Uhm… cite?
White society as a whole was pretty convinced of the inferiority of the blacks at this time, let’s be fair. Society as a whole was warped. That’s what happens when you have an immoral (or amoral, I don’t know which one applied to the majority) institution like slavery. You have people out there trying to justify it because it is so profitable. Even science wasn’t immune to this. The Union nearly passed an amendment reinforcing the right to own slaves.
I’m not defending slavery, but there is a picture being painted in this thread of a black and white situation, while in reality there was a lot of gray.
That’s as may be. The South was, however, wrong about seccession on moral, legal, and practical grounds.
The South wanted to keep owning slaves.
Some of them still do. Most of them are the ones that want to keep their flag alive and well.
It’s a question on how to consider human beings as trash or not.
This is utter nonsense.
First of all, if you knew anything about north Georgia, you would know that there are few black people there. This is because there were few slaves there before the war. It is hilly terrain, and very little of it was suited to large plantations.
So the hypothetical cracker from north Georgia would have little investment in the idea that blacks were inferior. Much less would he go to war over the notion. And your idea that preachers there spent any time advocating for the inferiority of a race whose faces were seldom seen in that region is ludicrous.
And yet, north Georgia did raise many volunteer regiments for the Confederacy. Why did they fight?
We really don’t need to speculate about why the Southern foot soldier went to war. I already linked one 1861 recruiting poster from Alabama. The poster does not appeal to race. It calls on volunteers to defend the state from invasion.
But since we are talking about north Georgia, let’s look at recruiting materials for Smith’s Legion, which was raised in Union County, in north Georgia. Here’s some of the pertinent language from that recruiting pitch:
No appeal to race. No appeal to preserve slavery. As with the Alabama recruiting poster, the appeal is to sovereignty, and defense of the state.
Der Trihs, if you wish to discuss the motivations of the common foot soldier, please address the actual evidence rather than offering us your wild speculations on the motives of those involved.
Yeah, I’ve seen everything in Confederate recruiting posters from, “The Yankees want to rape our women”, to “Hey, we’ll pay you cash!”, to “You’re going to be drafted anyway, so might as well join up!”, to Forrest’s cheerful “Come on, boys, if you want a heap of fun and kill some Yankees”.
Even the ones I’ve seen that reference slavery do so as an additional thing, like “Men of Virginia, to the rescue! Your soil has been invaded by your Abolition foes, and we call upon you to rally at once and drive them back!” Most of it is along that line. I’m not saying you didn’t find direct appeals to defense of slavery in Confederate recruiting posters. You might well have done so, and I’d like to see them, but for the most part, I didn’t.
You really only find big slavery references in US recruiting posters later in the war that are trying to black recruits. Stuff like “Join us and end slavery”, “Join us and set the slaves free”, “Lincoln set the slaves free, so join up and show you deserve to be free”, that sort of thing.
This is it exactly. WillFarnaby’s later claim that
is ridiculous.
When leaders of South Carolina met to discuss secession, they were meeting in the United States. They were meeting to plan an action that would make the federal government incapable of carrying out its required duties. That’s by definition an illegal conspiracy. South Carolina had signed on to the federal constitution less than a century earlier, and these men planned treachery against the promises of their forefathers.
Since they were planning a method to violate the federal constitution (and by extension South Carolina law, since South Carolina had signed on to the federal constitution), their actions were illegal, which means they were legally invalid. So the secession may have happened, but it never happened legally.
If somehow they’d found a way to get out of the Constitution–say, pushing through an amendment to the constitution that allowed an exit–then they might have seceded legally, at which point the constitution wouldn’t have applied to them.
But since they never seceded legally, they never seceded, and the constitution never stopped applying to them.
Exapno Mapcase, one of us is from a state that promoted slavery for two hundred years. And the other is still being victimized by the obsession with States’ Rights. Of course the Civil War was about slavery. But States’ Rights has never stopped being an issue in the South. Haven’t you noticed the states trying to change Roe v. Wade a state at a time? And haven’t you noticed the effort to cut back on the privilege of voting for the poor, ethnic groups, college students, and the elderly – all by changing state laws state by state? I wouldn’t be able to vote in elections if I didn’t already have a passport! What about the rights of Hispanics in Arizona? What about the states that do away with elected officials and just appoint a “town manager” to run things. That is happening in Michigan.
Don’t just shrug off States’ Rights as a non relevant issue during and after the Civil War. It was and is real and hideous.
Saying that my grandfather fought in the Civil War for slavery is like saying that women and men signed up to take revenge on Iraq for 9/11. Young people will fight for their homeland even if they don’t know or understand what the issue is. Tell them they’re fighting for FREEDOM and they will give their lives.
Neither my grandfather nor his older brothers owned slaves. My grandfather wanted to be with his brothers. His brothers wanted to fight more likely than not, because that’s where the action was. Don’t you see that kind of thinking all of the time? They fight for a side because of where they were brought up.
Fighting against slavery is about the only worthy cause in all of the Civil War. So it’s easy to be proud of what the Union did. But Northerners are quick to forget how much longer most of their states were slave states.
And one never knows how many of the Confederate veterans lived to regret fighting on the side of slavery and states’ rights. And few people hear about the extreme cruelty of Camp Douglas in Illinois. Torture is torture. And all of those who fought for the Confederacy are dead.
Not all of their children have perpetuated bigotry.
As opposed to all those living who fought for the Union?
(It would be nice to provide a link or to quote the post to which you are responding. It appears to have been a post from over a week ago on the first page of the thread. And while “states rights” has been used in various ways to promote various arguments over the years, only slavery has actually prompted anyone to go to war.)
That’s not really true. Or, more to say, it’s true, but only trivially true. If you compare Massachusetts to Arkansas, Massachusetts had slavery for longer than Tennessee (150 years vs 70), but Massachusetts was settled in the 1620s, and Tennessee was settled in the 1790s. Massachusetts had already abolished slavery by the time the first settlers from Virginia and North Carolina were bringing their slaves in.
You have to compare like to like…compare Massachusetts (settled in 1620) to Virginia (settled in 1607), and Virginia had slaves longer. Compare Tennessee (settled in 1790) and Ohio (settled in 1785), and Tennessee had slaves longer than Ohio, which really never had them.
I was responding to the title of the thread: Civil War Was Not Over Slavery?
Pardon me. I forgot that you knew all personal and private motives of the soldiers while I know only what my grandfather and uncles told my father. The rest is just hearsay from history classes at these inferior Southern schools where we have access to only Southern-bred and educated professors.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about that rule that says I have to mention the Union troops every time I mention the Confederates. I thought that paying them due respect in the paragraph before that one would be sufficient. I have never defended the Confederates, but that is not quite good enough either…It is my tainted blood.
Captain Amazing, you are right that it is not fair to lump all Northerners into the same category. I can’t even say that most Yanks are forgetful of the role of slavery in the North. But you would be surprised at how many times I’ve seen people refer to the Southern states as “the slave states.”
I was aware that Virginia had slaves about as long as New York did and that we didn’t have slaves as long in Tennessee because we weren’t even settled here. Southern coastal areas had slaves for a long time. We don’t really disagree.
Sometimes I get so infuriated when someone who should know better (Chris Matthews, for example) talks as if the South has nothing but trouble-makers from the Right. He does nothing but shame us. I wish he had noticed that Nashville supported Obama in 2008. That doesn’t fit the stereotype, does it? Oh, well. He and Bill Maher are a little bigoted about Southerners. I mustn’t do the same to the Yanks.
Yet you specifically addressed Exapno Mapcase who had posted on several different occasions with separate discussion points.
Now, you are just being silly. As you have so stridently noted, the topic of the thread is Civil War Was Not Over Slavery?. The personal motivations of the various individuals for choosing to participate in a war, once it has begun, do not change the reasons the led to the war commencing. (And if you are going to make an issue about the phrase “prompted anyone to go to war,” I will simply note that you are spinning the phrase you quoted to be about personal motivations while the phrase was pretty clearly posted as a description of the casus belli, rather than those personal motivations.
Getting huffy about family recollections or Southern scholarship is simply a hijack since I have expressed no thoughts on the one or contempt for the other.
Oh, feel free to be as bigoted as they are–and receive the same respect for your actions.
Slavery, in the slave holding states, wasn’t in danger.
In what context? If you’re talking about Bleeding Kansas or the 1860 Presidential election–i.e., the run-up to the Civil War–well, that’s pretty much the standard terminology. The Southerners of the day seem to have preferred “slave-holding states”, but even they themselves sometimes slipped up and not only referred to themselves as the “slave states” but to those Other People as the “free states” (“The hostility to this institution [of slavery]…refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union…It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union”.)
Generally, people in the slave states–I mean, the slave-holding states–preferred to refer to the rest of the U.S. as the “non-slave-holding states”. You’ve kind of lost the propaganda war if you openly admit you’re fighting against “the Free States”.
Captain Amazing didn’t say anything about not lumping all Northerners into the same category.
I think it’s a stretch to assume that the real reasons people fought are exactly congruent to the recruiting posters other people put up.
I recently met someone a lot like our dear Mr. Farnaby. There was a civil war show around here. Now, the ethusaists in costume were all polite and to my knowledge not about to discuss events. This being Knoxville, we no doubt had way more people descended from Union sodlers than Confederate. Among the detailed desctriptions of civil war medicine, and the remnants of a small but tough civil war fort, was one gentleman who kept repeating some damn nonsense.
In addition to claiming Grant a was “butcher” (an old but very stupid canard), he claimed the war was and repeated some of the arguments that **Will Farnaby **used, though no reference ot the 5th Amendment. In fact, he brought it up entirely on his own, and I simply politely said I disagreed but didn’t care to argue. When he started talking damn nonsense about the Constitution, however, I pointed out that the “More Perfect Union” as built atop the Articles of Confederation. Turns out he didn’t even know that the phrase was in the Constitution… although he kept a Civil-War-era copy right with him!
He kept at it and kept arguing even as I was walking away. I expect he feels he won, merely because I was unwilling to argue at a public event.
Less of a stretch than imposing our own ideas about their motivations 150 years after the fact.