Which of the following best describes the Confederate cause?

In My Humble Opinion
21

The grievances that the 13 Colonies used to demand independence from Britain were, frankly, not very good ones. They were whining about paying taxes, which were raised because the British had to pay for wars they fought DEFENDING THE COLONIES from the French and their allied native tribes during the French and Indian War. So the Revolutionary War wasn’t particularly justified, but the 13 colonies won and gained their independence. How “just” their cause was doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it. George Washington was a traitor to the British Empire and if the Americans had lost the war he would have been hung, along with lots of the people who we idolize today, in accordance with British Law. But that didn’t happen, and the British signed a treaty which made the United States an independent country.

The South lost the Civil War because it was outproduced by the North, and because of flawed strategy. Their status as an independent nation really didn’t have anything to do with whether they had legitimate grievances with the Federal government or not – they aren’t independent because they lost, not because they were wrong. If somehow the Confederacy had won the Civil War and became an independent nation, then that would make the Confederate cause no less evil. It would just mean evil had triumphed, but the Confederate States of America would be an independent country.

So why does voting 6 mean that I am British, exactly?

[by the way, the British Empire granted my home country independence in 1948, so I wouldn’t be a Brit either way. But you know. Whatever.]

And the Allies didn’t fight to stop the Nazis from killing Jews, they fought to stop Germany’s territorial expansion, and later to conquer as much of Germany as possible before the Soviets did so that the post-war border wouldn’t see the Soviets all the way in France. So what? Does that make the Nazis any less evil?

Lincoln was racist against black people. So what? That doesn’t make the Confederates any less evil.

22

The Confederacy was more one dimensional than the Nazis, though; more purely evil. The South wasn’t so much comparable to the Nazis, but to the concentration camp commanders; the situations would mirror each other better if they had somehow taken over Germany and created a nation devoted to *literally nothing *other than killing as many people as possible.

23

Hey Der Trihs, this might be a slight hijack, but – I am always looking for new sources about these kinds of topics, and you seem like you’ve read at least a few. Anything good about how the South got poor whites so enthralled by slavery? You’d think at least some of them would realize that slavery is free labor, which is competing with their paid labor, and therefore hurting them economically. And yet it does seem like the South was pretty united in support of slavery.

24

Would you say the same thing for the large number of other cultures throughout history that used slaves? Pure evil?

25

I don’t speak for DerTrihs, but since I also said that I considered the Confederacy pretty repugnant, I figured I’d throw my two cents in.

First of all, I don’t consider morality to be relative, and I think that doing so leads to allowing horribly immoral things to occur all over the world. So slavery is wrong and evil today, in the United States but also in China or the moon (if you somehow got some slaves up there?). Slavery was wrong last year, and ten years ago, five hundred years ago, and ten thousand years ago. So to answer your question in one word – yes.

Yes, the Roman Empire did lots of very, very evil and immoral things throughout its history. If they were around today, behaving as they did in, say, 200 AD, we’d all consider them repugnant. The fact that everyone else was also acting immorally in 200 AD is no excuse.

But at the same time, every society has to be judged in comparison to the societies around it. Sure, the Roman empire was barbaric and did evil things, that would be evil and immoral today and were evil and immoral back then. Some of their opponents were worse then they were, and others were better. But their society was deeply flawed, whether they knew it or not. You could average out all of the surrounding states and figure out whether Rome was more or less moral than its surrounding states. The answer would probably depend on which particular period in Roman history you look at, of course.

Mind you, our society is also deeply flawed. I do what I can to guide it in the direction I believe will bring us closer to a truly moral society, by voting, advocating for candidates who agree with my position, etc., but I recognize that we aren’t perfect either. We’re definitely better than the Romans, though, and we’re definitely better than the Confederacy.

So, judging a place like, say, Ancient Greece, we can say that it was a society with deep moral flaws. It had slavery, it had discrimination, it had no rights for women. In some ways, it was better than its neighbors, and in others it was worse. We have this idea of the West and Democracy triumphing over the evil Imperialist Persians in the Peloponnesian War, but in some ways citizens of Persia were more free than citizens of the Greek city states. We can recognize the good things we got from our Hellenic roots, like the idea of democracy. But we shouldn’t idolize ancient Greece or pretend that it was far superior, morally, than the rest of the ancient world.

Now what if we judge the Confederacy by the standards of its times? Well, slavery had already been abolished in many places. By the Civil War, the only major countries to still practice slavery were Brazil and the United States. So the Confederacy’s obsession with slavery was not a product of its time – it was a throwback to a far less moral age.

Couple that with the fact that the Confederacy wasn’t a nation that happened to use slaves – the Confederate States of America was founded by slave owners, for the purpose of maintaining slavery, or their “peculiar institution” as they called it. This is what makes the Confederacy stand head and shoulders above the rest of the slave-owning nations, in terms of immorality. There would have been no Confederate States of America if it wasn’t for slavery.

26

But did the people want to, or just the rich, racist white politicians?

27

I dont understand the first lines.

However, the second part is a little true, the North didn’t fight for the slaves, the North fought (initially) to restore the Union- and because* the South attacked the North.*

28

Because they may have been “poor illiterate white trash” but at least they were better than those “subhuman niggers”.

29

Slavery in the South was just about the worst form of slavery. You were a slave because you were black and “subhuman”. In other cultures, you were a slave as you were a POW and better to be a slave than just slaughtered, or you were a slave as punishment for a crime (instead of being stuck in a prison). Buying your way out was much easier. In many cases a master routinely freed his slaves in his will. But even if you were a freed back man in the south, you were still seen as subhuman, and you’d have to constantly prove you were freed- and it didnt always work.

So debt slavery, punishment slavery and POW slavery all were varying degrees of evil. (Altho a case can be made that punishment slavery was a necessary evil ) but racist slavery is *doubly evil. *

30

I don’t know if a meaningful majority wanted it, but there sure were plenty of poor, average people jumping to join the military and fight for the cause.

31

Why do you think that is, considering how unpaid slave labor hurts them economically?

32

Well, it started with the South attacking another part of the South a couple of thousand feet away.

33

For the same reason that so many people today support the rights of the rich, becuse they dream of someday being rich themselves? Poor people who didn’t own slaves aspired to someday be rich people who did own slaves.

34

Also, I’m not sure if poor southerners considered slavery taking away jobs so much as considering slaves to be labor-saving devices to make things easier for “real” people. Do modern laborers resent tractors taking away plow-and-mule labor?

35

Ft Sumpter didn’t belong to the South. It was Federal territory, it belonged to the USA.

36

Deluded by their leadership and because in those days you were more loyal to your State than your nation.

37

The seceding states described their cause explicitly, and it overwhelmingly came down to protecting the right to own slaves - and to carry that right into new territories. From Georgia’s secession declaration:

“For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic.”

Non-slave holding southern whites didn’t care much about upholding the finances of plantation owners. But they could be whipped up into sectional loyalties and defending their own perceived economic self-interest.

The North didn’t defeat the South just because of superior resources. They had a whole lot of people dedicated to preserving the Union and who were willing to undergo terrible conditions in order to fight for it (many in the South up until the end persisted in the delusion that Union soldiers didn’t have the stomach for fighting and would just give up and go away).

38

Would any of those states succeeded if all of the adults in the state could vote on the decision?

39

The Americans who fought against the British in 1776 were traitors and rebels to the British government. But they got away with it because they won the war.

The Confederates were traitors and rebels to the United States government in 1861. But they couldn’t make it stick.

But in both cases, the treason and rebellion occurred at the beginning of the war before anyone knew what the outcome would be.

Modern-day Confederate supporters want to pretend that somehow the Confederates remained loyal Americans throughout the war. Which is nonsense.

I have no idea how you got the Native Americans wrapped up in all this.

40

That was not true for most people. If it had been generally accepted then they’re wouldn’t have been a war. Everyone would have agreed that the southern states had a right to secede and form a new country. That obviously was not what most people thought. Even in the south there were plenty of people who felt nationhood outranked statehood.