# Why didn't the South/racists get their day of reckoning like postwar Germans did? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 4, 2016, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-the-south-racists-get-their-day-of-reckoning-like-postwar-germans-did/770571 "2016-11-04T00:23:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Corry\_El](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Corry\_El](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Corry_El)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2017, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-the-south-racists-get-their-day-of-reckoning-like-postwar-germans-did/770571/81 "2017-06-06T21:47:15Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > That is true. Lincoln’s \*primary \*motivation was to save the Union. But he was elected by a party and on a ticket that had as it goal the limitation and possibly eventual eradication of slavery. The South knew that full well, which is why they left the Union. Lincoln’s immediate goal ca. 1861 was not to abolish slavery. The average early Union volunteers main motivation certainly wasn’t. However, the secessionists’ main reason for seceding _was_ a belief that Lincoln’s election meant eventual abolition. See the South Carolina secession declaration. Slavery is pretty much all it talks about, the North’s long history of lack of good faith (eg wrt Fugitive Slave Law enforcement) and the last straw: “the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” [http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th\_century/csa\_scarsec.asp](http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp) And eventually during the war and after a more openly abolitionist faction of the GOP came to the fore. Anger toward the secessionists over the war’s terrible cost was a catalyst, but not that long after the election of Lincoln slavery was in fact abolished: the secessionists’ fear turned out reasonable, though exacerbated by their own actions. The excessive downplaying in the US nowadays of slavery and abolition as factors in the Civil War is driven from two sides: 1. Southerners (not necessarily all conservatives or just truly conservative Southerners) who want to honor ‘their heritage’ in the CSA and particularly its military without dealing with the moral stain of slavery that cause fought to preserve. 2. Left leaning people everywhere who go to any length to avoid looking like Stewie in Family Guy where he gives an unsolicited ‘you’re welcome’ to a black guy when touring Gettysburg. That attitude is obnoxious indeed, but the Union sacrifice was in fact in part, and increasingly as things developed and the cost rose, about freeing the slaves. Though not about racial equality, which isn’t the same thing. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2017, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-the-south-racists-get-their-day-of-reckoning-like-postwar-germans-did/770571/82 "2017-06-07T23:17:13Z")
> [@The\_Plutonium\_Kid](#): > > Only in theory. In practice, the communist movement established totalitarian oligarchies every bit as brutal as the Nazis. Communism is probably the bloodiest political movement in world history. All their noble-sounding platitudes and rhetoric are just a velvet glove on an iron fist. We’re not talking about the people in charge. We’re talking about the rank-in-file communists, who did believe what they talked about. That it is an easily corruptible system is tragic, but that doesn’t mean that most communists are totalitarian. > [@](#): > > Whew! That’s a tremendous over-generalization and over-simplification there. It isn’t that Southerners or anyone else were anti-egalitarian, it’s that the modern left has made radical egalitarianism a dogma that no one is supposed to question. Bullshit. I’ve been preached the same egalitarianism I practice my entire life. Until relatively recently, no one tried to paint that egalitarianism as left wing or radical. It can’t be, since it’s literally in our founding document as a country. “All men are created equal” is a bold statement. And we as a country haven’t really lived up to it. But that is the direction we are supposed to go. It’s why I get so upset to see all these Republicans claim that we don’t know what bigotry is. I’m just describing what I’ve known was bigotry back from when I was a Republican kid. The only difference is that I realize that the same thing happens to other groups. And it isn’t dogma. It’s something that we’ve worked out through the millennia of human existence. You might as well call democracy dogma. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-didnt-the-south-racists-get-their-day-of-reckoning-like-postwar-germans-did/770571.md?page=4)