Backslider wrote:
Sorry for the length of this, but...
Me too (mine, not yours)
(Someone):
As for laws disadvantageous to the south, to what laws are you referring?
I don't know his mind, but I'm assuming he's referring to a few import/export laws and tariffs that would've/were hurting the South's cotton-based economy but were advantageous to the industrial North.
On the other hand, there were laws that were patently advantageous to the South, such as the Fugitive Slave Law, that not only allowed slaves who had run away to free states to be returned (its original intent) but in fact given the lack of documentation of most poor free blacks often led to raids by bounty hunters seeking escaped slaves on black areas near borders of slave states, rounding up black folks until they had enough to match the number of escaped slaves they were looking for, and if the people rounded up couldn't prove they weren't slaves, poof!, they were. The last few years before the War, they couldn't even go to court to prove they weren't slaves, because they had no rights.
That's right. "Free" blacks had no rights. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Dred Scott decision. Officially, the decision was in a case over whether a slave owner could take a slave with him into a free state, live with this person as a paid servant for a decade, then move back to a slave state, taking the servant along as a slave. The court decided he had not been "free" during those years, even though he was paid and living in a state that didn't allow slavery. He had always been a slave.
But that was not all. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, a slave owner himself, wrote that "the negro . . . had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." According to this decision, rendered in 1856, even free blacks living in non-slave states were
not citizens of the United States, and had none of the rights of citizens, including redress of the courts. They had no rights at all. They were, essentially, slaves that didn't happen to belong to anybody.
I could go on, but this should do to show that not all the laws at the time of the Great Rebellion (my own favorite alternate term for the Civil War) favored the North.
That's part of the reason behind the Civil War, but the main part is that Americans, being the bloodthirsty critters that we are, hadn't had a good war in a few years and were itching to kill somebody. Wiping out the indigenous population just didn't have the oomph it once did.
Cynical as I am, I still think this is wrong. For one thing, we happily returned to killing the indigenous population almost as soon as the Civil War ended, so it obviously hadn't lost its appeal. I don't think you can reduce the Civil War to man's natural lust for violence -- though that certainly played its part.
I'm snipping your personal background to provide a bit of mine. I grew up in one of the few states where slavery was untouched by the Emancipation Proclamation. Missouri was a slave state that remained loyal to the Union (well, except for the legislators elected in 1860, most of whom ended up in the exile government that operated out of Arkansas and insisted they were the "true" government of Missouri). St. Louis, where I was born and now live, was fairly solidly Union. I spent most of my growth years in the rural southeast of the state, however, where there were many rebel sympathizers then and were many racist yahoos when I was young (and probably still are now). I remember being told about (by someone who was actually present) a conversation where grown men were actually discussing the possibility of "stringing up" a local high school athlete who happened to be black for having the temerity to date a local doctor's daughter (the doctor didn't mind at all, nor did most of us kids -- things are getting better, slowly).
There are a few people who collect Civil War memorabilia or display the Confederate Battle Flag for whom it is a matter of heritage and history. They represent perhaps 1% of the people who do so. I have, in fact, met only one in my life I would not say was deeply racist.
Of course, history books never talk about how bad the North treated its working class, particularly immigrants, during this time, nicely glossing over labor riots, unsafe working conditions in factories and conscription when telling us how evil and dastardly all those Southern slave owners were.
Oh, please. Not only is the history of the labor movement in the country taught in history books, but the fact is that conditions in Europe were sufficiently worse that those immigrants CHOSE to come here to endure the misery you cite; the slaves had no choice in the matter.
The Civil War was only nominally about slavery and freeing the slaves.
I'm sorry, but this is just untrue. It's a popular notion these days, and it's true that the version of the War to Free the Slaves I was taught in grade school was overly simplistic (although I can tell you from looking at my daughter's textbooks that they're doing better now), but the fact is that the war was, in fact,
primarily about freeing the slaves.
The Republican party was first and foremost a party built around Abolition. That was their unifying factor, the cause they rallied around, the only thing some of the disparate members all agreed on.
In the words of the Grolier Encyclopedia, it was "organized in 1854 to oppose the extension of slavery into the territories."
That was why the Republican Party existed. In the 1860 election, this six-year-old 3rd party swept Lincoln into the White House for a variety of complicated reasons, including the fact that the 2nd party, the Whigs, was dying, and the Democrats had themselves split -- largely, but not entirely over the slavery issue -- into Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats with two separate Presidential Candidates. But make no mistake about it. People who voted for Lincoln were, by and large, opposed to slavery, and his unexpected election shocked the South into rebellion.
The Southern reaction to his election was to assume that he would try to end slavery, and soon. Ironically, Lincoln was in fact a believer in gradual and evolutionary measures, and would have tried to phase out slavery over time, probably. He didn't
want to see the country split over the problem.
But the slave owners who controlled the machinery of government in most Southern states didn't wait to see what Lincoln would do. The seceded, and rebelled. Immediately.
Not because of tarriffs that had been in place for years. Because of Lincoln's election. Because they wanted to defend their "peculiar institution" (and that's
their word for it!) and their way of life, and they were certain that his election doomed it.
Only a few souls, such as Horace Greeley, gave a damn about the slaves one way or another.
This is nonsense. See above. The Republican party would not have existed if Abolition had not been a passionate ideal held by a lot of people. A minority of people, yes -- in many ways Lincoln's Republicans were a fourth party, rather than a third (with the two Democrat parties 1st and 2nd and the dying Whigs 3rd), and his election can be seen as a fluke. But they were a very sizable minority who were
very passionate. Think of the anti-drinkers who were to force through Prohibition a few decades later. Or today's abortion foes. It was not just "a few souls."
In fact, during the dark days of the war, when the tide was in the South's favor, the most dangerous place a black man could be was in New York City or Boston.
This is quite possible, but only emphasizes the point that people at the time saw the war as, in fact, being about slavery, and were mad at the black people they saw around them as being in an abstract way the cause of the misery they felt themselves to be in.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a propaganda tool; hell, it only freed slaves in Confederate areas - a place where it can be argued the Federal government had no say - and didn't touch those in bondage in Union territory like Maryland, New Orleans or Eastern Tennessee.
Umm, not sure you're right about New Orleans (I'm pretty sure it said "the states" and I thought Louisiana was in the Confederacy), but on the other hand you left out the entire state of Missouri, so we'll call it even. Sure, the Emancipation Proclamation was a propaganda tool. Its ostensible intent was to scare the rebellious states into abandoning the war. "Give up and we'll let you keep your slaves, at least for now; keep fighting and we declare them all to be free." Nobody expected it to work. The real power of it was the hope that its dissemination throughout the south would cause slave rebellions that would essential give the South a two-front war. It was less successful on this count than had been hoped, and few slaves were freed by the E.P. until Sherman marched through.
I also clipped the flag discussion; I agree with it wholeheartedly. The "Confederate flag," as most people incorrectly think of it, was resurrected purely and totally by foes of civil rights. Even the 1890 Mississippi decision was connected to one of the many rises of the Klan.
People who fight for symbols - and I'm including any and all symbols here - are only superceded in stupidity by those who would kill and die for those symbols. And as far as any and all wars go, just remember to look at who's telling you to fight and die for whatever reason and where they sit when the blood starts to pour. Take care, Matt
I don't know. Symbols stand for ideas, after all. Are you willing to die for, let's say, the American ideals of freedom and democracy? Does the American flag stand for those ideals or not?
I used to believe the way you do about things like flags. Symbols. More often than not, empty ones. I used to refuse to stand to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school, and in fact there were enough of us who did that the school quit saying it in the mornings rather than have the spectacle of kids sitting in their seats or being sent to the Principal every day. I said the words were meaningless, that this country was founded on slavery and existed on injustice and was fighting a war for rubber and oil (the rubber dates me -- it was Vietnam, not the Gulf, and my ideas were a lot more common than those who bravely stood up to the mindless patriotism of the Gulf War days, much less the jingoism that has infected us since 9/11).
But while I still decry mindless patriotism, I no longer think all patriotism is mindless. I realize that the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Declaration of Independence, and all those other symbols of what America is supposed to stand for, are promises of the future, not statements about the present or past, and they are promises that can only be redeemed if we make them happen. And yes, sometimes those symbols are worth fighting for, because the ideas they stand for are worth fighting for, and even if the symbols stand for them imperfectly, even if the ideals don't exist anywhere except on paper and in people's minds, they are still real, and are still worth fighting for.
One final note. Someone else said that slavery was "vital" to the economy of the South. This is only sort of true, and the extent to which is
is true was largely created by the Southern aristocracy's insistence on
making it true.
The fact is, industrialization and civil rights were the wave of the future, and all agricultural slave economies were doomed, even those that didn't depend on racial injustice (Russia freed the serfs a decade or so after the Civil War, for instance). It was a matter of time. By the 1820s, it was clear to most even in the South that slavery would eventually have to go, and from that point on you essentially have a small -- but very rich and powerful -- minority warping the entire region away from progress trying to presever an 18th Century way of life for themselves and their heirs. It was doomed to failure, even without the war.
You're probably going to tell me that slavery exists today. It does, but there is no place where large scale slavery exists as a dominant part of the economy. The closest is probably Bangkok, where the sex industry employs hundreds of slaves and virtual slaves, and is at least a major force, if not a key component, of the economy. But really, slavery exists in tiny backwaters, in eddys and tidepools. It is not yet exterminated, but it has not been a major economic force anywhere since the 1890s.
Wow. I knew this was going to be long, but it's
much longer than I intended. Sorry, all.
_________________
Lord Julius
Grandlord of Palnu
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
Edits: first two trying to fix a quote problem, third correcting a couple of typos I should have caught before I sent it (and fourth, I found yet another one: "in fract" *sigh* -- if there are any more, they're staying).
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: lordjulius on 2002-04-17 08:38 ]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: lordjulius on 2002-04-17 08:39 ]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: lordjulius on 2002-04-17 09:16 ]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: lordjulius on 2002-04-17 09:19 ]</font>
Coincidence? 