re: Is everyone here glad the North won the Civil War?

I'm anti-slavery, but I'm also pro-self determination. Totally okay with South seceding without slavery if it's what the majority in those states want.

Maybe your 4x Grandfather should have stayed in Europe.

If I could travel back in time I'd like to be able to visit both the North and South to see how much actual difference the two sides felt about African Americans. I'd also like to see how racism played out toward other immigrants as well as the native Americans. We were probably closer to disliking everybody not like us than the North likes to portray.

No

quote:

---

Is everyone here glad the North won the Civil War?

---

at least I am

What would the idiots have done when blacks outnumbered whites? Don't laugh. Such was the case in Mississippi in 1940.

quote:

---

serious question- I always see this in these threads. Why does everyone think it was on its way out?


Just as the USA itself left Slavery behind, just as the UK and France themselves left Slavery behind, the free, proud, and fiercely independent Confederate States of America would have done the same. To assume that the same historical forces that acted on France, the UK and the USA to move away from Slavery would have somehow not acted on the Confederate States of America seems illogical to me.

Can you make a serious LOGICAL argument to persuade me that the same historical forces that led to the movement away from Slavery in those other places I mentioned would have somehow not done the same for the CSA?

Do you seriously believe that the United Kingdom and the United States of America would have ended Slavery if, by doing so, the national economic security of their nation-states would have been endangered?

PS Germany, Russia both had a form of slavery, which became a thing of the past in both places due to the same historical forces that ended slavery in the more Western countries.

---

I ask myself the same question - if slavery was "on the way out", why did the South literally start a war over it? The answer is - it WASN'T "on the way out", at least they didn't perceive it as such at that time. Take a few minutes to read the Articles of Secession, and you'll see that the southern states were not interested in abandoning slavery. To presume so is completely illogical, especially given the events leading up to the civil war.

Would historical factors have eventually caused the demise of slavery? With the benefit of hindsight, we can say probably so, but again, the timeline is heavily debatable. I would say minimum 40 years, up to 100 years. That's not really the point; what evidence do you have that as of 1861, the slaveholding states were ready, willing, or planning to abandon slavery?

Your examples also completely ignore one of the most unique elements of American slavery - race. Slavery in the US was heavily tied to cotton (and sugar cane), so using France and Russia as examples isn't an exact parallel - especially since this totally ignores the lack of a racial element to Russian slavery. And while Russia may have abolished slavery in 1861, it didn't stop the Russian Civil war 60 years later, and led to the introduction of communism....