Posted on 06/11/2013 4:48:08 AM PDT by iowamark
Civil War buffs have long speculated about how different the war might have been if only the Confederacy had won formal recognition from Britain. But few recognize how close that came to happening — and how much pro-Southern sympathy in Britain was built on a lie...
Early British support for the South was further buttressed by something as mundane as a protective tariff — the Morrill Tariff — approved by Congress on March 2, 1861. This new tariff, passed to protect American infant industries, also unwittingly gave rise to a troublesome myth of mounting trans-Atlantic proportions.
The tariff had been opposed by many Southern legislators, which is why it passed so easily once their states seceded. But this coincidence of timing fed a mistaken inversion of causation among the sympathetic British public – secession allowed the tariff to pass, but many in Britain thought that the tariff had come first, and so incensed the Southern states that they left the union.
Nor was this a simple misunderstanding. Pro-Southern business interests and journalists fed the myth that the war was over trade, not slavery – the better to win over people who might be appalled at siding with slave owners against the forces of abolition...
Why was England so susceptible to this fiction? For one thing, the Union did not immediately declare itself on a crusade for abolition at the war’s outset. Instead, Northern politicians cited vague notions of “union” – which could easily sound like an effort to put a noble gloss on a crass commercial dispute.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
I’ll leave the smarmy to you.
I’m in!
Just one of many examples:
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/07/opinion/la-oe-medoff-roosevelt-holocaust-20130407
Because Southern industries didn’t get the same preferential treatment as large Northern ones, hence it was to their deficit.
The Emancipation Proclamation went over like wet fart up North. It spawned Conscription Riots and the Copperheads to go Hermitile.
The only large Southern industry wasn't threatened by imports. It's customers, foreign and domestic, clammored for its goods and there were no foreign sources of cotton to compete with their supplying U.S. textile mills. So what would protective tariffs have accomplished for them?
Again, what difference did that make to the average Northern consumer who was paying the same inflated price as the Southern consumer was? Did it benefit him that some manufacturer was able to jack up his price due to tariffs? Did his community realize additional tax revenues because the business was located there? No. Did it create jobs? Some, but not for most people. So why did it matter where the industry was located? Tariffs hit everyone, North and South. They forced everyone to pay an inflated price. They did not harm one part of the country more than another.
I thought conscription spawned the Conscription Riots. Hence the name. Silly me.
Why would that be embarrassing?
I won’t push this thread any further off-topic except to say that the ADL doesn’t appear to agree that FDR was an anti-Semite. It’s especially foolhardy to judge people or their actions through a contemporary lens.
It is often tossed off that Lincoln was a racist, southerners were all sympathetic to slavery, and now FDR an anti-Semite. All mis-statements IMO.
How about just dealing with it logically?
But very Southron. And you forgot the 'Lincoln was gay' claims tossed about
Nobody wanted to be drafted to fight for the “black man”. It was ok to volunteer for Lincoln’s War but being drafted was a whole different kettle of fish.
Well, yes, the ADL is a left wing organization so of course they think well of FDR. That is my whole point. Official Jews consider the Democratic Party their party, but they do so incorrectly.
The Lincoln Coven members guzzled the Lincoln Kool-Aid.
I'm pretty self-taught in that area.
You had a fool for a teacher.
What FDR said about Jews in private
Author: FDR failed to save more Jews during Holocaust; ‘vision of what America should look like’
Medoff is definitely pushing things to build a case against Roosevelt, but he does have stuff to push and to build.
He doesn't mention any casual social anti-Semitism in the Roosevelt family on the one hand or the fact that Roosevelt had so many Jewish associates and appointees on the other.
He relies on ideas that FDR shared with many at the time: that immigration was to be restricted to maintain the current ethnic composition of the country, and that too many Jews in any one place would result in anti-Semitism.
Whether that made Roosevelt an anti-Semite in the context of his own day is something people will have to make up their own minds about. It certainly is true that accepted attitudes then were very different from what's considered acceptable now.
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