re: Civil War Confederate veteran interview

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Frankly, confederate apologists are worse than the goddamned Japanese about their treatment of their neighbors in WW2.

The Germans owned up to their atrocities. The Japanese pretend it didn't happen. Us? We deny that slavery was the primary motivator - we even say that slaves didn't have it so bad. It's a source of fricking pride.

fricking disgusting.

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Ah, the incoherent ramblings of an overly emotional simpleton. You think I’m trying to apologize and make excuses for the “Lost Cause” because what I say goes against your narrative. What you fail to see, through a complete lack of critical thinking and logic, is that I judge the Civil War not from “im on this side or that side” standpoint. Instead I judge the Civil War the same way I do other wars that I’ve studied extensively for decades. I look at the matter not as a “who’s right and who’s wrong”, but rather from the perspective of an unattached observer. I’m all wars both sides think they’re the right side. And to understand any war you have to look at the perspective of both sides and take that perspective into account.

For example, as I’ve laid out here, the Southerns perspective was that federal forces in Fort Sumter were a foreign occupation of what, again from the Southern viewpoint, was sovereign Confederate soil. The Confederates attempted to find a peaceful solution via negotiation. Where they miscalculated was Lincoln was never going to negotiate with them in any real way. Had Lincoln come to a negotiated solution that would have been tantamount to official US recognition of the Confederacy as an independent country. Lincoln fully realized only war would convince the South to rejoin the union. However, Lincoln did not want to be seen as the one to start that war. He had two important reasons:

1. To many at that time, it wasn’t entirely clear he legally could stop them from leaving the union
2. There were still Southern states who had not left the Union and Lincoln did not want to seem the aggressor and thus drive those states to join the Confederacy.

Lincoln saw Fort Sumter as his way of solving both problems 1 & 2. He knew the provisioning of the garrison at Fort Sumter would signal to the Confederates there would be no negotiated settlement. This would force the Confederates hand. Either the Confederates would (1) allow a foreign power to occupy forts (Sumter was far from the only Federally occupied fort in the South), thus dealing a fatal blow on the world stage to the notion of a Confederate States or America or (2) go to war to try to force the US to leave what the Confederates considered sovereign Confederate soil.

And it worked perfectly.

(By the way, if you ever did a real study of the run-up to the war, you’d already know all this. It’s pretty much common history knowledge. )

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we even say that slaves didn't have it so bad.

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Relatively?

Do you know what slavery was like in other places around the world?