Could a city secede?
How about a county? A town? An individual? Did the constitution forbid it?
I would really like to know where you got all this information. MOST of the people in the southern states did NOT own slaves and many of them wouldn’t have had slaves if they had been given to them; it was all many of the poor southern farmers could do to support themselves; why would they add the burden of supporting and caring for a slave? I doubt very seriously that dreams of becoming a slave owners preoccupied many people at all and I doubt that Walter Scott’s novels served as a guide or moral code for anyone; people were smart enough, for the most part, to understand that those novels were works of fiction. The southern government didn’t restrict education in any sense; the fact was that most of the people in the south were agrarian and poorly educated to begin with. They couldn’t provide education to their children because the poor tykes were put to work scratching out a living as soon as they were big enough to wield a tool of some sort. And just as a nit pik, the expression is TOE the line and NOT Tow the line. I think you’ve either read Gone With The Wind or have seen the movie and thought it was a documentary.
And none of what I say is to be construed as being supportive of the institution of slavery.
I’ve mentioned a term I coined about this neverending debate and subject of irritation before:
Dixiephrenia- a cognitive dichotomy that requires post WW2 southerners to be willing to trash or defend their regional and family history at a moment’s notice and with equal elan. The defense is usually towards non-Southerners who want to paint all southerners as ignorant and racist, the attack is for fellow southerners who want to paint all southern history as sinned against and not sinning.
I’m a direct descendant of several slaveowners, at least one black slave, and of a lot of poor white farmers who owned slaves. While I haven’t placed a definite connection, my surname derives from an Irish family sold into slavery in the Caribbean under Cromwell, one of whom later immigrated to an area of Virginia where I’ve traced my direct ancestry to, so there’s possibly a descent there. I have neither pride nor shame in any of my lineages, I just acknowledge them. The majority of the southerners I’ve known (which is most of the people I’ve known) are the same way about the war, slavery, and all things related to Southern history- it’s trivia rather than obsession and most freely admit the evils of slavery while feeling no part of it regardless of the acts of their ancestors (if they happen to know who their ancestors were).
An odd, or cool, thing about reading history that I noticed when I was a kid: I’ve never been to Italy, but a book on the Roman empire, even a primary source (in English translation), is often far more familiar a landscape than a book on, say, the Battle of Chickamauga which occurred so recently the primary sources do not need to be translated, in a place a few hours from my home and where I’ve stood, and in a campaign which involved several of my ancestors (all of them Confederate privates whose serving in the CSA armies no more branded them as pro-slavery than Pope Benedict XVI’s serving in the Wehrmacht brands him pro-Holocaust). The antebellum nation was a strange and alien place that like our ancestors manages to have little or nothing in common with those alive today and yet is responsible for our being here.
I think most of the world’s annoyance if not its atrocities derive from the need for simple answers, and that’s as true of the Civil War as it is of religion as it is of global warming as it is of American involvement in other nations. Yes, slavery was evil, I’m going to take a real stand and say it out loud (or online), but it was legal, and it’s no more accurate to say that all slaveowners were evil than it is to say all slaves were moral. It’s unthinkable that a state should secede today, but at the time there were still veterans of the war in which Americans seceded from Great Britain (granted they were in their 90s or better and moving pretty slow, but they were alive- the Revolution was that recent). Slavery’s unthinkable to us today, but so is genocide- U.S. troops slaughtered Cheyenne women and children in Colorado and Oklahoma years after the Civil War began. It’s unthinkable that women should be denied the right to vote, but it was taken for granted then. This was the same land and the same language, many of the same buildings and houses are still lived in (I’ve lived in a couple of them), it’s the same bloodline, but while it has lessons to teach on human nature and the like, it’s ultimately a landscape as alien to us as the battlefields at Philippi or the Golden Horn and as such it CANNOT be discussed using our own moral gauges (gauges which, I might add, would condemn most northerners of the time, including Sherman [a virulent racist who had no problem whatever with slavery, hence probably the admittedly simplistic and erroneous boss in the OP’s characterization of him- genocidal is going a bit far, but he was by his own admissions a total bastard who wanted to scare the hell out of the civilians of the south).
Anyway, the abstract: you’re not going to convince people that history wasn’t what they think it wasn’t, but for the record it wasn’t what most people think it was (myself not excluded).
[The above was written under fire so please forgive sudden case changes and typos.]
[I’m Alexander H. Stephens, VP of the Confederacy, and I approved this post. And slavery.]
I weep for my southern brethren, who are misguided, as well as my yankee brethren, who are misguided, as well.
I personally abhor the very idea of slavery, and racism is a complete no-go for me. The Civil War was won by the Union, which was strengthened in the process. Viva la Union!
But there was some seriously fucked up shit going on on both sides of this conflict, and nobody in the North, excepting Quakers and a few other abolitionists (whom in today’s equivalent would be regarded as ultra liberals and shunned) liked or even gave a tinker’s dam about black people, called them niggers and remaining segregated, in historical timeframes, something like 5 minutes less than the South.
The vast, vast majority of Southerners didn’t own slaves, and for that matter, didn’t own enough land to even remotely justify their use. Most soldiers on both sides served because they were drafted, end of story. When the Civil War began, neither civil rights nor voting rights for blacks were stated as goals by the North. The only non-church-entity segment of the Northern population who gave a shit about slavery were the ones who wrongly thought they couldn’t hack the competition from slave labor. Slavery was on the way out, anyway, and the Civil War could have been avoided, had cooler heads prevailed. Unfortunately, in those days, the cooler heads had prctically no role in government.
What neither side finds convenient is that the Civil War was a big fat waste of a million lives that had little or nothing to do with the rich man’s pissing contest that started it.
So, to characterize Southerners as knuckle-dragging racists is only half right. Northerners were also knuckle-dragging racists who happened to have representatives who opposed the South’s secession, and that’s about it. It didn’t take much to start wars back then, apparently.
I get sick and tired of the constant portrayal of southerners as savages and the constant portrayal of northerners as angels who fought only to free the slaves; the majority of people on either side could not have cared less about slavery. The Union, God Bless It, couldn’t have fielded an army if they/it had not instituted a draft and the institution of that draft led to violent anti-draft riots throughout the union states; riots that were largely put down by the use of armed force, I.E., the Union Army. That says a lot, to me, of the eagerness to free the slaves exhibited by the majority of northerners. As if a draft wasn’t bad enough, one could, if wealthy enough, buy one’s way out of it and plenty of draftees did just that. For a paltry $100.00, IIRC, one could hire a substitute to serve in one’s place. It really was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.
Sherman would have made an excellent Roman Legionnaire; crucifixion would probably have been seen as right and proper by him.
On a Cub Scout trip to Gettysburg, my son and I stopped at a souvenir shop. He asked to buy an action figure of a soldier; I told him to get two. He picked out a ‘Billy Yank’ and was about to pick out a ‘Johnny Reb’, when he put it back. I asked him why.
“I didn’t want to buy a Bad Guy, Daddy.”
I then took 5 minutes to explain that the reason Gettysburg is remembered the way it is is because of the horror of war, not that one side was Good and one side was Bad. “Michael, when every building in 5 square miles has to drill fist-sized holes in the corners of the floors to drain off the spilled blood of the wounded, and even then it rarely gets lower than ankle-deep, civilized people capable of rational thought realize that War and Death on this sort of scale must never be waged or tolerated again.”
There was another customer in the shop; a woman from a few miles South of Gettysburg (which is actually not very far from the Mason-Dixon Line). She put down the item she was going to buy, let out a loud “Harrumph!” and stormed out of the store. The owner then walked up to me.
“Look, I’m sorry I caused your store to lose a sale, but I thought it was important to tell my son the truth about what happened here in Gettysburg…”
“Don’t worry,” she said in a calm tone. “We get Nuts like that one all the time.”
I come from family in the south who did own slaves–a smallish homestead with (IMS) two slaves to work it, in addition to the family. This is not something I brag of, but it is also something of which I am not particularly ashamed–it has nothing to do with the making of who I am or who my family is today. It was legal to do so, (although I think it was immoral to do so). It is just a footnote in our history. That is is waaay more than a footnote to the descendants of those two slaves is much more likely, and is therefore regrettable and regretted. If I had been alive then, perhaps I would have made other choices-who can say for sure?
I really don’t get the whole antebellum, Old South meme. For military history buffs, I can see that the battles were fascinating. Certainly it is subject deserving of serious study and debate. But this whole Confederate flag thing, and the Way of Life; the whole “Lee surrendered, I didn’t” stuff–what purpose does this serve? Regional identity? How about the local HS sports teams or the state uni’s? How about touting the natural beauty so much of the south has? How about the cuisine? Something, anything, rather than a bloody, horrid mess that destroyed so much and caused pain far into this century. I just don’t get it. My great aunts used to say things like, “well, Ginny (my mother) married a Yankee.” Oh, puleese. :rolleyes:
FTR, Atlanta was hardly a town at all when Sherman burned it.
Out of curiosity, are The NYC Draft Riots taught in school? (They occurred a week after Gettysburg, when several (no exact count exists) blacks were murdered by mobs and hundreds more were beaten and or burned out of their homes and churches.) For that matter, the race riots in Harlem and Chicago/Cicero well after Jim Crow, or that Central Park is built on slave cemeteries? While there are most definitely southerners who are simplistic and self-deluded about their history (particularly that fucking flag, which isn’t even one of the three - official -flags of the Confederacy) I’m with all above who express irritation with the Southern and non-Southern simplicists who see the war as Good v. Evil when neither the war nor race in America were ever simple or localized issues.
He didn’t really burn it, for that matter. The South did as much damage by firing the ammo deposits and depot when they withdrew; most of Sherman’s damage was caused with his shelling, but even after both Sherman and the Rebs had done their damage most of the city was still standing. (The most impressive thing Sherman did was completely evacuate the city of civilians.)
Today there are a handful- between three and twelve antebellum buildings in Atlanta (the variance depending on the count and on how you define “antebellum” and how you define “Atlanta”). The most often heard explanation for this lack of historical preservation is Sherman, but the truth is that the ones that didn’t fall down from age were torn down to build newer and bigger buildings, so you’re left with a city of 4 million with streets and plazas named after peachtrees where there are no peachtrees and after GWTW characters where there’s nothing anybody from that book would have recognized left standing. (That’d be a cool idea for a play- Scarlett falls through a timewarp and goes from 1872 Atlanta to a gay bar in midtown built on the site of Kennedy’s Lumber- but of course the Mitchell family would sue.)
Not if you were an Indian.
This is of course quite obviously false, since the Union DID field an Army without the draft, bringing the draft in only later in the war to replace the men who’d died, been wounded or run away from the army they’d been fielding for two years.
Look at it like this: If the draft had not been instituted, the Union couldn’t have fielded an army for the very reasons you laid out; had they relied on volunteers to free the slaves, they would have had to forget about it.
Of course you know, most of this antebellum preservation is maintained by enterprising people who no more believe in the virtues & romance of the Old South any more than the citizens of Roswell New Mexico believe in UFOs, right?
An odd thing that brought home to me how recent this strange landscape is: I’ve been doing genealogical research lately and I photocopied the will of an ancestor from Autauga County, Alabama. He was in his early 70s when he wrote the will in 1859 and bequeathes property (mostly slaves) to particular heirs then requests the estate be inventoried, sold, and divided equally among his wife (who was about 28) and his children. This is the (relevant to this post) portion of his will:
(He had an additional daughter with her and posthumously born twin sons after writing this will, but I digress.)
Anyway, Rebecca, who inherited Allen and Fanny and their children “and increase” and who was my mother’s [however many greats] aunt and her step-great-grandmother, attended my parents’ wedding in 1952. She was in her early 90s and to quote my mother “didn’t know where in the hell she was or who in the hell was getting married”, but it’s still bizarre that I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo and was a kid under Reagan and yet my parents wedding was attended by a former slaveowner. I knew several of Rebecca’s many children (they were the same age as my grandparents), the last surviving of whom only died a couple of years ago.
That can be also important to remember: while it may seem on par with Neanderthals and Black Plague and Cher’s youth, slavery and the Civil War are still in the living memory (meaning that the oldest people alive remember the people who lived through it as the old people from their youth). In a decade or so when the vast majority of the current oldest-generation still alive in great numbers in the south (the ones who were young adults in WW2 and middle aged during the late Civil Rights era) are gone it will be removed from Living Memory. It will be interesting to see if it remains as prominent a touchstone afterwards. (For me, Living Memory would date to around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries as that’s the oldest era I have first hand accounts of from the people who lived it.)
I enclose this inventory of my ancestor’s estate strictly as a “might be of interest” to people who like primary sources and are curious how slaves were valued as compared to other property. It’s very difficult to convert currency from this era (inventory was done in 1861) to our own currency, but roughly $1 then would equal about $20 now (or slightly more in Canadian dollars). The spacing may be off.
It’s fascinating, if only to me, at how much things cost at the time. (The estate inventory of another ancestor lists a lot of “ladie’s lace throat wear taken from old dresses, 4” at $8, or the price of a cow and a hog.)
You can also see that the least expensive slave, 63 year old Samuel, was more expensive than the most expensive of this man’s horses and was still as valuable as 50 cows or 83 hogs. That must have made him feel good about himself. :dubious:
Try reading for context before tossing off these little gems, and avoid truncating quotes to suit your fancy. What I said was
Clearly I was referring to the inane “Sherman was a genocidal killer” claim quoted in the OP.
The fact that they could not afford one does not mean they would not have gotten better alnd and slaves if they could have, and a vast number did. It was THE way to get ahead; scholarship, industry, mercanitlism, even public service or military service - these were all secondary to geting a plantation.
As I said, it was the way to get ahead, and what people stuck with. They could have done differently but chose not to. The Scott reference was an atempt to explain how the planter class controlled the public realm through influence, wealth, education, and leisure time - and saw themselves as the embodiment of chivalry. Nor was this some fictional amusement: some quite seriously suggested they were the modern-day incarnation of the English Cavaliers.
As a nitpick, notice which two letters happen to be next to eahc on the keyboard. Hmmm… W and E. Interesting, that.
:rolleyes: When in doubt, pretend the other poster just pulled it out of his ass. Always a good one. Maybe the TIME-Life series The Civil War, or Ken Burns’ documentaries, or James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. But hey, I disagree wht you, so I must be getting my info from Gone With the Wind. Maybe one day I’ll even see it.
Didn’t say it was.
The Constitution certainly doesn’t forbid an individual from “seceding”. People change their citizenship all the time. The Constitution doesn’t set any way for people to do it, but it is possible nonetheless.
Regards,
Shodan
In New York, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Draft Riots were taught. Until 1990 or so, the places where they shelled 7th Avenue could still be seen on the buildings of the City.
There were several areas of the south that remained loyal to the Union, most famously The Free State of Winston (County, Alabama), Scott County MS (later renamed Jeff Davis County as a deliberate insult), and basically most of central and southeastern Tennessee. Every Confederate state fielded Union troops and all but South Carolina fielded full Union regiments.
There were also many southerners (some of them slaveowners believe it or not) who were active in the underground railroad. Sadly, their bravery and heroism went unrecorded in the vast majority of cases as
1- before the war it would at minimum have seen them imprisoned for a long time and more likely would have seen them hanged
2- even after the war, it would have made it almost impossible to remain in an area because resentments still ran deep
Then there were cases like Dolly Madison’s father. He converted to the Quakers and became very abolitionist in his sympathies, freeing all of his slaves and moving north to work in slavery-free businesses. His investments failed and he went from being a wealthy Virginia farmer to a penniless and deeply in debt Pennsylvania businessman. Slave economy was like the Mafia- next to impossible to extricate yourself from once you were a practitioner and most practitioners were born into the system. (As renowned a man as Thomas Jefferson had to beg permission in his will for the six slaves he manumitted to be allowed to remain in the state; it was granted for him, but it was not at all pro-forma.)
To paraphrase a quote by Upton Sinclair, it is difficult for a man to understand something when his *income and property **depends upon him not understanding. This has seldom been more true than it was of slaveowners not “understanding” abolition, but it still has many reaches today. Poverty is probably second only to death and a long road trip with Gary Busey in the things people fear the most.
*Sinclair said salary rather than income and property