Posted on 01/18/2023 11:11:53 PM PST by CFW
The University of Richmond recently removed the name of T.C. Williams, an early benefactor, from its law school because of his alleged ownership of slaves in the 19th century.
The family argues he contributed to the demise of slavery and now argues the university should refund Williams’ previously donated money to the institution.
“If suddenly his name is not good enough for the University, then isn’t the proper ethical and indeed virtuous action to return the benefactor’s money with interest? At a 6% compounded interest over 132 years, T.C. Williams gift to the law school alone is now valued at over $51 million, and this does not include many other substantial gifts from my family to the University,” Rob Smith, Williams’ great-great-grandson, said in a letter to President Kevin Hallock.
(Excerpt) Read more at thecollegefix.com ...
What was all the uproar about Kansas? You can barely grow cotton in the most south western part of it today. In 1850 something you couldn't grow cotton there at all. Just what exactly was anyone expecting slaves to do in Kansas?
The fight over Kansas was about whether it would vote with the Southern coalition, or the Northern coalition. Control of congress hung in the balance, and the money powers in the North had rigged the government to keep favoring them with laws that benefited them, so control of congress was worth many hundreds of millions of dollars to the money power structure of the North.
So you don't think they would have had themselves a fine little proxy war to determine the control of congress by making sure Kansas would vote with them?
If you think "bloody Kansas" was about slaves in Kansas, you have been bamboozled. The "free soil party", which was the dominant force opposing slavery in Kansas, was headquartered in New York City, New York. The primary economic beneficiary of then existing federal trade and taxation policy.
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry?
And John Brown was instrumental in causing Kansas to be bloody. His son was one of the agitators in that state. Brown was a wool merchant. Cotton was the number one economic competitor with wool.
Perhaps it is just a coincidence that John Brown's economic interest lay in the same direction as his religious fervor.
A slave revolt in the South would have made him wealthy, because wool sales would have gone up massively if cotton became unavailable.
And it only applied to areas he didn't control. As the London Spectator put it:
"The principle is not that one man may not own another... it is that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."
One of Lincoln's cabinet secretaries (Seward I think) said
"We hold them in bondage where we can free them, and we set them free where we cannot reach them." (words to that effect.)
Cynical move by Lincoln. Politically useful though.
Very close analogy. New York has effectively been controlling most of the country since 1820. Much of the publishing industry was there, and today most of the media lie system is located there.
New York and it's assorted plutocrats control the government in DC, and they have since about the 1820s.
So obviously... You have never heard of a dude named John Brown and a place called Harpers Ferry? How about Frederick Douglass? Any bells ringing there?
Good to know... Because everybody who was alive and could read, or could listen to somebody who could read knew of John Brown and Frederick Douglas and they knew about the abolitionist cause. The northern states had abolished slavery... The southern states were dependent upon slavery. Be reasonable... The cause of the war, the reason for the war, was slavery not taxes.
That tax ruse was a good excuse for the American Revolution too, but even that conflict was essentially about slavery. Abolitionism and it’s popularity in England were threatening the slave trade, and the writing was on the wall... With the English even offering slaves freedom during the revolution, a sure sign that that abolishment of slavery was in the offing.
In 1807 just 24 years after the American revolution the Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the trading of slaves throughout the British empire and they abolished slavery altogether in 1833. Twenty eight years before the Civil War that needed to be fought, because if it hadn’t... There would still be slaves in the south to this day.
You need to take a time machine back to that time and explain it to the negro population which was unfortunate enough to be caught outside in the streets at that time.
The lucky ones got by with just a beating; the unlucky got lynched.
While the draft was the trigger, every rioter understood the need for the draft was to end slavery.
Not so obviously. I talk about John Brown in a message subsequent to the one to which you are responding. His economic interests and his religious fervor curiously lined up in the same direction.
Had he been successful, he would have perpetrated the greatest mass slaughter in US history. John Brown was a very bad man. He was a terrorist who would have spilled the blood of hundreds of thousands of people.
The northern states had abolished slavery.
No they hadn't. They passed some laws and mostly pretended they didn't still have slaves, but many of them still had slaves. I don't consider slavery "abolished" until there are actually no more slaves left in your state.
The southern states were dependent upon slavery.
Funny thing. 60% of the Southern trade revenue (produced by the slaves) ended up in the pockets of New York and Washington DC. Tell me again who was dependent upon slaves?
Be reasonable... The cause of the war, the reason for the war, was slavery not taxes.
So I have been told all my life, and which I had believed all my life until a few years ago when I got a look at the economic data and discovered all that stuff I had been told was a lie meant to cover up the money side of the conflict.
Yes, the people who got wealthy from controlling economic power and who waged war against the south to maintain that economic power, lied to us to justify what they had done.
That tax ruse was a good excuse for the American Revolution too, but even that conflict was essentially about slavery.
Say again?
With the English even offering slaves freedom during the revolution, a sure sign that that abolishment of slavery was in the offing.
All 13 states, including Massachusetts, were slave states in 1776. And now you are telling me the British were the good guys?
Twenty eight years before the Civil War that needed to be fought, because if it hadn’t... There would still be slaves in the south to this day.
If the South had remained in the Union, the *UNION* would still have slaves in it. (except economic factors would have ended it decades ago.)
You aren't grasping the fact the *UNION* offered the South permanent slavery. Where would your moral outrage be now if the South had taken the deal?
The US constitution explicitly requires the return of escaped slaves. It's Article IV, section 2.
"Slavery" was just an after the fact excused they trotted out to justify the carnage they had committed.
When My mother asked her prospective father-in law about her African ancestry; he, who had a PhD in micro-biology from Harvard, said after five or six generations it didn’t make any difference. I was in a Colombia University seminar with a Liberian grad student (clan scars on his cheeks but a Western name) who said the freed slaves from American arrived with Western weapons and enslaved the locals. He must have been from mixed ancestry (I can sympathize).
Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs.
If that part about freed slaves from America arriving in Liberia with American weapons and enslaving the locals the would just mean things had come full circle considering it was Africans who enslaved other Africans and sold them to European and American slave traders.
South Carolina did not mention the Morrill Tariff in its Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. Rather, South Carolina's entire argument was that northern states were not cooperating in the return of fugitive slaves and the newly elected president was "hostile to slavery." The reason for secession was slavery.
-"It passed the U.S. Senate on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln's inauguration."-
Seven states seceded and their senators resigned before that vote. If they had stayed and voted, they might have voted down the Morrill Tariff. It was not the reason for secession.
He campaigned on stopping the spread of slavery. The slave states seceded because he was anti-slavery. But, he also believed in preserving the Union, and he tried to make concessions in an effort to avoid a war and keep the slave states from seceding.
It applied to the states where slavery had not been abolished. Slavery had been abolished in the other states.
This makes me recall a saying i've run across from time to time.
"The slave does not dream of freedom. The slave dreams of being the Master."
I think you must be talking about Liberia in your example above.
First of all, you are mistaken. South Carolina did indeed complain about the tariffs. Bitterly.
Secondly, Syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts argues that the Southern states, taxed at 72% of their trade income, very much hated the taxes, but had no legal justification for seceding on the basis of taxes because the constitution empowers congress to set the taxation rate. They DID however have a legal justification for seceding under "breech of contract" on the issue of slavery, because the states did in fact violate the constitutional law which required the return of escaped slaves.
Paul Craig Roberts argues that they used this breech of contract to justify their secession, but their real gripe was the taxes.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/11/13/a-civil-war-lesson-for-the-uneducated/
So all the powerful people who gained power and wealth as a result of the Civil War have told us ever since. These are the same liberal people living in the same large Northern cities who lie to us today about Trump, about Russian Collusion, about Hunter Biden's laptop, about vote fraud, about everything.
Do you not grasp that when lying is required to keep wealth and power, the wealthy and powerful will lie without compunction?
But, he also believed in preserving the Union, and he tried to make concessions in an effort to avoid a war and keep the slave states from seceding.
His concession was to keep slavery in the Union forever. That is exactly what the Corwin Amendment would have done, and Lincoln didn't just support it, he pushed it.
So if Lincoln's solution to secession was to offer permanent slavery, how is the war about slavery?
Clearly the North wasn't fighting for the freedom of slaves. They already tossed that away with their offer of passing the Corwin amendment.
PFL
You are incorrect. Slavery still existed in the Union slave states, (there were five of them) and it continued to exist in the Union slave states until December of 1865, which was 8 months after it was abolished in all the Confederate states.
Yeah. The North fought an entire war with slavery continuing in Northern states and then claimed it was about slavery.
Robert Barnwell Rhett, South Carolina attorney general (1832), U.S. Representative (1837–1849), and U.S. Senator (1850–1852) aka "the Father of Secession" penned an address, which the convention adopted on December 25, 1860 to accompany its secession ordinance. It provides:
The Revolution of 1776, turned upon one great principle, self government, and self taxation, the criterion of self government. Where the interests of two people united together under one Government, are different, each must have the power to protect its interests by the organization of the Government, or they cannot be free. The interests of Great Britain and of the Colonies, were different and antagonistic. Great Britain was desirous of carrying out the policy of all nations toward their Colonies, of making them tributary to their wealth and power. She had vast and complicated relations with the whole world. Her policy toward her North American Colonies, was to identify them with her in all these complicated relations; and to make them bear, in common with the rest of the Empire, the full burden of her obligations and necessities. She had a vast public debt; she had a European policy and an Asiatic policy, which had occasioned the accumulation of her public debt, and which kept her in continual wars. The North American Colonies saw their interests, political and commercial, sacrificed by such a policy. Their interests required, that they should not be identified with the burdens and wars of the mother country. They had been settled under Charters, which gave them self government, at least so far as their property was concerned. They had taxed themselves, and had never been taxed by the Government of Great Britain. To make them a part of a consolidated Empire, the Parliament of Great Britain determined to assume the power of legislating for the Colonies in all cases whatsoever. Our ancestors resisted the pretension. They refused to be a part of the consolidated Government of Great Britain.
The Southern States, now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States, that the Colonies did towards Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British parliament. "The General Welfare," is the only limit to the legislation of either; and the majority in Congress, as in the British parliament, are the sole judges of the expediency of the legislation, this "General Welfare" requires. Thus, the Government of the United States has become a consolidated Government; and the people of the Southern State, are compelled to meet the very despotism, their fathers threw off in the Revolution of 1776.
And so with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress, is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.
There is another evil, in the condition of the Southern toward the Northern States, which our ancestors refused to bear toward Great Britain. Our ancestors not only taxed themselves, but all the taxes collected from them, were expended among them. Had they submitted to the pretensions of the British Government, the taxes collected from them, would have been expended in other parts of the British Empire. They were fully aware of the effect of such a policy in impoverishing the people from whom taxes are collected, and in enriching those who receive the benefit of their expenditure. To prevent the evils of such a policy, was one of the motives which drove them on to Revolution. Yet this British policy, has been fully realized towards the Southern States, by the Northern States. The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three fourths of them are expended at the North. This cause, with others, connected with the operation of the General Government, has made the cities of the South provincial. Their growth is paralyzed; they are mere suburbs of Northern cities. The agricultural productions of the South are the basis of the foreign commerce of the United States; yet Southern cities do not carry it on. Our foreign trade, is almost annihilated…… To make, however, their numerical power available to rule the Union, the North must consolidate their power. It would not be united, on any matter common to the whole Union in other words, on any constitutional subject for on such subjects divisions are as likely to exist in the North as in the South. Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest. If this could be made the criterion of parties at the North, the North could be united in its power; and thus carry out its measures of sectional ambition, encroachment, and aggrandizement. To build up their sectional predominance in the Union, the Constitution must be first abolished by constructions; but that being done, the consolidation of the North to rule the South, by the tariff and slavery issues, was in the obvious course of things.
South Carolinians had been expressing such thoughts for a long time.
"The north has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the north ... The South as the great exporting portion of the Union has, in reality, paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue," John C Calhoun March 4, 1850
"The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism." Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election
George McDuffie of South Carolina stated in the House of Representatives, "If the union of these states shall ever be severed, and their liberties subverted, historians who record these disasters will have to ascribe them to measures of this description. I do sincerely believe that neither this government, nor any free government, can exist for a quarter of a century under such a system of legislation." While the Northern manufacturer enjoyed free trade with the South, the Southern planter was not allowed to enjoy free trade with those countries to which he could market his goods at the most benefit to himself. Furthermore, while the six cotton States — South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas — had less than one-eighth of the representation in Congress, they furnished two-thirds of the exports of the country, much of which was exchanged for imported necessities. Thus, McDuffie noted that because the import tariff effectively hindered Southern commerce, the relation which the Cotton States bore to the protected manufacturing States of the North was now the same as that which the colonies had once borne to Great Britain; under the current system, they had merely changed masters.
"The great object of free governments is liberty. The great test of liberty in modern times, is to be free in the imposition of taxes, and the expenditure of taxes.... For a people to be free in the imposition and payment of taxes, they must lay them through their representatives." Consequently, because they were being taxed without corresponding representation, the Southern States had been reduced to the condition of colonies of the North and thus were no longer free." Robert Barnwell Rhett 1850
The solution was determined by John Cunningham to exist only in independence: "The legislation of this Union has impoverished them [the Southern States] by taxation and by a diversion of the proceeds of our labor and trade to enriching Northern Cities and States. These results are not only sufficient reasons why we would prosper better out of the union but are of themselves sufficient causes of our secession. Upon the mere score of commercial prosperity, we should insist upon disunion. Let Charleston be relieved from her present constrained vassalage in trade to the North, and be made a free port and my life on it, she will at once expand into a great and controlling city."
In a letter to the Carolina Times in 1857, Representative Laurence Keitt wrote, "I believe that the safety of the South is only in herself."
James H. Hammond (US Senator from South Carolina) likewise stated in 1858, "I have no hesitation in saying that the Plantation States should discard any government that makes a protective tariff its policy."
"Next to the demands for safety and equality, the secessionist leaders emphasized familiar economic complaints. South Carolinians in particular were convinced of the general truth of Rhett's and Hammond's much publicized figures upon Southern tribute to Northern interests." (Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, Ordeal of the Union, Volume 2, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950, p. 332)
That's just South Carolinians.
-"It passed the U.S. Senate on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln's inauguration."- Seven states seceded and their senators resigned before that vote. If they had stayed and voted, they might have voted down the Morrill Tariff. It was not the reason for secession.
All it would have taken would have been a little good old fashioned log rolling. ie "we'll give this subsidy to this industry in your state or that tariff exemption to that group of exporters in your state if you will vote for the Morrill Tariff....but if you refuse, we'll pick off one or two other senators from other states via the same tactics and you'll get nothing, so you better make a deal with us."
It was obvious the Morrill Tariff was going to pass. The continuing and guaranteed to be much worse economic exploitation of the Southern states for the benefit of special interests in the Northern states was a perfectly good reason to secede. Remember, this wasn't the first time. Southerners had been through this before a generation earlier during the Tariff of Abominations and the Nullification Crisis in South Carolina. Now due to immigration mostly to the Northern states, their position was much worse. Now, there's no doubt the Northern states were going to be able to cram this tariff and worse down their throats and they had no means of stopping it - other than to leave what was a voluntary union. So they did.
Interesting theory. But, the Confederate states did not even mention a tariff in their Declarations of Secession. Only slavery was mentioned.
Of course, they would oppose the tariff. But, their economy was largely dependent on slavery, which Lincoln wanted to end.
The war was over slavery.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.