Thank you, Nemo.
I am so very stupid, and you are so very smart.
Thanks for setting me straight, I’ll not trouble you again!
:rolleyes:
Sort of agreeing here. Segregation kept the Black population in lousy schools. Now the Whites flee to private schools, leaving the public system behind, and the White population doesn’t want to raise taxes to support the schools they don’t use.
I’ll agree with you.
Hmm… that’s funny, I read that link and I found plenty of mention of tariffs, expansion, industrialzation and a feeling of corruption in the federal government.
Your degrading reference to lighthouses shows you are not reading what is written. The argument is that the Northern states is being enhanced by support from the Federal government (ie. with money from taxes), which is not a equal distribution of resources. (Ie. the southern agricultural states are being shafted.
The references you made about the opposition to slavery is taking the writing out of context. The point being made was that anti-slavery proponents were not able to win support with the current political parties and thus formed a new party (the Republican party) to try and gain control of the federal government. The writers were not debating the morality of slavery, they were arguing that the Federal government did not have the authority to limit State rights in this matter, nor could they impose a ban on slavery in the new territories. (Sort of like G. Bush saying he could authorize warrentless wiretaps even tho the Constitution says no such thing. His argument is that it doesn’t say he can’t. Same argument here.)
You can disagree with the Confederates all you want, (I certainly don’t agree with a lot of what they said) but you can’t just sum up the Civil War in a simplistic statement like, “It was about slavery.” You didn’t even acurately summerize the document you offered as proof of your argument.
Look, you can talk all you want about tarriffs and western expansion and agriculture vs industrialization, but the reason these problems were unresolvable was because of slavery. The southern states seceded because they wanted to preserve slavery. And they could see that the increasing power of the northern states meant that slavery was going to be endangered. And since the entire southern economy and social structure was built on the cornerstone of slavery, that was intolerable.
Of course the northerners didn’t oppose slavery because they were enlightened people. And the southerners didn’t support slavery because they were cackling villains out vaudeville. They supported slavery because they made their money by forcing slaves to work. But just because they didn’t support slavery because they enjoyed evil for evil’s sake doesn’t change the fact that slavery is evil.
A mugger who beats up and robs old ladies doesn’t do it because he hates old ladies, he does it for money. That doesn’t change the fact that he does, in fact, beat up and rob old ladies. The plantation owner wasn’t a mustache-twirling villain, but his wealth depended on beatings, torture, terror, murder, and rape. So let’s not pat him on the back too hard.
I’m not sure I can agree here because you are making generalized without proof of causation. If I’m reading you right, you are saying after integration, whites are “fleeing” to private schools… because they don’t want their kids to go to school with blacks? Maybe some people are that bigoted, but isn’t it more likely that parents don’t want their kids to go to “lousy schools”? Everytime a new public school is built in this area (Georgia), the population shifts. People that can afford it are likely to move into that district so their kids can go to the new school.
Demographicly speaking, whites have better jobs so more whites move than non-whites.*** Is this racism, or simply a symptom of inequality?*** Wealthier blacks can (and do) move to the new schools as well. And the wealthest people can afford private schools. There are no racial prohibitions to any of them that I know, but it’s a fact that you have to have money to go there.
Good jobs don’t always require good educations, but a good education can lead to a better job. If there is a lack of good jobs in the South it isn’t because of the population, I’d say it’s more likely do to a lack of infrastructure that would support those jobs. Are there more rail-lines and roads in the North? Access to power supplies? High density population centers (such as cities) to provide workers? One of the largest cities in the South is Atlanta, but it’s more accurate to call it a sprawl… it covers several counties. If you don’t have a car in the south, your job opportunities are more limited.
Sometimes the problem causes the situation, and sometimes the situation causes the problem. Worst case senario, they both cause the other in a vicious cycle.
As far as I know, nobody was nominating slaveowners for medals. But what I find hard to believe is that 67% of Southerns would go to war to protect the “property” of the other 33% that owned slaves. (Ok, not 100% of the South fought, nor did 100% of the North. The point is a larger percentage of those fighting for the South were not fighting for their slaves.) Of those that did own slaves, 1% owned 20-30% of them; In other words, the very rich of the time.
You acknowledge that the Plantation owners were not the vaudville villains doing evil for evil’s sake, but that they had an economic interest at stake; But what about those that didn’t have an economic reason? Are you saying they were evil? What was** their **motivation?
I still say the war was about politics and money. Morality was political justification after the fact for the horrible cost in human lives.
Correct, the war was about politics and money. The supporters of secession and war in the South convinced a sufficient number of their fellow free Southern citizens to rally to the Southern cause in support of a series of political and economic propositions.
Political:
Economic:
(According to Georgia, it may only have been $3,000,000,000 worth of property. Either way, an enormous sum, even more enormous for the time, and it wasn’t just stored wealth–stacks of gold bars or something–but the productive basis for the entire economy of the Deep South, and of considerable economic importance to the rest of the Southern states.)
One-third of the electorate is not a small number in a representative democracy. Especially if that one-third has a serious material interest at stake, while the other two-thirds have more abstract philosophical reasons for opposing the interest of the one-third. (The economic commitment of small slaveholders wouldn’t necessarily be any less than that of large slaveholders. I’m sure there were cases of rich bankers who owned a couple of maids and butlers, but a small-scale farmer who owned a slave or two who worked alongside his own family on the farm could have just as strong an economic interest in slavery as the rich plantation owner, in terms of the proportion of that small slaveowner’s assets and economic future.)
Add in aspirational interests on the part of the non-slave-owning two-thirds–“I don’t own any slaves yet, but someday I will, if those meddling abolitionists don’t screw everything up”. Add in perfectly rational economic interests by the non-slave-owning two-thirds–“I don’t own any slaves, but I make my living providing goods and services to the people who do; if those rich plantation owners are wiped out, I’ll be wiped out with them”. Add in social and political interests–black inequality was presented as a bulwark of white equality; a kind of foundation on which the equality of “all white men” could supposedly rest. Add in the economic fears of poor whites who had no desire to economically compete with freed blacks. Add in racism and racially-based fears–black inequality was presented as natural and Christian and right, and white supremacy as a necessary defense against “savages” running amok and having their way with the daughters of slave-owners and non-slave-owners alike.
And of course, especially once the supporters of secession got the South into a shooting war, feelings of patriotism, a desire to not look like a coward to the rest of the community, and all the other reasons why young men go off to fight, all came into play.
Agreed. The south seceded to preserve the money-making economic engine of the south, namely plantation slave labor. The value of the slaves was in the billions of dollars, in 1865 dollars. Any weakening of slavery would mean economic disaster for every slaveholder.
Again, agreed. There was a great deal of effort expended on showing how slavery was beneficial for the slave, how it was ordained by God, so forth.
Mark Twain wrote an essay about the poor southern whites-who took up arms (and died in large numbers) to protect the planation system, that kept them in poverty.
The plantation system WAS the problem-it depended upon monoclture (cotton, tobacco) that wore out the soil and produced poverty for the small farmers.
It wasn’t ntil the aftermath of the Firts World War, that attitudes in the Deep South began to change.
New York and Vermont had the only ICBMs deployed east of the Mississippi River.
Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Home of the 556th Strategic Missile Squadron.
We were probably underrepresented in 1961, because of our poverty. ;);)
So AC was important? Who do you have to thank for that? Willis Haviland Carrier, of Buffalo, New York.; :eek:
You shouldn’t. I could expand greatly on the economic arguments he made, but since you acknowledged that he was right, there’s no point. Nice to see ignorance fought. :rolleyes:
Too late to edit.
I didn’t really want to go to the trouble that MEBuckner did.
Thanks, MEBuckner!
… and? What is the logical extention of this argument? Economic collapse of the Southern states. The average person did not need to own slaves in order to fear economic disaster. At the same time, the very wealthy would lose something more precious to them… political power in the federal government.
Nice; Way to spin what I said. Obviously I was referring to the “winners” of the War justifying it’s cost. The arguments for slavery were presented far in advance of the war. (Wrongly imo, but for some reason people seem intent on ignoring the fact that I’m not arguing in “defense” of the South. I’m simply stating what I see as the cause.)
History is written by the winners. I don’t know who said/wrote that, but only a fool ignores it the truth of it. Did Columbus “discover” America? No. Was it taught for decades in American schools that he did? Yes. If you understand WHY, then you’ll understand what I’m saying. If you insist that he did, then there’s nothing I can do to convince you otherwise.
Look, I agree that the North didn’t fight the war in order to abolish slavery, that’s clear. But the South indisputably did secede to preserve slavery. Slavery was what made the knot of other problems–tarriffs and whatnot–impossible to resolve. And they needed to preserve slavery because the abolition of slavery meant economic collapse, as you say. Either that, or a buyback of slaves at their market value, which, given the limited government revenues of the time, would have been absolutely impossible.
So–the nation could not continue half slave and half free. The South decided the solution to the problem was secession. That was intolerable to the North. And so we had the civil war.
While I haven’t read all of the above word for word, it seems like the focus is on the state of things in 1861. That’s a good starting point but just as important is the fact that …
-
the south got the economic shit kicked out of them during the war, and
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they had to rebuild with a large population of relatively poor, uneducated ex-slaves
Well, yes and no. They might not have started the war to end slavery, but I’d argue that’s more or less why they continued to fight it.
Some… perhaps most (perhaps), clearly not all.