Posted on 01/26/2007 6:05:29 PM PST by Dog Gone
Any attempt to judge our history by today's standards -- out of the context in which it occurred -- is at best problematic and at worst dishonest.
For example, consider the following quotations:
"So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished."
"[T]here is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."
By today's standards, the person who made the first statement, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, would be considered enlightened. The person who made the second, President Abraham Lincoln, would be considered a white supremacist.
Many believe that the War Between the States was solely about slavery and that the Confederacy is synonymous with racism. That conclusion is faulty because the premise is inaccurate.
If slavery had been the sole or even the predominant issue in sparking the Civil War, this statement by Lincoln is puzzling: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it."
If preserving slavery was the South's sole motive for waging war, why did Lee free his slaves before the war began? In 1856, he said slavery was "a moral and political evil in any country."
Why was Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation effective in 1863 rather than when the war started in 1861? And why did it free only the slaves in the Confederacy and not in Northern or border states?
If slavery was the only reason for the Civil War, how do you explain Texas Gov. Sam Houston's support for the Union and for the institution of slavery? In light of the fact that 90 percent of Confederate soldiers owned no slaves, is it logical to assume they would have put their own lives at risk so that slave-owning aristocrats could continue their privileged status?
There are few simple and concise answers to these questions.
One answer, however, is that most Southerners' allegiance was to their sovereign states first and the Union second. They believed that states freely joined the Union without coercion and were free to leave.
You could say they really believed in the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- the "powers not delegated" clause. They believed that the federal government should be responsible for the common defense, a postal service and little else. They viewed the Union Army as an invader, not an emancipator.
I am not attempting to trivialize slavery. It is a dark chapter in our history, North and South alike.
However, I am a proud Southerner and a proud descendent of Confederate soldiers. I honor their service because, to me, it represents the sacrifice of life and livelihood that Southerners made for a cause more important to them than their personal security and self-interest.
I'm aware of the genocidal war conducted by my country against the American Indian, but I'm still a proud American. And I'm also aware of the atrocities that occurred at My Lai, but I am proud of my service as a Marine in Vietnam.
If the Confederate flag represented slavery, the U.S. flag must represent slavery even more so.
Slavery existed for four years under the Stars and Bars and for almost 100 years under the Stars and Stripes.
If the few hundred members of racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan want to adopt the Confederate flag as their symbol, over the objections of millions of Southerners, should we believe it has been corrupted for all time?
Given that the KKK has adopted the cross for its burnings, should churches across the country remove this symbol of Christian faith from all places of worship?
Should we diminish the service of the Buffalo Soldiers (black U.S. cavalry troopers of the late 1800s) because they were an integral part of a war that subjugated and enslaved the Plains Indians?
No. We should not surrender the Confederate flag or the cross to the racists, and we should not tear down the monuments.
Retroactive cleansing of history is doomed to failure because it is, at heart, a lie. We should memorialize and commemorate all of our soldiers who served honorably -- those who wore blue or gray or served as Buffalo Soldiers -- whether or not we in today's enlightened world completely support their actions.
I think you are wrong. There were a few abolitionists in the New England area. There were a few obscure abolitionists in the South. That's about it. Manumition wasn't a cause in the North. It had nothing to do with the North waging war. Preservation of the Union was the only thing.
Pardon, I spelled manumission incorrectly.
And that's a good point. But what is cheaper, the care and feeding of a slave or the wage of a worker? Believe it or not there was a debate at the time and there was a valid argument either way. The only answer is that a man is free to work when and where he wants and a slave was denied that freedom. But economically, there was a debate.
Or in other words, if you keep paying the Tariff, we will not have to invade.
Or in other words, if you obey the law your elected representatives passed and don't start an insurrection, the federal government won't have to put it down.
The South opened the war by bombardment of Ft. Sumter. What is the importance of this federal facility? "Because it was a major tariff-collecting facility in the harbor at Charleston. So long as the Union controlled it, the South would still have to pay Lincoln's oppressive tariffs."
No, it wasn't. It was an uncompleted Federal defensive fort, guarding the harbor, which the state of SC ceded the land for and lobbied to have built following the British actions of 1812. Tariffs were collected in Charleston. Moreover, they weren't "Lincoln's" tariffs. They predated Lincoln's administration by many years, including many Southern born presidencies and representation by many southern dominated congresses.
If anyone cares to really read the Emancipation Proclamation, they will find that Lincoln only freed slaves in territories that had seceded. You will note that specific parishes in Louisiana are listed. They were loyal to the Confederacy The other parishes where loyal to the Union.
As has been pointed out many times here, a proclamation by the CinC would only have legal authority in those places in a state of insurrection. The Emancipation Proclamation could not have covered those other areas. That is why Lincoln pushed for the 13th Amendment so strongly in his re-election platform of 1864, to complete the emancipation for the rest of the United States.
In this, you are being as absolutist as those who state that preservation of slavery was the only reason for the South to fight. The causes of "Free Soil", abolition, and prevention of the revival of slave importation were all potent political movers in the North. See this: the Republican Party platform of 1860, which was enough of a popular concept to win a plurality in the face of a divided Dem party.
PS, for those of you who claim tariffs were the cause, please note the RP platform called for adjusting them more equitably.
In fact, both the North and South were slave societies. Both were British cultural products : the world wide plantation system of white overseers and brown/black workers from India to the southern US cotton plantations. And the North was a spin off of the original British Industrial Revolution, MACHINES were(and still are)the "slaves" of that(and our) society.
Thus over the 4 years of the civil war these 2 systems were tested against each other much as the contest between John Henry and the Steam Drill in mining. Even with John Henry's muscles and hammer, he couldn't keep up with the Steam Drill.
And so, over the long run, it was Industrial Might, like 3 times the railroads, that did the south in. The south had more courage, more valor, better generals in the early going but it was the MACHINE that eventually wore them down.
The battle of Gettysberg clearly illustrated WHY the south lost the war. The rebs blindly attacked the union center, Pickett's Charge, and were cut to pieces by the MACHINE. The only offensive move by the union forces was 2 PA cannon batteries came forward to the sides of Pickett's 10,000 and caught them in a cross fire.
And yet, what if the southern leadership had come to their senses early on, and seen the strategic defeat coming, and negotiated an armed truce. That would have ended the hostilities. Thus in the next generation you would have had a SOUTHERN rail line being developed to southern california, white straw bosses, black slaves, and GERMAN engineers.
Remember, Otto Von Bismarck was consolidating GERMANY in the 1870's and looking for GERMAN colonies thruout the world. Thus the US confederacy would have been an ideal ally. Thus, strange as it may seem, WWI could have been fought in the US as well as europe.
If it not been for arrogant PRIDE in the southern breast, ours might be a different US and world today...
THE
CONFEDERATE SOLDIER
I will not forget him, nor will my children or my children's children!!
Excerpted from Seventy Years In Dixie,
by F.D. Srygley, Florida Confederate Veteran... Faith and Facts Press, first printing 1891.
To people who passed through those memorable days in Dixie, it seems queer to hear Southern men and women spoken of as "traitors," "rebels," "enemies of American liberty" and "foes of the Constitution." I know not what may have been the secret motives of wily leaders, if there were any such leaders, which I gravely doubt, but as for the people, nothing but patriotism pure and simple moved them to vote secession and to enlist in the army.
The people at the South felt just as confident that the people at the North contemplated a deliberate overthrow of the Republic as their fathers in the Revolution felt that King George was a tyrant. In all the public orations and private discussions the idea that slavery was the bone of contention never once entered the minds of the common people . . . .
They understood that the Constitution of the United States was assailed, and that they were offering themselves for its defense. The question, as they understood it, was whether American liberty should be perpetuated or crushed by Northern monarchy.
Fighting for slavery? Think of the absurdity of the thing! The Southern army was largely made up of volunteers from the mountain regions. There were no slaves of consequence in that mountain country, and those poor mountaineers hated "stuck-up" slave holders as cordially as a saint hates sin. True, they understood in a vague sort of way that there was some discussion on the subject of slavery in a general way, but to them this was only an incidental and irrelevant topic of public interest which was in no way connected with the question of secession.
The people understood that the question at issue was simply their right to manage their own affairs in their own States. If the North proposed to interfere with that right, what assurance had they that it would not take from them their homes and all their property? I know not what the leaders thought, but there was no mistaking the feelings and opinions of the common people. . . .
I understood that in seceding the South held on to the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and Bunker Hill monument, and the life of George Washington. . . .
We traitors? We rebels against the American government and enemies of the Constitution? Shades of Washington and Bunker Hill! Why, what were the people up in the mountains fighting for if not for the Constitution? . . . . What did they care about slavery? Hadn't it been as a thorn in the flesh to them from time immemorial? Did not everybody know that the North had set aside the Constitution, throttled our liberty and pulled the tail feathers out of the American eagle?
***
A BAND of BROTHERS
Sen. E.W. Carmack, 1903
The Confederate soldiers were our kin folk and our heroes. We testify to the country our enduring fidelity to their memory. We commemorate their valor and devotion. There were some things not surrendered at Appomattox. We did not surrender our rights and history, nor was it one of those conditions of surrender that unfriendly lips should be suffered to tell the story of that war or that unfriendly hands should write the epitaphs of our Confederate dead. We have the right to teach our children the true history of that war, the causes that led up to it and the principles involved.
"We Southron are people to whom the past is forever speaking."
We listen because we cannot help ourselves, for the past speaks to us with many voices. Far out of that dark nowhere which is the time before we were born, men who were flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood went through fire and storm to break a path to the future and form a true government, by the people, and for the people.
We are part of the future they died for; they are part of the past that brought the future. What they did--the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, the stories they told and the songs they sang and, finally, the deaths they died--make up a part of our own experience. We can not cut ourselves off from it. It is as real to us as something that happened last week. It is a basic part of our "Southern Heritage"as Americans" (Author unknown)
***
The Confederate soldier was in most cases a volunteer. His average age was 21-23, but there were some as young as 11 and some in their 60's. Most of which were illiterate and 60-70% were farmers by trade. They worked their land with their own hands and did this without salves.
These Southern patriots were raised under the shadow of The War for Independence. They were brought up to honour and respect that struggle by their fathers and grandfathers. They knew from this up bringing The War for Independence was to insure the people and states the right to rule themselves. It is not too difficult to understand why these Southerners and many Northerners "That's right" Northerners, fought for self rule and state rights.
These Confederate warriors were under fed, under clothed, and almost never paid his $11 a month. They fought until the very end and begged for another go at 'em when Lee surrendered! I ask you, is this men that would fight only for slavery, when they owned no slaves??...No I say!, They were fighting for the very thing their fathers fought for, Independence...PoP
***
History is not the relation of campaigns, and battles, and generals or other individuals, but that which show the principles for which justified Her struggle for those principles.
Every one should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history and descend to posterity.
We owe it to our dead, to our living and to our children to preserve the truth and repel the falsehoods, so that we may secure just judgment from the only tribunal before which we may appear and be fully and fairly be heard, and that tribunal is the bar of history.
Robert E. Lee
***
."All that was, or is now, desired is that error and injustice be excluded from the text-books of the schools and from the literature brought into our homes; that the truth be told, without exaggeration and without omission; truth for its own sake and for the sake of honest history, and that the generations to come after us not be left to bear the burden of shame and dishonor unrighteously laid upon the name of their noble sires." Rev. James P. Smith, Last Survivor of the Staff of Lt. Genl. Stonewall Jackson.
***
"The heartstrings of the mother, woven around the grave of her lost child, will never be severed while she lives; but does that hinder the continued flow of maternal devotions to those who are left her? The South's affections are bound, with links that cannot be broken, around the graves of her sons who fell in her defense and to the mementos and memories of the great struggle; but does that fact lessen her loyalty to the proud emblem of a reunited country? Does her unparalleled defense of the now dead Confederacy argue less readiness to battle for the ever-living Republic, in the making and the administering of which she bore so conspicuous a part?
If those unhappy patriots who find a scarecrow in every faded, riddled Confederate flag would delve deeper into the philosophy of human nature, or rise higher, say to the plane on which McKinley stood, they would be better satisfied with their Southern countrymen, with Southern sentiment, with the breadth and strength of the unobtrusive but sincere Southern patriotism. They would see that man is so constituted, the immutable laws of our being are such, that to stifle the sentiment and extinguish the hallowed memories of a people is to destroy their manhood.
The unseemly things which occurred in the great conflict between the States should be forgotten, or at least forgiven, and no longer permitted to disturb complete harmony between North and South. All American youth in all sections should be taught to hold in perpetual remembrance all that was great and good on both sides; to comprehend the inherited convictions for which saintly women suffered and patriotic men died; to recognize the unparalleled carnage as proof of unrivaled courage; to appreciate the singular absence of all personal animosity and the frequent manifestation between those brave antagonists of a good-fellowship such as had never before been witnessed between hostile armies. It will be a glorious day for our country when all the children within its borders shall learn that four years of fratricidal war between the North and the South was waged by neither with criminal or unworthy intent, but by both to protect what they conceived to be threatened rights and imperiled liberty; that the issues which divided the sections were born when the Republic was born, and were forever buried in an ocean of fraternal blood."
Gen. John Brown Gordon, C.S.A. - "Reminiscences of the Civil War," Charles Scribner, New York, 1904.
***
The "States of Secession's" white populations, number of
troops furnished, and number of troops killed.....1861-1865
There were many from other states, even the north. I know of no records on these.
State Pop. #Troops %Pop. # Dead %Troops
1- Alabama 526,271 100,000 19.0 1,466 1.47
2- Arkansas 323,143 45,000 13.9 6,862 15.25
3- Florida 77,746 15,000 19.3 2,346 15.64
4- Georgia 591,550 130,000 22.0 10,974 8.44
5- Louisiana 357,492 53,000 14.8 6,545 12.35
6- Mississippi 353,899 85,000 24.0 15,256 17.95
7- N. Carolina 629,492 127,000 20.2 40,275 31.71
8-S. Carolina 291,300 60,000 20.6 17,682 29.47
9- Tennessee 826,722 115,000 13.9 6,414 5.57
10- Texas 420,891 58,000 13.8 3,849 6.64
11- Virginia 1,047,299 155,000 14.8 14,794 10.48
This I Fly in Their Honour
My Blood
Thomas Aaron
52nd TN. Inf.
Alexander Ralston
23rd TN. Inf.
James Ralston
23rd TN. Inf.
Because my father wore the gray,
I have the right to greet each day,
With love and pride and tribute pay,
To every son who wore the gray.
I think when heavens gate swings wide,
And in shall flow it's human tide,
Redeemed and pure shall pass that day,
Every son that wore the Confederate Gray!
Author unknown
©1998-2006 TheSouthernAmerican.org All Rights Reserved
No part of this website may be duplicated without permission.
Wonder just how many slaves
this poor Johnny owned!?
START * PoP/STATEMENT * FACTS * DID YOU KNOW * LINCOLN * LINCOLN 2
THE CONFEDERATE * PATRIOTS OF COLOUR * REBEL BRAVES * JEWISH REBS
PUNISHMENT? * OUR YOUTH * YOUTH 2 * DID BLACKS SERVE? * WARRIOR
OUR FLAGS * HAVE YOU READ THIS?? * FORUM PATRIOTS OF COLOUR * REBEL BRAVES * JEWISH REBS
We are indeed, thanks to the bloody leftist media and sellout 'liberal' traitors who would rather give aid and comfort to America's Islamic & communist enemies, then support their own country, thus the last thing needed is additional gas thrown on the fires of division. It only serves the enemy.
There is a minority in here who choose to ignore those historical facts and they are determined to exist in a defeated past, while ignoring today's real dangers we face as a nation.
The RP was not there when the tariffs were enacted, so that carries no water.
1828Congress again raises tariffs with the Tariff of Abominations. The tariffs are designed to support American industry and in that way are successful greatly benefiting the northern industrial economy, however the tariffs are damaging to the southern agricultural economy.
1832
The Tariff Act of 1832 reduces duties. The South, still dissatisfied threatens secession.
1833
A Compromise Tariff Act is passed as a means of gradually reducing the tariffs of concern in the southern states. Confrontation is averted with this compromise.
1834
Slavery abolished throughout the British Empire. [And the holders were reimbursed for their property.]
In 1856, the Republicans became a national party when John C. Fremont was nominated for President under the slogan: "Free soil, free labor, free speech, free men, Fremont." Four years later, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White House.
So in a generation or three, when California and Arizona vote to secede and form Aztlan, you'll be cool with that?
The political organizers of the rebellion represented the powerful slavocracy. Instigating open civil war, over 600,000 Americans dead, coupled with leaving America vulnerable to European powers, that real 'noble' of them......
It's not quite that simple. Every new state admitted came to the party with two new Senators -- so each new free state had the potential to shift the balance toward abolition. So the question wasn't just the expansion of slavery on the continent, but the expansion of abolitionism in the Senate.
All the compromises of the early 19th century were, from the Southern side, about maintaining the existing balance. It was a defensive posture.
There would also have been the very real problem of what to do with all the slaves who, by design, lacked the skills necessary for independent living.
Only those locked into a permanent existence of self-inflicted rebellion against everything America stands for would continue dredging up the failures of a domestic insurrection for the sake of perpetuating a forced labour based cotton empire.
"Several Freepers have already posted the text or links to what amounts to signed confessions by the political leaders of the several Confederate states in regard to the centrality of slavery in their deliberations."
When someone is attempting to rewrite history so the 'new version' only interlinks with their agenda key historical facts are deliberately ignored, altered or subject to the 'Big Lie'.
I assume California would take Boxer and Feinstein? What's the problem?
Clearly the logic of what I said went completely over your head, and your comment is an example what I was saying. Your stated concern was that an article that makes a case for the southern position was divisive. I stated that inflammatory comments that deny some valid southern positions was equally devise. So you responded with an inflammatory comments that are not related to the point I was making.
That's the kind of logic liberals like to use... dialog is "you shut up and listen to me."
Your logic is at least consistent as you go on to blame all the casualties on the Confederacy, even though both sides decided to go to war.
My questions to you are,
If it is "divisive" to make comments defending the south, why is it not divisive to make comments attacking it>?
If you are concerned about divisive comments, why did you make the one you did?
Finally, just for fun and since you brought it up, how many casualties would have occurred in the Civil War if the Union had permitted the Confederacy to secede?
The more significant question is "What impact will mechanization have on the human labor pool, whether slave or paid labor?" With mechanized harvesting and processing, one landowner could manage the same sized acreage without the need for hundreds of employees. With the social pressure to ban slavery, mechanization would have virtually eliminated the institution within a generation.
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