I didn’t even bother reading the rest after this line because your poorly formatted WALL of text indicates you have nothing of substance to say. If, on the off chance you have some piercing insight buried in that, you can’t expect people to wade through all of it.
I did. It was a description of the motivations for the war, then a description of the sharecropper system and institutionalized racism, then it suddenly veered left into a story about North Korea’s horrible treatment of people who try to escape.
I’m certainly unhappy about the latter, but not sure what it has to do with this thread.
I’m not goods at making points clear sometimes. My own failing. I question the motives of people who give support to the denial of evil. I wanted to give a small illustration of the nature of that evil. Slavery was not a hypothetical. What is the motive of those who claim the Civil War was fought for anything less? This thread is a public record. In just the past few days, state officials in Texas attempted to sanitize their school textbooks to remove references to the slave trade, pretending it was a negligible matter related to the sugar trade, if they intended to reference it all. Do you think the deniers studied slavery and came up with their ‘opinions’ based on anything resembling objective study. I don’t. I don’t know what their motives are, but there are people who will take what they say, and use it to justify more evil. If you don’t like what I said, I don’t care. If I stated any falsehoods, I apologize and will ask the administrators to correct them. But this subject is too important for me to stand by and contribute to ignorance that has, will, and does today, cause human suffering. You may criticize my style and methods all you like. I won’t bother to defend them. The relationship between slavery and Korea seems abundantly clear to me. I don’t understand how you can miss it.
I would like to clarify something. I cannot say the versions of the Civil War presented to me by the Montgomery County Maryland school system were official policy. This was not a practise shared by all teachers. All in all they provided a better than average attempt at educating me. But I was a fool as a child. I am thankful for whatever mechanism turned on my brain later in life so that I did not become a supporter and defender of ignorance as a result of their mistake in this case.
You know, I am on your side of this discussion, but you are letting your personal feelings take you over the top, here.
The idea that those who incorrectly argue for a “states rights” motivation for the secession do so from a perspective of dishonesty or moral turpitude is not supportable without a significant amount of evidence that you have not presented, (and which is, frankly, not available to you). One might, with sufficient research, provide evidence that the people who initially proposed the “states rights” argument might have done so with a deliberate intention to obscure the truth. (I doubt that there is sufficient evidence that you could actually prove that point, but will concede the possibility for the sake of argument.) Making the assumption that people who, following 150 years of accumulated argument for that position, and being led by the arguments to a conclusion different from yours and mine are, themselves, dishonest, is not supportable.
Beyond that, of course, your diatribe, here, whatever your motivation, is way too close to a personal attack on other posters. Having made your feelings known, you will now confine further attacks on other posters to the BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
I don’t think this is quite right. Lincoln won a popular majority in enough states to secure him an electoral victory, without a single Southern state. If every single vote Lincoln didn’t get had gone to a single Democratic candidate, he still would have won (though CA and OR would have flipped)
Lincoln’s election was a thus an indication of the inevitability of the demise of slavery - with an increasingly industrial North, and the ability of a candidate to win without a single vote from the South, slavery’s days were numbered, whether or not Lincoln was going to push for abolition.
I’d argue that an educated person pushing “states rights” is engaged in moral turpitude. There is no evidence to support the “states rights” bullshit, except repeating talking points drilled into them since they were children. But examination of the evidence is required of an educated person. Examination of the secession statements alone demolishes that the underlying reason was anything other than slavery. An examination of the historical context of independence through the civil war would show that just about every public discussion about the entire nation was centered on slavery, foreign relations over slavery, or a central bank, or wiping out Indians.
And I’m not trying to scold those on the other side of the debate. But I would like them to read what the Southern proponents of secession and war actually said and wrote at the time.
Slavery was obviously the reason for secession. But that doesn’t mean the Southern states weren’t serious about states’ rights. They were -to their detriment- as demonstrated by the above noted threat by Georgia to secede from the Confederacy, and Jefferson Davis’s “Died of an Idea” remark.
You’re not trying to scold them, you just want them to know that they’re “engaged in moral turpitude,” and “repeating talking points drilled into them since they were children.” Gotcha.
Of course, this isn’t IMHO, so I’m not sure why you or anyone feel the need to express your opinion of the motives of those who don’t precisely agree with you. If you’re not posting variations on “But…but…slavery!”, then you’re a secret racist, is that it? Then again, we’ve seen how you react to those who bring a different perspective to GD.
ok, i figured something like this would happen. i’ve made my feelings known. i won;t address the subject further except for short clarification or correction.
To avoid posting on this thread anymore, I invite anyone who wants to say something to me to use a private message. Reasoning and flaming are both fine.
You will not do that in this thread (or this forum), where I have already indicated that attacks on other posters is a violation of the SDMB rules.
If you need to express that belief, take it to the BBQ Pit or a different message board.
[ /Moderating ]
This is a quote from way back in the original thread. My position is that while slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, to state that any event as large as a war is about a single cause is a gross over-simplification. My presentation of ‘real evidence’ may be sparse, however I enjoy the intellectual challenge of making the abstract argument.
Assumption: The real reason behind slavery was economic (without it all those in power in the south would collapse, as would the entire economy effectively devastating it)
Assumption: Slavery was adopted in the south largely for economic reasons. To pursue an aggressive agrarian policy, it was necessary to have vast quantities of workers who were unpaid)
Assumption: If the south had rejected slavery and pursued another strategy for it’s economy, there are other choices they could have made which would have resulted in economic conflict with the north, that combined with regional differences could have easily provoked another war, even on the timetable of the actual Civil War.
Conclusion: There is a coherent argument that the Civil War could have happened about slavery. It’s abstract, and involves some big assumptions, but I feel sure it’s coherent.
Respectfully,
AllFree
Did you mean ‘would have happened without slavery’? After clarifying that, I will respond in a private message.
Would is pretty strong, but I’m willing to extend it to that. However, you should remember, this isn’t something that can be proved, I’m just saying it’s a coherent argument. I think the chances of the Civil War occurring drop dramatically without slavery, however we can only speculate on what would have been the alternative if Slavery hadn’t been adopted by the south, too many other factors are involved for a clear projection, but it’s certainly possible.
I can’t reach you by private message, and don’t want to post my response on this thread to avoid aggravating any problem I have already created. (I don’t think my response to you would do that in this case). If you can activate private messaging or send me a private message with a means of responding, I will.
Perhaps I can defuse the problem simply by stating that my main point was that ‘a coherent theory’ is an extremely low standard. I can present a coherent theory for many improbably, insane, and even impossible events. As I said, I believe that Slavery was the biggest issue by far, and without it the war probably wouldn’t have happened, however that assumes that slavery would not be replaced by another equally problematic system that would have the same result.
It is a simplification but not a gross one, any more than saying Pearl Harbor was caused by Japanese imperialism.
Behind slavery, or behind the continuation of slavery? Remember that there was slavery in the North also originally, but the development of manufacturing and the absence of plantations meant it wasn’t economically necessary.
That would imply that slavery began after the plantation system. However, the plantation system was able to develop because of the presence of slavery, so I think your cart is before your horse.
I’d like to hear a plausible example of one. The problem of slavery is that a large part of the country had matured to the point of considering it a moral evil, and the South was concerned that it would be restricted on that basis, and that would destroy their economy. If the South had gotten into mining, or family farms, or manufacturing, I fail to see what the North could have done to threaten this at the fundamental level they were felt to be threatening slavery. Tariffs were always an issue, but a compromise can be negotiated (unlike whether a state was slave or free) and I doubt anyone would be publishing best selling books on the evils or benefits of tariffs.
Coherent, possibly, but I don’t buy it is plausible without an example of something that would drive this.
It’s an interesting question. The tariff was a clear regional issue, and I can see how it could have stirred some resentment. Probably not enough to start a secession movement, but then again maybe.
The 1860 election, with Lincoln winning without any Southern votes, drove home the fact that the North now firmly held the reins in Washington. Even if the South had been operating by that time on a sharecropper system rather than using slavery, I can imagine this lack of electoral power being a very real concern.
It would mean that the North could collectively impose whatever tariffs it desired, without having to concern itself with the Southern response. I can imagine resentment rising because of this, beginning with the idea that the South would have been effectively financing the federal government while having little voice in it.
Remember that this was before the income tax, and the tariff was a major source of revenue for the federal government, so as government inevitably grew, there would be a continual pressure to raise tariffs to increase federal revenue. It is not impossible to imagine a sort of regional tax revolt under those circumstances, with fire-eating politicians arguing that the South was being reduced to economic serfdom to the North.
(I again affirm, lest anyone mistake my thinking, that slavery was the proximate cause of the Civil War. The above is just a thought experiment.)