[SIDEBAR]I want to know how you got such long poll options.
Every time I have tried to do a poll I had to edit the options way down because I ran afoul of the length limit (I forget how many characters it is). [/SIDEBAR]
Oh, yes, I voted #5 but also there was a little truth in #3.
I hit the limit and had to keep trimming words off the options in the poll until I could post successfully. You’ll notice the poll options don’t exactly match word for word with the options in the post as I was over the limit on 3 of them.
You do realize that there is still slavery in the world?
And?
I voted for #1, because that is probably closest to my personal feelings, but there is at least some truth in all of the options, even #6. I say that because no one can point to any part of the constitution that prohibits secession, the post hoc Texas v. White decision of the Supreme Court notwithstanding.
Whether secession was constitutional may be contested, but waging war against the US is treason and has been since 1787. According to Article III, sec 3 of the US Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them." The first shot was fired by the Confederates. From that moment on, the South was committing treason.
There is no honor in fighting for a dishonorable cause. I can forgive those who committed treason against the US, but I can’t call them honorable. Mistaken, maybe, human, sure, but not honorable.
Idk but growing up in Ohio, it always seemed rather odd finding things that honored the Confederacy in the north.
Particularly Morgan county, with it’s high school team being Morgan raiders.
New York, Baltimore, all kinds of places.
So even as a child it seemed odd to venerate our enemy. Then again, we honor quite a lot of natives who took up arms against us as well.
Since then I’ve come to understand our goal was simply to keep them united with us, they weren’t our enemy and in the case of the natives the US had a love/hate relationship from day 1.
Seems a common thing we do when our “enemy” is domestic. We wouldn’t have Nazi memorials, but we might if they had lived here. Even the brittish who fought the revolution we don’t memorialize. Off battlefield much of the “enemies” on either side of the civil war were often treated essentially just like anyone else. Morgan’s men just kind of hung out In Mcconnelsville , somewhat welcomed …pows on either side would roam the towns like locals and return to pow camps in the beginning.
An odd sort of dichotomy indeed.
The Confederates may have finally coalesced to secede on the basis of slavery, so call them the bad guys, that’s fine.
As far as “the good guys won” that’s laughable. The north didn’t go into it to stop slavery they went into it to keep the south in the fold and keep them supplying raw materials and agricultural goods to the nation’s wealth.
New York was a slave state 20-30 years before that and when they drafted New Yorkers for the union army they hung blacks in the street and burned down a black orphanage because they blamed them for the war.
Only 2 percent of northerners actually supported abolition.
Slavery ended in the north largely for reasons other than moral objection.
Kind of a funny remnant to mention… I know a couple who are named Robert Lee and Elizabeth Freeman.
Basically I figure we are past the time where memorializing these people is necessary to the nation’s unity so if people find them offensive then good riddance to the statues and memorials.
I mean, there’s still legal slavery in the US, we’re just more subtle about it. Prison labor. It’s even POC-coded what with that whole “POC are far more likely to be convinced of crimes” thing. We’ve never fully escaped our white supremacist roots.
Which isn’t to say it’s not good we abolished chattel slavery. Just… it’s shortsighted to think “yay us, the good guys won!” Even among the Union, there was a not uncommon sentiment that was essentially “well, slavery is inhumane but they don’t really belong here so we should be ship the liberated black people back to Africa”. Basically substituting black subjugation with white ethnonationalism.
The Confederacy was one of the most purely evil causes in human history; worse than the Nazis in my opinion. It was an abomination, and anyone who fought for it or supported it deserves nothing but condemnation.
That’s how it should be “viewed by modern Americans”.
To be clear, the sentiment that lead to the American Colonization Society (and ultimately Liberia) was complex, and people had different motivations, from slaveowners trying to “repatriate” freemen to prevent them from sowing dissent among slaves, to crypto (or not-so-crypto)-ethnonationalists, to people who probably simply believed the US’ history with slavery was too tainted to give black people a good chance. There was wide disagreement with this sentiment (especially among freemen themselves), but also among white people who genuinely saw black people as equals and welcomed them. I’m not trying to paint the entirety of the Union or all repatriation advocates as equally good/bad or holding identical views, but I do think it’s important to note even the “good guy” Union had deeply rooted threads of white supremacy in it.
I was just pointing out that calling slave owing southerners dinosaurs for not embracing abolition isn’t an accurate choice of words because slavery still exists and dinosaurs don’t.
I’ve never been able to get poll questions nearly that long. I wonder if they have changed the limit lately?
So who were the good guys in that war?
Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware all had legal slavery when the war began; New Jersey still had a few “apprentices for life.” Those five states contributed 320,000 troops to the Union Army. For that matter, General Ulysses S. Grant had spent the years before the war managing a slave plantation in Missouri.
While the Peculiar Institution was certainly a driving force behind the Civil War, and for the landed elite who ruled the Confederacy probably THE single most important reason, it wasn’t the only reason that led poor men from the hills of Tennessee or the frontiers of Texas to don the grey. Perhaps a quarter of the Confederate troops owned slaves themselves or came from slave-owning families; others certainly grew up around and benefited from slavery, but still others came from communities where slavery was rare to nonexistent. A complex tangle of loyalty, slavery, family, patriotism, politics, and religion brought men into both armies, and I don’t think it reasonable to simply say “Us good, them bad.”
Every war has bad guys, but not every war has good guys. That said, the side that is fighting against slavery, or at least fighting for reasons unrelated to slavery, is morally far superior to the side that is fighting for slavery.
And the only thing that Confederate soldiers were loyal to was the principle of slavery. They weren’t loyal to their nation, and they weren’t loyal to their states.
The Supremacy Clause has been in there right since the beginning
Well said.
I’ve always been perplexed by the belief the North overwhelmingly loved and embraced African-Americans.
Racism existed throughout this country.
We’ve discussed segregation in the Negro Motorist Green Book thread in Mundane. Segregation wasn’t exclusive to the South.
Anyone who thinks that it was mainly about States Rights is some combination of delusional and mentally challenged.
If I engage you, are we going to get into a debate about what conditions constitute slavery? Because according to some, slavery is alive and well in the USA and I’m not prepared to pick those sorts of nits. I lack the precision to participate effectively in GD. Our civil war started because some people wanted, as individuals, to own other people. Like I own my sofa. Now, that was considered totes cool 2000+ years ago–of course people own people, WTF?; and considerably less so 400 years ago. 150 years ago most of The West, at least, considered the practice unfashionable. Perhaps dinosaur was not the perfect metaphor because, as you point out, the practice is not extinct. But in 1860 Western Culture, it was about as acceptable as, well, blackface in 2019 USA. Sure it’s still there, but it is remarkably unpopular. And just for brownie points I’m struggling to find a country today that has not, officially at least, outlawed the practice.
ETA: I for one strongly support the shorthand “Peculiar Institution” for reference to the USA slavery wart. I didn’t even know that was a thing. Shows what an intellectual heavy I am.
I wasn’t even thinking of the US. I am aware of some American “under the table” type stuff, prisoner work, people using illegal alien house labor for basically room and board, pimps and that sort of thing. But that’s all illegal.
I was thinking more of places where slavery is accepted. Buyers and sellers of human beings in middle eastern and certain African countries. Or places in Asia where debt is handed down generation after generation. Or sex slavery/human trafficking where prostitution is legal. Or sweatshops where there is netting around the buildings to catch people trying to jump to their deaths.