Posted on 04/12/2011 4:38:31 AM PDT by iowamark
The assertion that the Civil War was not “about slavery” is as infantile as it is idiotic. You can only believe that if you are very selective in your acceptance and examination of the evidence.
Since just about no one will openly support slavery today, people who feel inclined to support the Confederacy have to resort to perverse and extravagant rationalizations to defend secession. Personally, I think the Civil War was absolutely unnecessary and fatal to the cause of limited government. I also firmly believe that slavery was moribund in North America, it would have died out in a generation or two without the Civil War.
The ills visited on America by Civil War are with us today. I doubt that the United States would have engaged in the Spanish-American War, had their not been a Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt's generation, feeling cheated of the opportunity for an adventure and crusade like the Civil War found it in Cuba. With disastrous effects for the country. Expanding our territory beyond the contiguous 48 lead us to conflicts with Japan and bolstered our unhealthy tendency to become involved in Europe's wars.
I never understood it....a good chunk of the generals on both sides fought shoulder to shoulder in the Mexican War.
I do believe the south had a larger number of these general officers who fought Santa Anna...and that included the commander in Chief, Jefferson Davis.
This could have been handled better...IMHO.
>”[Abner] Doubleday, in turn, wheeled the Bible around like a howitzer and fired it straight back at Anderson, pointing out that since the slaves in the Old Testament were white, he saw no reason why some pious Southern master should not enslave the major himself, ‘and read texts of Scripture to him to keep him quiet.’ Anderson, Doubleday later boasted, was unable to counter this merciless logical volley.”
I don’t see what’s logical about it. It was well known that white slavery — and every other kind of slavery — was common in ancient times (for instance, among the Greeks and Romans). Pope Gregory I is said to have exclaimed when he first saw some unusually fair-skinned slaves from what later became England, “Non Angli, sed angeli [They are not Angles, but angels].” But the fact that the slavery of whites had been accepted in the past is not a good argument against the slavery of the blacks.
I’m not saying this in support of slavery, of course. I share the anti-slavery attitude not only of Northerners but of early Southerners such as Jefferson and Madison, and wish they’d been able to find a way to end it early in the country’s history. In 1784 Jefferson wrote an ordinance that would have outlawed slavery in all the nation’s territories, the southern ones too, but it failed to pass by the margin of a single vote (when a person who had intended to vote for it was ill and missing the vote). That measure would have excluded slavery from the fertile cotton lands to which it later spread from the Atlantic states, and almost certainly have caused it to end in a gradual and relatively peaceful way. Instead, sectional divisions hardened, leading to the Civil War.
I agree with you and others that there were unequivocal declarations in favor of slavery by Southerners at the time of the Civil War, and agree that it was the root cause that split the country, and caused Southerners to assert what they believed was the right of their states to determine their own destinies. Bear in mind, though, that many Southerners who opposed both slavery and secession, including some very prominent ones, chose to fight for the Confederacy.
[Likewise many Northerners who were not abolitionists, and who were racists — as were the vast majority of persons at that time — chose to fight for the North. Lincoln himself would certainly be considered racist by current standards. Most persons in the North didn’t really believe in the equality of all men.]
The Civil War just wasn’t that simple. Though slavery was a root cause of the war, Confederate soldiers didn’t go through what they went through for the sake of slavery. They were fighting for their homeland and trying to protect their loved ones from the ravages of war. None of my Southern ancestors owned slaves at the time of the Civil War, yet when one sixteen-year-old received word that his eighteen-year-old brother had died fighting for the Confederacy, he joined up too.
I don’t consider the Civil War a simple confrontation between good and evil, and the Confederates merely traitors. It’s true that they were traitors to the national government and to the country as a whole, but they were loyal to the state and region to which they felt they owed the greater allegiance (and they’d felt that way for generations).
There is a good cautionary tale here. My best guess, which I have repeated many times, is that if the free states have to secede from a socialist United States, it will be bloodless and the thugs will let us go. I believe that Obama and his cronies are pansies who know that they don’t know how to fight. I could be wrong, in which case it could get ugly - one of the main reasons I believe we should be cautious in choosing that option and only follow that path as a last resort, when all other means have failed or cannot reasonably be employed. My first choice is to vote them out in 2012. My second choice is to go Galt even further than I already have. Secession is a last resort.
I think your comparison of the issues of slavery and abortion are provocative - and valid. Will there come a day when folks look back on these times and wonder why were weren’t more resolute in defeating the murderous practice?
pathetic NS desperately looking for a fight bump, that’s what you really mean you pathetic retread loser.
If you enjoy historical fiction in the style of “The Killer Angels” (the book the movie Gettysburg was based off) I’d recommend “Gone for Soldiers.” It looks at these generals as young LTs and CPTs fighting together in Mexico.
I have a number of years back read Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels and The Last Full Measure
I see that Gone for Soldiers is about the mexican war and most of the generals fighting in the civil war(both sides) were younger officers fighting together in that conflict and I might be interested in reading it....thanks...
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