Jesus, are you serious? The War of Northern Aggression? It’s the fucking Civil War, you idiot. And that beautiful house was built with slave labor. As in human slavery, the thing the Confederates went to war to preserve. Human. Fucking. Slavery.
Speaking as a lifelong Southerner, the South was in the wrong. Fucking face it. I don’t care how demur the women were or how dashing the uniforms. They were fighting for human slavery. Just because they were your great great grandfather doesn’t mean they weren’t on the wrong side. My great great grandfather was on the wrong side, too, and that doesn’t make me a bad person. Hell, that doesn’t even make him a bad person.
And no, Lincoln wasn’t a evil dictator. You want proof? He didn’t hang Robert E. Lee. He could have, but he didn’t.
And poor Lee. They took his huge fucking house and huge fucking plantation and buried the dead people he made there. Well you know what? He was a traitor. He got off easy.
I know when you go on a tour given by the Daughters of the Confederacy, you get what you deserve. But jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick, it’s the 21st century!
I hate the term in the thread title as much as you, but I find the need to be slightly argumentative. I am not a history buff, but I was taught that the reason the Confederacy went to war was the issue of federal vs state’s rights. Slavery for the southern states at that time was the lynch pin for their economic survival, and the Constitutional matter as to the supremacy of state or federal power was yet to be solidified. When it became clear that the Feds were asserting their authority and thus getting rid of slavery, war broke. Of course, the soldiers may very well have been fighting to keep slavery, the issue of politics being over their head. I dunno.
I cant quite put my finger on it, but this elicted a serious eyebrow raise from me.
That’s a gross oversimplification of Lee and the time he lived in. IMHO, he was a great and tragic man. Robert E. Lee
I was with you until the end of paragraph 4. Wrong side or not, I can’t call Lee, or any other who fought for the Confederacy, a traitor. But they did lose, and it’s past time for everybody south of the Mason-Dixon line to deal with it.
-silenus, direct descendant of Pvt. Moses Potter, Company “D,” Third South Carolina Battalion (James), Kershaw’s Brigade, McLaws Division, 1st Corps (Longstreet), Army of Northern Virginia
No, but betting on the Tennessee/Auburn football game and then not paying up when Tennessee gets whupped, THAT might make you a bad person. Or at least a forgetful one.
Yes and no. The sole right involved was slavery. There really was no other serious dispute, other than the usual arguments over taxes. But those have been going on for eons now and do not, as a rule. start wars. Not even the Revolutionary War.
Actually, no. The South had in part been waging war in Missouri for years, and had in fact turned the North against them through repeated insolence, cruelty, and wild demands - including numerous violations of the State’s Rights principles they claimed to hold dear. Even after Lincoln’s accession to the Presidency, the Abolition movement remained a minority and would never have been able to force its ideals on the South. It would have had an influence, but nothing like total and immediate abolition.
Hence the irony. The South revolted against an oppression that never was and wound up destroying the very system they claimed to be protecting.
I think you should make an exception to allow really old guys in seersucker to talk about the War of Northern Aggression from the confines of their front porches.
White Southerners like myself have much to be proud of and much to be ashamed of in our past. It is unfortunate so few of us can tell one thing from another.
The North had no proposals to end slavery that had any popular support. The only issues that the North was enforcing was that slavery could not be exported to new territories (and even that was tied up in the agreement that no free state could be admitted to the union without a corresponding slave state). It is true that the prevention of new slave territories would have eventually removed the South’s power in Congress–in about an additional 20 or 30 years.
The issue, nearly the single issue, debated in the Democratic convention in Savannah in the Spring of 1860 was that of slavery. When the pro-slavery firebrands refused to accept the tepidly anti-slave Stephen Douglas as the nominee, breaking the party, they pretty much guaranteed that the Democrats could not win the presidency, giving it to the six-year-old abolitionist-leaning Republican Party. They then used the election of Lincoln–who had never made any political effort to bring about abolition–as an excuse to secede.
As to States Rights: it was in the states of Virginia and the Carolinas that we find the most bellicose in threats of war to prevent New England from seceding in 1813 when that part of the country suffered most heavily in Mr. Madison’s War that had been pushed by Southern interests.
Since the SDMB is populated with a mature and sophisicated membership, I think we can rationally approach this topic with a logical and impartial viewpoint.
So, the tour guide has the temerity to state that the American Civil War was a War of Northern Agression? From what I remember, the Civil War commenced when Fort Sumter was attacked by Southern forces.
So basically, *they started it *!!!
Did too, did too !!!
If you were taught the reason the southern states went to war was to preserve state’s rights, you were taught wrong. If you were taught that those fought for the Confederacy weren’t traitors, you were taught wrong.
I’m with the OP. Let’s put the kibosh on this revisionist history of a bunch of traitors and slavers.
Do you know any good books I can read on this topic, because now I am totally confused as to why the Civil War happened at all. I mispoke in my earlier post a little. I knew there was no popular support for abolition at the time of Lincoln’s presidency, but I was always taught that the war broke out when the South thought that the national government was planning on shutting down slavery via a country>state power play.
In any case, I’m glad my ignorance is clearing. I hate being unclear on history.
I’m half southern and I hate the freaking Confederacy. One good friend of mine replies to ‘The War of Northern Agression’ with ‘Oh, you mean the failed war to preserve slavery?’
I’m sick of the modern attitude of ‘Wrong about slavery right about everything else’…no the fucking South was wrong about everything else too!
It is an extremely cmplex issue, because like any mass political movement there were a great many people involved, and they did not all agree. Men like Stephe Douglas (Confederate VP) and Robert E. Lee were light years away from, say, Jeff Davis or Edmund Ruffin (a prominent S. Carolina secessionist firebrand who killed himself when he realized the South’s defeat). Indeed, many of the South’s best and brightest leaders were men who were only tepidly in favor of it! (Of course, this is also becaue so many went to West Point and were very close to their Northern colleagues.)
I would highly reccomend James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. It’s a fantasic one-volume book. Although thick and pretty detailed, he’s a good writer and makes even the driest events fascinating. A third of the book covers events before the Civil War, detailing how policy decision made decades before the Civil War set the stage for it. While not entirely unsympathetic to the South (good people, bad cause), it does seem clear that most of the problems were caused by a fierce sense of pride. Certainly he notes events where Northerners did provoke them to some degree or another, but never leaves out the basic fact that the outrageous level of Southern response and the insistence on a seige mentality was a greater influence on events. Basically, the South made her own enemies.
The South got a lot of its press out after the war ironically because the North was lenient with them. Jeff Davis mostly sat at home, still moderately wealthy, and wrote memoirs praising… himself and his cause. And so did many others.
