I saw it, I would like to read more of the Judge’s opinions, but it sounds like revisionist history. I know I’m not adding anything to the conversation by saying that, but meh.
Also, I enjoyed point 2 of this cracked article.
The south never had a chance. They had about 5.6 million free people and 3.5 million slaves. The north had 22 million free people and half a million slaves. The north had a much higher GDP, twice as many soldiers (despite only pulling half as many out of the free population), better diplomatic ties (no other nation even recognized the confederacy). Yay us, this is one of the handful of reasons I’m proud of my home state (which fought in the union).
The real question is why are the right wingers rewriting history about this now. Was slavery on the way out in the 19th century? Yes. Many nations (as well as virtually every northern state) voluntarily abolished slavery in the first half of the 19th century. But the south’s economy worked with slavery, and their culture promoted it. After slavery was abolished the south just re-instituted different forms as sharecropping, vagrancy laws, etc.
The real question is when would the south have voluntarily abolished slavery if it had not been forced on them? I would guess the early 20th century. Keep in mind that a lot of mideastern nations didn’t abolish slavery until the 20th century. So that practice did (and does still) exist even though it is de jure illegal in most places.
Well . . . The South never had a chance so long as the Union was determined to win. But, remember, George Washington won the American Revolution just by keeping the war going and going and going until the British lost the political will to keep fighting it – and they could have kept fighting it if they wanted to, even after Yorktown. Lee might conceivably have done that, public opinion in the North was always divided on the war.
Some people have believed this stuff for decades. What’s new, I think, is that their views are getting more popular as the Republican Party moves further and further to the right. The right is as hostile to civil rights and government as it has been in maybe 40 or 50 years, so they need a view of history that says government intervention in anything at any point is bad and unnecessary. So here you have a “libertarian” view that says slavery was bad, but it would have gone away peacefully on its own and greedy, tariff-mad Lincoln chose war to dominate white people in the South. It’s a proxy for what they’re saying about health insurance, and also what they’re saying about voting rights and all sorts of other rights as they work to eliminate all the laws protecting them.
Once they could buy John Deere, they would figure out that they were throwing money away keeping many slaves.
Whether they would have taught the remaining to drive a tractor is another question.
And then the only things keeping slavery alive would have been the remaining economic niches plus white supremacy and emulation of the very rich… all of which are extremely powerful.
People may seek out viewpoints from the other side, and that’s good, but they probably seek out the most extreme of them, or the loudest. That’s not going to help either side. The middle - where convincing and compromising happens - gets lost.
You don’t give up about something that happened 150 years ago, do you?
I don’t understand “remaining economic niches” or “emulation of the very rich”, although I presume “white supremacy” means kicking African Americans around. That was done for quite a while after the civil war.
If the Civil War had not happened then I suspect slavery levels would have dropped dramatically during the Boll Weevil infestations of the early 20th century. This would not have been any altruism on the part of the Southerners, but rather more a bunch of plantation owners going bankrupt, far too fixed in their ways to change crops, and just deciding to cut losses by not feeding all those mouths.
I suspect a lot of now freed slaves may well have starved to death in the process.
The South attracted a lot of industry, like textile mills, with good access to raw materials and low wages. Think of what would have happened if the plantation owners sunk their money into factories and moved their slaves into them to work even more cheaply than immigrants. Then we’d have a kind of minimum wage argument - free and pay the slaves, but you’ll have to pay more for your knickers.
Yeah, I’ve heard from those Confederate apologists, growing up in Texas. But they were always a minority–most of us are relative newcomers whose people weren’t here yet. Among those whose families do go back that far–we’ve got plenty of outspoken folks whose ancestors were considered property. In school, we learned the basic history that Napolitano ignores.
He just doesn’t fit the pattern–some old fart droning on in a Foghorn Leghorn accent about The War of Northern Aggression. Napolitano is a new recruit. He doesn’t have the flimsy excuse of being brought up in a family looking back at imagined glories on the old Plantation. He lies for money & Jon Stewart was far more polite than I would have been.
