Posted on 04/08/2002 2:17:58 PM PDT by WhowasGustavusFox
What distinguishes war from peace is that people come to think of their whole society and way of life as threatened. The way that one group sees another as a threat explains why most people fight, but it doesn't explain why there was a war or why the people of one group came to view the other as an enemy and a menace.
Southerners fought for noble causes, not slavery.
What he ignores is that for some in 1860, slavery was a noble cause. While some secessionist leaders regarded it as a necessary evil, others regarded it as a positive good, a blessing and the basis of higher civilization. That isn't the whole story either, but leaving it out distorts our view of the war and its causes.
Had everyone in the past had the same ideas of nobility, freedom, justice and civilization that we share now, wars would have been far less common. The fact that their ideas of what such words meant differed from our own goes a long way to explaining past disputes.
A lot of people assume that the rebels were basically like conservatives today. But consider, in spite of our difficulties and disagreements today, we do manage to live and work together as a nation. That this wasn't possible in 1860 indicates how deep a gulf exists between our present situation and that of Lincoln's day.
Slaves were termed as "property" and as such they had no voting rights. But this doesn't mean that every slave was maltreated, and every plantation owner was a Simon Legree. There were more than just a handful of blacks who fought for the Confederacy. But of course the Yankee myth that only a handful of them fought for the South will be spewn out like so much vomit.
We have argued over that point ad nauseum; the author of 44 has consistently wriggled and dissembled when I caught him in an indefensible position; and he is representative of the statist-by-any-means crowd.
What do you think of Lincoln's invasion of Virginia in that Virginia had specifically reserved secession rights in her ratification of the Constitution (and the other states had acceded to that "qualification")
And why would New England have asserted the right of secession in 1814, while she was perhaps the foremost slaving section IN THE WORLD and then denied the South the same right in 1861?
Thanks
The statist pigs who haunt these threads will kick, scream, pout and dissemble but remember, Adams and Hummel are BOTH Northerners!
Indeed, an entire series of vital texts, if you want to avoid the disinformationist filter of the globalist cabal, is here.
Here are a couple of salient quotes that augment your 52 quite well; note the dates of each:
”Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail." -–Calhoun, 1831
"What was once a Constitutional Federal Republic, is now converted in reality into one as absolute as that of the autocrat of Russia, and as despotic in its tendency as any absolute government that ever existed." -- John C. Calhoun, Southern statesman and visionary in his last speech to Congress, 1850
I don't believe the facts bear this out. That 30% figure of any aggregate group of slave holders is the highest I have seen mentioned for any one group.
That group?
The free blacks of the New Orleans area in 1860-61!
Now I have not studied the numbers so I have to admit that this is only what I have heard and not what I have for myself confirmed.
I found the numbers while doing genealogical research. I posted the exact figures for Texas and Louisiana. People love to lie with statistics, but the figure needs to be how many families owned slaves, about 25-30%. You can get that down to under 10% by counting slave OWNERS because slaves were owned by the head of the household and most families had 4-6 people. This would be like saying most Americans have no cars because they are for the most part owned by the father in the family.
Make no mistake, I come from a long line of slave holders, Mouton's, McGee's, Taylor's. Some owned 2 or 3, some owned hundreds. I am neither proud of, nor bothered by the fact of something that ended a hundred years before I was born. I do however prefer to report what I have researched rather than what someone told me.
In their ignorance they fought and died (often bravely) in a cause which was against the concept of Christianity and the ideals of their nation.
In this they are not alone. Germans died fighting for Hitler and Russians for Stalin when their interests were no greater than the poor dumb dirt farmers from the South. But they believed their leaders lying propaganda, too.
Lincoln could not have purchased the Slaves of the south either. There was no ability to afford it from a treasury of 1860s U.S. government. But never got the chance since the whackjobs of the Slaveocracy attacked U.S. interests, property and armed forces forcing an armed response.
I tried to choose my words carefully, and so most of your response is not really relevant. Everything you said after sentence one might be true. (I don't really know.) But did most, or even many, slaves want to secede? We don't know, because the entire political structure was built, AFAIK, to negate the idea that the slaves were people whose consent mattered. It is thus not correct to justify secession by resort to a "will of the people" argument. We have no evidence at all that it was the will of the slaves who, I assume, were a significant portion of the population of the South.
That is all I am saying.
1)Northern states had outlawed the possession of slaves and that is why there was a Dred Scott case in the first place. Scott maintained that by virtue of his presence in a state where slavery was illegal he was thereby free. The court said no he was not even a citizen anyway. Southerners could bring slaves North with them even when slavery was illegal there.
2)Fugitive Slave laws were passed because they would flee to freedom in the North where slavery was illegal. If slavery had not been outlawed in the North there would have been no need for such laws.
By all means read ALL of the reviews at AMAZON.COM.... here is one of them:
Reviewer: A reader
This is one of the best books I've ever read on American negro slavery. What makes it a valuable edition to the academic literature is that the authors did not go into this with any ideological axes to grind. Indeed, both are political liberals who thoroughly deprecate the institution of slavery as a social and moral evil. They simply wanted to attain a better understanding of the actual economics of slavery in the Old South by analyzing the Plantation Books (i.e. the financial logs of Southern planters) and other relevant statistical resources so as to be able to accurately assess what slavery was like and how it affected the slave, the master and Southern society as a whole.
Much to their surprise, the authors concluded that slavery, as it was, bore little resemblance to the fictional, fever-swamp, nonsense that is peddled by the NAACP, the liberal media, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and left-wing academics. They found that slaves had a better diet and better housing conditions than their wage-slave, immigrant counterparts in the North. They also found that slave families were rarely broken up and that miscagenation between masters and slaves was exceeedingly rare -- indeed, almost nonexistant. They also found that many slaves earned substantial incomes - a fact that surprises many people who believe that slaves did not earn money for their labour. I could go on and on but that would give away the book and ruin the joy of reading a text that absolutely blows away virtually all the "conventional wisdom" you've ever heard repeated about slavery in the Old South.
Anyone who really wants to learn the truth about slavery owes it to themselves to buy and read this book.
Slaveocracy just happens to be the most accurate description of the form of government in Ole Dixie. It was an aristocracy of slave owners. However, the poor dumb jmokes who died by the thousands weren't allowed to mix with the high and mighty Slaveocrats (whose slaves were better off than the poor white trash), just to die protecting their economic and political system.
This is a fantasy. Virginia never "specifically reserved" the right for Virginia to secede from the Union in her ratification of the Constitution.
At the convention, a resolution was proposed to make Virginia's ratification of the Constitution conditional on the adoption of several amendments to the Constitution, but that resolution failed by 8 votes.
Just can't handle the truth, can you?
A lot better than, I suspect, but then that isn't saying much.
Thank you
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