Ahh,
Warms my heart to see neo-confederate arguments so totally sodomized. 
It is particularly satisfying to have history explained so well to a neo-Confederate by Sampiro – who lives in Alabama.
I can appreciate jrodefeld’s earnestness and interest. And all of us can continue to learn. But reading from several sources over a long period of time should be the solution to his problem here. And he should check important facts carefully and be sure that the logic is right. Be will to learn here as well as to fight ignorance.
I learned several things from this thread. Thanks.
I just got back from a biz trip to South Carolina. While in Charleston, we took an historic carriage ride through the city. On this excursion, we were informed of a few pertinent “facts”:
[ul]
[li]The Civil War – oops, I mean the War of Northern Aggression – had nothing to do with slavery.[/li][li]It is called the War of Northern Aggression because “we just wanted to be separate but the Yankees invaded and slaughtered our families.”[/li][li]The slaves came to America. They weren’t dragged here kicking and screaming … they just came here. And they all loved it, apparently.[/li][li]And … the piece-de-resistance (quoted because I made sure to remember it word for word) … “… and that’s why many people consider Lincoln to be a tyrant.”[/li][/ul]
The stuff one can learn from a flunkie driving a horse cart.
Since I was already aware of his views on race, no, it does not make me question his motivations in starting the war. I don’t think many people believe Lincoln went to war just to free the slaves. Was this your opinion until recently? Because it’s naive. Very few leaders get involved in wars purely out of the goodness of their hearts. See also World War II.
I’m not going to ask you to repeat yourself, but suffice it to say I don’t believe any of the pegs of your argument to this point.
I didn’t say it was unreasonable. I’m saying I don’t think it mattered much. Southern whites believed they were superior to blacks. (And yes, Northerners mostly felt the same way.) If that hadn’t been the case, slavery would not have endured. Even if slavery had not been abolished by war, I don’t think these people would have willingly made their former slaves their societal equals and given them the same rights.
I this point you need to admit this whole thread is just cover for a modern libertarian argument. I’m not sure why you are going to all this trouble. But I think you’re essentially trying to paint the U.S. government and Lincoln in the worst possible light as a justification to modern issues.
Ah, yes, Lincoln as a tyrant. John Wilkes Booth agreed, with his “Sic Semper Tyrannis.”
And our modern Lily White Tea Partiers, whom the Libertarians are courting. Who never gave a fuck for the budget or growing government powers until we got a black president. Whom they have tried to demonize, for all his fairly moderate ways…
He’s going to all the trouble because he failed earlier.
jrodefeld gives his reasons in posts 211 and 221 in this thread. It’s not about the Civil War so much as it’s about starting another one.
The way he sees it America as Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, ect. would have recognised it is nearly dead. By failing to follow libertarian beliefs we’re killing the USA and it’s a long, painful death.
He seems to think that (soon?) a time will come when those remaining few who still believe in freedom, liberty and the REAL American way will have to essentially destroy the union for it’s own good. Euthanasia for cancer-ridden nation.
So we get his fantasy of how the Confederates may not have been exactly good but at least they were principled because that’s exactly how he would see another secession. He feels that if the Confederacy had been allowed to stand America as its founders would have seen it would still be around, and eventually the North would have realized what it was missing and would have humbly admitted the South was correct and then they could have all lived together happily ever after. Which again is exactly what he hopes will happen if we try breaking the country in two a second time.
I know. I was there. 
Posts 211 and 221 were the ones that prompted my observation, I just didn’t get around to posting it over the weekend.
Oh. :smack: Well, uh…
Well, in terms of lives, I think it is fair to say that a war in which, inevitably, some lives will be lost, in return for which there will be an end to slavery, could well be considered a moral choice (depending on those lives lost and chances of success, of course).
I think there’s a problem you’ve overlooked, that of an official recognition of a practice even when the recognition is an attempt to end it. By allowing a program of buying slaves from slaveowners, it sends the message that the transaction of people for money is acceptable. With hindsight, and current sensibilites, we can more easily see the point - to end slavery. But for people who support slavery and own slaves, I very much think that the point would be taken of “they don’t want us to do it, but overall it’s an a-ok practice”. Which, I suspect, would mean continued support for slavery benefiting the country or companies overseas, would encourage even owning of slaves internationally by citizens (and so in turn efforts by what would be a powerful voice in government to prop up regimes or governments abroad prepared to deal with such practices), plus the more direct effects; since you only need slaves healthy enough to sell, and not to work, decreased care for them by slaveowners, probably some level of encouraging slaves to have kids to increase one’s “yield”, and probably considerably more intolerance towards black people - because, after all, it would say that the U.S. was willing to go to war to protect the rights of white people, but not to go to war to protect the rights and lives of black people.
Hell, then. I’m banging the drum for Jones County, Mississippi; a bunch of non-slave-owning hillbillies who turned around and seceeded from the Confederacy
even though that’s not at all historically accurate, if I’m going to admire an inaccuracy, I’ll choose the most admirable one going
Not all tour guides are created equal, but I’ve never had that problem in Charleston. Mine were pros. They also talked more about other aspects of the city’s history than the Civil War- Blackbeard taking them hostage for instance, or the Revolutionary significance of Charleston or the earthquake. One of my favorite anecdotes was of 300+ ex President Taft riding the elevator up the first tall building in town to assure others it was safe.
The guides at Fort Sumter are of course NPS employees. I’ve been twice; the first time it was a guy who looked like Larry the Cable Guy but gave such a rousing lecture on the history of the place and the battle you wanted to grab a gun and fire back at Beauregard- superb. (Also pointed out something the irony of which is so rarely mentioned in books on the war even though it’s as symbolic of anything in a novel: Ft. Sumter is a small sandbar that would not support a fort so for decades granite ballast stones from New Hampshire and Vermont were dropped by ships to form the little island, so it was literally a northern island in the middle of Charleston harbor, one that would have never existed had it not been for the Federal government*.) The second time I went the tour guide reminded me more of Sarah Silverman but not as scholarly; she actually forgot the name of the commander during the shelling and the date of the battle (“It was in… I think March or April… anyway, it was in 1861 I think”- a perfectly acceptable thing to forget at absolutely any place of employment on Earth except Fort Sumter!).
Of course Savannah was irritating. There I specifically paid for and took a private “Civil War” walking tour of the old part of the city and the guide (a she-student at SCAD) knew less about the topic than I did; she wanted to show me things associated with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil which I didn’t particularly care about. (She was super nice and actually bright so I didn’t complain but I was irritated; had to find out things like where Sherman was HQd or which cemeteries the soldiers camped in on my own.)
Of course in Charleston my favorite tours of the city are in the bikeshaws driven by Citadel guys. Riding in a cab pulled by a well built college age military cadet in Speedos you don’t notice the surroundings as much but you don’t mind. “See that mansion- it was divided during the earthquake- can you imagine a thing of such beauty that’s split in two equal halves” (“Oh…yeah”).
*One of the reasons Sumter was such a bone of contention to the north (because remember it was far from the only fort in a southern harbor) was that the expense of building it was astronomical, second only to its sister project Fort Jefferson/Dry Tortugas as a building project (the expense of which for such a remote location [so remote the rebels never even cared about seizing it] killed political careers).
Actually several of them did own slaves; they sided with the Union anyway. (1860 population: 2,916, of whom 350 were slaves.)
The most interesting one was Newt(on) Knight, who was called “The King of Jones County” or “President of the Free State of Jones” or other pejorative exalted titles. He personally did not own slaves (not surprising as he was only 23 when the war began) but his father did and he had a long time romantic relationship with one of them, so much so that his wife ultimately left him due to the affair after which he lived openly with the by then former slave, Rachel, as man and wife, even having a marriage ceremony performed. (This was completely against the law but he got very little legal flack for it due to the fact Knight was known to be more than ready for any physical altercation, plus he said “I’d rather get shot than die of fear” and was heavily armed when he said it.)
An interesting thing about Knight in the Census is that by 1900, when his (white) first wife has left and his (black) second wife was deceased, he still lived in his little farm with his biracial children, he was counted in the Census as black. Not sure why they did this- perhaps he told them “put me down as black or white or purple, I don’t care” or perhaps it was “well, if he’s got black children who call him Pa then he must be black” logic.
Open interracial relationships- by which I’m referring to consentual unions, not slave-rape or otherwise coerced relationships- were far more common than many people realize. Morgan Freeman, Nell Carter, the Delany Sisters, Rosa Parks and several other famous African-Americans descend from long time consentual monogamous (at least in terms of living together openly) relationships by people who were married-in-all-but-legality in the Jim Crow south. I’ve collected some fascinating stories about some of these unions including one in my own family that involves a one legged Confederate veteran who avenged the rape of his biracial daughter with a bloody rampage and found an interesting way to avoid legal trouble over it. (The Delany sisters also descend from a white plantation mistress who had children by one of her slaves after she separated from her husband; though a much smaller minority, consenting unions of white women/black men [enslaved or otherwise] were more common than you might think.)
Interesting: Free State of Jonesis in pre-production as a 2012 movie. I hope it doesn’t get stuck in the quicksand of fellow 1860s pics like Spielberg’s Lincolnor Manhunt based on Swanson’s book about the hunt for Booth and conspirators. (For a war with as many devotees and that has been the setting for so many hit movies from the silent era to Cold Mountain it’s amazing how few films have been made in the last few decades.)
Speaking of Charleston and of fanatics, an interesting story is that of Edmund Ruffin. His significance at Fort Sumter is fairly well known, but his pre-war life was interesting; he was more than just a pretty face. Before the war he was one of the most brilliant agriculturalists and conservationists in U.S. history, some of his works (particularly on swamps and how to farm them) continuing to be referred to a century after his death. He was also a COMPLETE FANATIC on the topics of southern independence, though oddly a very moderate prior to some invisible curtain in the 1850s.
In 1861 he was, depending on the source, either 70 or 67 or somewhere in between (dates of birth often fluctuate in that era). He was a Virginia aristocrat for several generations (hisnot so spectacular home, Marlbourne- named for marl, or limestone, for his use of it in agriculture) but speculated a lot in South Carolina land where he made a fortune buying “tapped out farms” at firesale prices and reinvigorating them. He moved to Charleston because he was disgusted at Virginia being wishy washy (often forgotten: Virginia seceded after Ft. Sumter) and requested permission to fire the first shot at Ft. Sumter; whether he did fire the first or not is disputed, but he did fire at Ft. Sumter. Afterwards he enlisted in the infantry.
He wrote several works about his predictions in the 1850s, some spot on (that Virginia would ride the fence and that when they did secede west Virginia would counter-secede from Virginia, that the border states would never formally secede, etc.) and some pretty far off (the war would begin upon Seward’s election in 1868, southern victory). He retained his fanaticism throughout the war and even though he was in his early 70s and arthritic after Lee and Johnston surrendered he urged Davis to keep fighting and vowed to do so himself.
Instead, when it was clear that the war was completely lost and that the paroled Confederate soldiers he’d hoped would double cross the Yankees by regrouping in fact just wanted to go home, he walked over one of his Virginia plantations, gave detailed instructions to the overseers about fertilizers, ate a hearty lunch with friends, then went upstairs and wrote a note:
Then he draped himself in a Confederate flag like a shroud, propped himself up on a pointed stick at his back so that it would pierce his heart if his body were blown back by something with the force of, say, a revolver being pointed into his mouth and fired, and then he put a revolver in his mouth and fired.
On a scale of 1 to 10 in the CSA fanaticism spectrum, I put Ruffin at about a 1 (or perhaps 2 if the absolutely insane fanatics are a 1 instead of off the chart). Davis would be about a 2, Lee perhaps a 4-5, Newt Knight a 9-10. I’d wager the 4-6 median of the chart would capture most of the enlisted soldiers in the war.
For the Union, with 1 being “abolitionist long before the war” and 10 being a "let them keep their slaves, most enlisted men again probably 4-6; slavery seems to have been viewed by most northerners something like we view the horrible slums of India or the sweatshops of Cambodia: a horrible thing but frankly not something we stay up nights worrying about and certainly not something we’re willing to fight whoever’s responsible to end.