Blazer's Scout Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Oh really??
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths-a
> bout-why-the-south-seceded/2011/01/03/ABHr6jD_stor
> y.html


Like most things, it depends on how you look at it.

Most southerners did not own slaves (less than 25%), and of those who did the average was less than 4. However, it has puzzled historians since the Civil War why so many non-slave ownering Southerners were so willing to support the Confederacy.

As to slavery dying of its own accord, well it probably would have, George Washington expressed his dissaticfaction with the whole concept of slavery and recorded that he wished he could emancipate his. He wasn't so much a human rights activist but rather realized that it was not econimically advantageous.

5 Myths about why the South seceded
https://historymusings.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/james-loewen-5-myths-about-why-the-south-seceded-washington-post-most-viewed/

Source: WaPo, 1-9-11

One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we’re still fighting it – or at least fighting over its history. I’ve polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States’ rights? Tariffs and taxes? As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war’s various battles – from Fort Sumter to Appomattox – let’s first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.

The South seceded over states’ rights.…


Secession was about tariffs and taxes.…

Most white Southerners didn’t own slaves, so they wouldn’t secede for slavery.…


Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.…


The South couldn’t have made it long as a slave society…. –


Sociologist James W. Loewen is the author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and co-editor, with Edward Sebesta, of “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.”

5 Myths about why the South seceded
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/07/AR2011010706547.html

One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we're still fighting it - or at least fighting over its history. I've polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States' rights? Tariffs and taxes? ¶ As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war's various battles - from Fort Sumter to Appomattox - let's first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.

The South seceded over states' rights.


1Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states' rights - that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.

On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina's secession convention adopted a "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." It noted "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" and protested that Northern states had failed to "fulfill their constitutional obligations" by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states' rights, birthed the Civil War.

Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world," proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. "Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization."


Secession was about tariffs and taxes.


2During the nadir of post-civil-war race relations - the terrible years after 1890 when town after town across the North became all-white "sundown towns" and state after state across the South prevented African Americans from voting - "anything but slavery" explanations of the Civil War gained traction. To this day Confederate sympathizers successfully float this false claim, along with their preferred name for the conflict: the War Between the States. At the infamous Secession Ball in South Carolina, hosted in December by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, "the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure," The Washington Post reported.

These explanations are flatly wrong. High tariffs had prompted the Nullification Crisis in 1831-33, when, after South Carolina demanded the right to nullify federal laws or secede in protest, President Andrew Jackson threatened force. No state joined the movement, and South Carolina backed down. Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them. Why would they? Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.


Most white Southerners didn't own slaves, so they wouldn't secede for slavery.


3Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.

However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy now.

Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: "It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians." Given this belief, most white Southerners - and many Northerners, too - could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains.

Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.


4Since the Civil War did end slavery, many Americans think abolition was the Union's goal. But the North initially went to war to hold the nation together. Abolition came later.

On Aug. 22, 1862, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune that included the following passage: "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. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."

However, Lincoln's own anti-slavery sentiment was widely known at the time. In the same letter, he went on: "I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free." A month later, Lincoln combined official duty and private wish in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

The South couldn't have made it long as a slave society.


5 Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them - or forced them to abandon slavery?

To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it.

As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of that war, let us take pride this time - as we did not during the centennial - that secession on slavery's behalf failed.

Sociologist James W. Loewen is the author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and co-editor, with Edward Sebesta, of "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader."

Still butt hurt about the thrashing Mosby gave you Lt. Blazer? And I assume you still haven't read Lies My Teacher Told Me by Mr. Loewen?

Loewen is very good at picking out facts which have been conveniently ignored or downplayed in constructing the prevailing historical myths, and he uses them to punch holes in those myths. His weakness though is that he does this to advance counter-myths, which in turn also ignore or downplay facts that don't fit. Mr. Loewen is clearly a historical revisionist. That doesn't make him a worse historical analyst than Southern revisionists of the late 19th century, but he is also no better.

Anybody who says the Civil War wasn't about slavery is an idiot. Slavery was the main thing that united the cotton states of the deep South, the sugar growers of Louisiana, the industrializing states of the upper South and frontier Texas. OTOH anyone who says the Civil War was just about slavery has blinders on. There are a great many things which had to come together to make the Civil War happen when and how it did.

Bill.N. Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Still butt hurt about the thrashing Mosby gave you
> Lt. Blazer? And I assume you still haven't read
> Lies My Teacher Told Me by Mr. Loewen?
>
> Loewen is very good at picking out facts which
> have been conveniently ignored or downplayed in
> constructing the prevailing historical myths, and
> he uses them to punch holes in those myths. His
> weakness though is that he does this to advance
> counter-myths, which in turn also ignore or
> downplay facts that don't fit. Mr. Loewen is
> clearly a historical revisionist. That doesn't
> make him a worse historical analyst than Southern
> revisionists of the late 19th century, but he is
> also no better.
>
> Anybody who says the Civil War wasn't about
> slavery is an idiot. Slavery was the main thing
> that united the cotton states of the deep South,
> the sugar growers of Louisiana, the
> industrializing states of the upper South and
> frontier Texas. OTOH anyone who says the Civil
> War was just about slavery has blinders on. There
> are a great many things which had to come together
> to make the Civil War happen when and how it did.

You make a very good point that many on this forum fail to pick up on. Slavery was a HUGE part of the South's economy. They were the cheap labor force used to harvest the cotton and other crops/stables that the South produced.

Good point! Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> You make a very good point that many on this forum
> fail to pick up on. Slavery was a HUGE part of the
> South's economy. They were the cheap labor force
> used to harvest the cotton and other crops/stables
> that the South produced.


Exactly, slavery was an economic issue first racist issue second. The twisting into trying to portray it as just pure racism and the war being some Lord of the Rings style battle of the morality of good and evil is just rewriting history in a politically correct matter. Given the divide at the time any major issue that would have devastated the south economically could have led to war, it wasnt just because they hated blacks so much like so many try and claim now

Rename Jefferson Davis Highway. I can be down with that, let's just be fair about it:

Across the country, Rename anything, and remove, all statues, tributes, memorials that honor anyone in the US named "Kennedy". The Kennedy family bootlegged alcohol when it was illegal to build their fortune, enabling alcoholism and the waste of an honest man's wages during the Depression. They cheated on their wives and were disrespectful to women, and one of them contributed to the death of an innocent woman at Chappaquiddick.

Rename or remove anything associated with Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia. He was a racist bigot and a Ku Klux Klan Member.

I can go along with this type of thinking but apply the standard across the board.

You equate Southern leaders with Adolf Hilter? Are you educated because the comparison falls far short? The 1860s were quite different times and thankfully the country has moved on to equality for all people. But to deny history or run away from it actually diminishes the progress that we have made.

Arlington would still be part of DC if it wasn't for slavery, essentially. Arlington left the District of Columbia when it was fear that it would become illegal to sell slaves in DC. The slave trade was a big part of the county at the time.

Miller time Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> In college, I had the opportunity to interview
> Bela Kiraly. He was the Hungarian general who in
> 1956 commanded all 'freedom fighters' in Budapest
> against the Soviets. Fascinating story, but in the
> end, it obviously didn't work out in his favor. He
> was able to get out of the country and came here.
> When I talked with him, he was a professor in New
> York.
>
> Because of his prominence and experience, people
> in DC wanted to talk with Kiraly. So he came here
> first. Outside of debriefings, he had someone
> showing him around the common sights. During that,
> he saw Robert E. Lee's house in Arlington. He knew
> enough American history to know Lee was in charge
> of the ANV, and was amazed the house of this
> 'rebel' had been maintained. I remember him
> saying, "That's the moment I understood what a
> great country this is." I'd guess it wouldn't have
> been maintained in Hungary.
>
> Now, most of us know the real story behind that
> house and the establishment of Arlington Cemetery,
> and it isn't quite to honor an opposing general.
> But that's the way it appeared to this one
> prominent foreigner. And the bottom line is the
> house is still standing, relatively well
> maintained, and known for its last private owner.
> That's a level of toleration and pure celebration
> of the past - good and bad - that has always been
> a bit unique about us.

I suspect, and I may be wrong here considering you interviewed the man, but I suspect that it wasn't astonishment about honoring a rebel so much as we kept the name. In Soviet politics if you were deemed a traitor or an enemy, your name and existence was expunged. Sacked generals and officials were removed from photographs, etc in the Soviet Union.

Let's not forget that the Arlington House, is the Robert E. Lee Memorial, which is run by the National Park Service. Arlington County was named in honor of Lee. Arlington was previously Alexandria County.

Arlington might be the "Berkeley of the East Coast" or the "Portland of the East Coast" but the vast majority still respect the region's local history. An online poll revealed that an overwhelming majority of Arlington residents did not want to change the name of its oldest high school Washington-Lee, which is almost a century old. There are a number of outspoken residents who despise Lee, Jackson et al., and would like to eradicate any public references to them. But they are in the minority.

@Pops and @Light Horse Harry @neoritter @wes mead 2014 @Liberal Logic 004:

Yes. I am educated. And yes. I DO equate confederate leaders with Hitler and the generals and politicians who made him possible.

Don't you understand that to African Americans, slavery was the equivalent of the Holocaust?

We were ripped from our native land and placed in shackles. Millions of us died during the passage from our homeland to the Americas. Once here, we were forced to work for free and not permitted the freedoms humans by right ought to have. We were bred and sold like cattle for someone else's profit. We were brutalized. We were denied an education (indeed, we were forbidden by law to learn to read and write). We were hunted down like animals if we dared escape our captors. Our families were ripped from us. Our women were raped.

Given the above brualities, do you REALLY not understand why we view confederate leaders, slave holders, and slave traders, with contempt, disgust, and hatred? Given those brutalities, do you REALLY not understand why we find it objectionable that the people who perpetrated them be honored and celebrated with holidays, schools, and roads named after them?

Surely, Jews still living in Germany (as well a most non-Jews living there today) would strenuously object to honoring Hitler, himself, as well as object to honoring Speer, Himmler, Barbie, Mengele, Goebbels, and other Hitler henchmen with schools, streets, roads, holiday, and bridges named after them. I suspect (hope?) that even YOU and your allies on this thread would think that it would be outrageous for Germany TODAY to honor these men by naming schools, streets, roads, and bridges after them or celebrating them with a holiday.

I don't undestand why you have such difficulty understanding why African Americans and other forward-thinking Americans find it objectionable to honor confederate generals, slave-holders, and slave traders TODAY with holidays celebrating them or with schools, bridges, roads, and streets named after them.

Do I want confederate generals' names bannished from our history books? Do I want to eradicate any public references to them? No. Of course not. They were part of our history. We should study them and the contributions they made to building this nation. I will even give you that they probably had many good attributes and made many good contributions to the nation. But at some point, no matter how good a father or husband someone might have been ... no matter how much they might have loved the state that they lived in ... no matter how skilled a military strategist they might have been ... no matter how much they were loved by their neighbors, a persons BAD deeds outweigh their good ones and they become unworthy of celebration. I draw that line with people who enslaved others human beings, who brutalized them, who bred and sold them like cattle, who raped them, and yes... who took up arms against their (our) nation to protect the right of states to continue those acts of inhumanity.

neoritter Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Arlington would still be part of DC if it wasn't
> for slavery, essentially. Arlington left the
> District of Columbia when it was fear that it
> would become illegal to sell slaves in DC. The
> slave trade was a big part of the county at the
> time.

Slavery played only a minimal part in the decision to retrocede Alexandria City and County to Virginia. The primary problem was that the focus of most public improvements in the District of Columbia was north of the Potomac River, and as the 19th century progressed Virginia was reluctant to financially support projects for Alexandria.

By the 1840s Washington/Georgetown had the C&O canal funded in part by the Federal Government pushing westward towards Cumberland and the B&O rail line. Alexandria only had an extension of the C&O canal that it had to pay a large portion of the cost for, and which only captured a small portion of the C&O traffic. Virginia was unwilling to pay for railroads terminating in Alexandria, and had stopped the RF&P RR at Aquia Creek. Meanwhile the B&O RR through its Harpers Ferry connection was diverting traffic that had previously gone to Alexandria to the port of Baltimore. With retrocession it was hoped that Virginia would undertake transportation projects that would benefit Alexandria. Within a few years afterwards Virginia chartered and agreed to underwrite 60% of the stock subscriptions to the Orange & Alexandria, the Manassas Gap and the Alexandria, Loudoun & Hampshire.

Rapes, mutilations, beatings, the separation of families, and murders was the slave experience. The Emancipation Proclamation (written by Lincoln) coupled with Union military victories freed most of the slaves followed by the Thirteenth Amendment (aggressively advocated by Lincoln).

Abolitionist Union soliders (mostly limited to German immigrants and Northeasterners in the beginning) became the norm as the war progressed.

Thank God for the Union Army and the destruction of slavery.

"I don't undestand why you have such difficulty understanding why African Americans and other forward-thinking Americans find it objectionable to honor confederate generals, slave-holders, and slave traders TODAY with holidays celebrating them or with schools, bridges, roads, and streets named after them.

Do I want confederate generals' names bannished from our history books? Do I want to eradicate any public references to them? No. Of course not. They were part of our history. We should study them and the contributions they made to building this nation."

Exactly.

Uh oh Controversy Ahead! Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Confederate leader’s name on U.S. 1 still
> rankles some
> http://www.insidenova.com/news/arlington/confedera
> te-leader-s-name-on-u-s-still-rankles-some/article
> _61eb59c6-7b41-11e3-b259-001a4bcf887a.html
>
>
> Jefferson Davis may well be the Confederacy’s
> combination of Rodney Dangerfield and kudzu – a
> leader who gets no respect, yet you just can’t
> seem to get rid of him.
>
> Arlington resident Robert Parry is trying to
> accomplish the latter, asking county officials to
> seek removal of the name of Davis, the lone
> president of the Confederate States of America,
> from roadways in Arlington.
>
> “I, and I’m sure other Arlingtonians, find it
> offensive that this vestige of slavery and
> segregation lives on in the 21st century,” Parry
> said in a letter to county officials. “This
> honor to Jefferson Davis is especially offensive
> in South Arlington, where we are proud of the
> diversity of our community.”
>
> An aide to County Board Chairman Jay Fisette
> responded, and suggested that removing Davis’s
> name could be more than a little complicated:
> •“Jefferson Davis Highway” (Route 1)
> received its name by General Assembly fiat in
> 1922, and it would require legislative approval to
> remove it.
> •The portion of Route 110 from Route 1 to
> Interstate 66 also is named in honor of Davis, and
> while it would not require an act of the General
> Assembly to remove it, the county government would
> have to petition the Commonwealth Transportation
> Board to do so – and, if approved, the county
> government would have to shoulder the expense of
> new signage.
>
> “Staff is not in a position to recommend next
> steps, resolution, time frames or action on this
> matter,” the county response noted.
>
> County Board members in 2011 did take action to
> rename a portion of Old Jefferson Davis Highway in
> Crystal City as “Long Bridge Drive,” an action
> that did not require state approval.
>
> During discussion of that change, County Board
> member Chris Zimmerman took a swipe at the use of
> Davis’s name on roadways. “There are aspects
> of our history I’m not particularly interested
> in celebrating,” Zimmerman said.
>
> But county officials have shown little inclination
> to use up political capital in an effort to remove
> Davis’s name from the more substantive roads,
> and likely would find little enthusiasm among the
> county’s legislative delegation if they tried.
>
> “It would take a tremendous effort to achieve a
> symbolic goal,” said Del. Bob Brink (D-48th).
>
> U.S. Route 1, which runs from Maine to Florida, is
> designated “Jefferson Davis Highway” for much
> of its length in Virginia, although portions of
> the road also are known as Richmond Highway and by
> other names. Additional states – mostly but not
> exclusively in the South – have roadways named
> to honor Davis.
>
> Davis was a former U.S. senator from Mississippi
> and U.S. secretary of war when he was tapped to
> lead the Confederacy in 1861. His reputation,
> hampered by tales of micro-managing and
> bureaucratic bungling, was eclipsed after the war
> by the likes of Robert E. Lee and other generals,
> although by the time of Davis’s death 125 years
> ago, there was a resurgence of respect for him
> among Southerners. Davis is buried at Hollywood
> Cemetery in Richmond.
>
> Lee’s memory is memorialized in Lee Highway
> (U.S. Route 29) through Arlington and other areas
> of Virginia, as well as on Washington-Lee High
> School. Last year, a parent asked School Board
> members to consider removing the name Lee from the
> school due to his rebellion against the U.S.
> government, and received the government equivalent
> of a “don’t call us, we’ll call you”
> response.
>
> When discussions like this have come up in the
> past, Arlington NAACP president Elmer Lowe Sr. has
> said he’s not particularly concerned about
> roads, schools and other government infrastructure
> named after Confederate leaders and slaveholders.
>
> “Why change it?” Lowe said in 2010 about a
> previous call to remove Davis’s name from Route
> 1. “Nobody has complained about it. It has been
> here for so long.”
>
> But Parry said that if Arlington officials can’t
> convince Richmond leaders to go along with dumping
> the name of Davis, a little civil disobedience
> might be in order.
>
> “Frankly, if the state authorities drag their
> heels, I believe we would be well within our local
> rights to remove the name on our own,” he said.
>
>
> The Virginia General Assembly in the 1920s named
> U.S. Route 1 across the commonwealth to honor
> Jefferson Davis, the lone president of the
> Confederacy. To remove the name, legislative
> action would be needed. (Library of Congress
> photo)

They could just change the name. Then no one would be upset.

They could change it to are president's name. Obama BLVD.

Everyone would like that.

Uh oh Controversy Ahead! Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Confederate leader’s name on U.S. 1 still
> rankles some
> http://www.insidenova.com/news/arlington/confedera
> te-leader-s-name-on-u-s-still-rankles-some/article
> _61eb59c6-7b41-11e3-b259-001a4bcf887a.html
>
>
> Jefferson Davis may well be the Confederacy’s
> combination of Rodney Dangerfield and kudzu – a
> leader who gets no respect, yet you just can’t
> seem to get rid of him.
>
> Arlington resident Robert Parry is trying to
> accomplish the latter, asking county officials to
> seek removal of the name of Davis, the lone
> president of the Confederate States of America,
> from roadways in Arlington.
>
> “I, and I’m sure other Arlingtonians, find it
> offensive that this vestige of slavery and
> segregation lives on in the 21st century,” Parry
> said in a letter to county officials. “This
> honor to Jefferson Davis is especially offensive
> in South Arlington, where we are proud of the
> diversity of our community.”
>
> An aide to County Board Chairman Jay Fisette
> responded, and suggested that removing Davis’s
> name could be more than a little complicated:
> •“Jefferson Davis Highway” (Route 1)
> received its name by General Assembly fiat in
> 1922, and it would require legislative approval to
> remove it.
> •The portion of Route 110 from Route 1 to
> Interstate 66 also is named in honor of Davis, and
> while it would not require an act of the General
> Assembly to remove it, the county government would
> have to petition the Commonwealth Transportation
> Board to do so – and, if approved, the county
> government would have to shoulder the expense of
> new signage.
>
> “Staff is not in a position to recommend next
> steps, resolution, time frames or action on this
> matter,” the county response noted.
>
> County Board members in 2011 did take action to
> rename a portion of Old Jefferson Davis Highway in
> Crystal City as “Long Bridge Drive,” an action
> that did not require state approval.
>
> During discussion of that change, County Board
> member Chris Zimmerman took a swipe at the use of
> Davis’s name on roadways. “There are aspects
> of our history I’m not particularly interested
> in celebrating,” Zimmerman said.
>
> But county officials have shown little inclination
> to use up political capital in an effort to remove
> Davis’s name from the more substantive roads,
> and likely would find little enthusiasm among the
> county’s legislative delegation if they tried.
>
> “It would take a tremendous effort to achieve a
> symbolic goal,” said Del. Bob Brink (D-48th).
>
> U.S. Route 1, which runs from Maine to Florida, is
> designated “Jefferson Davis Highway” for much
> of its length in Virginia, although portions of
> the road also are known as Richmond Highway and by
> other names. Additional states – mostly but not
> exclusively in the South – have roadways named
> to honor Davis.
>
> Davis was a former U.S. senator from Mississippi
> and U.S. secretary of war when he was tapped to
> lead the Confederacy in 1861. His reputation,
> hampered by tales of micro-managing and
> bureaucratic bungling, was eclipsed after the war
> by the likes of Robert E. Lee and other generals,
> although by the time of Davis’s death 125 years
> ago, there was a resurgence of respect for him
> among Southerners. Davis is buried at Hollywood
> Cemetery in Richmond.
>
> Lee’s memory is memorialized in Lee Highway
> (U.S. Route 29) through Arlington and other areas
> of Virginia, as well as on Washington-Lee High
> School. Last year, a parent asked School Board
> members to consider removing the name Lee from the
> school due to his rebellion against the U.S.
> government, and received the government equivalent
> of a “don’t call us, we’ll call you”
> response.
>
> When discussions like this have come up in the
> past, Arlington NAACP president Elmer Lowe Sr. has
> said he’s not particularly concerned about
> roads, schools and other government infrastructure
> named after Confederate leaders and slaveholders.
>
> “Why change it?” Lowe said in 2010 about a
> previous call to remove Davis’s name from Route
> 1. “Nobody has complained about it. It has been
> here for so long.”
>
> But Parry said that if Arlington officials can’t
> convince Richmond leaders to go along with dumping
> the name of Davis, a little civil disobedience
> might be in order.
>
> “Frankly, if the state authorities drag their
> heels, I believe we would be well within our local
> rights to remove the name on our own,” he said.
>
>
> The Virginia General Assembly in the 1920s named
> U.S. Route 1 across the commonwealth to honor
> Jefferson Davis, the lone president of the
> Confederacy. To remove the name, legislative
> action would be needed. (Library of Congress
> photo)

They could just change the name. Then no one would be upset.

They could change it to are president's name. Obama BLVD.

Everyone would like that.

Captain Blazer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Rapes, mutilations, beatings, the separation of
> families, and murders was the slave experience.

True... both in the South and the FOUR slave states in the North (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky). Ask those slave-holding Kentucky officers if they were fighting for the freedom of their slaves...

> The Emancipation Proclamation (written by Lincoln)
> coupled with Union military victories freed most
> of the slaves followed by the Thirteenth Amendment
> (aggressively advocated by Lincoln).

The Emancipation Proclamation did not free one slave in the Union states. Don't belittle the suffering of those slaves who suffered at the hands of their Union masters by propagating this lie. Those slaves would laugh at that fatuous statement.
The 13th Amendment is the only artifact in this period of history to celebrate. The murder of 600,000 Americans over a moronic squabble is damnable.

> Abolitionist Union soliders (mostly limited to
> German immigrants and Northeasterners in the
> beginning) became the norm as the war progressed.

Listen here sparky. You just don't seem to get it. The CAUSE of a war isn't decided as the war goes along. You go to war for the stated reasons before the bullets start flying. Everything else is just revisionist BS.

> Thank God for the Union Army and the destruction
> of slavery.

The Union Army forced men for the first time in American history (look it up) into conscription. Those innocent boys were driven to the battle field against their will with the threat of being shot for desertion. They were forced to murder their fellow Americans. Many of those officers in charge of all this were slave holders themselves who were certainly not fighting to end Slavery.

Please stop peddling BS.

"Ask those slave-holding Kentucky officers if they were fighting for the freedom of their slaves..."

They weren't but the abolition of slavery was the ultimate outcome of Union force of arms. Maryland remained in the Union due to extreme measures taken by Lincoln to prevent a vote for secession while western Maryland which was mostly antagonistic to slavery remained pro-Union. In Missouri there was a civil war within the Civil War over what else but slavery. You don't mention that the Confederate vs. Union lines in Missouri divided between slave holders and non-slave holders. My point being that the border states were themselves divided on the lines of slavery. You are exaggerating the import of these slave holding border state officers who fought for the North who put their loyalty to the United States before all else.

You are correct that the CAUSE of a war isn't decided as the war goes along. The cause was slavery. The scope and conduct of a war does and did change. Now who's peddling BS sparks?

http://www.nps.gov/civilwar/changing-war.htm

Yes... But... Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't undestand why you have such difficulty
> understanding why African Americans and other
> forward-thinking Americans find it objectionable
> to honor confederate generals, slave-holders, and
> slave traders TODAY with holidays celebrating them
> or with schools, bridges, roads, and streets named
> after them.


Interesting that you use the term "forward-thinking" when you seem hopelessly wedded to a history that happened over 150 years ago. Seems that's backward-thinking.

Captain Blazer,
You just can't concede the point that you're admitting is wrong.
"You are correct that the CAUSE of a war isn't decided as the war goes along."
Well Lincoln himself, the Commander-in-Chief of the Union Army said at the beginning of the war that the was was NOT about freeing the slaves. He stated the Union would fight the South because the South seceded.

"The cause was slavery. "
Wow. Just give it up.

Yes... But... Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> @Pops and @Light Horse Harry @neoritter @wes mead
> 2014 @Liberal Logic 004:
>
> Yes. I am educated. And yes. I DO equate
> confederate leaders with Hitler and the generals
> and politicians who made him possible.
>
> Don't you understand that to African Americans,
> slavery was the equivalent of the Holocaust?


By that logic you equate the founding fathers of our country with Hitler as well as the leaders of Africa who sold the slaves in the first place.

Not to diminish how bad slavery was, but it was not the holocaust. The slaves werent having medical experiments done on them or being mass exterminated like the Jews were. Theres also people still alive that fought in WWII, theres not a single living slave or slave owner that was on American soil still alive and a couple generations have passed. Almost half our countries existence has passed since the civil war actually.

> We were ripped from our native land and placed in
> shackles. Millions of us died during the passage
> from our homeland to the Americas. Once here, we
> were forced to work for free and not permitted the
> freedoms humans by right ought to have. We were
> bred and sold like cattle for someone else's
> profit. We were brutalized. We were denied an
> education (indeed, we were forbidden by law to
> learn to read and write). We were hunted down
> like animals if we dared escape our captors. Our
> families were ripped from us. Our women were
> raped.

I'm not sure if your intentionally doing it or not but your description is implying that the Americans did all of that when in fact Africans were responsible ripping them from their homes as you say. Really though if they werent sold as slaves they would have been killed by the tribe selling them. Not much has changed in Africa since then in that regard.

It wasnt even the southern colonists who brought the salves over, it mainly the English/Dutch/Portuguese. Even ships from the north were bringing over slaves making a fortune selling them in the south.

> Given the above brualities, do you REALLY not
> understand why we view confederate leaders, slave
> holders, and slave traders, with contempt,
> disgust, and hatred? Given those brutalities, do
> you REALLY not understand why we find it
> objectionable that the people who perpetrated them
> be honored and celebrated with holidays, schools,
> and roads named after them?


The next step from your argument would be to start wiping history and the country of the founding fathers as well. You cant say its fine to overlook it for them but not the civil war without being a hypocrite. Tearing down the Washington Monument however is not an option that would be considered acceptable.

Like mentioned above you seem to think this was only done by the south and all done by the south, it wasnt.

> Surely, Jews still living in Germany (as well a
> most non-Jews living there today) would
> strenuously object to honoring Hitler, himself, as
> well as object to honoring Speer, Himmler, Barbie,
> Mengele, Goebbels, and other Hitler henchmen with
> schools, streets, roads, holiday, and bridges
> named after them. I suspect (hope?) that even YOU
> and your allies on this thread would think that it
> would be outrageous for Germany TODAY to honor
> these men by naming schools, streets, roads, and
> bridges after them or celebrating them with a
> holiday.

Again youre talking about people that were trying to exterminate entire races of people in the most horrible ways possible while taking over the world. They really were worse and responsible for around 100 million deaths from their own efforts and the great war they started.

> I don't undestand why you have such difficulty
> understanding why African Americans and other
> forward-thinking Americans find it objectionable
> to honor confederate generals, slave-holders, and
> slave traders TODAY with holidays celebrating them
> or with schools, bridges, roads, and streets named
> after them.

You can leave out the pot shots with lines like forward thinking americans.

Would you agree that MLK day should be removed because of ties to the communist party or people who dont believe in celebrating someone who cheated on his wife?

This is the point your missing. Someone or a group of people will always be offended by everything. You cannot wipe a society clear of things that offend people which is whats so absurd about trying the politically correct movement. You take those names away and people who are offended will move onto the next thing they want changed or renamed. How about the people who are offended that names that have been there for decades are being changed, I guess their opinion doesnt matter?

Again, everything youre applying to them also applies to the founding fathers who at the time took up arms against their country to start a new one. The only difference was the founding fathers won their war while the south lost theirs.

Honestly if youre actually offended just seeing a name on a street you get offended to easily. It should have no impact on your life. Obamas going to have things named after him despite doing a horrible job, Im not going to be offended when it happens. Im not offended if I have to drive on a road named after Ted Kennedy who got away with murder, it is what it is.

Then again I dont live my life looking to be constantly offended by things like somehow that makes me morally superior. If youre going to have a moral test that needs to be passed to be honored though, you might as well just rename everything to generic numbers and destroy every single monument in the country.

You also seem to apply this thinking only to Confederates but leave out that 4 union states were slave states that held them even after the war. Grant had slaves till the wars end, do you want his name removed too and his commemorative coins from the mint destroyed, how about Sherman who held slaves after the war as well? The list can go on and on but you seem to only focus on the role of the south for things that offend you about it.

The Civil War Was Wrong Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Captain Blazer,
> You just can't concede the point that you're
> admitting is wrong.
> "You are correct that the CAUSE of a war isn't
> decided as the war goes along."
> Well Lincoln himself, the Commander-in-Chief of
> the Union Army said at the beginning of the war
> that the was was NOT about freeing the slaves. He
> stated the Union would fight the South because the
> South seceded.
>
> "The cause was slavery. "
> Wow. Just give it up.

The point I'm making is not wrong. I'll make it quite simple. You are confusing the CAUSE of the Civil War that does not change with Union war aims that did change. The immediate cause of the war was secession. The cause of secession was the election of Abraham Lincoln. The election of Abraham Lincoln influenced the Southern slave holding states to secede because these slave holding states saw Lincoln's election as a threat to slavery. While Southern nationalism had been developing for decades, this nationalism had defensiveness over the institution of slavery at it's root. So I have now identified the CAUSE of the war that I agree does not change. The fact that the United States government's response was not to say in 1861 "well hell's bell's the southern states have gone and seceded over slavery, we're just going to have to go and free all their slaves, that'll teach them" doesn't mean that the CAUSE of the war was not secession driven by the defense of slavery. The fact that in 1861 and early to mid - 1862 the Union's war aim was the restoration of the antebellum Union (not the freeing of the slaves)does not mean that the Southern states did not secede for the reason I have identified.

George Washington owned more African slaves than did many "Confederates." Should we rename Washington DC?

"Grant had slaves till the wars end, do you want his name removed too and his commemorative coins from the mint destroyed, how about Sherman who held slaves after the war as well?"

Wrong. Grant owned one slave named William Jones. He acquired him from his father-in-law. Keep in mind that Grant was a great army officer and a terrible business man. At a time when Grant could have desperately used the money from the sale of Jones, Grant signed a document that gave him his freedom in 1859. The Civil War began in 1861. Grant's attitudes over time went through a similar transformation to that of many other Union soldiers. He included black soldiers within his command. As President he sent the United States Army to protect freed men and women from the Ku Klux Klan in the South beginning in 1871. He enforced radical reconstruction and was by then well ahead of his time in his views on race and the rights of freed men.

It is not an established fact that Sherman ever owned any slaves. One biographer mentions this but there is scant evidence for this claim and it remains controversial. I fail to see how he could have owned any slaves after the war unless you mean he owned slaves in Delaware or Kentucky between April and December 1865. Sherman was not an abolitionist (although he opposed breaking up slave families and was not opposed to teaching slaves to read and write).

The Union used both of these great Generals to prosecute the war. Despite either of these men's flaws freed men and women benefited incalculably from their military victories.

Captain Blazer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Grant had slaves till the wars end, do you want
> his name removed too and his commemorative coins
> from the mint destroyed, how about Sherman who
> held slaves after the war as well?"
>
> Wrong. Grant owned one slave named William Jones.


I like how you say wrong then immediately confirm what I said. Grant was a slave owner. If your fine with leaving his coins and monuments and things named after him then this is a non issue being youre being a hypocrite cherry picking which slave owners are offensive.

Ironic though that the side "fighting to end slavery" is fine with their generals owning slaves during the war.

Liberal Logic 004 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Captain Blazer Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > "Grant had slaves till the wars end, do you
> want
> > his name removed too and his commemorative
> coins
> > from the mint destroyed, how about Sherman who
> > held slaves after the war as well?"
> >
> > Wrong. Grant owned one slave named William
> Jones.
>
>
> I like how you say wrong then immediately confirm
> what I said. Grant was a slave owner. If your
> fine with leaving his coins and monuments and
> things named after him then this is a non issue
> being youre being a hypocrite cherry picking which
> slave owners are offensive.
>
> Ironic though that the side "fighting to end
> slavery" is fine with their generals owning slaves
> during the war.


"Wrong" referred to your assertion that "Grant had slaves till the wars end." I have established that he emancipated his one slave in 1859. I apologize for any abruptness. I am not much of a coin collector but I believe that Grant's conduct during and after the war and the cause for which he fought certainly entitles him to a monument.

Nothing ironic about this at all. I find any slave owning or defense of slavery reprehensible and I am not "fine" with Union generals owning slaves at any time. I am simply acknowledging that 1) In the case of Grant people do change for the better and 2) Regardless of their attitudes and behaviours they made significant contributions to the cause of emancipation through their prowess in war.

Not going to join the argument for argument's sake, but I recently told someone that slaveholders / holding was a different time and place and the person who I was talking to said that offended him.

So I got to thinking: If you can look down the line 150/200 years from now (as generations are getting longer), do you think our descendants will have a hard time explaining that in a time of immense wealth, we let children starve and die worldwide of disease while we bought video game systems, and a nicer car & house than we needed?

Captain Blazer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> "Wrong" referred to your assertion that "Grant had
> slaves till the wars end." I have established
> that he emancipated his one slave in 1859. I
> apologize for any abruptness. I am not much of a
> coin collector but I believe that Grant's conduct
> during and after the war and the cause for which
> he fought certainly entitles him to a monument.

You still arent telling the full story. The Grant family owned slaves for several years after that during the war which Grant had use of after freeing his slave. He didnt need his own when his wifes family has a supply of them.


> Nothing ironic about this at all. I find any
> slave owning or defense of slavery reprehensible
> and I am not "fine" with Union generals owning
> slaves at any time. I am simply acknowledging
> that 1) In the case of Grant people do change for
> the better and 2) Regardless of their attitudes
> and behaviours they made significant contributions
> to the cause of emancipation through their prowess
> in war.

The irony is that people trying to claim this was a war to free slaves ignore this.

They all deserve to be honored. My entire point is the cherry picking that is being done in this tread. Lee is worthy of mention because he owned slaves, yet Grant was a slave owner and the Lee fmaily freed their slaves before the Grant family.

This has literally just turned into if it was from the Union it was fine but if it was the south theyre reprehensible. It all applies to both sides from a war that was all about power and control. You cant cherry pick who criticisms apply too. The other poster did it more than you but someone saying theyre offended by a southern slave owner but ignoring northern ones loses credibility about what theyre really offended about. Its certainly not slavery itself when overlooking it on one side.

Washington & Lee University celebrates MLK Jr Day:

http://news.blogs.wlu.edu/2014/01/13/donna-brazile-political-strategist-headlines-wls-king-birthday-celebration/

Can't we all get along?

To @Liberal Logic 004:

First, thanks for addressing my points. I appreciate the reasonable and reasoned discussion from many on this thread.

In response, I would say that yes. I hold virtually EVERYONE involved in the slave trade responsible and reprehensible, including those Africans on the African continent who participated in the trade. There ARE a few who I would not condemn, namely Free Persons of Color who purchased their spouses or children and only TECHNICALLY were slaveholders, and the many White slaveowners who had the decency to free their slaves in their wills or even during while they were still living.

With regard to Washington and Jefferson, they were two slave-holders who held enormous numbers of slaves. I believe the evil that they perpetrated (and the evil perpetrated by other slave-holding founding fathers) far outweighs any good that they did in their lives. Thus, I believe that their evil deeds render them unworthy of being celebrated. I realize that is an unpopular position to hold. But that is my position. That being said, especially since Washington and Jefferson were presidents, I accept the impracticality of renaming cities and dismantling monuments and wouldn't press for that. I WOULD press to make sure that teaching about the evil that they perpetrated be part of the curriculum in our schools, however.

With regard to Martin Luther King, Jr., surely, you are not suggesting that having an extramarital affair is the moral equivalency of participating in and fighting to perpetuate the institution of slavery? Surely you are not equating the holding of unpopular political views (your allegation that MLK supported communism) with pariticpating in and fighting to perpetuate the institution of slavery? I detested Ronald Reagan's political views and he certainly had a documented affair. But I don't think either of those things are in ANY way equivalent to the evil that was slavery.

As for your assertion that European slavetraders were not kidnappers, I would say that while Africans may well have been the INITIAL kidnappers of those who were transported to the Americas as slaves, the traders who the initial captors transferred the slaves to ALSO were kidnappers. Surely, that would be the case in U.S. law today if a set of kidnappers abducted a child and then sold that abudcted child to another person or persons who continued to hold them captive.

At one point in your post, you seem to absolve Europeans and Americans for participating in the slave trade and slavery because, after all, "if they [Africans] werent sold as slaves they would have been killed by the tribe selling them." My goodness. That is REALLY a specious argument. That is the equivalent of suggesting that it would be ok for YOU to capture and repeatedly rape a 9 year-old girl you find wandering the streets of a bad neigbborhood because, after all, if YOU don't rape her, someone else will. So YOU may as well go ahead and do it and profit from the gratification you get by doing it.

The fact that someone is offering to sell you a stolen product (in the case of slavery, human beings), does not absolve you of the moral responsiblity for buying and using that product when you know it is stolen.

You seem REALLY bothered by my comparison of slavery to the Holocaust, and you talk about our slavery experience as having been oh so long ago. I guess we will just have to disagree. I am only in my fifties. Yet, when I was growing up, I lived with realtives who had lived with relatives who had been slaves. My great grandfather was a slave. I have heard the stories of how brutal the institution was from relatives who ACTUALLY spoke to their loved ones who had been slaves. My ancesters were enslaved and brutalized for no reason other than because of their color. Some have estimated that MILLIONS of Africans died during the two-to-four month period when they were packed like sardines on ships in the most inhumane of conditions imaginable for their journey from the African continent to the Americas. I certainly equate the selling, breeding, raping, murder, and enslavement of a people for no reason other than their color with the Holocaust. But even if it is only one-fifth as evil as the Holocaust, the people perpetrating and fighting to perpetuate that evil are, themselves, evil and not worthy of being celebrated. How bad does a person have to be in your eyes to be considered unworthy of celebration? I bet most people would say just one thug who shoots a little old lady in the head to take her purse is unworthy of being celebrated, regardless of all of the other "good" things that he has done in his life (and I certainly would agree with them). Surely, you would agree that someone who is an active participant in an institution that is responsible for the death and subjucation of millions upon millions of people for no reason other than their race is AT LEAST as unworthy of celebration as a street thug.

Yes. I AM offended by this nation's celebration of people who treated my ancestors with disgusting brutality and inhumanity. But no. That doesn't mean I am easily offended. Quite the contrary, I am not. I suspect you would be offended, too, if it was YOUR great grandmother who was referred to as a "heiffer slave" in her owner's will. I suspect you would be offended, too, if it was your great grandmother who was systematically raped for profit. I suspect YOU, TOO, would be offended if the people who were responsible for those acts were celebrated with the greatest honors bestowed by our nation. That being said, I'm NOT obsessed by the desire to rip the memory of these evil people from our history books and streets. I was merely responding to the OP's post and trying to help those of you who don't understand our thinking to understand why we feel the way we feel.

We should all go to the MLK Jr. celebration in the Lee Chapel at W&L. That would be much healthier than stressing out over a street name that will not change.

Yes... But... Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> To @Liberal Logic 004:
>
> First, thanks for addressing my points. I
> appreciate the reasonable and reasoned discussion
> from many on this thread.
>
> In response, I would say that yes. I hold
> virtually EVERYONE involved in the slave trade
> responsible and reprehensible, including those
> Africans on the African continent who participated
> in the trade. There ARE a few who I would not
> condemn, namely Free Persons of Color who
> purchased their spouses or children and only
> TECHNICALLY were slaveholders, and the many White
> slaveowners who had the decency to free their
> slaves in their wills or even during while they
> were still living.

Fair enough I can respect that. So many seem to overlook that first part of the slave route like it was somehow only a white problem that I felt it worth mentioning.

> With regard to Washington and Jefferson, they were
> two slave-holders who held enormous numbers of
> slaves. I believe the evil that they perpetrated
> (and the evil perpetrated by other slave-holding
> founding fathers) far outweighs any good that they
> did in their lives. Thus, I believe that their
> evil deeds render them unworthy of being
> celebrated. I realize that is an unpopular
> position to hold. But that is my position. That
> being said, especially since Washington and
> Jefferson were presidents, I accept the
> impracticality of renaming cities and dismantling
> monuments and wouldn't press for that. I WOULD
> press to make sure that teaching about the evil
> that they perpetrated be part of the curriculum in
> our schools, however.

I dont believe in making moral judgements on previous societies. Theres certain individuals that were so evil like the Hitlers/Stalins and some terrorists of the world I make an exception for, but every future society looks back at the previous one as immoral and barbic. As technology improves and circumstances of the world change one day people will look back on our society the same way.

I dont believe its fair to cast moral judgements in that manner when our society will be judged the same way. Take any one of us now and insert us into that time period and we would have almost certainly gone along with the prevailing customs of the time.

Im a firm believer that it is what it is. Obviously no ones arguing for slaves now or to crucify people like the Romans but their contributions shouldnt be shunned because of that.

> With regard to Martin Luther King, Jr., surely,
> you are not suggesting that having an extramarital
> affair is the moral equivalency of participating
> in and fighting to perpetuate the institution of
> slavery? Surely you are not equating the holding
> of unpopular political views (your allegation that
> MLK supported communism) with pariticpating in and
> fighting to perpetuate the institution of slavery?
> I detested Ronald Reagan's political views and he
> certainly had a documented affair. But I don't
> think either of those things are in ANY way
> equivalent to the evil that was slavery.

Its not whether or not their equals, its whether or not the actions would pass a test of morality. Neither passes a morality test which is what my main point was. If our nation was a church then morality would play a lot bigger role in who receives recognition, but its not. No ones honoring MLK for his politics or his affairs, in the same way Lee isnt being honored because he had slaves (which he did free long before the war ended).

The only difference between the confederates and the founding fathers was that the founding fathers won their war. Had they lost they would have been viewed the same was as the confederates leaders. Both groups were doing what they felt was best for their country.

> As for your assertion that European slavetraders
> were not kidnappers, I would say that while
> Africans may well have been the INITIAL kidnappers
> of those who were transported to the Americas as
> slaves, the traders who the initial captors
> transferred the slaves to ALSO were kidnappers.
> Surely, that would be the case in U.S. law today
> if a set of kidnappers abducted a child and then
> sold that abudcted child to another person or
> persons who continued to hold them captive.
>
> At one point in your post, you seem to absolve
> Europeans and Americans for participating in the
> slave trade and slavery because, after all, "if
> they [Africans] werent sold as slaves they would
> have been killed by the tribe selling them." My
> goodness. That is REALLY a specious argument.
> That is the equivalent of suggesting that it would
> be ok for YOU to capture and repeatedly rape a 9
> year-old girl you find wandering the streets of a
> bad neigbborhood because, after all, if YOU don't
> rape her, someone else will. So YOU may as well
> go ahead and do it and profit from the
> gratification you get by doing it.

I actually blame the Europeans more than the Americans in the same way I blame a drug dealer more than a drug user for drug problems. Using the drug trade analogy I would label the Africans as the manufacturers while the Europeans were the dealers and the Americans were the users. If either of the first two dont do it the 3rd never has the chance to. Its just that the Europeans always seem to get a free pass in the same way a lot of people give the Africans a free pass which they should not if were looking for who was responsible.

Youre misreading what I was saying. I was giving history as to how slaves came to be. If push came to shove yes I would say thats better than being killed in a brutal manner but that wasnt the point at all. The point was they were generally losers in a tribal war or the result of African genocides between tribes that led to their sale to the Europeans to sell. It wasnt that one day a colonist showed up and said go find us salves you randomly pick which some people seem to believe sadly enough.

> The fact that someone is offering to sell you a
> stolen product (in the case of slavery, human
> beings), does not absolve you of the moral
> responsiblity for buying and using that product
> when you know it is stolen.

I agree. The Europeans are just as much to blame as the Africans. Without them there wouldnt have been a distribution route allowing it to happen.

> You seem REALLY bothered by my comparison of
> slavery to the Holocaust, and you talk about our
> slavery experience as having been oh so long ago.
> I guess we will just have to disagree. I am only
> in my fifties. Yet, when I was growing up, I
> lived with realtives who had lived with relatives
> who had been slaves. My great grandfather was a
> slave. I have heard the stories of how brutal the
> institution was from relatives who ACTUALLY spoke
> to their loved ones who had been slaves. My
> ancesters were enslaved and brutalized for no
> reason other than because of their color. Some
> have estimated that MILLIONS of Africans died
> during the two-to-four month period when they were
> packed like sardines on ships in the most inhumane
> of conditions imaginable for their journey from
> the African continent to the Americas. I
> certainly equate the selling, breeding, raping,
> murder, and enslavement of a people for no reason
> other than their color with the Holocaust. But
> even if it is only one-fifth as evil as the
> Holocaust, the people perpetrating and fighting to
> perpetuate that evil are, themselves, evil and not
> worthy of being celebrated. How bad does a person
> have to be in your eyes to be considered unworthy
> of celebration? I bet most people would say just
> one thug who shoots a little old lady in the head
> to take her purse is unworthy of being celebrated,
> regardless of all of the other "good" things that
> he has done in his life (and I certainly would
> agree with them). Surely, you would agree that
> someone who is an active participant in an
> institution that is responsible for the death and
> subjucation of millions upon millions of people
> for no reason other than their race is AT LEAST as
> unworthy of celebration as a street thug.

Im not really bothered by comparing it to the holocaust, but on a scale of horrible I would rank genocide and horrible medical experients that lead to 100 million deaths above slavery in the same way I would rank the German atrocioties above what the South Africans did well into the 20th century. Neither is admirable, but WWII was so horrible very few things in history compare and they all have 10s of millions of deaths if not more.

If someone were owning slaves today I would absolutely agree with your assessment. But I go back to my previous post about differences in cultures and acceptable norms through out history. The street thug who murders someone knows murder is wrong and socially unacceptable. People who lived in that time did not know what they were doing was wrong. It doesnt make it right but were looking back on them with a different set of morals than were prevalent at the time which we would not have had if we were born then.

200 years from now society could look back at us and say what monsters we were for allowing abortions for example. We arent immune to the same cultural and moral blinders that societies of the past had that makes are morals stand with future generations just like the moral of their time fall short of today.

> Yes. I AM offended by this nation's celebration
> of people who treated my ancestors with disgusting
> brutality and inhumanity. But no. That doesn't
> mean I am easily offended. Quite the contrary, I
> am not. I suspect you would be offended, too, if
> it was YOUR great grandmother who was referred to
> as a "heiffer slave" in her owner's will. I
> suspect you would be offended, too, if it was your
> great grandmother who was systematically raped for
> profit. I suspect YOU, TOO, would be offended if
> the people who were responsible for those acts
> were celebrated with the greatest honors bestowed
> by our nation. That being said, I'm NOT obsessed
> by the desire to rip the memory of these evil
> people from our history books and streets. I was
> merely responding to the OP's post and trying to
> help those of you who don't understand our
> thinking to understand why we feel the way we
> feel.

I may be different but I really dont get offended by things. Some things can make me angry but I wouldnt say offended. Theres plenty of things named after people that I cant stand but none of them offend me, theres just there. If I have to drive past it or down that road I do so without second thought and just go on with my day in all honesty. Every heritage has their story of oppression by some group of people. To me the past is the past though and nothing done today will change any of it.

Like Ive mentioned in previous posts the Civil war was about so much more than slavery that I wouldnt hold Lee or Davis personally responsible for the actions of individuals in the south. Had it really been a war of Slavery is bad and were starting this war to stop it that would be different, but thats not what the Norths intentions were when they started the war. They didnt want to lose their economic cash cows in the south with the profitable crops.

Union states being allowed to be slave states even after the war really proves that there were far stronger forces at work for why the Union didnt want the south to go in peace which is why I do not view a Lee as the ultimate defender of slavery. As I mentioned previously he did free he slaves with a few years of the war left as well and really did struggle with which side he would command.

NOBODY GIVES A FLYING FUCK ABOUT THIS THREAD BUT YOU, NIGGER.
SHUT THE FUCK UP AND DIE WITH YOUR NIGGEE MINDED BULLSHIT.
EVERYTHING IS NOT ABOUT MONEY, MATERIAL THINGS AND YOU INCESIVE FUCKING HABITS, NIGGER.
AND BY THE WAY.
FUCK YOU. ASSHOLE!

Liberal Logic 004 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Captain Blazer Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
>
> > "Wrong" referred to your assertion that "Grant
> had
> > slaves till the wars end." I have established
> > that he emancipated his one slave in 1859. I
> > apologize for any abruptness. I am not much of
> a
> > coin collector but I believe that Grant's
> conduct
> > during and after the war and the cause for
> which
> > he fought certainly entitles him to a monument.
>
> You still arent telling the full story. The Grant
> family owned slaves for several years after that
> during the war which Grant had use of after
> freeing his slave. He didnt need his own when his
> wifes family has a supply of them.
>
>
> > Nothing ironic about this at all. I find any
> > slave owning or defense of slavery
> reprehensible
> > and I am not "fine" with Union generals owning
> > slaves at any time. I am simply acknowledging
> > that 1) In the case of Grant people do change
> for
> > the better and 2) Regardless of their attitudes
> > and behaviours they made significant
> contributions
> > to the cause of emancipation through their
> prowess
> > in war.
>
> The irony is that people trying to claim this was
> a war to free slaves ignore this.
>
> They all deserve to be honored. My entire point
> is the cherry picking that is being done in this
> tread. Lee is worthy of mention because he owned
> slaves, yet Grant was a slave owner and the Lee
> fmaily freed their slaves before the Grant family.
>
>
> This has literally just turned into if it was from
> the Union it was fine but if it was the south
> theyre reprehensible. It all applies to both
> sides from a war that was all about power and
> control. You cant cherry pick who criticisms
> apply too. The other poster did it more than you
> but someone saying theyre offended by a southern
> slave owner but ignoring northern ones loses
> credibility about what theyre really offended
> about. Its certainly not slavery itself when
> overlooking it on one side.

As I stated earlier slave owning is reprehensible no matter who the owner is. The distinction that I make between slave owning Union vs. slave owning Confederate officers is based on the cause for which they fought, not their own personal conduct. I have provided numerous times, in detail throughout this board the basis for my argument that the Union side was the superior concerning slavery and emancipation beginning in September 1862 with the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. I invite you to look at these posts. I could write more on the subject but this is getting tiresome as round and round the circle goes. You seem quite interested in Union slave owning officers, border states, and the miniscule number of free blacks who owned slaves in the South. This is not surprising. It is a well known rhetorical tactic used to defend myths associated with "Confederate Pride" and "Southern Heritage". These examples are really used only to obscure the bigger picture. You do not write about the abolitionist Union officers and enlisted men because they do not suit your narrative. You do not write about the fact that when the Union Army came to a Confederate state, especially after Septemer 1862, the slaves were set free. However as early as 1861 the prescence of the Union army afforded many slaves the opportunity to escape. You can't ask the 179,000 black soldiers who fought for the Union how they felt about the Confederacy but I know what they would tell you. Do you know why a group of Quakers from Loudon County became the only unit from Virginia to fight for the Union? Because they were abolitionist Quakers opposed to SLAVERY, they formed the Loudon Rangers (Union). Just one example out of thousands.

Concerning your latest assertion regarding Grant:

“2. In 1858, while attempting to make a go in civilian life as a farmer near St. Louis, MO, U.S. Grant acquired a slave named William Jones, probably from his father-in-law, although the record is not entirely clear. In March, 1859, Grant gave Jones his freedom despite the fact that Grant desperately needed the money he might have recovered by selling him. Grant's wife, Julia, had the use of four slaves as personal servants; the record is unclear as to who held legal title to them (it could well have been Julia's father). In her own memoirs, Julia states that these were freed at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation.

"Sources: _Captain Sam Grant_, by Lloyd Lewis; _The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant_, by Julia Grant; _Let Us Have Peace, etc._ by Brooks D. Simpson.”

The War wasnt about slavery. Even Jeff Davis and Lee said that.

Yes... But... Wrote:
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> Yes. I AM offended by this nation's celebration
> of people who treated my ancestors with disgusting
> brutality and inhumanity. But no. That doesn't
> mean I am easily offended. Quite the contrary, I
> am not. I suspect you would be offended, too, if
> it was YOUR great grandmother who was referred to
> as a "heiffer slave" in her owner's will. I
> suspect you would be offended, too, if it was your
> great grandmother who was systematically raped for
> profit.

Sounds like someone's bitter over not knowing who his great-granddaddy was. Dere sure 'nuf was a lot of white guyz dere dat night banging away on granny's mouth and puzzy, right? Bet she liked it! She kept screamin' "Oh Lawdy! I'se a-commin' again!"

All this talk about owning slaves makes me want to get one now. Where can I buy a little nigger? I want to dress him up like a jockey and have him stand at the end of my driveway holding a lantern!

Later on, he can strum the banjo, sing spirituals for me and maybe dance around the fire. I think I'll call him Buckwheat!

Martha W. Wrote:
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> George Washington owned more African slaves than
> did many "Confederates." Should we rename
> Washington DC?

Jefferson on the other hand owned and "loved" his slaves. He even had children with them. Hence the term, "Founding Fathers" was coined. Heh.

I piss on highways named after white racists like these dudes, in case you southerner forgot, Johnny came marching home but with a sore behind and full of lead, confederates not only lost but these krackers quit, Yankess was going to that butt so these poor dudes, "QUIT". southerners were too dumb to read maps, were as dumb as the slaves they wouldn't allow to read, so i lol when Krackers get emotional at something so stupid, the south is rising again but with asians, blacks, hispanics and the white race dwindles because the "some" white men just can't produce and the white women like blacks, even white married women online searching for this

OBAMA YOU LOSERS, we breeding krackers out of power!

Celebrate the diversity! Celebrate!

Fuck you crackers!!!
Attachments:

"The hard reality was that if the Federal government waged war to destroy a government based on slavery it could not, by any imaginable maneuver, keep the war from revolving about the fundamental concept of human freedom. This concept is dangerous; it takes fire, like phosphorus, whenever it is exposed to the air, and the war was exposing it to the winds of heaven. No disclaimer could hide the fact that a class which lived by the slavery of one group of people, on the acquiescence of another group which enjoyed personal freedom, had taken up arms to maintain its privileges."

from Terrible Swift Sword by Bruce Catton (concerning Lincoln's December 3, 1861 State of the Union address to Congress, 10 months before the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation)

Causes Of The Civil War
The Events That Caused The American Civil War
http://www.historynet.com/causes-of-the-civil-war

The Northern and Southern sections of the United States developed along different lines. The South remained a predominantly agrarian economy while the North became more and more industrialized. Different social cultures and political beliefs developed. All of this led to disagreements on issues such as taxes, tariffs and internal improvements as well as states rights versus federal rights.

Slavery
The burning issue that led to the disruption of the union, however, was the debate over the future of slavery. That dispute led to secession, and secession brought about a war in which the Northern and Western states and territories fought to preserve the Union, and the South fought to establish Southern independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution.

The agrarian South utilized slaves to tend its large plantations and perform other duties. On the eve of the Civil War, some 4 million Africans and their descendants toiled as slave laborers in the South. Slavery was interwoven into the Southern economy even though only a relatively small portion of the population actually owned slaves. Slaves could be rented or traded or sold to pay debts. Ownership of more than a handful of slaves bestowed respect and contributed to social position, and slaves, as the property of individuals and businesses, represented the largest portion of the region’s personal and corporate wealth, as cotton and land prices declined and the price of slaves soared.

The states of the North, meanwhile, one by one had gradually abolished slavery. A steady flow of immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, insured the North a ready pool of laborers, many of whom could be hired at low wages, diminishing the need to cling to the institution of slavery. Learn more about Slavery in America

The Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott was a slave who sought citinzenship through the American legal system, and whose case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court. The famous Dred Scott Decision in 1857 denied his request stating that no person with African blood could become a U.S. citizen. Besides denying citizenship for African-Americans, it also overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had restricted slavery in certain U.S. territories. Learn more about Dred Scott

States’ Rights
States’ Rights refers To the struggle between the federal government and individual states over political power. In the Civil War era, this struggle focused heavily on the institution of slavery and whether the federal government had the right to regulate or even abolish slavery within an individual state. The sides of this debate were largely drawn between northern and southern states, thus widened the growing divide within the nation. Learn more about States’ Rights.

Abolitionist Movement
By the early 1830s, those who wished to see that institution abolished within the United States were becoming more strident and influential. They claimed obedience to "higher law" over obedience to the Constitution’s guarantee that a fugitive from one state would be considered a fugitive in all states. The fugitive slave act along with the publishing of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped expand the support for abolishing slavery nationwide. Learn more about the Abolitionist Movement.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabins was published in serial form in an anti-slavery newspaper in 1851 and in book format in 1852. Within two years it was a nationwide and worldwide bestseller. Depicting the evils of slavery, it offered a vision of slavery that few in the nation had seen before. The book succeeded at its goal, which was to start a wave of anti-slavery sentiment across the nation. Upon meeting Stowe, President Lincoln remarked, "So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe and her famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The Underground Railroad
Some abolitionists actively helped runaway slaves to escape via "the Underground Railroad," and there were instances in which men, even lawmen, sent to retrieve runaways were attacked and beaten by abolitionist mobs. To the slave holding states, this meant Northerners wanted to choose which parts of the Constitution they would enforce, while expecting the South to honor the entire document. The most famous activist of the underground railroad was Harriet Tubman, a nurse and spy in the Civil War and known as the Moses of her people. Learn more about The Underground Railroad

The Missouri Compromise
Additional territories gained from the U.S.–Mexican War of 1846–1848 heightened the slavery debate. Abolitionists fought to have slavery declared illegal in those territories, as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had done in the territory that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Advocates of slavery feared that if the institution were prohibited in any states carved out of the new territories the political power of slaveholding states would be diminished, possibly to the point of slavery being outlawed everywhere within the United States. Pro- and anti-slavery groups rushed to populate the new territories. Learn more about The Missouri Compromise

John Brown
In Kansas, particularly, violent clashes between proponents of the two ideologies occurred. One abolitionist in particular became famous—or infamous, depending on the point of view—for battles that caused the deaths of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. His name was John Brown. Ultimately, he left Kansas to carry his fight closer to the bosom of slavery. Learn more about John Brown

The Raid On Harper’s Ferry
On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and a band of followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in what is believed to have been an attempt to arm a slave insurrection. (Brown denied this at his trial, but evidence indicated otherwise.) They were dislodged by a force of U.S. Marines led by Army lieutenant colonel Robert E. Lee.

Brown was swiftly tried for treason against Virginia and hanged. Southern reaction initially was that his acts were those of a mad fanatic, of little consequence. But when Northern abolitionists made a martyr of him, Southerners came to believe this was proof the North intended to wage a war of extermination against white Southerners. Brown’s raid thus became a step on the road to war between the sections. Learn more about The Raid On Harper’s Ferry

The Election Of Abraham Lincoln
Exacerbating tensions, the old Whig political party was dying. Many of its followers joined with members of the American Party (Know-Nothings) and others who opposed slavery to form a new political entity in the 1850s, the Republican Party. When the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won the 1859 presidential election, Southern fears that the Republicans would abolish slavery reached a new peak. Lincoln was an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery but said he would not interfere with it where it existed. Learn more about Abraham Lincoln’s Election.

Southern Secession
That was not enough to calm the fears of delegates to an 1860 secession convention in South Carolina. To the surprise of other Southern states—and even to many South Carolinians—the convention voted to dissolve the state’s contract with the United States and strike off on its own.

South Carolina had threatened this before in the 1830s during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, over a tariff that benefited Northern manufacturers but increased the cost of goods in the South. Jackson had vowed to send an army to force the state to stay in the Union, and Congress authorized him to raise such an army (all Southern senators walked out in protest before the vote was taken), but a compromise prevented the confrontation from occurring.

Perhaps learning from that experience the danger of going it alone, in 1860 and early 1861 South Carolina sent emissaries to other slave holding states urging their legislatures to follow its lead, nullify their contract with the United States and form a new Southern Confederacy. Six more states heeded the siren call: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Others voted down secession—temporarily. Learn more about Secessionism

Fort Sumter
On April 10, 1861, knowing that resupplies were on their way from the North to the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, provisional Confederate forces in Charleston demanded the fort’s surrender. The fort’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, refused. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire with cannons. At 2:30 p.m. the following day, Major Anderson surrendered.

War had begun. Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, refusing to fight against other Southern states and feeling that Lincoln had exceeded his presidential authority, reversed themselves and voted in favor of session. The last one, Tennessee, did not depart until June 8, nearly a week after the first land battle had been fought at Philippi in Western Virginia. (The western section of Virginia rejected the session vote and broke away, ultimately forming a new, Union-loyal state, West Virginia. Other mountainous regions of the South, such as East Tennessee, also favored such a course but were too far from the support of Federal forces to attempt it.) Learn more about the battle of Fort Sumter

True Causes of the Civil War
Irreconcilable Differences
Simmering animosities between North and South signaled an American apocalypse

http://www.historynet.com/causes-of-the-civil-war

Any man who takes it upon himself to explain the causes of the Civil War deserves whatever grief comes his way, regardless of his good intentions. Having acknowledged that, let me also say I have long believed there is no more concise or stirring accounting for the war than the sentiments propounded by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in “The Second Coming,” some lines of which are included in this essay. Yeats wrote his short poem immediately following the catastrophe of World War I, but his thesis of a great, cataclysmic event is universal and timeless.

It is probably safe to say that the original impetus of the Civil War was set in motion when a Dutch trader offloaded a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, Va., in 1619. It took nearly 250 eventful years longer for it to boil into a war, but that Dutchman’s boatload was at the bottom of it—a fact that needs to be fixed in the reader’s mind from the start.

Of course there were other things, too. For instance, by the eve of the Civil War the sectional argument had become so far advanced that a significant number of Southerners were convinced that Yankees, like Negroes, constituted an entirely different race of people from themselves.

It is unclear who first put forth this curious interpretation of American history, but just as the great schism burst upon the scene it was subscribed to by no lesser Confederate luminaries than president Jefferson Davis himself and Admiral Raphael Semmes, of CSS Alabama fame, who asserted that the North was populated by descendants of the cold Puritan Roundheads of Oliver Cromwell—who had overthrown and executed the king of England in 1649—while others of the class were forced to flee to Holland, where they also caused trouble, before finally settling at Plymouth Rock, Mass.

Southerners on the other hand, or so the theory went, were the hereditary offspring of Cromwell’s enemies, the “gay cavaliers” of King Charles II and his glorious Restoration, who had imbued the South with their easygoing, chivalrous and honest ways. Whereas, according to Semmes, the people of the North had evolved accordingly into “gloomy, saturnine, and fanatical” people who “seemed to repel all the more kindly and generous impulses” (omitting—possibly in a momentary lapse of memory—that the original settlers of other Southern states, such as Georgia, had been prison convicts or, in the case of Louisiana, deportees, and that Semmes’ own wife was a Yankee from Ohio).

How beliefs such as this came to pass in the years between 1619 and 1860 reveals the astonishing capacity of human nature to confound traditional a posteriori deduction in an effort to justify what had become by then largely unjustifiable. But there is blame enough for all to go around.

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From that first miserable boatload of Africans in Jamestown, slavery spread to all the settlements, and, after the Revolutionary War, was established by laws in the states. But by the turn of the 19th century, slavery was confined to the South, where the economy was almost exclusively agricultural. For a time it appeared the practice was on its way to extinction. Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson probably summed up the attitude of the day when he defined the South’s “peculiar institution” as a necessary evil, which he and many others believed, or at least hoped, would wither away of its own accord since it was basically wasteful and unproductive.

Then along came Eli Whitney with his cotton gin, suddenly making it feasible to grow short-staple cotton that was fit for the great textile mills of England and France. This in turn, 40 years later, prompted South Carolina’s prominent senator John C. Calhoun to declare that slavery—far from being merely a “necessary evil”—was actually a “positive good,” because, among other things, in the years since the gin’s invention, the South had become fabulously rich, with cotton constituting some 80 percent of all U.S. exports.

But beneath this great wealth and prosperity, America seethed. Whenever you have two people—or peoples—joined in politics but doing diametrically opposing things, it is almost inevitable that at some point tensions and jealousies will break out. In the industrial North, there was a low, festering resentment that eight of the first 11 U.S. presidents were Southerners—and most of them Virginians at that. For their part, the agrarian Southerners harbored lingering umbrage over the internal improvements policy propagated by the national government, which sought to expand and develop roads, harbors, canals, etc., but which the Southerners felt was disproportionately weighted toward Northern interests. These were the first pangs of sectional dissension.

Then there was the matter of the Tariff of Abominations, which became abominable for all concerned.

This inflammatory piece of legislation, passed with the aid of Northern politicians, imposed a tax or duty on imported goods that caused practically everything purchased in the South to rise nearly half-again in price. This was because the South had become used to shipping its cotton to England and France and in return receiving boatloads of inexpensive European goods, including clothing made from its own cotton. However, as years went by, the North, particularly New England, had developed cotton mills of its own—as well as leather and harness manufactories, iron and steel mills, arms and munitions factories, potteries, furniture makers, silversmiths and so forth. And with the new tariff putting foreign goods out of financial reach, Southerners were forced to buy these products from the North at what they considered exorbitant costs.

Smart money might have concluded it would be wise for the South to build its own cotton mills and its own manufactories, but its people were too attached to growing cotton. A visitor in the 1830s described the relentless cycle of the planters’ misallocation of spare capital: “To sell cotton to buy Negroes—to make more cotton to buy more Negroes—‘ad infinitum.’”

Such was the Southern mindset, but the tariff nearly kicked off the war 30 years early because, as the furor rose, South Carolina’s Calhoun, who was then running for vice president of the United States, declared that states—his own state in particular—were under no obligation to obey the federal tariff law, or to collect it from ships entering its harbors. Later, South Carolina legislators acted on this assertion and defied the federal government to overrule them, lest the state secede. This set off the Nullification Crisis, which held in theory (or wishful thinking) that a state could nullify or ignore any federal law it held was not in its best interests. The crisis was defused only when President Andrew Jackson sent warships into Charleston Harbor—but it also marked the first time a Southern state had threatened to secede from the Union.

The incident also set the stage for the states’ rights dispute, pitting state laws against the notion of federal sovereignty—an argument which became ongoing into the next century, and the next. “States’ rights” also became a Southern watchword for Northern (or “Yankee”) intrusion on the Southern lifestyle. States’ rights political parties sprang up over the South; one particular example of just how volatile the issue had become was embodied in the decision in 1831 of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Gist (ironically from Union, S.C.) to name their firstborn son “States Rights Gist,” a name he bore proudly until November 30, 1864, when, as a Confederate brigadier general, he was shot and killed leading his men at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee.

Though the tariff question remained an open sore from its inception in 1828 right up to the Civil War, many modern historians have dismissed the impact it had on the growing rift between the two sections of the country. But any careful reading of newspapers, magazines or correspondence of the era indicates that here is where the feud began to fester into hatred. Some Southern historians in the past have argued this was the root cause of the Civil War. It wasn’t, but it was a critical ingredient in the suspicion and mistrust Southerners were beginning to feel about their Northern brethren, and by extension about the Union itself. Not only did the tariff issue raise for the first time the frightening specter of Southern secession, but it also seemed to have marked a mazy kind of dividing line in which the South vaguely started thinking of itself as a separate entity—perhaps even a separate country. Thus the cat, or at least the cat’s paw, was out of the bag.

All the resenting and seething naturally continued to spill over into politics. The North, with immigrants pouring in, vastly outnumbered the South in population and thus controlled the House of Representatives. But the U.S. Senate, by a sort of gentleman’s agreement laced with the usual bribes and threats, had remained 50-50, meaning that whenever a territory was admitted as a free state, the South got to add a corresponding slave state—and vice versa. That is until 1820, when Missouri applied for statehood and anti-slavery forces insisted it must be free. Ultimately, this resulted in Congress passing the Missouri Compromise, which decreed that Missouri could come in as a slave state (and Maine as a free state) but any other state created north of Missouri’s southern border would have to be free. That held the thing together for longer than it deserved.

In plain acknowledgement that slavery was an offensive practice, Congress in 1808 banned the importation of African slaves. Nevertheless there were millions of slaves living in the South, and their population continued growing. Beginning in the late 18th century, a small group of people in New England concluded that slavery was a social evil, and began to agitate for its abolition—hence, of course, the term “abolitionist.”

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Over the years this group became stronger and by the 1820s had turned into a full-fledged movement, preaching abolition from pulpits and podiums throughout the North, publishing pamphlets and newspapers, and generally stirring up sentiments both fair and foul in the halls of Congress and elsewhere. At first the abolitionists concluded that the best solution was to send the slaves back to Africa, and they actually acquired land in what is now Liberia, returning a small colony of ex-bondsmen across the ocean.

By the 1840s, the abolitionists had decided that slavery was not simply a social evil, but a “moral wrong,” and began to agitate on that basis.

This did not sit well with the churchgoing Southerners, who were now subjected to being called unpleasant and scandalous names by Northerners they did not even know. This provoked, among other things, religious schisms, which in the mid-1840s caused the American Methodist and Baptist churches to split into Northern and Southern denominations. Somehow the Presbyterians hung together, but it was a strain, while the Episcopal church remained a Southern stronghold and firebrand bastion among the wealthy and planter classes. Catholics also maintained their solidarity, prompting cynics to suggest it was only because they owed their allegiance to the pope of Rome rather than to any state, country or ideal.

Abolitionist literature began showing up in the Southern mails, causing Southerners to charge the abolitionists with attempting to foment a slave rebellion, the mere notion of which remained high on most Southerners’ anxiety lists. Murderous slave revolts had occurred in Haiti, Jamaica and Louisiana and more recently resulted in the killing of nearly 60 whites during the Nat Turner slave uprising in Virginia in 1831.

During the Mexican War the United States acquired enormous territories in the West, and what by then abolitionists called the “slave power” was pressing to colonize these lands. That prompted an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania to submit an amendment to a Mexican War funding bill in 1846 that would have prevented slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico—which became known, after its author, as the Wilmot Proviso. Even though it failed to pass into law, the very act of presenting the measure became a cause célèbre among Southerners who viewed it as further evidence that Northerners were not only out to destroy their “peculiar institution,” but their political power as well.

In 1850, to the consternation of Southerners, California was admitted into the Union as a free state—mainly because the Gold Rush miners did not want to find themselves in competition with slave labor. But for the first time it threw the balance of power in the Senate to the Northern states.

By then national politics had become almost entirely sectional, a dangerous business, pitting North against South—and vice versa—in practically all matters, however remote. To assuage Southern fury at the admission of free California, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made Northerners personally responsible for the return of runaway slaves. Contrary to its intentions, the act actually galvanized Northern sentiments against slavery because it seemed to demand direct assent to, and personal complicity with, the practice of human bondage.

During the decade of the 1850s, crisis seemed to pile upon crisis as levels of anger turned to rage, and rage turned to violence. One of the most polarizing episodes between North and South occurred upon the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which depicted the slave’s life as a relentless nightmare of sorrow and cruelty. Northern passions were inflamed while furious Southerners dismissed the story en masse as an outrageously skewed and unfair portrayal. (After the conflict began it was said that Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs. Stowe, remarked, “So you are the little lady who started this great war?”)

In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sponsored by frequent presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas, overturned the Missouri Compromise and permitted settlers in the Kansas Territory to choose for themselves whether they wanted a free or slave state. Outraged Northern abolitionists, horrified at the notion of slavery spreading by popular sovereignty, began raising funds to send anti-slave settlers to Kansas.

Equally outraged Southerners sent their own settlers, and a brutish group known as Border Ruffians from slaveholding Missouri went into Kansas to make trouble for the abolitionists. Into this unfortunate mix came an abolitionist fanatic named John Brown riding with his sons and gang. And as the murders and massacres began to pile up, newspapers throughout the land carried headlines of “Bleeding Kansas.”

In the halls of Congress, the slavery issue had prompted feuds, insults, duels and finally a divisive gag rule that forbade even discussion or debate on petitions about the issue of slavery. But during the Kansas controversy a confrontation between a senator and a congressman stood out as particularly shocking. In 1856, Charles Sumner, a 45-year-old Massachusetts senator and abolitionist, conducted a three-hour rant in the Senate chamber against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, focusing in particular on 59-year-old South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, whom he mocked and compared to a pimp, “having taken as his mistress the harlot, Slavery.” Two days later Congressman Preston Brooks, a nephew of the demeaned South Carolinian, appeared beside Sumner’s desk in the Senate and caned him nearly to death with a gold-headed gutta-percha walking stick.

By then, every respectable-sized city, North and South, had a half-dozen newspapers and even small towns had at least one or more; and the revolutionary new telegraph brought the latest news overnight or sooner. Throughout the North, the caning incident triggered profound indignation that was transformed into support for a new anti-slavery political party. In the election of 1856, the new Republican Party ran explorer John C. Frémont, the famed “Pathfinder,” for president, and even though he lost, the party had become a force to be reckoned with.

In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its infamous Dred Scott decision, which elated Southerners and enraged Northerners. The court ruled, in essence, that a slave was not a citizen, or even a person, and that slaves were “so far inferior that they [have] no rights which the white man [is] bound to respect.” Southerners were relieved that they could now move their slaves in and out of free territories and states without losing them, while in the North the ruling merely drove more people into the anti-slavery camp.

Then in 1859, John Brown, of Bleeding Kansas notoriety, staged a murderous raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., hoping to inspire a general slave uprising. The raid was thwarted by U.S. troops, and Brown was tried for treason
and hanged; but when it came out that he was being financed by Northern abolitionists, Southern anger was profuse and furious—especially after the Northern press elevated Brown to the status of hero and martyr. It simply reinforced the Southern conviction that Northerners were out to destroy their way of life.

As the crucial election of 1860 approached, there arose talk of Southern secession by a group of “fire-eaters”— influential orators who insisted Northern “fanatics” intended to free slaves “by law if possible, by force if necessary.” Hectoring abolitionist newspapers and Northern orators (known as Black, or Radical Republicans) provided ample fodder for that conclusion.

The 1850s drew to a close in near social convulsion and the established political parties began to break apart—always a dangerous sign. The Whigs simply vanished into other parties; the Democrats split into Northern and Southern contingents, each with its own slate of candidates. A Constitutional Union party also appeared, looking for votes from moderates in the Border States. As a practical matter, all of this assured a victory for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who was widely, if wrongly, viewed in the South as a rabid abolitionist. With the addition of Minnesota (1858) and Oregon (1859) as free states, the Southerners’ greatest fears were about to be realized—complete control of the federal government by free-state, anti-slavery politicians.

With the vote split four ways, Lincoln and the Republicans swept into power in November 1860, gaining a majority of the Electoral College, but only a 40 percent plurality of the popular vote. It didn’t matter to the South. In short order, always pugnacious South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, followed by six other Deep South states that were invested heavily in cotton.

Much of the Southern apprehension and ire that Lincoln would free the slaves was misplaced. No matter how distasteful he found the practice of slavery, the overarching philosophy that drove Lincoln was a hard pragmatism that did not include the forcible abolition of slavery by the federal government—for the simple reason that he could not envision any political way of accomplishing it. But Lincoln, like a considerable number of Northern people, was decidedly against allowing slavery to spread into new territories and states. By denying slaveholders the right to extend their boundaries, Lincoln would in effect also be weakening their power in Washington, and over time this would almost inevitably have resulted in the abolition of slavery, as sooner or later the land would have worn out.

But that wasn’t bad enough for the Southern press, which whipped up the populace to such a pitch of fury that Lincoln became as reviled as John Brown himself. These influential journals, from Richmond to Charleston and myriad points in between, painted a sensational picture of Lincoln in words and cartoons as an arch-abolitionist—a kind of antichrist who would turn the slaves loose to rape, murder and pillage. For the most part, Southerners ate it up. If there is a case to be made on what caused the Civil War, the Southern press and its editors would be among the first in the dock. It goes a long way in explaining why only one in three Confederate soldiers were slaveholders, or came from slaveholding families. It wasn’t their slaves they were defending, it was their homes against the specter of slaves-gone-wild.

Interestingly, many if not most of the wealthiest Southerners were opposed to secession for the simple reason that they had the most to lose if it came to war and the war went badly. But in the end they, like practically everyone else, were swept along on the tide of anti-Washington, anti-abolition, anti-Northern and anti-Lincoln rhetoric.

To a lesser extent, the Northern press must accept its share of blame for antagonizing Southerners by damning and lampooning them as brutal lash-wielding torturers and heartless family separators. With all this back and forth carrying on for at least the decade preceding war, by the time hostilities broke out, few either in the North or the South had much use for the other, and minds were set. One elderly Tennessean later expressed it this way: “I wish there was a river of fire a mile wide between the North and the South, that would burn with unquenchable fury forevermore, and that it could never be passable to the endless ages of eternity by any living creature.”

The immediate cause of Southern secession, therefore, was a fear that Lincoln and the Republican Congress would have abolished the institution of slavery—which would have ruined fortunes, wrecked the Southern economy and left the South to contend with millions of freed blacks. The long-term cause was a feeling by most Southerners that the interests of the two sections of the country had drifted apart, and were no longer mutual or worthwhile.

The proximate cause of the war, however, was Lincoln’s determination not to allow the South to go peacefully out of the Union, which would have severely weakened, if not destroyed, the United States.

There is the possibility that war might have been avoided, and a solution worked out, had there not been so much mistrust on the part of the South. Unfortunately, some of the mistrust was well earned in a bombastic fog of hatred, recrimination and outrageous statements and accusations on both sides. Put another way, it was well known that Lincoln was anti-slavery, but both during his campaign for office and after his election, he insisted it was never his intention to disturb slavery where it already existed. The South simply did not believe him.

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The Lincoln administration was able to quell secession movements in several Border States—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and what would become West Virginia—by a combination of politics and force, including suspension of the Bill of Rights. But when Lincoln ordered all states to contribute men for an army to suppress the rebellion South Carolina started by firing on Fort Sumter, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina also joined the Confederacy rather than make war on their fellow Southerners.

“Because of incompatibility of temper,” a Southern woman was prompted to lament, “we have hated each other so. If we could only separate, a ‘separation a l’agreable,’ as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.”

Things had come a long way during the nearly 250 years since the Dutchman delivered his cargo of African slaves to the wharf at Jamestown, but in 1860 almost everyone agreed that a war wouldn’t last long. Most thought it would be over by summertime.


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Article originally published in the September 2010 issue of America’s Civil War.

We will welcome to our numbers the loyal true and brave, Shouting the battle cry of Freedom, And although he may be poor Not a man shall be a slave, Shouting the battle cry of Freedom The Union forever Hurrah boys Hurrah Down with the traitor up with the star, While we rally round the flag boys rally once again Shouting the battle cry of Freedom

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