Posted on 01/13/2011 6:50:56 AM PST by Michael.SF.
You are right, of course. There was a famous massacre of Unionist Germans trying to get to Mexico so they could eventually join the Union Army.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nueces_massacre
My point was that the huge majority of immigrants went to northern states, not that none went to the South.
My family has old letters from Confederate ancestors, and they were convinced they were fighting Hessian mercenaries, just as their grandfathers had in the Revolution.
How do you explain the thousands of black slave owners? And the black slave breeders who sold their own children into slavery?
I guess it wasn’t solely a white supremacy thing.
There were regiments and even whole divisions of Germans in the Union Army. Most of them had been in this country a while, but quite a few were fresh off the boat.
One of the German divisions was the first to be hit by Jackson’s flanking maneuver at Chancellorsville and started the panic that led to Union defeat.
They weren’t paid enough to qualify as mercenaries, though.
Black men can be *ssholes, too?
Some were there at Chancellorsville. They had some German ancestry themselves and pitied those poor “Hessian” boys, marched right into the line of fire and falling like logs, or so they wrote.
Also the Republicans were aware a law was less permanent than an amendment. Had they not forced through the 15th Amendment southern blacks would have been legally, as opposed to illegally, disenfranchised in the following decades.
An ancestor of mine who was a Missouri Unionist named one of his daughters Sigel. Unfortunately she died in childhood.
The Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to make permanent the rights secured for black people by the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It used a roundabout way of trying to compel the Southern states to let black men vote (by reducing their representation in Congress if they did not do so)—they did it that way instead of directly because that way Northern states could still restrict voting to whites without penalty (since they generally had about 1% black population—so they wouldn’t be in danger of losing any seats in Congress). Of course the threat to reduce representation was never carried out—in the 1890s and later when states like Mississippi and Alabama disfranchised the great majority of their black residents, they didn’t suffer any reduction in the size of their Congressional delegations.
Poor white Southerners supported slavery because no matter how dirt-poor they were, they were always at least one level above the slave. Is this guy really suggesting that people supported the Bush tax cuts for the same reason?
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