Posted on 07/22/2015 7:36:12 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Thanks for posting this. We have all been brainwashed with a comic-book version of what the Civil War was all about, and the ramifications that flow from it, and flowed into it.
Good post. Now post it to the NAACP who hold Lincoln in such high regard.
Not every civil war's sole focus is taking over the existing government.
We get the term from classical antiquity, and its use among the Romans.
The Romans used it to describe both wars that were waged to overthrow the government entirely, or to alienate territory from the government.
The US Civil War clearly fits into the latter category.
The issue in the Civil War was not slavery in the Southern slave states.
It was the extension of slavery into Federal territories and the violation of free state statutes that precipitated the Confederate attack on the Union which began the war.
Unlike many people, Lincoln had a strong faculty for absorbing and processing new information and for thinking things through beyond his first impressions or even his first analysis.
Not following your thinking. You contend the Confederates attacked the Union in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, er, I mean the Fort Sumter incident, in order to extend slavery into Federal territories and to continue (I suppose) the violation of free state statutes. How would a Confederate victory have accomplished those things?
A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government.
civil war n 1. (Military) war between parties, factions, or inhabitants of different regions within the same nation
The definition he is using in just inaccurate. I looked at about a dozen dictionaries. All had the same basic meaning as #1.
Many thanks for this info!
Inaccurate. For most of the nation's history prior to 1860, considerable funding was provided by sale of public lands.
During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue.
Not sure whether this is accurate or not.
Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859.
Wildly inaccurate.
Tariffs were charged only on imports and were paid where the importation occurred.
"New Orleans was the southern port that collected the most in the tariff, and it was only $3.1 million. The total south only collected $4.0 million in tariff revenues, whereas New York City collected $34.9 million in tariff revenues and the total for northern ports was $48.3 million."
https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/the-georgia-scv-lies-about-history-morrill-tariff-edition/
IOW, northern ports paid well over 90% of tariffs.
If you're going to post stuff about "forgotten facts," don't you think it might be a good idea to make sure the facts are actually facts first?
Lincoln was a pretty standard Whig politician that God in His providence forced into a moral corner. He did the same thing with the whole country, in His good time.
Reading Lincoln’s speeches carefully you can discern the slow but steady transformation, from the pre-war quotes - quite egregious to our modern ear - laid out in the article above, into this, from his second inaugural adddress:
“One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Those are the wise words of a changed, much more mature, much deeper, man. War is hell, and those who go through it are not the same when they come out as when they went in.
And of course, his refined-by-fire eloquence finally reached its zenith in his immortal address at Gettysburg.
By the way, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the bitter fruit of the compromise of the founders on the matter of chattel slavery that would have to be eaten by their grandchildren, and he issued the stern warning that today is inscribed on his memorial in the national capital:
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
What will be the destructive fruit of our generation’s surrender of equal protection for innocent babies, and the abandonment of marriage and the natural family?
Time will tell, but it ain’t gonna be pretty or fun.
One of the first things the Confederacy did after the war started was to invade Federal territory in the Southwest to secure it as slave territory. I assume you must have heard of Mesilla? Confederate forces took it 103 days after Fort Sumter fell, with an expedition that set out less than two weeks after Sumter.
Moreover, the Confederacy in its early days - back when most Confederates believed they had a chance of winning the war and dictating terms to the Union - would likely have demanded the return of fugitive property and contrabands as a condition of a peaceable settlement.
I can't imagine than an independent Confederacy would have signed any treaty that did not compel the Union to return escaped slaves - a grievance that was repeated again and again in secession conventions.
Problem is, it isn’t very good information.
You lot out there, I hope you are listening. Dr. Williams is no fool.
Absolutely.
Poor Walter - lost cause foolishness just taints everything else he says.
Actually a good question. The Democratic Party split (twice) in 1860 over the South demanding a federal slave code be imposed on territories, regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants.
It seems fairly obvious the CSA, had its secession succeeded, would have demanded some large portion of the territories, with threat of war if not ceded.
They also planned to expand south into the Caribbean and elsewhere in Latin America.
They didn’t think that out either. Given the logistics of the time, the only way such expansion could be supported was by sea.
The US Navy and Royal Navy would have had something to say about seaborne invasions into Mexico, Cuba or Central America.
In general, the South didn’t think thru much about what it would do after secession. 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.
But logic was in short supply in the South in 1860/61.
Very disappointed in Williams. Half of what he says here is just factually inaccurate.
The other half is opinion and interpretation, and therefore debatable. But interpretation based on non-facts is not very solid either.
Amazingly full of factual errors. Confederates did in fact attack Washington. Slave masters were fighting a war of independence? Independence for who?
Sure they can leave. There's the border right over there. -->
But they can't take the territory of the sovereign people of the United States without their consent.
It's that whole "consent of the governed" thing, you know. Right there in the Declaration as well.
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