCers are very happy to see you pushing their propaganda.
"the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction"
At the time that did not include Blacks. It also did not include Indians. It also did not include Asians. It certainly did not include women. No matter how much we today may disagree with leaving all those persons out.....that was what they thought at the time.
All they did was abolish it, "but we didn't mean to".
Ex Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc
They didn't have the votes. When they had the votes the voted to abolish it.
They didn't have the votes because until very late in the war, they themselves wouldn't have voted for it. They were not abolitionists as they said many times.
Of course you wasted no time posting my comments out of context. Here's my exact statement.
They didn't have any time, in the sense that secession was already happening and a civil war was coming. If they were going to pass this, they would have in the same amount of time that the five states did. They didn't. Your could haves and ifs don't prove anything.
The fact that they did not jump on it immediately does not mean they never would have passed it as you are claiming.
Post all of the alternate realities you want. The fact remains that they all had the same amount of time to ratify the law as the five states that did, if they had intended to. They didn't.
Why FR allows you to waste their bandwidth defending Leftist big government supporters like this is beyond me. But here you are again:
To summarize your latest posting of the same old talking points, the Democrats said slavery would be abolished at some point, the Democrats said they were willing to abolish slavery, and they had other grievences against the North besides abolition.
My answers are, I don't believe what the Democrats said no matter how many times you post them, JD never made good on his offer to abolish slavery, and from Georgia, "That reason was her fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity."
As for the comments from Senator Robert Toombs and Robert Barnwell Rhett, both were Democrats who were also slave owners and who defended the institution of slavery. Why should I care what either of them had to say?
OBTW, Robert Barnwell Rhett accused the Confederate government of centralizing measures that infringed on states' rights, and opposed arming slaves and offering them freedom. So much for most of your drivel, but that won't stop you from posting it again.
more statements about how the Republicans actually were abolitionists but never said so publicly or even in private but that you are going to cling to that little fantasy anyway because its convenient for you snipped.
They only said so in their platform in 1858 and followed through in 1864 and 1865.
Repeats snipped.
Yes and? This is a clear statement that Virginia left among other reasons because the federal government was oppressing the Southern states.
Southern slaveholding states. That word defines the whole context of their comments.
LOL! "what difference does it make that other states did not say they had the goal of preserving slavery which was not threatened anyway? I want to believe that because its convenient for me so I'm going to simply assume it."
The states that were willing to advertise they were fighting to preserve slavery laid out their case for why it was threatened. Their actions showed they meant it.
Mommy, TwelveOfTwenty called me Hitler again. Make him stop.
Now, now little FLT-Bird, we have to accept that the Democrats deliberately and explicitly protected slavery in their Constitution when they formed the Confederacy, much like Hitler passed laws to oppress Jews and other minorities he didn't like. If you want him to stop, you'll need to stop pretending the Democrats weren't defending slavery.
I'm going to point out that like a little toddler, you cannot conceive of the fact that people who lived in a different era had entirely different views on a number of things.
I could see your point if we were talking about the Founding Fathers, but by the 1860s most of the states had already abolished slavery at the state level. Furthermore, by offering to abolish slavery in return for military aid, JD showed he could clearly see how his institution looked to others. So much for your "product of their time" excuses.
Repeat snipped.
But if course it was never really about slavery. Their own political leaders were quite willing to protect slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment AND to strengthen federal fugitive slave laws.
They never did either, and ultimately went the other way and abolished slavery once they had the votes. Once again you rely on policies that were never ratified, made to a divided nation, to make your point, while ignoring the one policy that was ratified.
Slavery was something the Northern states were perfectly willing to live with - so long as they got their cut of the profits.
They were trying to walk the line between the abolitionists who were growing impatient, and avoiding secession and a civil war. Once that became moot, they abolished slavery outright as soon as they had the votes.
As long as you keep spreading PC Revisionist propaganda, I'll keep refuting it with facts, quotes and sources.
Speech of Jefferson Davis before the Mississippi Legislature, Nov. 16, 1858
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
Constitution of the Confederate States; March 11, 1861
Sec. 9. (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Sec. 2. (3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
actually murder was not legal in those countries when they each murdered millions.
On the books maybe, but as absolute dictators their (Hitler, Stalin, and Mao) word was law.
Does not prove there was a breeding program. You've only demonstrated that they were slaves which was never in dispute....Nope! A breeding program would be a program that was designed by the owners to breed livestock. That was not the case here. You've only proven that they were captive which once again, was never in dispute.
Introduction to Captive Breeding
Were they reproducing in a closed environment? Yes.
Were their children sold as chattel or used as beasts of burden? Yes.
Will FLT-Bird waste more bandwidth trying to get around all of this? You betcha.
FLT-Bird, unable to post actual numbers, reposted all of the snippets from his sources.
I know thousands of blacks served in the Confederacy's military. What is in dispute is how many thousands.
What isn't in dispute is that the number of blacks who served for the Confederates was less than 1/10, and less than 1/5 the number of escaped slaves, who served in the Union military. Do you have an answer for that, or will you fall back to reposting the same snippets from your favorite books?
Repeat snipped.
We're discussing the definition of terrorism - not the definition of slavery. Killing babies is not merely a tragedy, when it is done for political purposes it is terrorism. As indeed, the murder of innocent people for political purposes is. That's the very definition of terrorism. Note, we are not discussing slavery here no matter how desperate you are to inject slavery into absolutely everything.
My point is that who you see as terrorists, I see as freedom fighters. Two of the three you label terrorists were slaves who rebelled against their masters.
It's always a tragedy when innocent people and children are killed, but it's the people who are committing the injustices who are at fault.
And while the freedom fighters you call terrorists were fighting for their freedom, the slave holding states were killing them and condemning children to slavery. It's not hard to see who the real terrorists were.
Emancipation was a political cause at the time. What else could it be but that? You trying to deny it shows you are massively ignorant of history - or are simply lying.
It was much more than a political cause. It was an attempt to eliminate an injustice (to put it mildly) that the nation had allowed for far too long.
LOL! You obviously haven't read much history. He's the chief PC Revisionist.
What does how much history anyone has read have to do with knowing who McPherson is?
He spent most of his career pushing the "all about slavery" myth as well as the myth of the virtuous North.
He needs to go no further than to read the Confederacy's own documents and Constitution to see it was about preserving slavery.
As for the "virtuous North", I'm not making the claim that everyone in the North was with the good guys, so stop with that strawman.
Except they weren't defending slavery. Slavery was not threatened in the US. Cobb had no reason to lie about the chief concerns of Southerners being their economic exploitation by the Northern states. The vast majority of Southerners did not own any slaves. I bet the Leftist PCers are very happy to see you pushing their propaganda.
Speech of Jefferson Davis before the Mississippi Legislature, Nov. 16, 1858
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
Constitution of the Confederate States; March 11, 1861
Sec. 9. (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Sec. 2. (3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom: Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
At the time that ("the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction") did not include Blacks. It also did not include Indians. It also did not include Asians. It certainly did not include women. No matter how much we today may disagree with leaving all those persons out.....that was what they thought at the time.
That was what much of the country thought, sad to say. The platform said "all persons", and they backed it by abolishing slavery just seven years later.
They didn't have the votes because until very late in the war, they themselves wouldn't have voted for it. They were not abolitionists as they said many times.
They didn't have the votes because the party was only eight years old in 1864, and had to win over a country that was divided on this issue. You talk about how slow the states were to ratify the Corbomite Maneuver, but then you expect instant results when it suits your narrative.
But then again, as a leftist plant, that's how you're trying to make Conservatives look isn't it?
And they have the right solution. Secession.
Secession is the ultimate expression of states rights.
I agree but on FR we are in the minority. Most so called Freepers do not believe in states right, the republic or freedom for that matter.
BS.
Stuff your one nation BS.
WE DO NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bingo. Dead on.
Define the North “losing”.
And independent Confederacy. What would you define 'losing' to be?
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