Posted on 01/06/2006 12:05:39 PM PST by stainlessbanner
Sure, I'd be very interested to see some sources.
Then we certainly agree. My Great-Grandmother used to tell me that her Grandad, (my Confederate Ancestor) used to say that the war came down to a simple fact: People in the North not minding their own business. :) In other words, Southern men were fighting for the right to live their lives without another section of the country dictating to them. A basic reason for going to war.
Yep, and the Northern soldiers thinking "You can't just up and leave the Union."
During the Civil War ex-slave Frederick Douglass observed, "There are at the present moment, many colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down ... and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government."
That is true too....however I am one person who still believes that the right of secession still exists (in theory). I think in the near future, we might see a state or group of states attempt it.
Ok, I don't doubt one bit he said it, but I would want to know how he came to have this information. I doubt he ever observed it himself since he was unlikely to be wandering around southern army camps. I'd still want to see some material that was conclusive. I am still perplexed because the Confederate government was so adamantly opposed to letting blacks, free or otherwise, wear the Confederate uniform. I don't know how they would not know this was going on.
Here is some more info:
Dr. Lewis Steiner, a Union Sanitary Commission employee who lived through the Confederate occupation of Frederick, Maryland said, "Most of the Negroes...were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy Army." Erwin L. Jordan's book "Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia" cites eyewitness accounts of the Antietam campaign of "armed blacks in rebel columns bearing rifles, sabers, and knives and carrying knapsacks and haversacks." After the Battle of Seven Pines in June 1862, Union soldiers said that "Two black Confederate regiments not only fought but showed no mercy to the Yankee dead or wounded whom they mutilated, murdered and robbed."
In April 1861, a Petersburg, Virginia newspaper proposed, "Three cheers for the patriotic free Negroes of Lynchburg." after 70 blacks offered "to act in whatever capacity may be assigned to them" in defense of Virginia. Erwin L. Jordan cites one case where a captured group of white slave owners and blacks were offered freedom if they would take an oath of allegiance to the United States. One free black indignantly replied, "I can't take no such oaf as dat. I'm a secesh nigger." A slave in the group upon learning that his master refused to take the oath said, "I can't take no oath dat Massa won't take." A second slave said, "I ain't going out here on no dishonorable terms." One of the slave owners took the oath but his slave, who didn't take the oath, returning to Virginia under a flag of truce, expressed disgust at his master's disloyalty saying, "Massa had no principles."
Horace Greeley, in pointing out some differences between the two warring armies said, "For more than two years, Negroes have been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy. They have been embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the armies of the Union." General Nathan Bedford Forrest had both slaves and freemen serving in units under his command. After the war, General Forrest said of the black men who served under him "These boys stayed with me ... and better Confederates did not live."
It was not just Southern generals who owned slaves but northern generals owned them as well. General Ulysses Grant's slaves had to await the Thirteenth Amendment for freedom. When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, General Grant said, "Good help is so hard to come by these days."
These are but a few examples of the important role that blacks served, both as slaves and freemen in the Confederacy during the War Between the States
In a word, taxes. That and import/export policy. The south was rural and agricultural, the north was much more industrial, even in 1860. Thus policies that favored industry over agriculture hurt the South and forced it to change it's ways.
The main reason the south lost was because they were not as industrialized as the north, and because they had a much smaller population, in part because of all the immigrants, many of whom were employed in that industry. The plains states were not much of a factor, as they were barely beginning to be settled at that time, and were still considered to be part of the Great American Desert, not suitable for agriculture. In part because of the drought cycle which was at it's peak when the area was first explored, and in part because people thought grasslands had less rich soil than forests. (In reality the opposite is true, but it's especially not the case when the grassland is the American Great Plains, a legacy of the last ice age).
Many is not the same as most. The fact remains that most of the officers and men serving in the US military who were from the South chose to join the confederacy. This of course included Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and others. Lee had served alongside many who were to become stars of the Union firmament. People he considered his friends. His loyalty was to Virginia first. To Virginia, not to slavery or even to Jefferson Davis (who fought in the Mexican War along with Lee, Grant, Jackson, and even Sherman). Like I said it was a different time.
BTW, the very fact that Washington made that speech indicates that he knew many felt strong loyalties to their state, stronger in many cases than those to the United States. Ours was a system of divided responsibilities.
What I don't appreciate, from some on these threads, is the accusation that my ancestors were traitors and the assumption that the North held the moral high ground because it was fighting to end slavery.
Meant to add, before I got called away because the someone ran into my car with a rental truck, that these divided responsibilities did not have to lead to conflicting loyalties, if each level of government had stayed in it's own area of responsibility. The northern states had mostly eliminated slavery, such as was practiced there in the first place. Given the normal political process, and the fact that slavery had begun to outlive it's usefulness with the coming mechanization of agriculture. Slaves were expensive to buy and more expensive to maintain, as opposed to Irishmen and Chinese who were cheap and pretty much disposable. Each state could have found it's own way to ending the institution, and I believe would have in time. But of course the abolitionist do-gooders couldn't wait, they'd rather kill and destroy for their vision of justice. Or more properly, get others to kill and destroy for them. Very few, although some, Union soldiers cared much one way or the other about slavery, just as long as the Negroes stayed in the South, and didn't come north to compete for the industrial jobs, something which didn't much happen until WW-II. In so doing, they created a backlash, the effects of which are still being felt to one degree or another.
The situation was somewhat analogous to the liberals achieving their aims through the courts, rather than through the normal political process, with elections and all that messy stuff. But in this case it was having the federal government do the work that should have been done at the state level under the Constitution as it then existed.
It didn't. That process started with modern schools.
Well, the propagandists had convinced many that the Constitution didn't allow it, but it certainly is not forbidden in that document. They were convinced that the Johnny Rebs were just that "rebels", rather than citizens of soveriegn states that had decided by legitimate legislative methods to dissolve their ties with the Union. It's very telling though, that even with Lincoln assasinated by a Southerner, no Southerner was tried for treason, not even Jefferson Davis and the other political leaders. Lee went home, taking his horse Traveler with him. He became the president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). (Traveler outlived Lee, who died in 1870, of complications from a stroke)
I would sooner believe that poster instead of you.
Go to this site:
http://members.aol.com/neoconfeds/thorwitz.htm
It is about a Black gentleman and the Black soldiers. He said there were 90,000 Black soldiers who fought for the South.
When nearly everything was destroyed by the Northern Army, then the Southern way of life was destroyed, too.
I was talking to stand watie. I was actually agreeing with you vis-a-vis Southern attitudes to arming blacks, free or otherwise.
But of course you would!
You certainly have been involved in these threads extensively so you too have the cred!
LOL....comin out o' the wordwork!!
Frankly sometimes I think perhaps we shouldn't have listened to the Yankees when they told us to secede from GB. After all, we would have had to get rid of the slave earlier, and I for one would mind being forced to obey one man who claims authority from God Almighty less, than from 10 neighbors who claim authority on the grounds that there are 10 of em and one of me.
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