Posted on 07/22/2015 7:36:12 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery. We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery?
Was President Abraham Lincoln really for outlawing slavery? Let's look at his words. In an 1858 letter, Lincoln said, "I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave states, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists." In a Springfield, Illinois, speech, he explained: "My declarations upon this subject of Negro slavery may be misrepresented but cannot be misunderstood. I have said that I do not understand the Declaration (of Independence) to mean that all men were created equal in all respects." Debating Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."
What about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation? Here are his words: "I view the matter (of slaves' emancipation) as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion." He also wrote: "I will also concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition." When Lincoln first drafted the proclamation, war was going badly for the Union.
London and Paris were considering recognizing the Confederacy and assisting it in its war against the Union.
The Emancipation Proclamation was not a universal declaration. It specifically detailed where slaves were to be freed: only in those states "in rebellion against the United States." Slaves remained slaves in states not in rebellion — such as Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. The hypocrisy of the Emancipation Proclamation came in for heavy criticism. Lincoln's own secretary of state, William Seward, sarcastically said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."
Lincoln did articulate a view of secession that would have been heartily endorsed by the Confederacy: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. ... Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit." Lincoln expressed that view in an 1848 speech in the U.S. House of Representatives, supporting the war with Mexico and the secession of Texas.
Why didn't Lincoln share the same feelings about Southern secession? Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our nation's history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs. During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859. What "responsible" politician would let that much revenue go?
The figure of 90% is derived from the above amount, plus the value of tariffs paid on overseas purchases made with cash by Southern governments, and bounties for fish exports paid to the treasury, and the total reaches 90%.
Puts quite a different spin on things, doesn't it?
Apparently the South was a Cash Cow for the government. No wonder they didn't want to let it go. Who can resist free money?
Firstly, it is the central foundational premise of socialism/communism is that private ownership of property is not a natural right but rather one virtualized within the framework of community law. In expressing that exact sentiment, you've just unintentionally revealed your true ideological self.
Secondly, there was not a single political entity called "the sovereign people of the United States" prior to the rump passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Sovereignty had previously been vested the in peoples of the several States. I'll help you out a little: The Fourteenth Amendment was recorded AFTER the war.
It's that whole "consent of the governed" thing, you know. Right there in the Declaration as well.
Ah, the Declaration of Independence, my most favorite act of secession (that you secretly hate).
What a load.
The idea that private property ownership entails a “natural right” to secede from the nation in which that private real property is physically located is just pure nonsense. And to suggest that anyone who doesn’t believe that nonsense is a socialist or a communist is just plain nuts.
There is a political entity called the sovereign people of the United States. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were executed in their name, and ultimately, by their will and authority.
There's nothing obvious about the history of an alternate time-line, except that, being ALTERNATE to true history, it's obviously fictional.
Usually, one only turns to hypotheticals after one has exhausted all reference to factuals. But you've started your argument with hypotheticals. So, really, I guess this is a usual sort of argument, after all.
They also planned to expand south into the Caribbean and elsewhere in Latin America.
My first honest impulse was to respond 'totally unlike you-know-who', but I then it occurred to me that this was probably some intentionally vague reference to the old Knights of The Golden Circle conspiracy theory, our own version of the Elder Protocols libel. I now have to ask: Illuminati much?
They didn’t think that out either.
I graciously accept all your evidence at face value. Too bad you offered none.
Given the logistics of the time, the only way such expansion could be supported was by sea.
Is there a bridge to Cuba in our own time that I don't know about?
The US Navy and Royal Navy would have had something to say about seaborne invasions into Mexico, Cuba or Central America.
Ok, as someone who has actually read a book, I just have to ask, "what did the British say when the US got involved in Mexico, Cuba, and Central American?" I already know what the US would say: "Stop copying us!" Hypocrite.
In general, the South didn’t think thru much about what it would do after secession.
You JUST accused them planning the same campaign of expansion which the US itself would undertake. Now you're saying they didn't plan for afterward? Am I expecting a hypocrite to be consistent? Was that last question rhetorical?
They firmly believed slavery would die if it didn’t expand, but they had no realistic way for it to expand. Which meant the logical thing to do would have been to negotiate a gradual emancipation.
Ah, the old cotton-farming-caused-soil-exhaustion-and-required-ever-expanding-cultivation chestnut. I'll leave that one right here next to the first-shot-at-Sumter-started-the-war factoid like two components of logic bomb ready to go off. It will get used later, a sort of argumentative Chekhov's gun.
But logic was in short supply in the South in 1860/61.
Says the guy who just attempted to use logically contracdictive claims to accuse the South of wanting to act like the North.
What a well-reasoned reply. I wonder if you'll go walk around your room some, shake your fist, and then come back to attempt a more composed response.
How about you simply read the next post.
The idea that private property ownership entails a “natural right” to secede from the nation in which that private real property is physically located is just pure nonsense. And to suggest that anyone who doesn’t believe that nonsense is a socialist or a communist is just plain nuts.
In your previous post, you unintentionally conceded that the difference between secession and immigration is the withdrawal of the physical property. I won't let you take the back. I've only proposed that someone who is ideologically defined as a socialist should be nominated as one as well.
There is a political entity called the sovereign people of the United States.
It is an indestructible fact of history that the whole point of the Fourteenth Amendment was to define a type of super-national citizenship which had not previously existed.
Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were executed in their name, and ultimately, by their will and authority.
And in all foundational documents the term "United States" is grammatically plural, not singular. No, there was not a single sovereign political entity called "the People of the United States". The idea is anachronistic and revisionist. It is an indestructible fact of history that the whole point of the Fourteenth Amendment was to define a type of super-national citizenship which had not previously existed.
I don't know why the editor clipped and pasted that fragment like that.
Your post makes no sense. Of course there is a difference between personally leaving the country, which you’re perfectly free to do, and laying claim to a non-existent “right” to arbitrarily take some portion of the national territory away from the people of the United States. You’d have to be a blithering idiot not to recognize the difference.
When you start speaking of Natural Law and Rights, then the South was absolutely wrong to secede. We broke from England because of the tyranny of taxation without representation, a moral cause. The south attempted their secession to perpetuate slavery, as their Declarations of Secession admitted, an immoral cause.
You think that property is collectively owned by "the people" but not actual persons. You think "the nation" owns private land. You think that any person who attempts to keep their private property is exercising a "non-existent" right. Of course I recognize the difference...I called you a socialist the first time.
As if your private ownership of land excludes that land from the territory of the country in which it exists.
That’s crazy.
Yeah, you did. One of the stupidest things I've ever seen posted around here.
In fact, according to this source, Massachusetts was the first state to free all its slaves, in 1783, through a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, enforcing the 1780 Massachusetts constitution.
By the time of the US Constitutional Convention in 1787, five other states had begun gradual abolition of slavery: Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
New York began abolition in 1799, New Jersey in 1804.
ladyjane: "The north was making too much money using southern cotton to weave fabric up in the New England mills.
To do that they needed to enslave children as young as 6 years old to work in the mills."
Yes, some have argued that Northern "wage slavery" conditions were as bad, or worse than Southern African-slavery.
But there was no law holding a certain race of people in "wage slavery" -- so, many could and did, eventually, move west for a better life.
But, it's certainly true that the entire nation benefitted from exports of cotton grown by Southern slaves.
That hugely explains why, before the 1850s era Republicans, there had never been an anti-slavery political party -- not Whigs, nor Federalists and certainly not Northern Democrats.
ladyjane: "The north was making too much money off the onerous tariffs they enacted so four southern states were paying 90% of that federal income."
PeaRidge supports this claim in post #865, but I've never seen numbers supporting PeaRidge's analysis, and, I notice he's made a simple math error too ($198 million divided by $279 million = 71%, still too high, but not 87% as PeaRidge asserts).
First of all, this report from the time shows:
The exact number for 1860 cotton exports is $192 million, about which this report says:
And that number suggests total exports of $315 million, which is supported by this report from 1897.
Indeed, enumerated Southern exports for 1860 were:
So, what were the balance of US 1860 exports?
Bottom line: there is absolutely no denying that King Cotton ruled in 1860, but it was at roughly 50%, not 90% of our total exports.
That means, yes, large Southern cotton planters' slaves did contribute a disproportionate share to the national income.
But they were certainly not the only contributors, and in fact, after 1860, when the nation needed other income sources to make up for Southern cotton, those sources were readily found.
ladyjane: "The emancipation proclamation only freed Southern slaves.
The Union slaves were kept enslaved."
Sorry, but I don't "get" it, why do you people think that us such a clever comment to make?
Don't you know that soon after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Congressional Republicans began submitting bills for a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery entirely.
That amendment passed Congress in early 1865, and was fully ratified by the states in December 1865.
So why do you think it's so clever to point out that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation only did what he was constitutionally allowed?
ladyjane: "And BTW there were thousands of black slaver owners who didn’t want slavery to end.
But they were southerners so..."
In 1860, of 400,000 total Southern slave-holders with 4 million slaves, about 4,000 were blacks = one percent, holding roughly 13,000 slaves = 3 tenths of one percent of all slaves.
The largest concentration of black slave-holders was Louisiana, which was mostly under Union control during the war, and so those slaves would have been freed early on.
Louisiana also supplied dozens of black regiments -- nearly 25,000 black troops -- to the Union Army, so clearly the idea of freedom was not something they objected strongly to.
As I said in my earlier post, Massachusetts never enacted any laws against slavery. Their supreme court ruled that any slave who wanted his/her freedom could sue in the courts for it. That was not a law.
One of my ancestors had the last slave in Massachusetts. In Lexington, no less. That slave never sued and never left because life was difficult to live on one’s own and support oneself. So he stayed on in the household until his death. He could have left anytime but didn’t. There are many slaves buried in old cemeteries up there.
I should have added - the children who worked in the mills didn’t have that choice to leave the mills. Some of the parents came over as indentured servants. They were required to stay working in the mills for the duration of their servitude.
The report I cited says the Massachusetts’ Supreme Court’s ruling freed all Massachusetts slaves immediately.
You say it only freed those who wanted freedom, and some did not.
I’m not certain both of those can’t be true, or are mutually exclusive.
For certain, a more careful look shows that every other Northern state abolished slavery gradually, and your words suggest a certain gradual quality to Massachusetts as well.
On Northern children working in mills: everyone today agrees that was unacceptable, and it was eventually outlawed.
But we should push-back against suggestions that African slaves were “no different” from Northern indentured servants — that just ain’t so.
Indentured servants voluntarily contracted to work off their debts over a specified period of time.
That was hugely different from Africans kidnapped and held in involuntary bondage, not only for their lifetimes, but also the lifetimes of their descendants.
African slavery is a peculiar institution vastly different from, and more unacceptable than, traditional indentured service.
bump
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