Posted on 09/13/2015 4:30:35 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
The Syrian Civil War has been going on for four years now. It is being waged quite barbarously However, before the world reacts, we should put everything in perspective. While terrible, Syria's war is rather mild by the standards of historical civil wars.
Right, now a high estimate of 330,000 deaths related to Syrian struggle is floated around. However, the American Civil War killed more than twice as many people in a similar four-year time span.
J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000. - NY Times, 2012
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Damn.
I was looking for a retweet button.
And sadly, our federal government has learned nothing from the horrors of either our national civil war of 150 years ago, or the bloody disruptive foreign civil war crisis we have planned and funded in Syria.
At least in the case of our civil own civil war, we arguably claimed moral authority.
Al Queda backed rebels, creation of blood thirsty ISIS, and ruining Syria, no claim of moral authority this time around.
Mussies killing mussies.. I fail to see a problem,,
They been doing that yearly since 600A.D...
BAD mussies killing the Good ones.. must NOT be to many good mussies left.. Course the scale of what a good mussie IS may be degrading..
Getting hard to to find a good mussie..
Spanish Civil war got about 500,000 in a shorter period of time. Between 8 - 9 million in the Russian Civil War.
After the fact. There was no intention of abolishing slavery until 2 1/2 years after the war started. Had the South laid down arms within 2 1/2 years into the war, slavery would have continued as before.
Some people think the purpose of the war was to end slavery. It wasn't. The purpose of the war was to end independence for the Southern States. Ending Slavery got tagged on towards the end of the war.
Freakin awful
DU / progressive rag writer lurkers would have a Field Day screen capturing your animated gif featuring the dead Syrian child on the beach.
Hater Jerks we’d be called, with likely FR reputation damage.
Appreciate the point of view you brought up.
Scholars have debated the degree that abolition played in rallying northern union support for civil war.
My statement stands on moral authority of our civil war.
Our northern abolitionist majority elected an anti-slavery president, who provoked the south into declaring secession due to their fear of losing their precious entitlement right to own, use, sell, abuse and kill human property.
Freeing of slaves would naturally come once the war’s end was in sight.
The Civil War Trust:
Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery
An Interview with James Oakes
The Civil War Trust recently had a chance to sit down with historian James Oakes and discuss his new book, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States. This book describes the complex steps taken by the Lincoln administration to undermine and ultimately abolish slavery during the Civil War years.
Oakes Cover largeCivil War Trust: Some modern undercurrents have attempted to remove slavery as a primary cause of the American Civil War. Where do you come down on the cause or causes of the war?
James Oakes: Most, but not all, historians still agree with Abraham Lincoln that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. Most, but not all, would also agree that the slave states seceded to protect slavery. But over the past few decades a substantial number of historians have come to deny that the Civil War had any substantial antislavery origins. This has had major consequences, not the least of which is the commonplace that secession was “hysterical.” It also implies that the conflict was “reconcilable.” I think the antislavery threat was real and that secession was a perfectly understandable reaction to the victory of the Republicans in 1860. In retrospect secession turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation, but it was not to my mind hysterical. The South seceded from the Union because an antislavery majority in the North had elected an antislavery President.
Civil War Trust: Were Lincoln and the Republican Party committed to eliminating slavery in 1861?
“Freedom National” is available in our Civil War Trust-Amazon Bookstore »
James Oakes: Republicans came into the war with two broad scenarios for a federal assault on slavery. The first was a peacetime program familiar to all abolitionists that was designed to bring about what Lincoln would later call the “ultimate extinction” of slavery. They would, of course, ban slavery from all the western territories, but that was only one part of the larger project. They would prohibit federal enforcement of the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., withdraw federal protection of slavery on the high seas, and deny admission to any new slave states. With this package of policies, abolitionists believed, the federal government would construct a “cordon of freedom” around the slave states. They assumed that because slavery was intrinsically weak the “cordon of freedom” would ultimately strangle slavery to death, forcing the slave states themselves to abolish slavery on their own. Abolition would begin in the Border States, where slavery was weakest. As more and more free states joined the Union, as more and more slave states abandoned the institution, slavery would die.
It’s important to understand that antislavery politicians believed this was a peacetime policy, that it would not violate the Constitution’s ban on direct federal “interference” with slavery in the states where it already existed. Yet it was the reason the cotton states seceded.
Secession in turn led Republicans to threaten a second antislavery policy: immediate, uncompensated military emancipation in the disloyal states, justified under the war powers of the Constitution.
So these were the two broad scenarios Republicans put on the table during the secession crisis. In effect they offered the slave states and alternative. States that remained loyal would be offered a package of incentives designed to encourage the peaceful, gradual abolition of slavery. But secession meant war, and war meant immediate, uncompensated military emancipation.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
People have selectively emphasized the part of history they wish to believe, and the part that is officially taught to our children.
Lincoln says he would have accepted the continuation of slavery, but what he refused to accept was that States would non longer be under the control of Washington D.C.
Independence was the cause of the war. "Abolishing Slavery" got tacked on near the end to justify the bloodshed expended stopping other people from gaining their Independence from Washington D.C.
Oh, and there were five Union slave states that maintained Slavery all through the war. It would seem that if their purpose was to stop slavery, they could have started with those states. The Supply lines would have been a lot shorter.
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