Here is a fact about slavery they never mention. The Northern controlled Congress voted by a 3/4ths majority to keep slavery by passing an amendment that would guarantee slavery in the United States indefinitely.
Lincoln urged all the states to ratify this amendment in his first inaugural address.
So when the House and the Senate was completely controlled by the Northern states, they voted to keep slavery forever.
So if they tell you the Civil War was about slavery, they are lying to cover up that the war was about keeping the fat rich industrialists in New York rich and also to keep the corrupt bastards in Washington DC in the money.
The war was about greed. It was not about morality. Took me a long time to figure this out, and I wasn't even looking for it when I realized that was what happened.
So the Confederate states lied in their very own legislation declaring secession to throw us off where they said it was indeed about slavery / white supremacy? Their opposition to States rights by demanding federal invention to stop Northern states from not sending back slaves escaped into their territory? They were lying about all of that in their own official legislation, speeches, etc. to throw us off in the future to think this was about slavery?
It's time to get real. It was about slavery. Just a few minutes of basic research confirms this. The Confederate state legislatures said so. Their own leaders at the time said so in their speeches. I believe them - why don't you?
That's exactly what Rhett Butler said repeatedly in Gone With The Wind. Also Ashley Wilkes writes home to Melanie to say the same thing, after he's been in battle for a year or so (before he's captured and imprisoned at Rock Island). I'm talking about the novel. I'm not an expert on the movie, but I've been reading the novel to my wife a little at a time (to help her fall asleep) over the last two or three months.
“All wars are sacred. To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and the fine words from stay-at-home orators.”
I was unaware of this proposed amendment (the "Corwin Amendment"), nor of Lincoln's support of it. Thank you for including your comment about it.
The reason it didn’t every become law was because the south had already begun fighting
It was an effort to prevent that. It didn’t work
Exactly.
I can understand his feeling of shock at hearing a lot of this information. I, who graduated as a history major and who reads books and watches documentaries about history all the time, was similarly shocked when I learned about:
- the fact that the federal government got most of its money through tariffs which were paid overwhelmingly by the Southern states.
- the scale of federal expenditures for corporate subsidies and infrastructure projects which were spent overwhelmingly in the Northern states.
- the longstanding and bitter complaints by Southerners about this exploitation at the hands of the federal government for the benefit of the Northern states
- the fact that the North was perfectly willing to protect slavery - effectively forever - by express constitutional amendment if only the original 7 seceding states would return....which they refused.
- that slavery was ended just about nowhere else in the Western world (ie Europe and all their colonial possessions around the world) via a big bloody war. It was ended at about the same time, for the same reason (industrialization) and the usual method of ending slavery was via compensated emancipation.
The fact that I had gotten all the way through college as a history major and had never been taught this really opened my eyes to just how propagandized we are in America.
It was like watching the corporate media start attaching their tongues to Obama’s shorts in 2007 without even any pretense of balance, fairness, objectivity, etc and watching them just push the narrative of the day for the Democrat party on every single issue since then.
Once you see it, you can never unsee it.
Does it really shock anybody to hear that the history faculty....ie part of Academia....is just as massively biased and just as prone to pushing narratives, outright lying, and hiding the truth as the corporate media?
Once you know you’re being lied to and start looking for the truth yourself, you start finding it. The key is waking up to the fact that you’re being lied to in the first place. Many still haven’t woken up to that.
“So if they tell you the Civil War was about slavery...”
Here is what the North would NOT agree to: Expansion of slavery into the new states forming in the West. It also opposed returning slaves from the North to the South and letting Southern slave-owners bring slaved into the North.
But consider why Texas fought:
“The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States.
By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States....
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States....
That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.
By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.
For these and other reasons, solemnly asserting that the federal constitution has been violated and virtually abrogated by the several States named, seeing that the federal government is now passing under the control of our enemies to be diverted from the exalted objects of its creation to those of oppression and wrong, and realizing that our own State can no longer look for protection, but to God and her own sons—We the delegates of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America and the people thereof and confidently appeal to the intelligence and patriotism of the freemen of Texas to ratify the same at the ballot box, on the 23rd day of the present month.”
https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html
Every political conflict everywhere is usually about greed. Follow the money.
Your comments make even more sense when it is known that Lincoln was the railroad’s chief attorney. He wasn’t planning on running for office but his railroad buddies needed the union to stay together, so they put up Lincoln.
Because it's not a fact. It only takes a 2/3rds majority of each House to get a constitutional amendment through Congress (3/4 of state legislatures are required to ratify), and that's what this proposed amendment received -- exactly 2/3 in the Senate and 2/3 plus 2 votes in the House. Congress had considered and rejected 57 compromise attempts, and the Corwin Amendment was viewed as the last chance to save the Union -- or rather, to keep the Upper South from joining the Lower South in the Confederacy.
Virtually all Democrats voted for the Amendment (one lone dissenter apparently didn't think it went far enough to safeguard slavery). A majority of Republicans opposed it. Only enough Republicans voted for the Amendment to ensure its passage by the narrowest of margins. It was late and they felt they had to do something to save what was left of the union.
Passage and ratifiction of the Corwin Amendment would never have won back the Deep South states which had already seceded, but it was believed that it could have pursuaded those in the Upper South to remain in the union. There was no guarantee that the amendment would be ratified, though. Congress was doing what legislatures do best: kick the can down the road and expect somebody else to decide what to do.
You and I will never have to make such difficult and weighty decisions as those in the past did, so it's best not to speak to lightly about the choices that they made when constrained by circumstances we will never have to face.