It doesn't matter. The revisionists won a long time ago, and this is just final cleanup. Schools were teaching that the Civil War was fought over slavery even when I was in school, in the 1950s and early 1960s.
It doesn't matter. The revisionists won a long time ago, and this is just final cleanup. Schools were teaching that the Civil War was fought over slavery even when I was in school, in the 1950s and early 1960s. I don't remember when I first began to catch on that there was a lot more to it than just slavery, but it was well into adulthood, and it wasn't from any level of formal education.
It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.
It doesn't matter. The revisionists won a long time ago, and this is just final cleanup. Schools were teaching that the Civil War was fought over slavery even when I was in school, in the 1950s and early 1960s. I don't remember when I first began to catch on that there was a lot more to it than just slavery, but it was well into adulthood, and it wasn't from any level of formal education.
The South left because:
1) they opposed tariffs, which Lincoln supported
2) they opposed fed spending on internal improvements in the states, which Lincoln supported
3) they wanted to expand slavery to the territories which Lincoln opposed
The North fought the war because:
1) they wanted to "save the union"
2) Jefferson Davis was stupid enough to attack them first.
Those are the facts.
There was honor and villainy on both sides.
It's funny that you mention this. I was at the open house for my son's high school last night, and I overheard the popular American History teacher talking with some parents about how slavery was not the reason for the Civil War. This same teacher accurately predicted Trump winning the election before the race was down to Trump vs. Hillary.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
I'm conflicted. On one hand, I definitely believe that Sherman was way too light handed and didn't accomplish enough. On the other, I'm not a huge fan of ripping down statutes just because of modern sensibilities.
Any detail of slavery as being a major driving factor of the Civil War is willfully lying. It was a huge deal on both sides.
https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states
In various declarations, "slave" was mentioned 83 times.
It was not the only reason. They have other complaints too. Some being very valid. But it is a false rewriting of history to claim that slavery was not a substantial reason why the South declared independence. Call it early attempts at political correctness, polite lies to dance around the cold truth. And no non-slave state joined the Confederates. Though admittedly slave states stayed with the union. Another sign that it was a fairly complex situation.
Any slaver deserves death. Any slaver deserves ignominy. We threw off the yoke of European oppression in large part because we did not believe people were property. In the case of the Revolution, that the people were not owned by the crown. Sadly, we didn't carry that forward and apply it to all persons. Largely because, well, money talks. It is legitimately a stain on our history that we let money override our judgement and the words we put down in the Constitution.
Tariffs and fed overreach were legit reasons to be very angry. And possibly justification for pulling out of the union. But keeping slaves warranted the absolute devastation upon their people. The sin of the civil war is that it was not harsh enough. It didn't burn out the Southern aristocracy. Slaves remained slaves for decades under other names. 'Apprenticing' and arbitrary sentencing to hard labor were common. Then Jim Crow.
That said, every Roman of note owned slaves. At certain points, certain individual Romans probably owned more slaves than the entire South combined. Demanding that we pull down and smash a single Roman statute should be met with a proper amount of righteous fury at attempting to destroy history. While I'm leery as hell of the attempt of the South to whitewash their own history as "the War of Northern Aggression", I'm equally leery of the stated reasons why folks want to rip down Confederate statutes.
Once we start, I sincerely doubt it will stop with certain Confederate generals and politicians.
I'm conflicted. On one hand, I definitely believe that Sherman was way too light handed and didn't accomplish enough. On the other, I'm not a huge fan of ripping down statutes just because of modern sensibilities.I can understand your hatred of the institution but things like that are rarely well aimed and a whole lot more innocent people would be devastated and killed in the process. It is the main reason most us don't really want vigilante movements to organize for other crimes as they have historically gotten out of control and gone well beyond their purpose. Sherman's March accomplished the military purpose it aimed for. Reconstruction efforts after the war attempted to do what you wanted to see. The hatred and resentment over that (among ALL Southerners) lasted quite a while.
Any detail of slavery as being a major driving factor of the Civil War is willfully lying. It was a huge deal on both sides.
https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states
In various declarations, "slave" was mentioned 83 times.
It was not the only reason. They have other complaints too. Some being very valid. But it is a false rewriting of history to claim that slavery was not a substantial reason why the South declared independence. Call it early attempts at political correctness, polite lies to dance around the cold truth. And no non-slave state joined the Confederates. Though admittedly slave states stayed with the union. Another sign that it was a fairly complex situation.
Any slaver deserves death. Any slaver deserves ignominy. We threw off the yoke of European oppression in large part because we did not believe people were property. In the case of the Revolution, that the people were not owned by the crown. Sadly, we didn't carry that forward and apply it to all persons. Largely because, well, money talks. It is legitimately a stain on our history that we let money override our judgement and the words we put down in the Constitution.
Tariffs and fed overreach were legit reasons to be very angry. And possibly justification for pulling out of the union. But keeping slaves warranted the absolute devastation upon their people. The sin of the civil war is that it was not harsh enough. It didn't burn out the Southern aristocracy. Slaves remained slaves for decades under other names. 'Apprenticing' and arbitrary sentencing to hard labor were common. Then Jim Crow.
That said, every Roman of note owned slaves. At certain points, certain individual Romans probably owned more slaves than the entire South combined. Demanding that we pull down and smash a single Roman statute should be met with a proper amount of righteous fury at attempting to destroy history. While I'm leery as hell of the attempt of the South to whitewash their own history as "the War of Northern Aggression", I'm equally leery of the stated reasons why folks want to rip down Confederate statutes.
Once we start, I sincerely doubt it will stop with certain Confederate generals and politicians.
Put me in the category of the civil war being about many things, including slavery.Remembering back to past threads, I do not recall anyone claiming that the slavery had nothing to do with it which is what I get from the first part of your post. As I recall, that fueled much of the arguments on this site. One side was saying there were other factors in addition to slavery. The other side kept saying "but you can't take slavery out it". The first side essentially said "we aren't, we are just mentioning other factors in addition to it". ............And on it went with half the people just talking past each other and everyone wanting to put in their two cents.....
But to deny that the Civil war was, ultimately, primarily, about protecting the "property right" of being able to own slaves is equivalent to denying the holocaust, I think.
Individual confederate soldiers each had their own reason for fighting. But the confederate constitution was written to protect the "rights" of slaveholders and the plantation system. The leaders, those supporting the war at the highest levels, were by and large doing it to protect their wealth. And that wealth was in the form of owning others.
Remember, back in the day, the single biggest asset plantations had were its slaves. The land, buildings, equipment, and everything else amounted to rounding errors compared to the value of the slaves. As such, any threat to slavery was a threat to 90% of the wealth of the plantation owners.
Slavery was the casus belli - without slavery, with the other issues, no war. Without the other issues, with slavery, war.
That's because it was fought over slavery. Must we do this again?
I've got to disagree about it being money that caused the founders to avoid the slavery question. As I noted before, human motivations are never purely one thing or another.
In this case, the founders knew that freeing all slaves would be a massive disruption to at least half of the states (that's where the "economic" issues come in) which is a concern and it would result in the country not being united- the slave states would never ratify any government that freed the slaves. We'd have had the country of Virginia, of Carolina, of Pennsylvania, etc... that would either war with each other or war with Britain and eventually be reconquered. (If you will recall, even United, we barely made it through the next war with Britain.)
Of note, even the slaveholders were aware of this compromise with evil. The famous Jefferson quote, "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever" is about slavery.
So, yes, they were hypocrites, in that they considered slavery evil, but owned slaves. They did, however, plant the seeds for the ending of slavery by drafting the Constitution as under the Articles of Confederation the country would not have been able to do so. As I mentioned, it's mixed and those who want to hate everything about our culture want only to see the evil and not the struggle. (And, of course, ignore the state of most of humanity through history.)
I can understand your hatred of the institution but things like that are rarely well aimed and a whole lot more innocent people would be devastated and killed in the process. It is the main reason most us don't really want vigilante movements to organize for other crimes as they have historically gotten out of control and gone well beyond their purpose. Sherman's March accomplished the military purpose it aimed for. Reconstruction efforts after the war attempted to do what you wanted to see. The hatred and resentment over that (among ALL Southerners) lasted quite a while.
Also, the bolded part was a problem everywhere, not just the South. Full equality under the law was something that took a lot longer to happen. Black people continued to be second class citizens in lot of ways. Slavery was bad and needed to end, but there is plenty of blame to go around for everything else.
Remembering back to past threads, I do not recall anyone claiming that the slavery had nothing to do with it which is what I get from the first part of your post. As I recall, that fueled much of the arguments on this site. One side was saying there were other factors in addition to slavery. The other side kept saying "but you can't take slavery out it". The first side essentially said "we aren't, we are just mentioning other factors in addition to it". ............And on it went with half the people just talking past each other and everyone wanting to put in their two cents.....
Margaret Sanger Statue Stifling Laughter
I perhaps should have said economics, but yep. Money/economics was a huge part. Including why the South would not have given up slaves.1. The vigilante stuff I was thinking of were unrelated to the Civil War. The history channel did a show on historical vigilante movements in the US. Most were local and most all went too far. They nearly all fixed the problem they were meant to solve. I recall there was one instance in California where a second vigilante group was set up to oppose the first one. I am NOT trying to get down on vigilantes too much. I think that is something politicians and criminals should fear.
Sidenote, but have listened to some interesting lectures and whatnot that slavery makes folks stupid. Not really, just not interested in developing technology. Or spending the capital to invest in equipment. That not having slaves meant the North industrialized far faster and to a greater extent. Aside from the natural human instinct to desire to oppress other folks, slavery allows you to be inefficient by just throwing bodies at a problem rather than figuring out the proper way of doing things. Akin to throwing hardware at a software bottleneck. It's a bad idea, and it's hideously inefficient.
I concur that most of the Founders saw it exactly that way. A compromise with evil against a larger evil.
So have civilians in every war since WW1. We killed a lot of innocent French and Germans fighting the Kaiser. More fighting Hitler. More fighting the communists. More fighting terrorists. We killed easily well north of a hundred thousand Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. Probably five times that number. I do think there should be a cost/benefit analysis. In my personal opinion, Iraq was not worth thousands of US lives, let alone trillions of dollars and X hundred thousand Iraqis. The Kaiser, the South, Hitler, communists and terrorism generally? Absolutely worth the cost in blood.
A significant enough number of the population supported or was indifferent. They were allowing an aristocracy to take power. IMHO, even more than slavery, smashing that aristocracy was probably the more important aspect of the civil war. That they held economic power because of slavery is more damning, but they were a significant regional threat.
I'm not a blood thirsty savage, despite it being easily assumed from my earlier posts. I do believe the US government should have made reasonable offers. A hard cutoff in slavery set X years in the future. Offering to buy all slaves for fair market value outright. Offering assistance in industrializing to reduce the need for slaves. Not screwing around with tariffs to benefit wealthy northern industrialists. Just because someone deserves death doesn't mean you should go around killing them. As you say, vigilante movements such as the Klan or Antifa are their own evil and rapidly become worse than whatever alleged purpose they are supposed to serve.
Seeing both sides, I think any reasonable person could say "The Civil War was 80% slavery, give or take. Probably higher but we're trying to be nice"
There WERE other factors. But overwhelming, it was slavery and everything else was related. The states rights argument was largely "the feds were trying to soft ban slavery". Not that I don't believe the feds do trample over states, but enforcing Constitutional protections of citizens against state level oppression is definitely a legitimate task for the feds. The tariffs were part payoff to northern industrialists, but also to punish the south for refusing to industrialize and relying instead on slavery. I'm trying to think of a single "other factor" that was entirely or even substantially unrelated to slavery.
It is a legitimate response to "there were other factors" folks (of which I very much include myself) to say it was overwhelming about slavery to the point where bringing up the other issues should only be of academic consideration. It was virtually all slavery or slavery related subject based.
"Confederate Flags" removed from NYC subways.
http://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2017/08/18/peak-ridiculous-here-are-the-confederate-flag-looking-tiles-being-removed-from-nyc-subway/
"Confederate Flags" removed from NYC subways.
http://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2017/08/18/peak-ridiculous-here-are-the-confederate-flag-looking-tiles-being-removed-from-nyc-subway/
It's going beyond Civil War statues now...
http://nbc4i.com/2017/08/18/group-calls-for-removal-of-christopher-columbus-statue-downtown/
Calling for removal of the Columbus statue in Columbus, Ohio. Even suggesting the idea of changing the name of the city.
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/08/16/take-down-statue-remove-name-of-slave-owning-george-washington-from-chicago-park-pastor-says/
Calling for removal of Washington and Jackson statues in Chicago, and renaming parks.
Whatever will that large Catholic charitable organization do if they can't be the Knights of Columbus any longer? Will they have to become the Knights of Malcolm X?I always wondered . . . what happened to Malcolms I through IX?
The largest high relief sculpture in the world, the Confederate Memorial Carving, depicts three Confederate figures of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. The entire carved surface measures three-acres, larger than a football field and Mount Rushmore. The carving of the three men towers 400 feet above the ground, measures 90 by 190 feet, and is recessed 42 feet into the mountain. The deepest point of the carving is at Lee's elbow, which is 12 feet to the mountain's surface.
Now, as a Republican, I'm not entirely displeased to see Confederate statues removed. My question is, do we replace them with statues of Donald Trump?
Or do we replace them with statues of the prophet Mohammad?
???
Schneck's arrest about 11 p.m. Saturday followed a day of protests and counter-protests over another controversial statue, the Spirit of the Confederacy, in Sam Houston Park. The "Destroy the Confederacy" protest drew hundreds but ended without incident.
Park Ranger Tamara Curtis, who was not allowed to speak to the media Monday, found Schneck near the base of the Dowling statue with two boxes filled with a homemade detonator, a timer, wiring, a battery, a bottle of nitroglycerin and an explosive organic compound known as HMTD, hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, according to the sworn statement by Federal Bureau of Investigations Special Agent Patrick Hutchinson.
After being confronted, he tried to drink some of the liquid explosives but "immediately spit the liquid on the ground ... then proceeded to pour the contents of the bottle on the ground next to him," according to the statement.
They also believed that there should be no unemployment for blacks.
Don't they know Columbus was an undocumented immigrant, who spoke Spanish? ???
(stolen from one of Mark Steyn's listeners on the Rush Limbaugh show)
Since our history is "bad" maybe we can borrow some from Europe as they didn't own slaves...
They just called them "indentured servants."
A rose by any other name ...
Ole' Chris was an Italian. Dunno if he spoke Spanish, even if he did get funding from Isabella of Spain.
Insert Quote
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/08/take_down_the_statues_of_robert_byrd.html
Take Down the Statues of Robert Byrd
I thought the Muhammad idea would get a bit more reaction. Seemed humorous to me.
Nah....that would just piss them off more...
You say that like it's a bad thing. I think they'd praise it, as a show of love and acceptance to our Islamic brothers and sisters - er, gender-fluid siblings.
Yeah, until the Muslim's go all BSC and start chopping off heads....
Yeah, until the Muslim's go all BSC and start chopping off heads....
As long as they're chopping off the heads of the loving, accepting brothers and sisters and gender fluid siblings, I don't see this as a bad thing...
I want to rename every road named Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Maybe then the crime in those areas will drop.
In keeping with the tradition of assigning impractically long names to roads, I suggested General Thomas Johnathan "Stonewall" Jackson Memorial Highway.
Meanwhile Virginia wants to rename the Jefferson Davis Highway. https://survey.alexandriava.gov/s3/Jefferson-Davis-Highway-Renaming
My suggestions included:
Hershey Highway
Highway McHighwayface
and
Drumroll please.....
Jefferson Davis Highway !!!
Other great suggestions here:
http://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2017/08/24/virginia-seeks-new-name-for-jefferson-davis-highway-makes-wrong-turn-onto-information-superhighway/
Eventually, when we're all sufficiently woke, we'll need to destroy that monument to racism that we call the Democratic Party.
Now it's bleeding over to films. Gone With the Wind is now gone with the wind in Memphis.I don't know nothing 'bout censoring history for the sake of overly sensitive babies.
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/08/28/gone-with-wind-screenings-pulled-from-memphis-theater-for-racially-insensitive-content.html
I don't know nothing 'bout censoring history for the sake of overly sensitive babies.
Eventually, when we're all sufficiently woke, we'll need to destroy that monument to racism that we call the Democratic Party.
I want to rename every road named Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Maybe then the crime in those areas will drop.
Good on Charlie Daniels for this truth bomb calling out the jackwagons that are now after Dolly Parton:
https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2017/08/25/bam-charlie-daniels-hammers-activists-setting-sights-on-dolly-parton-business/