re: Civil War... States Rights or Slavery

You can read the Republican’s platform in 1860, you can read Lincoln before and during the war, you can read the congressional resolution for the reason for the war, you can read the originally proposed 13th amendment that passed in both houses, and you can read the emancipation proclamation. The north was not going to war to abolish slavery, they were conceding slavery to prevent disunion. Concession didn’t work so they went to war to prevent disunion. The Confederacy was trying to negotiate peace as soon as it was formed.

How many of those killed in the civil war were actual slave owners?

3%

I certainly think slavery was (and still is) wrong.

But it would be nice of more power was in the hands of the state. It would give the locals more control over their laws.

California could be a progressive, drug addicted, criminal utopia enjoying the fruits of green energy.

And the rest of the country could be normal.

quote:

---

I certainly think slavery was (and still is) wrong.

---

I would hope everyone would be on board with condemning the raw, banal, ruthless abuses of chattel slavery. But, that is with our modern perspective.

It is easy to pretend that these slaveholders were out there rounding up slaves in West Africa, hauling those poor souls back over here and putting them immediately to work. That was going on in large numbers (well the trade in black slaves from West Africa, largely enslaved by their also black enemies and sold to Muslim, European and American slave traders) for about 150 to 175 years, but by the time we had a Constitution as a nation, the middle passage was rapidly becoming the covert, illegal human trafficking operation that we see the vestiges to this day in certain parts of the world (and our own Southern border).

Slavery was a generational legacy from about the mid-18th Century on. Thomas Jefferson didn't "enslave" anyone any more than his slaves were "enslaved". They were born in their respective positions (slaveowner and slave) in a perverse twist on hereditary nobility (and serfdom if you want to complete the feudal allegory).

But, chattel slavery in the Antebellum South had an expiration date that was unrelated to the Civil War. It was economics. It was simply unfeasible to maintain much past the 1880s or 1890s without the war. Slaves had to have food, clothing and shelter provided by the slaveholders every day the Good Lord sent. The children did no productive work until around age 12. The adults (who survived to middle age) in their 50s and 60s performed a decreasing amount of work. Seasonally, only certain work could be done from late Fall to early Spring, particularly in the higher latitudes.

None of this justifies maintaining that peculiar institution, but it does explain why there was so much conflict, even internal conflict, in Southerners. The whole dowager slave infrastructure was a key part to dismantling. Large holders increasingly put codicils in their wills (yes, kicking the can, but it wasn't abject inaction) to have their slaves freed by a set date. Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, was deeply conflicted about its continued blighting.

As the costs of maintaining slaves skyrocketed, the larger owners began renting out their surplus manpower, driving down the wages of the poorer white dirt farmers and heavily impacting the entire poverty structure of what would become the class of white and black agricultural workers called "sharecroppers" in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.

And the Yankees generated a huge demand for Southern agricultural products (cotton, lumber/firewood, food) to feed their rapidly expanding industrial base and cities bursting at the seams with hungry factory workers and craftsmen.

If a sincere attempt had been made to compensate the slaveholders for the loss of capital, I think the war could have been avoided. The cultural divide was simply too great. That might be rose-tinted hindsight, but it is what it is.

quote:

---

The War of Northern Aggression was over states rights.

One of those rights was slavery. The Confederacy had that part wrong but a lot of their proposals were really, really good. I am sure they had other bad ideas, but it wasn't all bad.

I still stand by that the African slave trade was the worst thing to ever happen to America.

---

Hitler had some good ideas too. He just took shite a little to far.

Julius Howell was a historian that actually fought for the Confederacy. You can hear his story on You Tube. "We didn't fight for the preservation or extension of slavery," he says. "It was a great curse on this country that we had slavery. We fought for states' rights, for states' rights."

After the war, Howell taught at Reynoldson Institute in Gates County, N.C. He then went to the University of Pennsylvania and obtained a degree in history. He later went to Harvard and got a doctorate in history. Howell taught history at the University of Arkansas and later was head of the history department. In 1901, he became president of Virginia Intermont College in Bristol and served in that position for 50 years.

quote:

---

You are legit retarded and have a lack of cognitive thinking skills

---

I don't know why anyone with a southern education thinks I'd be insulted by this.

If it was primarily about slavery then how come the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t signed until 1863 when the Union’s war effort was stalled?