IVORYBILL –
It can’t be beside the point: the North’s hands were just as dirty from participating in the slave economy as were the South’s at the time the war started.
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Obviously untrue. The North did not have slavery at the time the war started; the South did. Therefore, their hands can only be deemed to be “just as dirty” if you (a) directly equate past wrongs with present ones; (b) directly equate indirect profit from wrongful actions with the wrongful actions themselves; and © totally discount the evolution of Northern sensibilities from considering slavery to be distasteful but tolerable to considering it to be intolerable at any price.
Yet surely you see that the North was apparently willing to sacrifice whatever stake it had in the “maintenance of the economic power of slavery in the United States” rather than continue with the Intolerable Institution. The South refused to do so, until forced to at the point of a sword. This, of course, is not surprising: The South’s economy was agrarian and largely slave-based; the North’s was not. The North could afford and absorb whatever negative economic impact would inure with national abolition; the South felt it could not.
I agree that the treatment should be even-handed; I disagree that it has not been to date, at least in this discussion.
Well, take a moment to calm down.
Of course, I never said this. I have said that slavery was THE overriding factor behind the Civil War, and the ONE factor without which it is probable that the would would not have occurred. And spare me the “Late Unpleasantness,” which smacks to me again of Southern revisionism. Let’s call a spade a spade: It was a war, and by far the worst war our country has ever experienced in terms of societal impact and sheer number of casualties.
“Power” is a theoretical cause that merely begs the question: Power to do what? So are “self-determination” or “autonomy” or whatever label you want to put on the concept of “the unfettered ability to decide whether or not to own slaves.” “Tariff” was not an issue sufficient to start the war, as is clearly illustrated by the fact that it didn’t start the war. “Just plain mad over hypocricy” is mere semantical squishiness, since it doesn’t even say what hypocrisy you’re referring to.
No, they would probably say “self-determination” or “autonomy” or “states’ rights” or “those bastard Yankees can’t tell uswhat to do” – again artificially removing the actual cause from the theoretical cause. The actual cause, of course, was that the exercise of self-determination or autonomy or states’ rights (or whatever you want to call it) lead inevitably back to the South’s desire to retain the institution of slavery, and to not be told by the North that they could not do so. It all comes back to slavery.
Well, I’ll leave you to argue that out with people who care about NBF, which I frankly do not. However, I continue to fail to see the value in continuing to venerate a person who was a lousy human being and who, even if a great general, by your own admission “played a minor role strategically.”
I would be happy to treat Sherman with similar ire, just as soon as I hear of anyone wanting to erect new monuments to him, or place his picture on a racist t-shirt or flag, or have evidence that he single-handedly started one of the most destructive and vicious racist organizations to ever plague our country.
Oh, I don’t know. That wasn’t the tone of my posts. It wasn’t the tone of GADARENE’S. I frankly don’t have the inclination to review the entire thread for “tone.” (And you had every right to revive it, but the whole thing isn’t fresh in my mind.)
My personal beef is with modern Southern apologists who want to revive the “romance” of the antebellum period, nicely sanitizing or out-right ignoring the existence of slavery, and who want to act as if the Civil War was primarily about some issue other than slavery. It just wasn’t. If you want to memorialize the old Lost Cause, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for some recognition that it was the old Misguided Lost Cause. It seems to me that if a society is only comfortable remembering a conflict by willfully ignoring large portions of what motivated it – and this is what I see in Southerners who hark back to those halcyon days of yore when women wore hoop skirts and men carried swords (if only for show) and the darkies were gay – then that society should not be surprised to find that others are baffled by the selective way they choose to “honor” the past.
It is the nature of a civil war that it is fought on native soil. And if by “we” you mean Southerners, then you are simply incorrect. Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania. And Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii.
There is little to indicate that a conditional surrender would have made any difference in how the war played out, or in how the South felt in its aftermath.
This again seems to me to be the natural result of having lost a civil war. And if you consider these to be bad things to have happened – as you apparently do – why would you (not you personally, but some Southerners) persist in remembering and venerating them? What possible constructive use is it to recall perceived wrongs inflicted on your family 140 years ago? The Serbs do that, you know – remember a conflict with the Croats that occured some 700 years ago – and look how much better off they are for having such long memories.
