Posted on 06/23/2013 5:55:07 PM PDT by Para-Ord.45
From the time Abraham Lincoln entered the White House nearly a century and a half ago, there has been an anti-Lincoln tradition in American life. President John Tyler’s son, writing in 1932, seemed to speak for a silent minority: “I think he was a bad man,” wrote Lyon Gardiner Tyler, “a man who forced the country into an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity.”
Throughout his presidency Lincoln was surrounded by rivals, even among his own cabinet. Outside the White House, his many enemies included conservative Whigs, Democrats, northern copperheads and New England abolitionists. Wisconsin editor, Marcus M. Pomeroy, sniped that Lincoln was a
“worse tyrant and more inhuman butcher than has existed since the days of Nero.”
Shortly before his reelection Pomeroy added: “The man who votes for Lincoln now is a traitor and murderer.… And if he is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good.”
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Having just returned from Gettysburg last week, the situation hinged on the issue of allowing new states to have slaves or not.
If the South thought this out, they could have retained slaves in some kind of “grandfathered” status and gone along with slavery bans in Kansas and Colorado. The South had much to lose, 50% of wealth was in slave ownership. Eventually, freeing them would be cost effective. Pay wages, charge for rent and food, i.e. company town.
The North initially fought the war timidly, compared to the South; but willpower would not overcome such a great resource differential.
I think Andrew Jackson established that one. South Carolina chickened out before he could carry out his threat.
You overlook the fact that for compensated emancipation to work it required an interest on the part of Southerners to allow emancipation, compensated or otherwise. Such an interest did not exist.
Your hypothetical scenario is so chock-full of logical fallacies it is impossible to speculate. I know that won’t stop you however so carry on ;-)
Also an interest on the part of poor southerners and all northerners in being taxed (a lot) to pay for compensation to rich southerners. Nobody wanted it.
But you are quite right. It took till February of 65 for the CSA Congress to recognize they might have to recruit some slave soldiers and free them after the war. Anybody who hadn’t figured out the necessity some time before that needed a really big cluestick.
But even they weren’t as dumb as the slaveowners of KY, who were offered compensation but instead insisted on keeping their slaves only to lose them by the 13th.
Seriously, by 1864 who couldn’t see that slavery was going doowwwn? Only someone who was obsessive and irrational.
Slavery died everywhere in the western world peacefully except in the USA. The war freed people that were definitely not ready for total freedom. Slavery was bad but turning a uneducated childlike person into the world was cruel. Most became share croppers for the “hated” whitey ex-owner’s land.
Because only in the USA was a large percentage of the population willing to launch a bloody rebellion to protect it.
The war freed people that were definitely not ready for total freedom.
Arguable but let's run with that anyway. By 1861 slavery had existed in what was to become the U.S. for almost 230 years. In all that time no effort had been made by the slave owners themselves to prepare their chattel for life after slavery. No attempts to prepare them were ongoing in 1861. There is absolutely no reason to believe that any attempts would have been made had the South won their rebellion or if the rebellion hadn't taken place at all. So according to you slavery should never end because the slaves would never be ready for total freedom.
Slavery was bad but turning a uneducated childlike person into the world was cruel.
How many uneducated white Southerners were there? They managed to fend for themselves all right. Or would they be better off in slavery as well?
Most became share croppers for the “hated” whitey ex-owner’s land.
Because that was the closest the "hated" whitey could come to re-establishing slavery.
AKA the population of the CSA.
The fact of the matter is, being made a slave was the best thing that ever happened to those blacks. The vast majority of blacks that were made slave were simply captives from internal tribal conflicts among Africans. If they had no value, they would simply have been slaughtered (as they are today). Instead, since they had value as slaves, they were allowed to live, sold to slavers, and then brought to the greatest nation on the face of the Earth while their brethren were left in the hell hole of Africa.
Emancipation without having any real options must have been nearly as frightening as remaining in bondage. Grant had a plan to give the freed slaves an option - but it wasn’t put in place.
Had the freed slaves had an option it also would have given them a “bargaining chip” with their ex-owners if they decided to remain in the South.
Lotsa “ifs” in this discussion though.
Would slavery have been a fate you would have jumped at? Even considering the alternatives?
There are a smattering of reported cases about life insurance upon slaves. My big worry was moral hazard. Fortunately, no reported cases consider this issue. The fact that there are no reported cases suggest that it was perhaps not a big problem.
From an insurance standpoint, the cases are fairly routine. In one case, the life of a slave was insured so long as he was not engaged in an occupation more dangerous than being a laborer in a tobacco warehouse and so long as he was not south of New Orleans. The man died when he fell off a riverboat traveling north from New Orleans so that he could work on a sugar plantation. The insurer refused to pay upon the grounds that he was on his way to a more dangerous occupation. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the slave was not involved in that occupation yet and was not south of New Orleans, and so the insurance applied.
Read more at: Insurance Journal
Necessity is the mother of invention. They had the human labor, so no need for the invention. Actually one invention, the cotton gin, increased the need for human labor to plant, tend and harvest all the new acreage that could now be turned into profit.
The greatness of a man is contrasted by the pettiness of his enemies.
“Seems I recall the SOUTH firing upon Fort Sumter. Unless history has it all wrong...”
Joethedrummer. suggest you check out a little background on the Sumner event besides lapping up Ken Burns version without question.
When did the CSA declare war on the USA? Hostilities did not commence until Lincoln provoked them by attempting to reinforce and re-supply a fort in S. Carolina’s main harbor. This WAS a needless purposeful calculated provocation.
Peaceful secession is legal: either by mutual agreement of the states and the federal government so there is no controversy, or by legal case with the Supreme Court as original jurisdiction to resolve the controversy, per Article 3 of the constitution.
Mutual agreement can occur either by constitutional amendment (3/4s of the states, with 2/3rds House and 2/3rds of the Senate) or perhaps by law (50%+ of House and Senate and Signature of President).
There is also treaty, which normally will state its own means of resolution of controversy, signed by President and ratified by 2/3rds of Senate.
None of the above means were attempted during the insurrection of 1860-1865, which is why it was an insurrection, not a peaceful secession.
May 6, 1861.
The entire tone and tenor of South Carolina’s departure from the union was belligerent, incendiary, and “a needless purposeful calculated provocation”. The United States was perfectly within their rights to re-provision one of their forts.
The hostilities were entirely on the heads of the confeds.
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