Were Confederates the Moral Equivalent of Nazis?

Great Debates
41

Does this mean that there should be no monuments to the U.S. Cavalry? After all, their cause (in large measure) was subjugation of the American Indian. Right?

That should also exclude Sherman from having any monuments or memorials, since he heartily subscribed to and participated in that cause.

It also means we should forget about the “Buffalo Soldiers.” Weren’t they fighting in an unjust cause?

What about Viet Nam vets? Was their cause “just”? The Vietnamese sure didn’t think so. Would you deny these vets memorials for their bravery and sacrifice in battle?

Was World War I truly a “just” cause from any perspective? Should its veterans be denied memorials?

What about the Spanish-American War? Was that a just cause, or were we just seizing an empire? Should the Rough Riders be denied any memorial?

42

Re: the whole Ft. Sumter thing

  1. Taking your divorce analogy - you and the SO are divorcing, and you say “I want and deserve the guest house. It’s mine”. If your SO says “No, it’s mine!”, you are not entitled to shoot your SO to get the guest house.
  2. Taking your analogy to shooting someone who won’t leave your house - You assume that Ft. Sumter rightfully belonged to the CSA. There are two problems with this - first, it assumes that the CSA was a legally constituted entity that could legally own anything. Second, even if the CSA was a legal entity, it assumes that everything within the CSA’s territory that belonged to the USA rightfully belonged to it. In point of fact, it wasn’t the CSA’s “house” - the CSA illegally took over the guest house, then said “I want the barn (Ft. Sumter), too. Give it to me, or I’ll shoot.”
    You appealed to me as a lawyer. Well, under any principle of property law I can think of, Ft. Sumter belonged to the U.S. government, and the U.S. government had a right to defend its property.
    This isn’t even an issue of states’ rights - Ft. Sumter didn’t belong to the state of South Carolina. It belonged to a separate legal entity, the federal government.
    Re: the Guantanamo Bay analogy - I notice you didn’t answer my question of who would have started the war, Castro or the U.S. Castro had the self-control not to start shooting; why didn’t the CSA?

Overall, your whole argument rests on a presumption that once the CSA declared independence, it was independent, and had its own soil to defend. I disagree, and, further, I’d suspect you disagree if you thought about it more. I think it was last year that a bunch of kooks declared their compound the independent “Republic of Texas”. The Texas Rangers went in and arrested them. Do you think the Texas Rangers were “invading” the “soil” of that “independent” country?
Just because the CSA was larger and the people involved were more rational doesn’t change the principle.

As for your examples of causes, and questions on whether they should be immortalized, your list doesn’t change my thinking. First of all, I think the Spanish-American war was just, as was WWI and Vietnam (in that case, the cause was sacrified to expediency). Sherman should not be memorialized for his participation in the Indian wars, but that doesn’t affect his service in the Civil War. No, the cavalry should not be honored for its actions in the Indian Wars (hell, do you think there should be a big statute commemorating the bravery of the troops at Wounded Knee?). I think the Buffalo Soldiers should be memorialized and honored for the contributions to equality, but not for their actions in the Indian wars.

Sua

43

SuaSponte, the problem with giving the moral of freeing the slaves to the northerners is they did not want to free the slaves. Freeing the slaves was only a tatic of war. There was no moral superority in war, there never is. Unless of course it was morally superior for the USA to never exist since they took that land from the indians. What moral right of ownership does the US have over the indians? The confederates were just continuing the longstanding tradition of “take it from the natives by force”. The constution should be removed too, at the time it was created illegally.

So certainly, it depends on perspective.

44

But the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed after the war was over. So, freeing the slaves wasn’t a tactic of war. You may be able to argue that the 13th Amendment was sheer vengance - take away the property of the vanquished to punish them. 'Course, the problem with that argument is that some slave states never left the Union, so why punish them? In any event, I don’t think the 14th and 15th Amendments can be written off as vengance.
Besides which, the South sure as hell thought the North wanted to end slavery - please see the links to various Confederate declarations of secession in this thread.

Oh, fer chrissakes. If we had intervened in Rwanda to forcibly stop the genocide, do you seriously believe we would have been on equal moral footing with the Hutus? What about if we had intervened in Cambodia? (Obeying Godwin’s Law, I’m not going to bring up WWII.)

Of course it would be morally superior if the USA had not taken land forcibly from the Indians. As it happens, we have to live with the facts as they are now.

I have never argued that “illegal” equals “immoral”. In fact, I strongly disagree. The CSA was both illegal and immoral.

Sua

45

I think some who’ve derided the CSA in this thread are failing to distinguish between the primary reasons for secession and the primary reasons why secession led to the Northern pursuit of the War. While it is accurate to say that the rebel states seceded to protect the institution of slavery, it is not accurate to say that the Civil War was waged to stamp out that institution. Clearly, Lincoln’s intent was to prevent the dissolution of the United States of America; the Union forces marched with the firm goal of quelling what they saw as a revolution that would destroy their country.

I am glad that the Union prevailed. It is inarguable that slavery is evil, and that the institution of slavery could not have been long tolerated in a nation founded on individual freedoms. It is equally inarguable that that nation could not have flourished as it did if the Confederate states had been allowed to peacefully secede.

However, I cannot perform the mental gymnastics necessary to believe two things that I would have to believe in order to deny the legitimacy of Confederate heroes: I can’t believe it was Constitutionally indefensible of the Southern states to secede, and I can’t believe that it was morally indefensible for citizens of the those Confederate states to defend their homes against invading forces.

46

But the Emancipation Proclamation was issued during the war, and historians are pretty much agreed that the EP was a political maneuver, not a statement of high-minded principle. And the slave states which didn’t leave the Union were eplicitly exempted from emancipating their slaves by the Emancipation Proclamation.

As I’ve already brought up earlier, if the South deserved to be punished for owning slaves (which pretty much seems to be your attitude), why didn’t the North deserve to be punished for importing and selling the slaves? You see, one of the sticking points in the slavery debate was that the North expected the South to bear the entire economic burden of ending slavery, even though the North had profited handsomely from the slave trade.

And in any case, the war didn’t end slavery. It merely replaced chattel slavery with debt bondage, usually in the form of sharecropping, which made it possible to enslave poor whites as well as poor blacks. The quasi-feudalistic structure of Southern society went on. The sharecroppers weren’t called slaves, and the relationship between landowner and tenant farmer was not legally recognized as a master/slave relationship. But that’s what it was.

47

But determining the rightness of a cause isn’t nearly as easy as you seem to think it is. Motivations are hard to separate from moral principle. And high-minded moral principles can and have been used as moral camouflage for spectactular crimes.

[QUOTE]
**
Bull. When your side starts a war (see Ft. Sumter), and the other side takes the fight to your turf, you aren’t being invaded by an aggressor - you are losing. Should the marines have stopped shooting at the Japanese troops on Saipan? I mean, after all, they were just defending the homes of the (Japanese) residents of that island from the evil American invaders.**

The South was not trying to conquer the North. And if the South started the war, it did so after severe provocation. Most of the war was fought on Southern territory, and the invading armies of the North were not simply responding to Southern provocations. They meant to crush the South, militarily, economically, and politically.

The incursions into the North were not intended to conquer territory and incorporate it into the Confederacy. The purpose of those campaigns was to pressure Washington into suing for peace. Had they succeeded, the South would have withdrawn its troops and made no claim on Northern territory.

And why shouldn’t I? You see, the thing that rankles me is that so many Northerners (and some Southern scalawags) assume more or less unthinkingly that the North was clearly morally superior to the South. While I don’t claim to be an expert or authority, anyone who is more than superficially acquainted with the history and issues of that war will be amused and disgusted by that attitude.

See above.

But first it must be determined that you have made a bad (by which I assume you mean “dishonorable”) choice. You haven’t done a very good job of establishing that.

48

And you are assuming that the United States government was a legally constituted entity that could legally own anything. The state of South Carolina existed before the Federal government did–or perhaps you think that South Carolina had no right to break its ties with the British government?

So the British military installations in the colonies were legally and morally the property of the Crown, and should not have been molested in any way by the revolutionaries?

So Castro would be morally justified in launching a war with the United States to drive the American military out of Guantanamo? Castro’s government is easily one of the most repressive in the Western hemisphere, if not the world. Would the United States be justified in crushing the Castro regime if Castro did launch an attack on our forces in Cuba?

So when would a people be justified in breaking their ties with a government and expelling the troops of said government from their territory? If Estonia and Ukraine had the right to secede from the Soviet Union, why did Alabama and Tennessee not have the right to secede from the United States?

You see, the real problem with the Civil War is that the question of secession was never really answered. Can you tell me what circumstances would legally and morally justify a state’s departure from the Union against the will of the Federal government, and to use military force to secure their departure?

Ah, yes. We should honor the black troopers but not the white ones. :rolleyes:

49

Sua, I think the chief issue that Lonesome is taking with your posts at this point is that you seem to view everything in very cut-and-dried, perfectly defined moral terms. You have accepted slavery as THE issue at stake in the war. Then, since everyone knows slavery is pure evil, you feel justified in tacking that sin on the back of every single Southerner living and fighting at that time. Wars are fought on so many high and low levels, but you only want to look at it from the government level. You completely suck all the humanity out of the issue, which is admittedly a much simpler way to look at the war, but, IMHO, a lacking one. It’s just not that easy.

I believe slavery is wrong. I believe that it is a good thing that the South lost the war. But I do not believe that we have the right to sit here a century and a half later and quibble about whether or not your average Jonny Reb made a bad decision to fight. I seriously doubt that there was any decision to be made. I would have fought, and you would have too.

And God bless moral relativism, because all morals are relative.

Quick hijack…all this talk of the Civil War and slavery has got me thinking of a racist quote I read from a letter by Abraham Lincoln, I think during his years in the Senate. The quote was essentially about the inherent superiority of the white race. Do any of the more knowledgeable folks in this thread know the one I’m talking about? Does it not represent Lincoln’s views once he took his inaugural oaths? That is to say, does the quote make Lincoln a hypocrite or does it just reflect the tendency of any intelligent person to change his mind when presented with new facts? Sorry to be so vague…I will do my best to look for the quote myself…

50

If you take a moment to refer to the website where I got this, you’ll see why I placed the “but…” in the subject heading. These guys are clearly not of the most level-headed sort. All of the exclamation marks and caps are their addition…unless Abraham Lincoln was always ranting like a loon. But the first quote matches the one I read in college. Feel free to debunk or tell me to get the hell out and start my own thread.

from http://www.1underground.net/Features/features85greatmen.shtml

Looking at this, I guess none of it necessarily means he was in favor of slavery, but he was clearly a man of the times…

51

No- you did not - you SAID as much, in your “humble” opinion- but you had no real facts to back it up. True- he did not mention several incidents in only several chapters devoted to the War- but note he did not mention Ft.Pillow either- nor hardly anything about the “crimes” of either side. It is a book published by OXFORD Press ferkrisake- the most respected, unbiased press in the western free nations.

52

It seems that most folks back then took white superiority for granted, so it’s something of a cheap shot to condemn Lincoln for holding a view that was very much a part of the culture of his time. For that matter, this attitude was quite common right down to the middle of the twentieth century. It’s ironic that both Lee and Lincoln were opposed to slavery but didn’t believe in equality of the races. I don’t recall what Jefferson Davis’ take on equality was, but IIRC he advocated the gradual abolition of slavery.

53

Danielinthewolvesden, I demonstrated an outright falsehood by your “leading historian.” He stated that Sherman’s troops committed “no outrages” against women. I gave you one example (and a horrendous example, at that) of just such an “outrage.”

Clearly, your man is wearing blinders which do not allow him to see any truth beyond the simplistic Union=good-and-noble, and Confederacy=evil.

54

I see that the History Channel is showing a documentary at 9:00 tonight (Monday 2/19) entitled “The Unfinished Civil War.” It might provide some additional fodder for debate here.

55

Hey Sua, do you think the war with Mexico was a just war?

See, I’m thinking maybe we should give California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico back. I mean, if we can’t erect monuments to the soldiers who fought in unjust wars, we can’t very well keep the spoils of unjust wars can we? Wouldn’t want to use a double standard, you know…

56

The practice of bringing new slaves to America was banned more than 30 years before the Civil War. Yes, some Northerners profited from the slave trade. However, the practice had been voluntarily abandoned. (Maybe not voluntarily by all of the practicioners but as a general practice.)

57

Um, here in Oregon we have a Sherman County that is very much named for the Civil War hero as well as a Grant County ditto and even a Union County. Portland hosts a Grant High School, and Sherman County has a Sherman High School. (Used to be Sherman County Union High School until recently when they shortened the name). But AFAIK, none of them play the Battle Hymn of the Republic or wave the Civil War era US flag after touchdowns.

58

There was a eugenics connection to the Civil War.
The word “miscegenation” was invented in 1863 by David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman. The 2 anonymously wrote the pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the White Man and the Negro. They hid their identities as anti-war Democrats so that their work would be perceived as a cry by a radical abolitionist for forced breeding of the races. Phrases such as “If any fact is well established in history it is that the miscegenetic or mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically, and morally, to those pure or unmixed…” and “It is idle to maintain that this present war is not a war for the Negro…
…it is a war, if you please, of amalgamation, so called - a war looking, as its final fruit, to the blending of the white and the black.” aimed to exploit the racist fears of northern voters to lessen support for the Republican administration. The miscegenation scare received some notice ( enough to enter the lexicon ). “Sunset” Cox thundered against it in Congress. For the most part; however, the issue was ignored by Republicans ( who were busy with their own character assassinations ). My source for the above information is Reelecting Lincoln by John C Waugh ( Crown Publishers, Inc. 1997 )

The Nazis weren’t the first to realize the potential of eugenic propaganda.

And, whereas, it has been reported that several of our low-born brethren have had the horrid audacity to think for themselves in regard to this new system of government, and, dreadful thought! have wickedly begun to doubt concerning the perfection of this evangelical constitution… - “John Humble” 1787

59

Was there as much debate [BOLD]during[/BOLD] the war as there is now about whether the war was about slavery or not? Just like folks used to argue about why the U.S. was really in Iraq or Vietnam? Were the people of the time mostly agreed on what the war was being fought for?

60

I have no cites immediately at hand, but yes, there was heated debate throughout the war on both sides. The North had supporters down South, and the South had supporters up North. Dissidents were illegally imprisoned on both sides. Opposition newspapers both North and South were likely to become the targets of angry mobs. Many Northerners took the attitude that the South simply ought to be allowed to leave: “Wayward sisters, part in peace.” Support for the Union in some parts of the South was so fierce that high Confederate officials didn’t dare enter those areas without military units for protection. There was opposition to the draft on both sides. Governor Brown of Georgia threatened to take Georgia out of the Confederacy over the issue, though I’m not sure how serious the threat was. Irish in New York rioted against the draft and attacked blacks, believing them to be the cause of the war. And as I’ve already noted, common soldiers in the CSA saw themselves as defending their homes while the upper classes were more likely to say that they were defending their right to own slaves. Lee freed his slaves at the opening of the war to make it perfectly clear that he was fighting to defend Virginia and not for slavery. Gen. McClellan, removed from command of the Union army for his excessive caution in prosecuting the war, ran for President against Lincoln in 1864, denouncing the war as a failure.

American politics have always been most energetic.