The Confederacy Was Not About Slavery

This is what happens when you side step a hot topic issue for 76 years folks. Plain and simple.

Instead of dealing with the basic issue of slavery in 1789 our founding fathers like others after them side stepped the issue, made compromises, tabled any bills dealing with slavery in 1833 on, and or ignored the topic until it became clear that the only way you can answer this question was by violence.

 

Pigfeet, your posts are like the review for my American History class leading up to the civil war! Nice attention to detail.

You are completely right (in THIS post.)

 

Yes, blacks did fight on the side of the confederacy. There were also Jews who fought on the side of the Nazis. Does that somehow lessen the offensive nature of the swastika?

 

From my favorite source The History Channel


CIVIL WAR





Civil War: Causes and Results


"Of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery," wrote historian James Ford Rhodes in 1913. Although historians today would not put it quite so starkly, Rhodes''s basic point remains valid.

In the decades since 1913 various schools of historiography have advanced other interpretations of the war''s causes. The progressive historians emphasized the widening economic gulf between the North and South. Cultural and social historians stressed the contrast between the civilizations and values of the two regions. But revisionist historians denied the existence of any fundamental economic or social conflicts. They pointed instead to self-serving politicians who created and then exploited the false issue of slavery''s expansion into new territories to whip up sectional passions and get themselves elected to office.

Few historians today subscribe to either the progressive or the revisionist interpretation in unalloyed form. To be sure, conflicts of interest occurred between the agricultural South and the industrializing North. But issues like tariffs, banks, and land grants divided parties and interest groups more than they did North and South. The South in the 1840s and 1850s had its advocates of industrialization and protective tariffs, just as the North had its millions of farmers and its low-tariff, antibank Democratic majority in many states. The Civil War was not fought over the issue of tariff or of industrialization or of land grants. Nor was it a consequence of false issues invented by demagogues. It was fought over profound, intractable problems that Americans on both sides believed went to the heart of their society and its future.

In this sense the "two civilizations" thesis comes closest to the mark. As a lawyer in Savannah, Georgia, expressed it in 1860, "in this country have arisen two races [i.e., Northerners and Southerners] which, although claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite to all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist under the same government." What lay at the root of this separation? Slavery. It was the sole institution not shared by North and South. The peculiar institution defined the South. "On the subject of slavery," declared the Charleston Mercury in 1858, "the North and South ... are not only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples."

Two of the North''s foremost political leaders echoed this point in the same year. Slavery and freedom, said Senator William H. Seward of New York, are "more than incongruous - they are incompatible." The collision between them "is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation." Abraham Lincoln, in a famous speech, declared that "]a house divided against itself cannot stand.[ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free."

But why could it not so endure? After all, in 1858 it had done so for seventy years. To be sure, slavery had been a source of contention at the Constitutional Convention, at the time of Missouri''s admission into the Union in 1821, in the debates between abolitionists and slavery''s defenders especially in the 1830s, at the time of Texas''s admission as a state in 1845 and the subsequent war with Mexico, and on numerous other occasions. But compromises palliated these conflicts; the Republic endured. What made the rhetoric of 1858 different? What split the Republic in 1861? The answer lies mainly in the schism generated by the expansion of slavery.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had seemed to settle this matter by dividing the territory acquired in the Louisian

 

>>It didn't start explicitly about Slavery, but that was the root of the matter.<<

Actually, the root of the matter was autonomy from government (Union) oppression. The Union always tried to subjugate the South so they revolted like any freedom-loving rebels would do.

Oh, yeah. And the KKK doesn't represent the Neo-Confederate ideology. They're a disgrace to the South and a disgrace to humanity and they should all pour gasoline on themselves and burn in a lake of white-hot firey plasma.

 

I think it's stupid for a bunch of states to get together and form there own little club, "the confederacy." But I guess some little ones did called "New England," but the north does not opress the south, and so long as the confederates don't band together and try and leave like the originaly sissy confederates did.

 

That was in the past. Not now.

 

The Neo-Confederate ideal is not secession. It's subversion and sabotage. Well, not for all of us. But that's what it is for me. I seek to subvert and sabotage the Status Quo because I'm against injustice and I hate groupthink.

 

Don't you think it's wierd for some suburbs in Virginia that would be considered part of the Washington metro area to be once Confederate? Back then, they wouldn't want anything to do with Washington.

 

HavocHound may I suggest an interesting read for you.

The book is called. "Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War."

by Charles B. Dew.

"Actually, the root of the matter was autonomy from government (Union) oppression. The Union always tried to subjugate the South so they revolted like any freedom-loving rebels would do"

I think after you read this book you might change your mind on this matter. Sure you can throw economics in the mix as a cause of tensions for the North and South, but that is dealing with the economical institution they were using.


"But that's what it is for me. I seek to subvert and sabotage the Status Quo because I'm against injustice and I hate groupthink."

So based on the argument that Dew makes and supports by the evidence of these Southern Commissioners who went all over the South preaching to the State senates about leaving the Union because of this and that. That is groupthink, and the status quo was very much the same in the South.

I will give you a passage at the way these guys got their messages across, and you be the judge. This is page 30

This is Judge Harris "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, the part of Mississippi is chosen, she will never submit to principles and policy of this Black Republican Administration. She had rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pile [pyre], than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race."

"In response to Harri's speech, the Georgia house and senate, adopted a joint resolution condemning the Northern people, press, and pulpit for supporting a political party "organized.... for the avowed purpose of destroying the institution of slavery, and consequently spreading ruin and desolation among the people in every portion of the states where it exists."

So as you can see here this was a highly organized movement to get all the Southern States on the same page and to leave the Union. So you judge for yourself but these Southerners the more I read about them are very twisted in their interpretation of what their rights were. Especially dealing with "Property". They created their own delusional shell to condone what they were doing and it's down right disturbing the more I read about them. I'm talking about your slave owning elites which was in the vast minority in the South, but then how about the common white guy in the South who couldn't afford slaves? Well there is a twisted story to them as well. If you read some studies on this you will see that all White Males who were of Lower and Middle classes wanted to aspire to one day own slaves as a status symbol. They also condoned slavery to the extent of saying well I may be dirt poor, but at least I'm not some black slave. They will always be above the blacks no matter what. This is evidence with the job of slave catcher or basically a bounty hunters who were lower class whites who roamed the countryside in the South and would track runaway slaves or stop blacks who are moving from plantation to plantation who may or may not have a pass. So there is a white supremist issue right there.

 

Actually, the root of the matter was autonomy from government (Union) oppression. The Union always tried to subjugate the South so they revolted like any freedom-loving rebels would do.

Thats a load of crock and you know it. It was over slavery, end of story. Are you aware most of the 15 presidents before Abe Lincoln were from states that formed the CSA? The Southerners only succeeded when Abe Lincoln was voted into office, a president who was wanting to end slavery (not right away either, he wanted to go through steps first, but by 1885 the Slaves would be free).

The way this "states rights" backtracking to justify the cause makes it sound is Abe Lincoln was in his cabin in Illinois worshipping Satan and and told the dark lord, "I shall run for president and suppress the South, that'll teach them for wanting state rights over federal bwahahahaha."

*rolls eyes* what ever, quit justifying the cause. It was over slavery even to the poor man who didnt own slaves. He didnt want them to be free, working for less money and putting in more time than he was willing to go for. Free slaves hurt his pocket too and he didnt like that. So get off the backtracking of justification, it sounds like the Empire for justifying the destruction of Alderaan. "There were Rebels on Alderaan so we had to destroy the entire planet to get rid of them"

*Rolls eyes again*

 

Jedi_Xen:

1) Why are you so pissed off about something that happened 140 years ago? I had relatives killed in the damn war fighting on the Confederate side, and you don't see me going into sarcastic rants involving the intent to make people feel stupid, as if that would somehow prove your point.

2) Can you explain to me how my illiterate great-great-great-grandfather, who minded his own business working his land to make enough to feed his family, benefited from slavery?

His son, my great-great-grandfather, passed on stories to his grandson, my grandfather, who is still alive today. These were not stories passed down so many generations that they've had time to be twisted into something they're not. When my great-great-great-grandfather took up his rifle, put on his uniform, and went to fight for the Confederacy, he did not tell his family, "I'm going to war so we can continue to oppress blacks." He told them, "I'm going to war to fight for my state, North Carolina, and my country, the Confederacy." Slavery was a non-issue to him.

It's not fair to lump all Confederate soldiers into the same category with the racist ancestors of current KKK members.

 

I don't think anyone is saying that the average confederate soldier fought for immorral reasons, probably quite the contrary.

But the Confederate Leaders were upset over slavery.

But it's not like Honest Abe was all that good a guy either, it seems like Abe was actually the master politician himself, picking up slavery as a political issue not out of some deep personal conviction to end slavery.

Northerners didn't want the Southerner's to leave. Southerner's felt they were being oppressed. But it was stil over the issue of slavery in the new states being admitted to the union.

 

You're right, Obi-Wan; that's why it was called a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." As I mentioned in an earlier post, my mother's ancestors, who were wealthy slaveholders, didn't even enlist, and I'm not sure how they avoided being drafted.

I'm sure the government cared about slavery, and that may have been a huge catalyst in the states' rights issue. However, I'm still not convinced it was the only catalyst.

As far as Lincoln--true, he wasn't perfect, and true, he didn't believe African-Americans were equal to whites. He wanted to ship them off to another country of their own--Liberia, in Africa, was created during the Civil War as a "haven" for freed slaves. However, I don't think the slavery issue was the only reason Southerners didn't like Lincoln, any more than I think slavery was the only cause of the war.

 

Lincoln was a master strategist. He did decide to Enacipate the slaves in 1862 for nothing. It was a military strategic move on his part to weaken the South even more.

 

Why are you so pissed off about something that happened 140 years ago? I had relatives killed in the damn war fighting on the Confederate side, and you don't see me going into sarcastic rants involving the intent to make people feel stupid, as if that would somehow prove your point.

Not pissed off about the war, pissed off about people trying to justify it with lies.
You had ancestors killed in the war, well then that makes two of us join the club, mine fought on both sides. Oh btw if anybody felt stupid by my comments its their fault, maybe they need to rethink their position.

Can you explain to me how my illiterate great-great-great-grandfather, who minded his own business working his land to make enough to feed his family, benefited from slavery?

Elementary really. A freed slave is going to want a job, a person in the south if he will hire a black person will won't pay him the same as he pays a white person. He can hire two blacks for what he pays one white, and get twice as much work. Its a game of politics. Not that the average confederate soldier believed in slavery or liked it, but when it came down to it they'd much rather the black man be in the field while they are in the work world getting paid a little bit of nothing to try and make ends meet. After all you said it yourself, Its a rich mans war and a poor mans fight.

It's not fair to lump all Confederate soldiers into the same category with the racist ancestors of current KKK members.

Nor did I try. Its a game of politics, when it comes down to it, the confederate solider was going to take care of his family before anybody else.

As far as Lincoln--true, he wasn't perfect, and true, he didn't believe African-Americans were equal to whites. He wanted to ship them off to another country of their own--Liberia, in Africa, was created during the Civil War as a "haven" for freed slaves. However, I don't think the slavery issue was the only reason Southerners didn't like Lincoln, any more than I think slavery was the only cause of the war.

Correct, he probably would have tried had he not been killed. Lincoln is viewed as he is because he was assassinated.

Lincoln was a master strategist. He did decide to Enacipate the slaves in 1862 for nothing. It was a military strategic move on his part to weaken the South even more.

It was more to keep Europe out of the war. Europe was very intrested. Western Europe favored the South why Eastern Europe favored the North. A little known fact is Russia sent Naval ships into American harbors during the war to protect them from other European powers. And Emperor Napolean III was ready to send troops into the South to aid the war effort, but was kept in check by Britain. Both Britian and France was waiting for a majore Southern Victory in Northern Territory, had Sharpsburg gone differently.....the South would probably have independence. But the Emancipation kept Europe out, no matter what happened the Europeans would have to work day and night to try and make it look like they wasnt supporting a regime that supported slavery. Lincoln made sure the slavery issue was in the fore front.

 

Elementary really. A freed slave is going to want a job, a person in the south if he will hire a black person will won't pay him the same as he pays a white person. He can hire two blacks for what he pays one white, and get twice as much work.

Well, in my great-great-great-grandfather's case, he was self-employed, so that didn't apply either.

Also, it's not like they were living in the information age, where the average citizen was sitting around analyzing economic situations. It's not like the average Confederate soldier told his wife, "Honey, if I don't go fight now, four years down the road, Lincoln might free all the slaves, then some black guy might get my job because the rich white guys are going to hire the black guy because they can pay him less." We're sitting here as the world's elite with Internet access and 24/7 information to analyze, but that wasn't the case with our ancestors.

 

It's not like the average Confederate soldier told his wife, "Honey, if I don't go fight now, four years down the road, Lincoln might free all the slaves, then some black guy might get my job because the rich white guys are going to hire the black guy because they can pay him less."

Youre right, the average Confederate Soldier didnt think about that, leave it to the politicians to do that. Politicians used things like this as a scare tactic. It doesnt apply to your grandfather, it applies to some of my ancestors however, when the south lost the war they got drunk and shot up the local court house because of fear of blacks taking their place in the coal mines.