Revisionist History: What If the South Had Won the Civil War? (Editorial)

Spetember 26, 2004 | Gary L. Livacari

[stand watie]

in your dreams.

offhand i can't think of a single traditional historian who would make such a SIMPLISTIC argument.certain REVISIONISTS & southHATERS would however.

free dixie,sw

[r9etb]

offhand i can't think of a single traditional historian who would make such a SIMPLISTIC argument.certain REVISIONISTS & southHATERS would however

LOL!!!! You're really reaching now, sw. By "traditionalist," I take it you're referring to historians who agree with you.

I must rely only on such poor sources as John C. Calhoun's famous speech in opposition to the Clay Compromise of 1850.

He opens his speech with the following words:

I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion. Entertaining this opinion, I have, on all proper occasions, endeavored to call the attention of both the two great parties which divided the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a point when it can no longer be disguised or denied that the Union is in danger. You have thus had forced upon you the greatest and gravest question that can ever come under your consideration: How can the Union be preserved?

And there you have it all in one paragraph. Slavery, agitation for its abolition, the threat of disunion, and all in the context of one of the great Sectional Crises. The only thing I lack, apparently, is a "traditionalist historian." Alas, I must make do with the words of a great statesman of the time.

Now be honest, sw -- aren't you embarrassed to have such a weak position?

[H.Akston]

Perhaps you are unaware that Winston Churchill wrote a satirical tome entitled - "If Lee had not won thw battle of Gettysburg"... all THIS crap would have happened, and he goes on to list all the crap that has actually happened.

[GaryL]

Thanks for informing me about that. I'm going to see if I can find it. Although I would tend to doubt that Churchill would agree with my take about the United States staying out of WWI!

[nolu chan]

[Heyworth #58] I've posted academically-accepted evidence that about 30% of southern FAMILIES owned slaves, which is not a number incompatible with your 5-6%, calculated as heads of households with average size families, but you don't accept that formulation, do you?

The actual enumerated number of slaveholders was 347,255. After that, a rather unique "scientific" method was used and "the number swelled to about 2,000,000." Further "academically-accepted" massaging of the numbers swelled the number to "about two million and a quarter."

SOURCE: Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860 - April 1861, edited by Jon L. Wakelyn, University of North Carolina Press, 1996, ISBN: 0-8078-2278-7, p. 79

James D.B. DeBow, "The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder," (Charleston: Evans & Cogswell, 1860)

DeBow begins as follows, this text running continuous to start his pamphlet.

"When in charge of the national census office, several years since, I found that it had been stated by an abolition Senator from his seat, that the number of slaveholders in the South did not exceed 150,000. convinced that it was a gross misrepresentation of the facts, I caused a careful examination of the returns to be made, which fixed the actual number at 347,255, and communicated the information, by note, to Senator Cass, who read it in the Senate. I first called attention to the fact that the number embraced slaveholding families, and that to arrive at the actual number of persons which the census showed to a family. When this was done, the number swelled to about 2,000,000.

"Since these results were made public, I have had reason to think, that the separation of the schedules of the slave and the free, was calculated to lead to omissions of the single properties, and that on this account it would be safe to put the number of families at 370,000, and the number of actual slaveholders at about two million and a quarter.

"Assuming the published returns, however, to be correct, it will appear that one-half of the population of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisianna, excluding the cites, are slaveholders, and that one-third of the population of the entire south are similarly circumstanced. The average number of slaves is nine to each slave-holding family, and one-half of the whole number of such holders are in possession of less than five slaves."

[nolu chan]

[r9etb] The Sectional Crises, which ultimately caused the South to secede, and which thereby led to the Civil War, were about slavery. Nothing more or less.

But the supreme irony can be found in the fact that early in 1861 the Republicans in Congress gave their votes to measures organizing the territories of Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota without prohibiting slavery. After beating Douglas in 1860, they organized the territories along the pattern of his policy, not Lincoln's.
[Author's italics.]

Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, copr 1948, Vintage Books edition 1989, p. 152, fn.

[stand watie]

what a LAUGH! the GENERAL was so poor in 1860 that he HAD to sell both of his horses & saddle to pay his bills. (thereafter, he rode a mule, which belonged to a cousin by marriage).

ALSO, if you can believe the tribal records at Tallequah, OK, he also could NOT afford a CSA General's uniform OR a "proper sword".

the General was a self-taught genius at partisan warfare, but had little money.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

aren't you ashamed to be so blind as to have drunk deeply of the damnyankee, REVISIONIST,south-HATING kool-aid????

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

THANKS!

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

an old grad school prof of mine at Auburn once said that if the South had won our war for independence, that the CSA would have been a British ally & the USA would have allied with Germany & Austria.

the whole thing of course is speculation, inasmuch as we have not YET won our freedom from the damnyankees.

free dixie,sw

[r9etb]

aren't you ashamed to be so blind as to have drunk deeply of the damnyankee, REVISIONIST,south-HATING kool-aid????

ROFL!!!! You have got to take an anger management class, little man.

[Heyworth]

DeBow was the Superintendent of the 1850 census, so I think we can consider him something of an expert on population enumeration. Now, if you've got some grounds to argue with his calculations--if, say, you want to argue that every slaveholder counted by the census was a bachelor with no family--I'd be happy to see the evidence. In the meantime, all we have is the census number of actual slaveholders multiplied by average family size.

Now, Watie will argue that the census is worthless and that one has to look at the tax records county by county, but he doesn't present any number that would be yielded by that method. What he actually asserts is that the number DeBow gives for enumerated slaveholders, comprising about 5-6% of the white population is basically correct. But he also believes that this number incorporates the families as well.

Again, in the absence of evidence beyond Watie's shouting "no it isn't" or occasionally citing the unpublished dissertation of a dead professor, these are the numbers. If you've got some other ones, let's see 'em.

[nolu chan]

The number of slaveholders is enumerated at 347,255. That is about 5-6% of the White population at the time. That is what stand watie states, repeatedly. -You- change the argument to "slaveholding families" and you rely upon an demonstrably erroneous computational method.

The further mathematical calculations have no bearing on reality, and make no allowance for one person being the holder of a large number of slaves.

Hypothetically, -one- person could have held -all- the slaves. The mathematical computation upon which you rely would not be affected. The computational method irrationally relies upon the slaves being equally distributed among all White families.

Using such computational methods, one may state that in the 1992 election, approximately 100 million people voted. There were about 4 people per family. Thus, in 1992, there were about 400 million voting families in the USA.

In the immortal words of Henry Lee, "Something wrong."

[nolu chan]

[nc] "Hypothetically, -one- person could have held -all- the slaves."

Correction. That should have been one family.

[HenryLeeII]

I'm surprised them Yankee Freepers ain't never mentioned the baseless and vile rumor that President Davis was acceptin' deferred comp-in-say-shun from the huge Confederate contractor Hallibubba!

[stand watie]

little man????

should i be offended by your STUPID name-calling????

the TRUTH is the TRUTH, no matter how much you may wish it to be otherwise.

free dixie,sw

[Heyworth]

The number of slaveholders is enumerated at 347,255. That is about 5-6% of the White population at the time. That is what stand watie states, repeatedly. -You- change the argument to "slaveholding families" and you rely upon an demonstrably erroneous computational method.

But the entire point of this argument is Watie's attempt to prove that slavery played a minor role in the south of the time. To do that, he's only willing to count the number of actual slaveholders, without attributing those slaveholders to some larger demographic unit like a family. And there's a big difference between saying that only 5% of southerners owned slaves and saying that 30% of southern families owned slaves. Even though both may be true, the former minimizes the economic reality of how deeply entrenched slavery was in southern society and how widespread personal economic interest in the institution extended.

The further mathematical calculations have no bearing on reality, and make no allowance for one person being the holder of a large number of slaves.

Hypothetically, -one- person could have held -all- the slaves. The mathematical computation upon which you rely would not be affected. The computational method irrationally relies upon the slaves being equally distributed among all White families.

No it doesn't. Where are you getting that? The number of slaves hasn't even entered the discussion, although there were 3.5 million slaves in the south. The one assumption is that slaveholder families are the same size, on average, as non-slaveholding families in the south. The number is question is 347,255 slaveholders. Are you saying that one person could have held all the slaves and the other 347,254 didn't actually? Your argument makes no sense. The way it actually breaks down is that only 6% of slaveholders owned more than 50 slaves. 88% of owners had fewer than 20 and 50% less than ten

[stand watie]

arguing with "heyworth the hateful" is pointless.

his mind, such as it is, is made up. everything that conflicts, however slightly, from his "set in concrete" drivel, anti-Southron bigotry & arrogant ignorance is, of course, WRONG & everyone who doesn't agree with him is fatally flawed as well.

more fool he.

NOTE: i DID get him to admit that his attack, on my thesis concerning steam traction machines/animal powered agricultural equipment, as replacements for persons (slave or free), was FALSE! (when dealing with a HATER/BIGOT, any progress, no matter now slight, is an improvement.)

free dixie,sw