Which is a good point, but Lincoln would’ve let them keep slavery right up until 1862 or 1863. It didn’t start off about slavery, but that’s what finished it.
I just had to pipe up to say that is an absurd and factually incorrect assertion (else North Korea, the Sovs in the day etc could have claimed Nato allies were starting a war by the mere supply of advance bases…)
Of course using the standards on display in this argument, indeed WWII was the War of Polish Aggression… Queer analysis, really queer analysis.
Here is a typical Confederate recruiting poster. It is entirely directed to the threat of invasion.
As I’ve stated earlier, the War was ultimately about slavery. But if you ask why the typical Confederate soldier fought, you get a different answer. As this poster demonstrates, they fought, as they understood the matter, to defend their homeland.
It’s a yes-and-no situation.
Most southern manpower simply would not enlist without conscription - the South started running low almost before the war started and would have collapsed in 1863 sans conscription. While desertion was a pain for the North, it was crippling for the South.
The immediate military need was defense against the North, but that was also a political judgement. There were a lot of Southern unionists, and many more who might be sympathetic but who were not prepared to fight for it.
The hard core of the army, the group which enlisted early, were also hard-core states-righters, men of above-average income and social standing, and who had a deep belief in black inferiority, having created and sustained that belief.
A belief in black inferiority had nothing to do with the reasons for enlistment for most Confederate soldiers. What the hell did some cracker from the hills of north Georgia care about alleged black inferiority? He sure wasn’t going to war over that idea. Please show me one recruiting poster that says “We must establish the superiority of the white race!”
Yes, it did, because the South started it and the South went to war over slavery.
I think it’s more accurate to say the South seceded over slavery, and went to war over sovereignty.
As you so… elequently put it, “crackes from the hills of north Georgia” did not enlist until forced to do so by consciroption, hence the Confederates running out of men in early 1862. Early recruits were, as I said, of high social standing and most defintiely no unaware of politics. They were from politically-involved families and most definitely understood that the entire point of seccession was to guarrantee slavery.
Edit: Looking at your second post there, I would say there’s little difference in practice. The basic fact is that the South was prepared to use violence to defend slavery, even when it wasn’t being attacked. Secession was explicitly a tool to make that defense possible. Not for nothing were Wide-Awakes already forming before secession.
Not if you read the new constitutions of the states that seceded. Or the Cornerstone Speech.
That’s simply not true. A number of volunteer units formed in north Georgia in 1861 and 1862.
I’m not sure how you think these prove your point. As I said, the states seceded so they could preserve slavery.
I think it’s more accurate to say the the South seceded over slavery and the North went to war over secession. The war, from the North’s perspective, became more and more about slavery over time, but it wasn’t so much so at the start.
If the Cubans had a problem with Guantanamo and they warned us to desert the base, and we didn’t , and they attacked I would be defending the Cubans.
So countrys have the right to have a base on foreign soil? Or in foreign harbors? Queer analysis, really queer analysis.
If the other country invites them to build a base there, yes. And if they change their mind later on, they don’t get to keep everything in the base. We call that “stealing.”
Building the base was a sunk cost at that point and the Union had no responsibility to defend the harbor any longer, so why didn’t they just abandon it?
Probably because they wanted to instigate a war.
Because it was their property. They paid for it, they built it, they owned it. Why should they give it away to a pack of thieves?
Note, also, that Fort Sumter is just the biggest and best example of Southern banditry. Throughout the South, Federal property, from land, to equipment, to straight-up cash money, was seized by the Confederate government without cause. You can argue that people have a natural right to secession, but in exercising that right, they did enormous violence (even before the shooting started) to the rights of the North by appropriating their property. If the South wanted out, they could have tried to negotiate a settlement that would equitably disentangle Northern interests from Southern territory. They didn’t even bother to try, and decided instead to take what they wanted at gunpoint.
Note that you jsut moved from a (poor) legal) argument to an argument on rpacticality. If the latter becomes necessary for your stance, the former must be assuemd to be insufficient. And then of course you make rather silly accusations.
I never said they were above reproach. I said they could secede.
I’m not trying to make an argument on practicality, I asked a question and gave wild speculation, just trying to join in with the spirit of the thread.
Because he’d been taught from childhood that that was the central, most important fact in life. Every Sunday he went to church and was preached at about the inferiority of blacks and how slavery was the will of God; and that’s pretty much all church preached to him about. People who traveled North expressed surprise that the Bible touched on subjects other than slavery. The South by the time of the Civil War was a narrow, warped society dedicated to protecting and promoting slavery and almost nothing else; everything else was subsumed into that one fixation.
Spot on!