Spare me the hyperbole. It’s easy to be the moral authority behind your computer screen in 2018. Slavery was ubiquitous until the 19th century. It was a fact of life nearly everywhere and forever. There was not any more “mass brutality and rape” in the antebellum South than there was in any other slaveholding society.
What about the South’s decision to secede from the Union? That was an intentionally provocative act of war. All Lincoln was doing by resupplying the fort was… resupplying a fort, which lay within legal US territory. The fact that an group of criminals declared themselves independent doesn’t change that.
Are all minor footnotes compared to slavery.
Great for you. Is there a reason why you’re doing this? Because as a decent human being I think it’s pretty obvious that the South was oon the wrong side of history here.
Slavery was no longer ubiquitous by the time of the Civil War. The South was hanging on to a barbaric practice long after the rest of the world (except Brazil) had moved on.
Also: “yes, slavery was wrong, but all the cool kids are doing it!”
If you really believe this, then you are ignorant of the history of slavery. The kind of slavery in the US (and the Caribbean and much of Latin America, though most of those places ended slavery before the US) was fundamentally different, and far more brutal, than the slavery from ancient Rome. There may have been a few other slave societies as bad as that of the Americas, but none were worse, and many were far less brutal. American slavery was unusual in that it was race-based, and slaves were not considered fully human.
Why do you feel the need to defend it, or minimize its own evil? You don’t bear any blame for it at all, as a Southern white person. I’m also a Southern white person – I grew up in Louisiana. I bear no blame for slavery either. But if we’re misrepresenting history, or minimizing the evil of our forebears, then we do bear some blame.
In my opinion, Southern white society has never fully accepted how utterly horrible slavery was. It’s never fully accepted that the “Southern way of life” was an evil way of life, and the notions of Southern chivalry were the height of hypocrisy. And rhetorical dismissals such as yours are part of the tools that Southerners have used for decades in order to maintain the fiction that the Confederacy wasn’t unusually immoral, even for its time. We should stop, and recognize how evil our forebears were to their black neighbors, during and after slavery, and how wrong it is to make excuses for or rationalize that evil behavior.
Disclaimer: I’m from the south, both ancestrally and as a personal prior place of residence, although I never regarded it as “home”.
I put “It’s a complex issue and both sides were flawed.”, not because it isn’t true that the south’s reason for seceding was for one of the worst reasons possible, but because the north’s motivations were not exactly pure. Yes, there plenty of sincere abolitionists, and their desire to end slavery was certainly part of the coalition of northerners’ perspectives, but it would be a mistake to characterize the entire north (or its elected Senators and Representatives) as a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. There were some in the north who were (or would have been) OK with the continuation of slavery but who, for political ideological reasons, did not like the precedent of American states simply choosing to leave the union at will, and therefore supported the notion that it was illegal for the southern states to do so. There were people throughout the north who were (or would have been) happy to let the southern states work out their own answers w/regards to slavery but who resented southern intrusion upon the rights of northern states via legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Act. And there were some politicians in the north whose interests were primarily economic, who had long-range interests in the south’s agricultural products, who ideally wanted to see some combination of events leading to the south continuing to produce them, the products being cheaply available to themselves as manufacturers, and the south in a position of reduced power to control those transactions – something that an independent south making separate trade agreements with Britain and Europe could threaten.
Only a subset of the folks in the north saw the slaves as equally human in intelligence, worth, and dignity and had a partisan interest in the war in order to free them and give them full and equal rights.
Actually by 1860 Europe was pretty much free of slavery. Canada and Mexico had few slaves and no system of slavery.
This was before the time of things like income taxes and sales taxes. Tariffs used to be considered the normal means for a government to collect revenue. You put a tax on imported goods.
And the United States didn’t import agricultural products; we were an agricultural exporter. Putting a tariff on agricultural goods would have been useless. (In Europe, where they did import agricultural products, they put the tariffs on them.)
If the government wanted to collect revenue it had to put a tariff on something that was imported. Which at the time was industrial products. Britain was the main industrial manufacturer of the era and we imported a lot of British industrial products. So the government put a tariff on them to collect revenue.
Some Americans saw this as a business opportunity. If imported industrial goods were being charged a tariff, domestic industrial goods could be manufactured at an advantage. So they built factories.
There were plenty of southerners who had money. They could see the same situation. There was nothing that stopped them from investing in factories. But they chose to cling to their old agricultural system instead. That was a bad decision but nobody else did it to them.
And when the Confederacy was formed as a nation, one of the first things it did was enact a tariff on industrial goods of its own. As I said, government needed revenue and that was how it was done at the time.
You’re acting like the abolitionists were a major political force. They weren’t. They existed and they were loud but they held no actual power. They were like the Libertarians of their day.
A few abolitionists joined the Republican party. But most did not because the Republican party was not seen as a major supporter for abolition. Most abolitionists voted for the Liberty party or the Free Soil party.
No, it wasn’t. Slavery had disappeared in Europe during the middle ages. When slaves began being brought to the American colonies in the 17th century, it was the revival of practice that hadn’t existed in western society for over six hundred years.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons still counts as doing the right thing.
Well, the poll was largely about the south’s behavior and motivations. If doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons is different from doing the wrong thing under extenuating circumstances, I’d think there’s a difference also between doing the right thing for the right reason and doing it for the wrong ones.
Historical note: While the people of the South were fighting to preserve their entire way of life, ordinary Northerners had little reason to fight, and could have become quite disgusted with that horrible bloody war when there was no quick victory. A negotiated peace would have been inevitable if the North did not have a Great Cause to fight for. They did fight on, however, largely because top opinion-makers in the North had enraptured them with the story of “That new Saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death, — the new [Martyr whose suffering did] make the gallows glorious like the Cross.” The song commemorating John Brown’s martyrdom became, by far, the most popular song in North America during the Civil War years.
It’s always been good policy to control a lower class by showing them a class even lower than themselves. (And this is why the kleptocrats in today’s America are so eager to incite hatred against blacks and Hispanics.)
“All the adults”? Does this include adult slaves?
(If you’ve not read it already, you may find a letter from an emancipated slave to his former owner to be interesting.)
I love that letter! A pleasure to read it again.
To be fair, that’s only true if you don’t count serfdom as a form of slavery, which it totally was. But as others have pointed out, not all forms of slavery are equal, and the Colonial race-based chattel slavery was significantly worse than serfdom.
So the 600 year figure is my quibble. But even serfdom was long gone from most of Europe by the mid-1700s, meaning the Europeans got rid of their ‘diet slavery’ long before the South got rid of the real thing.
I am pretty sure that what 90% of us are saying is that there are no mitigating circumstances that make slavery, or fighting a war for slavery, morally ok.
Sick Burns of History! I think I read this one back in high school, but I’m not sure. Was definitely worth the re-read! I just love some of these letters. There’s a great one from Mongolian history, but I’ll spoiler it as it is a bit off topic.
A letter from one of the Mongolian Khans in response to a letter from the Pope that rebuked the Khan for going against God’s will. The Khan’s response is to explain, if your God is all powerful, then he must want me to win – otherwise he would have surely made me lose by now. Therefore, let’s schedule a time for Jesus to come pay tribute to me, the Khan.
Yes, in theory the Republicans platform said nothing about *banning *slavery, just stopping it’s spread into new territories.
All of those were not unique to the North.
In fact before the war the Democrats loved manifest Destiny while Lincoln opposed it. So, you’re pretty much wrong there. And the South was more Nationalistic than the North.
And of course the American brand of imperialism was hundreds of times better than the European kind. so that’s not even all that evil either.
The American cause turned righteous on January 1, 1863. But in any case, if the South was worse in atrocities than the North that blows your argument away. No doubt the Allies committed several war crimes during WW2, but saying that the Allies didnt have a righteous cause is bogus.
I think you need to do a little research on the origins of the Republican Party.
This is from Wikipedia, but it seems to be fairly accurate:
The Free Soil Party was largely absorbed into the Republican Party in the mid 1850s.
As for the Liberty Party, most of its members joined the Free Soil Party in the late 1840s and early 1850s, and most of the remaining members of the Liberty Party joined the Republican Party after its formation.
Links:
There was , actually. Slavery due to punishment for a crime or as a POW had some tiny basis as a just cause. But the South was into slavery due to racism. That was far worse than other types.
This simplistic view errs in both directions.
Before the time of Christ, Solon of Athens banned debt bondage and freed all enslaved Athenian citizens; Cyrus the Great of Persia freed the slaves in his Empire; Asoka the great Buddhist Emperor in India abolished the slave trade; ancient Chinese Emperors also abolished slavery, at least for periods.
In the 7th century A.D. Saint Balthild of Ascania, who was herself enslaved as a child but became Regent of Frankia when her husband Clovis II died very young, banned the enslavement of Christians. Enslavement of blacks, heathens, and Muslims remained generally legal but in 1493 Queen Isabella of Castile banned the enslavement of Native Americans. Those who had already been sold by Columbus in Seville were tracked down, purchased, and released.
Since Slavery has little purpose when the wages of peasants are at bare subsistence level, slavery could be abolished in Western Europe with little economic effect: serfs were often effectively just the tax-paying vassals with the least land.
So it’s quite incorrect to assert that slavery similar in scale to the antebellum South was common-place before the 19th century. OTOH, slavery was NOT fully abolished in the 19th century and continues to this day. It is estimated that there are perhaps 20 million slaves today just in India. Here’s a chart showing where the world’s 30 million slaves live; other estimates put the world-wide slave total at 46 million or even 70 million.
In the U.S. there are over 2 million people presently incarcerated in prisons or jails. Some of them are compelled to work for 23¢/hour or less, and placed in solitary confinement if they refuse. In addition to these “legal” slaves of the state, there are at least 60,000 privately “owned” slaves in the U.S., or probably much more than that depending on how broad a definition is used.
I believe in the right of self-determination. As such, I think that the people of South Carolina had a right to secede from the Union and form another ‘union’ should it so choose without fear of violent reprisals. I see it as no different than Brexit or if California decided it wanted to be its own country. I feel that joining the United States was a voluntary association and as such, leaving the United States should be a voluntary decision. At the same time though, I don’t think that the ‘people’ of South Carolina did choose to secede. I think that the white landowners chose to secede. If there would have been a vote among all of the people including slaves and women that voted for secession, then I think that the Federal government would have been remiss in a violent response. Since that is not what happened, I still abhor violence, but do not recognize that South Carolina was exercising their right to secede in a moral manner.
Oh. Well I agree with that completely. Pointing to the north and saying “But they…” doesn’t erase southern culpability.