Posted on 06/16/2014 6:04:34 PM PDT by riverss
First of all, the 'North' did not have any slaves. Four border states that stayed loyal during the war were 'Slave' states, but they had very few slaves compared to the South. The issue was quite the opposite of what you seem to think. It was about assuring new markets for excess slaves for the future.
The issue was the expansion of slavery to the territories, not about getting more slaves. The Deep South states realized that with the rate their own slave populations were increasing, they would have far too many slaves within a generation than they could handle. They needed new markets which is why they demanded that the Western territories be open to slavery.
It's that simple. Lincoln and the Republicans in 1860 had no dreams of ending slavery via an election. The only campaign promise Lincoln made was to stop the spread of slavery to the west.
The hard core fire-eaters on the south realized that stopping the spread of slavery would before long drive down the value of their fast growing slave population, but also put them in a position where they would be totally outnumbered by their own slaves. That was a nightmare scenario for them --- bankrupt and surrounded by people who hated you.
Arguments over ending slavery didn't cause the Civil War --- it was the Republican opposition to the Expansion of Slavery that caused it. Without expansion and new markets, the South would have choked to death on (or by) their own slaves.
It was economics, and the South had one totally screwed up economic system that was completely reliant on slavery.
Where’s the Dixie ping?
What Republicans called a “cordon of freedom,” secessionists denounced as an inflammatory circle of fire.
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/29/did_northern_aggression_cause_the_civil_war/
Ole Abe was smoking the revenue pipe. What else is new? He was no different than any other politician.
If the South successfully seceded they would then start to export their cotton on ships from southern ports directly to Europe instead of having to ship the cotton up North and pay fees for it to be shipped out of Northern ports on Ameican owned ships. At the time cotton was not allowed to be shipped out of the couotry on any ship not American owned. All the shipbuilding industry was up in New England and that’s where the ships were. Very little was exported out of Savannah or Charleston because it would have had to go on foreign ships.
So bottom line it was all about the money as usual and slavery made a nice fall guy.
I guess I’m a little shell shocked by never hearing about CA until now.
After reading the deal offered by the gov., Corwin Amendment, I just can’t for reasons yet understood ever again think the war was ever about slavery.
This should put an end to that slavery issue just on the face value of the Corwin Amendment.
Yet here we have the United States of America offering the South slaves forever, and.....we will fix it so it will last forever...for y’all.
The reason I get all up about this is my family could still be in bondage if it had passed. We made it up to sharecroppers, then freemen, O, and I’m white.
And my GGGF and 4 of his brothers fought in the war together.
3 were shot up, 1 killed, 1 sent home to take care of their momma who was left alone on the farm when the war started.
I know exactly why they fought, we were invaded., and we still tell the stories.
It wasn’t about slavery to them at all.
Now I’m starting to get a little p o’d over this whole issue.
By the time the Corwin amendment was passed seven Southern states had announced their secession and adopted a constitution that guaranteed slavery in every state and every territory the country might acquire, with no authority at any level to interfere with it, and no real chance that it could ever be done away with. Compare that with the Corwin amendment, which only guaranteed slavery in those states were it currently existed and ended any chance of it expanding, then why is it surprising that the Southern states were not tempted to rejoin? Why go back and accept limits to slavery when you can remain in your Confederacy and ensure unlimited slavery throughout your country forever?
The north went to war to defend the union and won the slaves freedom in the bargain. The south went to war to defend slavery and lost everything in the bargain.
Thanks for the help.
The slaves issue would had been over sooner or later anyway. Slavery was on it’s last legs in the 1840’s-50’s thank God.
I believe the war was not about slavery and never was. That thinking is over for me.
People still use it to pound on the South, but some of us, a lot of us didn’t get on the shame and blame train.
Here’s what I think it boils down to and not much more.
I could be wrong but really don’t care if I am anymore.
The Corwin Amendment was offered to the South somewhere about March 2-12 1861
Keep your slaves forever if y’all come back into the Union.
Our answer, we have had enough, let’s fight.
All those years and years of bickering and backstabbing were OVER.
Our answer was in our cannon balls tearing up Fort Sumter April 12, 1861 all deals were now null and void and we burned all the bridges.
We went for broke and we got it, but by God we tried.
We had had enough.
This is what I get out of a lifetime of stories told me from a defeated people, a culture totally burned to the ground, that the North will never know OR understand.
This was just like William Travis (Son of S.C.) had done. Firing his cannon at Santa Anna from the Alamo was his answer to.
The north then went to war to defend the union and won the slaves freedom in return.
The South went to war to stop ONE OF THE LARGEST armies out there, aka the Northern Invaders (Yankee) and we lost.
We lost just about everything.
We did however keep our pride and ability to fight. Government couldn’t take that, but sure like to use it.
(in the Armed Forces)
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
You would be very hard pressed to find a quote from a single Southern leader of the time that would agree with that.
I believe the war was not about slavery and never was.
Then what was it about? What was the cause of the bickering and backstabbing you speak of?
It’s goes back to J C Calhoun and A Jackson.
Again S.C. boys that hated each other and stayed in a p*#%ing contest.
Care for slaves? asked the Indians how much the gov. cares for anybody.
Slaves, about half the states were free states, part were not, and the rest were not going to be slave states.
It was winding down whether you won’t to admit to it or not but I don’t really care.
So I see.
Calhoun’s death on March 31, 1850, one of his greatest foes, U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, sternly rebuked an associate who suggested that he honor Calhoun with a eulogy in Congress. ‘He is not dead, sir — he is not dead,’ remarked Benton, a staunch Unionist. ‘There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.’ A decade later, a bloody civil war would prove Benton was right.
http://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-he-started-the-civil-war.htm
On March 12, 1861, a week after Lincoln’s inauguration and a month before Fort Sumter, the New York Evening Post, another Republican Party mouthpiece, advocated a preemptive strike against the Southern free traders with a naval attack that would “abolish all ports of entry” into the Southern states.
The Newark Daily Advertiser, meanwhile, expressed its disgust that Southerners had apparently “taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade,” and that they “may be willing to go . . . toward free trade with the European powers.”
“The chief instigator of the present troubles—South Carolina—have all along for years been preparing the way for the adoption of free trade,” and must therefore be stopped “by the closing of the ports” by military force.
http://mises.org/daily/1168
Lincoln said: “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using force against, or among the people anywhere” (emphasis added).
Collect the higher tariff rate, he said, and there will be no invasion. Fail to collect it, and there will be an invasion. Two years later, he would deport the most outspoken member of the Democratic Party opposition, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham said this in a speech:
[T]he Confederate Congress . . . adopted our old tariff of 1857 . . .fixing their rate of duties at five, fifteen, and twenty percent lower than ours. The result was . . . trade and commerce . . . began to look to the South . . . . The city of New York, the great commercial emporium of the Union, and the North-west, the chief granary of the union, began to clamor now, loudly, for a repeal of the pernicious and ruinous tariff. Threatened thus with the loss of both political power and wealth, or the repeal of the tariff, and, at last, of both, New England—and Pennsylvania . . . demanded, now, coercion and civil war, with all its horrors, as the price of preserving either from destruction . . . . The subjugation of the South, and the closing up of her ports—first, by force, in war, and afterward, by tariff laws, in peace, was deliberately resolved upon by the East.
As McGuire and Van Cott conclude: “[T]he tariff issue may in fact have been even more important in the North-South tensions that led to the Civil War than many economists and historians currently believe.”
Yeah. The tyrant and his party were generally ambivalent about slavery. Slavery in the north didn’t end until after the war.
That’s one of the grosser distortions of the truth that I’ve seen on the WBTS threads.
First of all slavery had been eliminated in almost every northern state, and the states that still had allowed it had paths to its elimination. It really was largely symbolic though since the slave population in the north was but a tiny fraction of the slave population in the south.
By contrast the southern states not only embraced slavery, they doubled-down on their exploitation of other human beings. They had no intention of ever letting go of their human chattel and would destroy anyone or anything that stood in their way.
The true tyrants were the southron slavers.
Virginia, the largest slave state (also had more free blacks than any non-slave state) seriously considered emancipating slaves in the 1830s. The effort was led by Thomas Jefferson Randolph.
Well the qualifier “almost every northern state” was of little consolation if you were working on a plantation. The plain truth is the union states that preserved slavery did so longer than their southern brethren. The emancipation proclamation ended slavery in the states that seceded once those states were defeated. The 13th amendment ended it in the rest, although I would argue as did several other abolitionists at the time that it was already unconstitutional under the original bill of rights particularly with regard to pernicious legislation such as the federal fugitive slave act.
That the slavers were scum is to me a given. I simply disagree that the reasons for the invasion of the south were primarily due to some noble desire to emancipate the slaves. There was already a model for peaceably eliminating slavery that was successfully implemented by Britain. Namely paying for the slaves that were freed. That such a model was not seriously pursued prior to the invasion of the south strongly suggests that the motivation for said invasion was less noble than the historical revisionists would like to acknowledge.
There were no plantations in the north. Virtually every northern slave served as domestic help.
The plain truth is the union states that preserved slavery did so longer than their southern brethren.
Another obscene distortion of the truth. Every northern state had a plan for emancipation, zero southern states would even seriously contemplate it.
I simply disagree that the reasons for the invasion of the south were primarily due to some noble desire to emancipate the slaves.
I know of no one, other than southern apologists, who claim that.
There was already a model for peaceably eliminating slavery that was successfully implemented by Britain. Namely paying for the slaves that were freed.
Several parties from the north, including Lincoln, proposed precisely that but southern leaders would have none of it. The only revisionists I see are playing for the Rebs.
“disagree that the reasons for the invasion of the south were primarily due to some noble desire to emancipate the slaves”.
Yes, slavery is use to divert, to try and shame but it doesn’t work on Southerners ever!!
Northerners just don’t get that, and probably never will! That in itself, has it’s on problems.
“Slavery started the war” has been parroted by the sheeple, trained to force people away from the North’s illegal attack on the South. It’s nothing but a deception, watch for it because it never stops.
BUT WHY do people jump straight to slaves when it is documented that it was not about slaves.
Slaves may have been a part of the South and would have gone with the South but THAT WAS LEGAL. There were GIVE OUR TAKE 3 reasons spelled out CLEARLY as to why the South left the Union and...started a new country.
It happen.
I’ll try to put it together as it would be used in a court room...
In like I would like to illegally change an existing old contract that I don’t like. My name is no where on the Doc. but I want change it because I’ll “feel” better.
I WANT TO change the way slave is used in the top part of that old contract DOC. that has ALREADY BEEN SIGNED AND AGREED TO by other people.
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