(I’m sure there are a number spelling and grammatical errors in the following. I may have made a factual error somewhere, and if so I apologize in advance)
All of the causes of the Civil War were directly related to slavery. We’ve seen the baseless counter arguments. Does anyone think this is the first time this subject was debated?
I’m spending more time writing this now then any response I’ve made on this topic, because addressing the revisionists has taken no time. They have no case.
Now I will say why this matters to me. This thread started on the thread about the misinformation we were taught in school. I mentioned evolution to stir up some debate. I forgot that people who are not overt racists or weak-minded fools were still willing to argue this point. I should have posted this subject instead. I consider it too important to ignore.
I went to public elementary school in Montgomery County Md., where the morally relativistic approach was taken to the Civil War. That area was blatently bigoted in many ways during the 60’s. We were taught that the North (not us Marylanders, we were Southern), looked at it one way, and the South had a different but equally relevant point of view. Luckily I managed to unlearn what I was taught, along with the presumption of the equality of the ‘viewpoints’. This argument started before the Civil War and has never ended for the people who don’t like ‘Yankees’. That dislike continues for those people largely because ‘Yankees’ point out the lies and bads acts of the proud Southerners, past and present. Facts, now, as then, have no bearing on the subject for them. It isn’t said now as openly as in the past, but Southerners were not talking about ‘states rights’ in the beginning. They directly quoted the Bible which told them they were entitled to own slaves. Most of these arguments fail to even address the reality of slavery in the US compared to other forms practised through history. Biblical slavery was tame compared to the US brand. Our country practised the worst form of slavery known, where human beings were nothing but property, as if they were inanimate objects. Slaves had absolutely no rights. You could not commit a crime against a slave, of any kind. If you harmed a slave you did not own, you were civilly liable to the slave’s owner for the damage. Slaves were bred like farm animals. Unlike many slave cultures where slaves could earn their freedom, or be set free in their old age, or have their children born free, or have their children fathered by their owners considered as familial, or have some minimal rights supported under the law, these practises were discouraged in the South. We deliberately stopped the importation of slaves, making each existing slave worth more monetarily for the owners, and countering any justification for freedom. Slaves became a limited resource. The break with the slave trade was supported by non-pro-slavery people as some sort of way to address the problem, but actually making it worse in many respects. The slave owners whole-heartedly supported the importation ban because it increased the value of their holdings. Remember that slaves were not 4/5ths of a person as mentioned in the Constitution. They were not people under the law at all. The 4/5ths measure was an electoral gift to slave owners and slave states to give them greater representation in the government. The worst aspect of this system was that it was formed on a purely racist basis. The practise of slavery in the English colonies was based originally on indentured servitude, a form of de facto slavery, since the indenturer controlled the basis of the indenturees fullfilment of his service. Seperated from the English courts that ordered the servitude, the indenturers had no incentive to honor the supposed terms initially imposed. But the American people had a general distaste for the practise. These were after all ‘white’ people from the British Empire, just like themselves. But the slaves for sale by the slave traders were considered ‘black’ subhumans. As their numbers increased, distaste for the keeping of ‘white’ slaves mounted, and ‘white’ slaves were routinely freed. The slave owners disseminated fear of these soulless creatures among the non-slave owning populace. They routinely pointed out that the slaves should be grateful that they had been brought to this country to live in a Christian nation instead of among the heathen natives. Their failure to show gratitude was a characteristic of their subhuman status. The practise of ‘color scales’ began as a demonstration that the more slaves looked like ‘whites’, the better they would be treated. There is a story about Lincoln or his father (I don’t recall the specifics after all these years), visiting the Deep South, and seeing an apparently ‘white’ woman, put up for sale as a slave. She was purchased and set free by ‘white’ men. A ‘black’ freed slave had no one to support his rights in the South. Freedom documents were ignored by bounty hunters sent to capture runaway slaves. They had no trouble doing this because the word of any ‘white’ man was worth more than the word of the most moral ‘black’. These crimes carried into the North as well. By law, runaway slaves were property to be returned to their owners, and while many Northerners didn’t believe in slavery, or this law, based on some sort of weakly defined morality, most were just as racist as the Southerners. Slave owners were not the only Southerners, but they maintained enormous political power, controlling the state governments. That was not difficult because they controlled the economy of the South. They refused to agree to any change in the Union that would allow non-slave states to gain an electoral advantage which would have allowed slavery to be abolished by law. When they saw the inevitability of that happening eventually, and that they would be economically devestated as result of having to pay for labor, and the loss of their valuable slave property, they set about to secede from the Union to maintain their right to own human beings as property. Exploiting their now deeply embedded regional animosity toward those moralistic Yankees, they seeded the cry of invasion, and routinely called on the non-slave owners to aid them for their own protection from the sub-humans who would be free unleash their animalistic instincts, as well as the Yankees who would approriate all Southerner’s property. Then they launched their attack on the Union. They assumed, rightly, that the North was unprepared to fight a war. Lincoln however, was not dissuaded, and patiently waited while a Union army was formed. By the time the North was prepared to take on the Confederacy in their own states, the Civil War had already become a bloodbath. Following Lee’s invasion of the North, and the discovery of the psychopathic treatment of Union POWs in Andersonville, the North was prepared to wage all out war, without regard to the suffering that could result on either side. They now mourned the loss of their own, with little regard for the slaves or any Southerner. By the end of the war, the South had been decimated, as a direct result of their insistence on maintaining slavery, despite every attempt at compromise by the North. With the ending of the war, the slaves were freed and the Union was restored. But freedom for slaves meant only an end to their prior legal status. The Southerners refused to participate in Union government, and tried to maintain an insurgent defiance, marked by continuing violence. Lincoln attempted a period of reconstruction, but the refusal of the Southerners to acknowledge their citizenship in the Union, which they had been born with, shifted political power to freed slaves and Northern transplants, briefly. With their economy destroyed, the Southerners mounted an insurgency based on the theft of their God given right to own slaves. Even Southerners who had no desire to own slaves, proclaimed their victimhood for being forced into legal equality with the ‘black’ creatures. The freed slaves were given nothing but citizenship. Southerners refused to obey the laws. Freed slaves were kept in illegal slavery for decades following the war. Owning nothing, mostly denied the right to own anything, some freed slaves left the South, some returning to Africa, some traveling to the North where they received barely better treatment. Many had no choice but o remain in the South as sharecroppers. The Southern insurgency began to turn against the former slaves in their midst. Attacks against Northerners or ‘whites’ might be treated as crimes, but the former slaves were now denied their legal rights, and routinely tortured and murdered. This new brand of psychopathy was considered just by the ‘white’ Southerns because of the suffering they endured, despite the fact that they willingly brought upon themselves as a result of their own actions. Former slave owners who owned land, and needed the ‘blacks’ to work it may have become the saviors of the freed slaves, as their own economic status would become threatened without them. Sharecropping and the rest of life in the South for freed slaves became ‘slavery lite’. Denied any education for generations, having anything that they owned routinely stolen, and with a nearly non-existent ability to petition the government for recourse, the former slaves survived at the whims of their former masters. Many fled to remote areas, or sought refuge in the cities where they were segregated, and the Jim Crow system developed. Many continued to move northward, where there rights began to slowly become established. Many more spent the rest of their lives hanging from trees, shot, beaten or burned to death.
Did you get tired of this diatribe? I’m sure it must been an unpleasant reads, especially if you are a US citizen. But this is what the Civil War was about. Slavery, and the insistence of the Southern ‘whites’ that it had been their right to own the subhuman ‘blacks’ as property. They started the practise of lying to redefine their sick philosophy as a legal issue, rights of states that did not exist. They set up a system of re-education to blame the war on the North. They insisted that North started the War in direct opposition to the facts. The South started the war over slavery. They secededs without due process of law over slavery. It is indisputable that the Southern states accepted no compromises. They attacked the Army at Ft. Sumter without provocation. They falsely claimed the Northern Army had invaded their States to steal their property. They falsely claimed atrocities by the North that never occurred. They repeatedly refused to uphold the law. They murdered former slaves to take revenge against the imagined crimes of the North.
This is all over and in the past right? Nonsense, look at this thread. The genetic and political supporters of this system continue to repeat the lies, and give false justifications for evil acts. Every cause of the Civil War was directly based on slavery, and nothing else.
Abraham Lincoln, early in life, saw run-away slaves beaten and dragged in chains back to the sick existence from which they had escaped. Lincoln was an unabashed racist, but he stated clearly, ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong’. Southerners who did not directly participate in the practise of slavery witnessed it throughout their lives, and when they saw that the horror might end, were willing to sacrifice anything and everything to maintain it.
Do I sound overly judgemental? Surely I must have exagerated for effect, right? That is why I will finish with an unrelated story. A colleague of mine was born and raised in China. He and his wife emigrated to this country. His brother-in-law still lives in China. He is a soldier in the Chinese Army stationed along the river that separates China from North Korea. For years North Koreans, have crossed into China to find work. The North Koreans are the illegal immigrants of China, working subsistence agricultural jobs to get a little money to keep their families in their native land from starving to death. For years, as the North Korean refugees crossed freezing water, to seek a future in China, the Chinese guards would feed them and direct them to the road to the farming villages where they might find some work. China and North Korea are not great friends, but have a centuries old political understanding to leave each to their own ways. China is currently dependent on North Korea for copper ore to feed their burgeoning industry, and Kim Jung Il has used this influence well. Outraged at the ease with which his ‘citizens’ could escape to China, Kim bargained an agreement with China, that escapees would be returned. My friend’s brother was ordered not to feed anyone crossing the river, and hold them until the North Korean Army came to pick them up. As this happened for the first time, a North Korean Officer oversaw the process of the pickup. The North Koreans, were lined up, and soldiers took a steel wire, and one by one forced it through the flesh of the captive’s shoulders, beneath their collarbones. When all had been tethered in this way, they were dragged across the river, back to the hellhole from which they had almost escaped. The officer was the last to cross, but before he did, my colleague’s brother-in-law took him aside and told him, ‘If I ever see that happen again, I will kill you’. He has related that he had never seen it again. The starving refugees have since then been forced across the river at gunpoint. He is sure the wire torture is started after the North Koreans are out of sight on the other side.
That is a horror that is is going on today. Do you consider this a right of the North Korean State? Is this about trade agreements between China and North Korea? Is this some intellectual argument about sovereignty? I have seen the answer that Slavery Deniers would provide. Do not bother trying to draw your immoral distinctions to me. Frankly, I have been overly tolerant of you so far. I have given you the benefit of the doubt that you are mistaken. I will accept your apologies and retractions, but I will not waste my time waiting for them. I call upon the honest and decent members of the SDMB to use your intellect to fight them. Call them out not just on their inaccuracies, but for their lack of morals. Does the Straight Dope fight ignorance by giving it a home? Answer this for yourselves.
Problem solved.