Posted on 10/03/2015 1:28:14 PM PDT by Kaslin
Although the American Revolution resulted in independence for the United States and World War II made it an international power, the American Civil War was arguably the most important war in American history. It truly was an American watershed.
In order to appreciate that war’s significance, it must be understood what the Civil War was about. Contrary to all-too-popular opinion, the Civil War was not about states’ rights. Instead it was all about slavery and white supremacy. As shown in my just-released book, The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won, there is compelling evidence that secession and the Confederacy were the result of Southerners’ desire to preserve slavery and white supremacy – not to promote states’ rights.
The evidence of the seceders’ motivations is clear-cut and convincing. Only slave states seceded, and the greater the percentage of slaves and the percentage of slave-owning families the more likely a slave state was to secede. Those states complained that the Federal Government was doing not too much but too little – Southerners wanted the central government to more aggressively enforce slavery, especially to return runaway slaves. They also were upset that other states were passing “liberty laws” to make it more difficult to retrieve runaways. The issue was not who had the power to do what but instead whether their powers were being used to promote slavery. Far from respecting individual states’ rights, they wanted to compel the Federal and other state governments to enforce slaveholders’ rights and preserve slavery.
The strongest evidence of seceders’ motivations is the language they used in their own secession documents. What could be more telling? Six of the seven early seceding states provided clear statements of their reasons for seceding. Their reasons included the election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed extension of slavery into territories; the runaway slave issue; the threat to slavery’s existence with the possible loss of four to six billion dollars in slave property (the largest component of Southern wealth); the perceived end of white supremacy and the resultant political and social equality of blacks and whites, and desperate warnings of the effect all this change would have on Southern Womanhood.
South Carolina’s declaration of the reasons for secession said, “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution [runaway slave return provision].”
As he called for a secession convention, Mississippi’s governor declared, “The existence or the abolition of African slavery in the Southern States is now up for a final settlement.” Citing only slavery-protection reasons, that state’s legislature convened a secession convention. The latter’s declaration of the causes of secession got right to the point in its opening line: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world.”
Not only did their own secession resolutions reveal slavery and white supremacy as their causation, but the seven states who seceded even before Lincoln’s inauguration immediately began an outreach campaign to other slave states. Their correspondence and speeches relied only on slavery-related issues to encourage other slave states’ secession. They only lobbied slave states.
Much other evidence demonstrates that slavery and white supremacy preservation were the causes of secession and even trumped possible Confederate victory in the war. All efforts to avoid war by compromise focused only on slavery issues. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said slavery was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy and Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers had erred in stating that all men were created equal.
Even though it had a tremendous manpower shortage, the Confederacy officially rejected the use of slaves as soldiers (as inconsistent with its white supremacy views) and rejected one-on-one prisoner exchanges for captured black Union soldiers. Just as American colonists needed European intervention to win the Revolutionary War, the Confederates were desperate for British and French intervention; however, they declined to end slavery in order to achieve involvement by the slavery-hating Europeans.
Union victory ended slavery and kept America from being an international pariah. It also resulted in passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments; these provided the legal basis for ending legal segregation and providing blacks with voting and other civil rights.
Despite the compelling evidence of slavery’s and white supremacy’s roles in fomenting secession, the Confederacy, and the Civil War, too many contemporary Americans cling to the myth that somehow states’ rights were at the root of the Civil War. We need to accept the reality of the racial underpinnings of that critical war in order to contemplate, confront, and overcome the continuing racial tensions in America.
Booth was no hero because he turned the ‘goon’ into a martyr. But if any two historical figures deserved each other it would be Abe and John.
Tau Food, your buddy central_va is talking in Latin again. Even if he thinks it’s Spanish, you know how that upsets me. Please tell him that his “hero”, a low down dirty dog (and a man whose name I still don’t mention) caused far greater damage to reconstruction than anyone else. He deprived the Nation of four more years of the presidency for our finest mind to date and he set in motion an ill will between the North and the South that cannot ever be rectified, and is in fact palpable on this short thread.
That’s because people like cva aren’t bright enough to recognize that the Civil War was a self-inflicted wound.
¿Español? Voy a darles unos dibujos.
Una nación:
La Reconstrucción:
No queremos una separación:
Re: What did Lincoln and the Northern states do to the Constitution?
They claimed that “The Union” was irrevocable and perpetual; that slavery could be outlawed; that federal rights preempted states rights; that individual rights could be revoked by Executive Orders; and that the federal government was allowed to use an infinite level of violence and destruction to impose its will on any state that disagreed.
How many Southern states would have agreed to sign that Constitution? How many Northern states, for that matter?
Re: “I would instead ask what rational endpoint the Southern states envisioned for the war.”
Secession, or federal guarantees that slavery would be lawful within those states that chose to endorse it.
Re: “What was the alternative?
The alternative I suggested in my original post - the North could have purchased all slaves in the South and relocated all of them in the North. The cost would have been less than what the North paid for the War, and 700,000 young lives would have been preserved, and the economy of the South would not have been destroyed by war.
Re: “Is there something wrong with wanting to end such an evil institution as slavery?”
Nothing at all.
But there was something grotesquely wrong with waging 4 years of savage warfare against fellow Americans to make that happen.
The option to just let the South secede was another solution.
Or, creating and enforcing an international boycott of all slave produced goods was another option.
Instead, Lincoln chose total war, he chose total economic destruction of the South, and he chose to abandon millions of illiterate, impoverished former slaves to fend for themselves against Southerners who hated and feared them.
Sherman and his savages raided farms and plantations, Sherman’s men ransacked houses, stole property, set fires. It was an unusually cold winter, harvests were taken or destroyed — “and there was no making up a crop.” People were left to starve, stealing and slaughtering cows, chickens, turkeys, sheep and hogs and taking as much other food–especially bread and potatoes–as they could carry. (These groups of foraging soldiers were nicknamed “burners,” and they burned whatever they could not carry.) The marauding Yankees needed the supplies, but they also wanted to teach Georgians a lesson: “it isn’t so sweet to secede,” one soldier wrote in a letter home, “as [they] thought it would be.”
Terrorists and savages Sherman and his men not only destroyed everything in their path, but murdered the innocent: the elderly, children, the handicapped and raping women and children along the way.
"We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.”
"The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous..."
Sherman vowed to remain in the West "till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched."
Historians have since speculated that he was suffering from depression or nervous exhaustion, but whatever its cause, the general’s bizarre behavior eventually found its way into the papers, some of which labeled him insane. Even his own troops knew he was insane
"During an assault," Sherman instructed his troops, "the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age." He chillingly referred to this policy in an 1867 letter to Grant as "the final solution to the Indian problem," a phrase Hitler invoked some 70 years later William T Sherman
Being drawn and quartered in public in a village square was too good for this monster.
Even if true, where did Lincoln's views on blacks differ from the Southern leaders who you look up to? If you claim to hate Lincoln for that then shouldn't you hate them, too?
What he allowed that psycho, Sherman, to do was atrocious.
Win?
No, I'm not.
You have it in writing the racist things Lincoln said about blacks.
And the question remains, if you hate Lincoln for that then shouldn't you also hate all your Southern leaders whose views on blacks were no better or worse?
The Southerners were wrong to hold slaves...but aPRESIDENT saying such horrible racist things about blacks?
Lincoln hated blacks and there’s no way he killed 800,000 of his fellow Americans and wounded a million over slavery.
He knew if the Southern states seceded, the North would suffer greatly because of the Southern products they needed- such as cotton.
That’s why he became a mass murderer.
Lincoln, Grant and Sherman should have been hung.
I'll grant you number one, but disagree on the rest. Lincoln knew that slavery could be ended only by Constitutional amendment. And when faced with the war that the South forced upon him, Lincoln won. What was he supposed to do?
How many Southern states would have agreed to sign that Constitution? How many Northern states, for that matter?
Yet ratify it they did.
Secession, or federal guarantees that slavery would be lawful within those states that chose to endorse it.
They had that.
The alternative I suggested in my original post - the North could have purchased all slaves in the South and relocated all of them in the North.
What makes you think the South would want to sell? Or are you suggesting, after complaining that Lincoln revoked individual rights, that Lincoln could have just ordered them to sell? Take away the slaves and forcibly remove them then who would work the fields or provide all the manual and domestic labor the South depended on? You scheme would be an economic death blow to the South.
But there was something grotesquely wrong with waging 4 years of savage warfare against fellow Americans to make that happen.
And waging four years of savage warfare to protect that institution? Nothing wrong with that?
You blame Lincoln for the entire war and ignore the fact that it was the South who initiated the war and the South was as eager for the conflict as you claim Lincoln was, if not more so.
The option to just let the South secede was another solution.
Not seceding was yet another option as well.
Or, creating and enforcing an international boycott of all slave produced goods was another option.
No it was not.
Instead, Lincoln chose total war, he chose total economic destruction of the South, and he chose to abandon millions of illiterate, impoverished former slaves to fend for themselves against Southerners who hated and feared them.
The South chose war. Your complaint seems to be that they lost.
‘What did Sherman do? Win?
_________________________________________
Sherman and his savages raided farms and plantations, Sherman’s men ransacked houses, stole property, set fires. It was an unusually cold winter, harvests were taken or destroyed — “and there was no making up a crop.” People were left to starve, stealing and slaughtering cows, chickens, turkeys, sheep and hogs and taking as much other food–especially bread and potatoes–as they could carry. (These groups of foraging soldiers were nicknamed “burners,” and they burned whatever they could not carry.) The marauding Yankees needed the supplies, but they also wanted to teach Georgians a lesson: “it isn’t so sweet to secede,” one soldier wrote in a letter home, “as [they] thought it would be.”
Terrorists and savages Sherman and his men not only destroyed everything in their path, but murdered the innocent: the elderly, children, the handicapped and raping women and children along the way.
“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.”
“The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous...”
Sherman vowed to remain in the West “till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched.”
Historians have since speculated that he was suffering from depression or nervous exhaustion, but whatever its cause, the general’s bizarre behavior eventually found its way into the papers, some of which labeled him insane. Even his own troops knew he was insane
“During an assault,” Sherman instructed his troops, “the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” He chillingly referred to this policy in an 1867 letter to Grant as “the final solution to the Indian problem,” a phrase Hitler invoked some 70 years later William T Sherman
Being drawn and quartered in public in a village square was too good for this monster.
And a little footnote; From what I’ve read, the Yanks treated the freed slaves much worse than the plantation owners ever did.
That crazy monster, Sherman ENJOYED murdering, robbing, burning and raping women and children on his march to the sea..and the black hater, Lincoln encouraged him.
As far as I know they never sold their wives and children down the river.
That crazy monster, Sherman ENJOYED murdering, robbing, burning and raping women and children on his march to the sea..and the black hater, Lincoln encouraged him.
Your insane hatred is duly noted.
I was wondering when you would show up.
When will you go away?
Never.
You already said that.
You keep denying the truth
Nothing that you scribbled comes anywhere near the truth.
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