Posted on 06/06/2020 7:40:09 PM PDT by Meatspace
Why didn’t you give a link to the source of those quotations? That’s obviously a list chosen to portray the war as being for slavery. Some of the quotations, though, concern reasons for secession, which are different from the motivations for which most of the soldiers themselves fought.
>>”The leaders of the time disagree with you.”<<
Who in that list has the statue and reputation of the leaders I quoted, Lee and Lincoln?
Most of them are either from the Southern Declarations of the Causes of Secession or speeches from the Confederate Secession Commissioners to various secession conventions.
Who in that list has the statue and reputation of the leaders I quoted, Lee and Lincoln?
Well it would be hard to find a quote from Lincoln saying he was fighting to preserve slavery. A the time of secession Lee was an army officer in Texas. Most of the quotes I provided either predated the rebellion or were from leaders during the rebellion. But if you like I can add a quote from Alexander Stephens saying it was all over slavery. Would that help?
Well, of course it would, and I never claimed that. What Lincoln's statements show is that he fought to preserve the Union, not to end slavery. Here he is being even more explicit about it in a letter to Horace Greeley than in his Inaugural Address that I quoted previously:
"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." [The latter is what he eventually did.]
One well known name on your list is that of Mosby ("The Gray Ghost"), who was famous for conducting cavalry raids. After the war he became a supporter of Ulysses S. Grant, and he speaks as if the reasons for secession and for fighting were the same. Yet the ones he cites for his own behavior show otherwise (as, of course, did Lee's).
I was surprised to see that he makes several of the same points I've been making:
"Now while I think as badly of slavery as Horace Greeley did I am not ashamed that my family were slaveholders. It was our inheritance...People must be judged by the standard of their own age...I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery...The South was my country." [Letter from John S. Mosby to Samuel Chapman, 1907]
He calls it the "side of slavery" and, yes, slavery existed there (and only in a couple of states on the Union side), but he makes clear that he himself was fighting for what he considered his country. He applied that to other soldiers too -- "a soldier fights for his country".
>>”Who in that list has the statue and reputation of the leaders I quoted, Lee and Lincoln?” [Gjones2]
Oops, I had monuments on my mind, and wrote “statue” — it should have been “stature” (though I don’t imagine they have statues to match them either :-). Sorry.
There is a site, The Abbeville Institute that sheds light on all this..
Melanometric Privilege?
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