Thanks for the links.
Is this a joke? You don’t see the difference between chattel slavery and voluntary paid labor under admittedly very poor working conditions? Slaves were abused and treated as property, viewed as inferior, and deprived of all basic rights. Although conditions for coal miners were bad, they were paid, had freedom of movement, and had largely unionized by the turn of the 20th century. There is plenty of moral difference, but if you really can’t see that, I’m not sure what to tell you.
Sounds exactly like slavery.
This is too personal for Great Debates. Please attack the arguments without attacking the person making them.
Except that slavery was a legal status, authorized and recognized by government and requiring government enforcement.
Anyone with sufficient force and insufficient humanity could kidnap or entrap laborers for his farm. It happens occassionally to this day in this country. :eek: What makes that not-slavery now, and what made slavery slavery then, is what happens when an unpaid farm worker guarded by armed men manages to escape a private farm.* Then, he would have been dragged back there by the sheriff or by federal marshals. Now, he wouldn’t be.
Slavery doesn’t exist without government sanction and thus cannot be completely eliminated without government action, if only a repeal law that relieves law enforcement of any duty to return escaped slaves.
*In contrast to prison farms staffed by duly-convicted prisoners.
I’m a “born and raised” southerner. All my peeps all the way back to jolly ole England are/were southerners. Deep South - Georgia and Carolinas. I have never met anyone that resented having slavery ownership rights revoked. Not even close.
The destruction of the South was nothing as compared to the destruction of Germany in WW II. Does Dresden ring a bell? And I’m so sorry the North was mean to a region full of traitors.
If you visit Berlin today, you will see the Holocaust Museum in the very center of the city, just steps from the Brandenburg Gate, with a stunning sculpture above ground and a fine and heart-rending museum below ground, one that focuses on the people who suffer. This site is also where the Bunker was - that gets a tiny sign in basically a patch of dirt.
If the South were like Germany, no states would raise the battle flag, only a fringe of loonies would fly it on their trucks, and there would be a large and well maintained museum of slavery in Richmond, giving the stories of the suffering of the slaves.
The colonies wanted more sovereignty from Britain.
The South wanted more sovereignty from the Union.
The difference is the colonies won, while the South lost.
If the colonies had lost, the sentiment for more sovereignty from Britain wouldn’t have faded.
Just because the South lost, there is no reason that desire for more sovereignty from the Union will fade.
I believe the US was founded on such a principal. All men are created equal was their declaration while still having slaves and still enforcing unfair concessions from the natives. So there is no contradiction, the US was founded only for the rights of while people, blacks and Native Americans were not really included.
With such a belief system the US colonists felt justified breaking away from England and forming their own country. There should be no lesser expectation from any part of the US that sees the same level of oppression and unjust government.
Good point
Of course it would have. The Loyalists would have ended up running things instead of fleeing to Canada.
My ancestors did not start the war. I don’t know if any of my ancestors owned slaves nor do you. I don’t own a confederate battle banner; I’ve never owned such a banner nor have i ever flown or displayed such a banner and I don’t give a damn how many people call it the confederate flag. The fact is that it isn’t or wasn’t the confederate flag and saying it’s okay to call it that because a lot of people do simply proves that a lot of people don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Personally, I am over it. You and your ilk are not.
What’s the difference in a law enacted by Washington versus a law enacted in Albany? Does anyone really think that a state law is better than a federal law just because of where it originated? How is a state any more self-government than a country?
To me, everyone who’s crying for states rights is just upset because their political faction isn’t in power at the national level. Let them gain power over the federal government and they’ll drop the states rights platform in a heartbeat.
While the war was undoubtedly about slavery in part, that doesn’t mean that it was just about slavery, or even mainly about slavery. Though it’s not hard to see why it would get the most attention. The fact is that there were questions about how much power the federal government had over the states long before the war, and having nothing to do with slavery. In northern Georgia, in the late 1820s, if I recall correctly, war almost happened due to Georgians wanting to mine for gold/silver in the western part of the state, but the U.S. had told the Cherokees that there land was off limits to whites. Naturally, sadly, the Cherokee came out on the losing end of that.
The larger point is that one can hold that states’ rights were an important and noble issue and that slavery was a disgusting part of our history. From what I’ve read, most southerners didn’t even own slaves, but they didn’t want the feds to be able to tell them what they could and could not do. Regardless, if it took that horrific war to end the vile practice, so be it. Even if states’ rights took a big hit.
Though, of course, it was about slavery and nothing else, every serious historian supports this, and denying this is itself a form of apologism for slavery/the Confederacy/present-day racism, on par with creationism in both its igorance of academic consensus among qualified people and in the ridiculous motivations for making the denial (also, usually believed in by the same people).
The south wanted more control over the Union. Abolition was still a long way off at the start of the Civil War. What ticked off the South was the thought that they could not force the Northern states to return slaves. The fact that Northern states wanted to make all slaves who entered their territory free a much more immediate issue than the the possibility of abolishing slavery.
The South dominated the federal government for much of the first 100 years. The election of Lincoln was significant to the South not because of what Lincoln stood for, but because he was elected without a single Southern elector. This did not mean abolish around the corner as it would be long time before there were enough free states to constitute 3/4 of all states as would be required for a new Amendment. But it would only take a few judges appointed to the Supreme Court to overturn Dredd Scott.
Except that the Southerners did not support more states rights. They explicitly wanted to curtail them. The only state right they support was one that was not threatened. That being the right to own slaves. The Confederate Constitution did not support states rights and general states rights were not listed as a cause in any declaration of secession that I am aware of.
The states right issue is a post Reconstruction justification.
Check out the CSA Constitution. It gave more power to the CSA federal government than the US.
One that stands out is that it expressly forbidding laws restricting or impairing the right to own slaves (Article 1, section 9.4).
And also explicitly requires that new states MUST allow and preserve slavery as it existed in the rest of the CSA (Article 4, Section 3.3).
And actually, it has an entire section devoted to rights DENIED individual states (Article 1, Section 10).
Otherwise, it’s very much like the US Constitution. In other words, states’ rights didn’t seem to pre-occupy them very much. It’s basically the same federal form of government from the US with an explicit acceptance of slavery. Even if a state wanted to join the CSA without slavery, it would not be allowed to do so. How is that States’ Rights?
Let me be another person who strongly disagrees with you. While a miner’s life may indeed suck he has hope that he–or his children–will have a better life. Miners were allowed to get an education and learn to read. If they were lucky enough to find a better opportunity they were (usually) free to grab it.
A slave had almost no hope, outside of insurrection. A scant few might earn their freedom or be released when their master died but that was largely outside of their control (and they always had to worry about it being revoked). It was generally illegal to learn to read and write and every part of one’s life could be controlled, including who you married and had children with. Slaves were routinely separated from their families. If you can’t see a moral difference between the two then you lack any imagination whatsoever to put yourself in other’s shoes.
Sounds like you’re not a member of the group being addressed in this “pointless” thread, then, and have nothing in particular to contribute, nor any reason to speak on their behalf.
The ultimate tendency of that thinking is county autonomy, then village autonomy, then individual/family autonomy to the point of anarchism – “Every yard a kingdom! Every child and dog a serf!”* – which might have been the whole point all along. But you should not argue in that direction unless you are prepared to defend anarchism as such.
- Strictly speaking, this is a motto of patriopsychotic anarchomaterialism. Praise “Bob”!
They did if they were Southerners.