It's seems that I still run across people who for some reason were told that the Civil War was not fought over slavery...still. This is part of the same belabored attempt to assuage democrats of their culpability for their long support of the institution of slavery. Some say that the North was industrialized and the South was agrarian, but this isn't true. Some say it was a states rights issue. Some say that Abraham Lincoln didn't fight to end slavery, but rather to preserve the Union. I will be using this thread as a forum to dispute the nonsense put out by the people who want to rewrite history, discredit republicans, abolitionists and justify democrat rebellion. Just to start, have a look at this video which does a great job of dispelling the myth that the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery: [video=youtube;pcy7qV-BGF4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcy7qV-BGF4[/video]
I would like for people to also read some related issues that I have created threads on and so consider this post a cross reference post to these related issues: The Myth of the Southern Strategy The Myth of the Southern Strategy Part II Republican Platforms Support Civil Rights Debunking the "Parties Switched" Myth GOP's Record on Race Democrat Party's Record on Race Democratic Party's record on Race Part II
As a Non American with no horse in this race but a master in History its quite clear to me that the war was NOT about Slavery although slavery was an important secondary condition. Slavery wass not being outlawed by the North ,indeed the emancipaion doctrine excluded Northern states. It was clearly about access to markets and individual states rights. Nopthing has been 'debumked' propaganda snippets are merely that
The Opening Post was distracting by mentioning the modern Democrats and Republicans which have no relationship to the 19th century parties since there has been a polar shift between the two parties on the issue of civil rights for blacks. Col. Seidule is an impressive speaker who clearly proves the case that the American Civil War was indeed fought over the issue of slavery.
The single reason the South went to sedition was because they believed the next new state would give the votes in Congress to end slavery. There was exactly NO other reason. This was the single reason the South went to war against the North.
The "states rights" issue was specific, it was about the right of a state to continue slavery. Everything else was secondary and residual to that issue. It is just revisionist history to claim otherwise. It was well understood the USA was going to continue to add new territories and new states, and they would be non-slave states. This mean voting to outlaw slavery in Congress. There also was fury in the South that Northern states were becoming sanctuaries for run-away slaves. Northern cities and officials were refusing to arrest and return them, despite the Dread Scott decision of the Supreme Court. Just as Andrew Jackson went to war in Spanish Florida using the issue of it becoming a hideout for runaway slaves, the whole North was becoming a hideout for runaway slaves. A slave had a VERY high dollar value so the North increasingly harboring runaway slaves was the North keeping valuable stolen property in their view. The "logic" of "states rights" and residual issues were then used to claim it wasn't about slavery, but slavery was the core issue, core motivate, and core political and social issue of the day. White confederates now make the same arguments Confederates did then. 5,000,000 blacks died directly in slavery importation. The average life span of a slave in the South was barely over 20 years. Black babies born less than perfect were immediately killed as defective livestock, which is what slaves were. In many ways, slaves were treated worse than livestock. The pro-Confederate rights people vehemently claim the lose of 600,000 lives in the Civil War was unthinkable, but the millions and millions of black slave deaths and treatment so horrific it makes ISIS seem like humanitarians is something they will totally ignore - as they fundamentally have the same view Southern Confederates did - only white people matter.
No, there hasn't been a polar shift. Democrats still define black people as a people separate from white people by their race and as a separate special interests group rather than fully America as they are being white people. The segregationists in the past were Southern Democrats, not Republicans, it was a Republican Congress that passed the Civil Rights act outlawing racism by Democrat officials, and the political and social segregationists now are Democrats.
That doesn't make any sense. Congress could not end slavery. It was enshrined in the Constitution and would require a Constitutional Amendment, which would require agreement of 2/3rds of the states. They were nowhere near that level of agreement before the Civil War.
One of the big driving factors of the Northern opposition to slavery were all the laborers in the North (primarily recent Irish immigrants) who felt their wages were being undercut by cheap slave labor in the South. There were those who believed the use of slavery represented unfair competition. The South, meanwhile, had a huge export market (primarily cotton and corn meal) and believed the basis of their economy would be threatened if they did not have access to slave labor to be able to keep commodity prices down. However, the material conditions of laborers in the North were not really any better than those of the slaves in the South. In his book Das Kapital, Karl Marx made the argument that maintaining a slave was actually more expensive to a plantation owner than the cost of hiring a laborer was to an employer in the North. So why did Southern plantation owners prefer slaves? Ironically, the institution of slavery tied up much of the labor force. Slaves could not hire themselves out (usually), and the system generally made it impractical for slave owners to hire their slaves out. This resulted in a lack of competition among the labor force, which created a sort of "shortage". A slave owner also had a vested interest in the slave, since he was the owner, and if the slave became ill or died this would cut into his profits. In contrast, many of the large employers in the North could pay wages that were not enough to survive on, it was no matter to them what happened to the worker since they could always hire another one. Slaves might have been brutally forced to work grueling long hard hours in the field under a scorching sun, but at least they were well-fed and provided with housing, which was not always the case among impoverished laborers in the North. It was also believed (and there may be some level of truth to it) that the Negro was better suited to working in the Southern fields than the white man. The laborers in the North had emigrated from Northern Europe, where the temperatures were much cooler. In contrast, the slaves had been imported from the hot climates of Western Africa. Even Adam Smith addressed this point in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. The Irish laborers probably would have fainted from heat exhaustion working those long hours in the field under the hot humid Southern climate. The slaves also tended to be stronger. Perhaps partly because individuals of African ancestry statistically tend to have higher testosterone levels and more muscle mass, but also possibly because some of the plantation owners had been informally carrying out a sort of human breeding, preferring to use their stronger male slave workers to mate. So the slaves had greater endurance to carry out hard physical labor than the Northern laborers who were more likely to work in a textile mill.
You've got your facts back-to-front. "We have lost the South for a generation" With these words, reportedly spoken to Bill Moyers after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Democrat LBJ showed that he actually underestimated the power of racism to affect our politics. If generations are counted in 20 year increments, we're now in the middle of the 3rd generation and the South is still lost.
Pretending there was no Missouri Compromise to avoid the issue, are we? Seem to recall reading Abraham Lincoln telling the woman who wrote the book Uncle Tom's Cabin "so you're the little lady that started the great big war." It was about slavery. The South and angry whites now try to shroud it in other topics, anything to make it so slavery and attrocities on the mass and institutional scale against blacks is declared an irrelevancy.
But regardless of what reasons the South gave, the Civil War all in all was a good and necessary thing. The social order and slave-based culture of the South needed to be destroyed. So regardless, it was a just war. One of the most just wars in world history. It annoys me to hear raging against all whites as racists given how many white Northerners died and suffered to set slaves free.
Getting into black support of Democrats and white-anger over more modern issues is an entirely different set of issues.
Slave labor is more costly than serf/sweat shop labor, because you don't have to house and feed sweat shop laborers. What you can't do with sweat shop laborers is torture them, rape them, and outright murder them. You can't sell their children for profit. You can't breed laborers for profit. A laborer is not a monetary asset. The "pluses" of having a slave over a laborer is that you can do anything you want to a slave. Personally. At any time. A person can only claim they are economically superior to a laborer, not racially and in every way over a black slave. A laborer doesn't have to submit to anything and do anything you say 24/7 from birth to death. A slave can't go on strike. A slave can't quit or ever say no. A slave can never be a competition to you. The climate acclamation argument you make doesn't work, though. Anyone can become conditioned to hot or cold environments.
Pretending there was no 3/5ths compromise to avoid the issue, are we? We're talking about states, not territories.
Debating a modern white Confederate over whether the Civil War was about slavery will be as rational and debating Jehovah's Witnesses at your door. There is one God and Jehovah is his name = the only people who matter are white people because are there are no other people of our species.
The Civil War was obviously fought over slavery but your rhetoric about Democrats supporting the institution of slavery has no relevance today. Today the Democratic Party is more progressive and Egalitarian than the Republican Party which is full of far-right conservatives who tend to be less tolerant and many are racists, much more racist than the Democrats.
The southern states lose on the states rights issue as well since it was the southern states who abandoned states rights and called up a 'national' army well before Lincoln did. On a separate issue, the South also exempted anyone who owned 20 slaves or more from service. That war was fought for the southern landed gentry.
