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Well see.... The North is absolved because they released their slaves sooner.... Never mind that if one is going to hate southerners over attrocities committed in the past, one must ALSO hate, Germans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, oh... AMERICANS, etc, etc, etc...
Maybe Angus is Canadian? They have a relatively clean past and it would make him less of a hypocrite...
The difference between all those other countries and Southerners is that Germans don't spend a lifetime rationalizing Adolph Hitler and defending him. The Spanish don't have web sites glorifying the Inquistion. Most of us don't celebrate the destruction of the Native American culture and devote hours to fantasizing about how great it was.
You guys, on the other hand, do exactly that with your vicious and perverted ante-bellum society. You take the position that there was really nothing wrong with 'Jim Crow' laws. You even had one of your Senators - the Senate Majority Leader - lament that we would have been a better country if only the racist bigot Strom Thurmond had been elected President in 1948.
How about that song so thoughtfully posted by Frog? What's your favorite line? I know, it's so hard to choose just one for you!
My point was not that the north was more moral than the south - it was not generally. It's simply that slavery was the cause of the civil war (and indirectly that a powerful federal government has been needed historically to end evils that the local communities supported).
Actually, two separate Supreme Court Chief Justices. And Chief Justice Taney who did write the Dred Scott decision is unfairly demonized. While Dred Scott was a horrible decision, Taney was an impressive legal mind, his other decisions were generally considered to be excellent.
And I think disparaging TexasReb's cites based solely on the fact that you don't like his name is not fair. His citations are accurate. He doesn't have to be an expert, this is a public forum, but if his facts are accurate then they deserve to be considered.
No one here (at least I hope no one here) on this thread defends the practice of slavery, or thinks that the South should have been allowed to spread the practice in order to maintain political power. But it's unfair to dismiss the people who see the Civil War in multi-dimension. To take modern values and perceptions and try to apply them to the causes of the Civil War is unfair to the Americans, both Northern and Southern, who lived then and didn't have the advantage of modern values and perceptions.
Well, that was the reason the Civil War was fought.
But I'm assuming that you believe that while no one "...thinks that the South should have been allowed to spread the practice in order to maintain political power..." it was perfectly OK to Secede and plunge the country into a Civil War to maintain the practice.
The logic of that thinking totally escapes me - and most other rational, non-Southern human beings.
Now come on, many blacks were in the state militia's during that war, and all they did was answer to Confederate officials. Even though your black I wouldn't consider you the universal voice of blacks, because you don't speak for all black people, if want to rip up confederate flags, then go ahead, but don't expect to not have resistance.
And your true nature shines through, my text in Blue.
Okay, thank you for admitting that the Confederates fought for slaves. Slavery was the MAIN reason why they fought, Digusting but true.
Yes, but it was most prevalent in the South. Racism has and still is more prevalent in the south. I've never said that there wasn't any racism in the North. Such things are fiction.
LOL I think these neo-confederates use these "Black Confederate Soldiers" as a myth to make it seem like the Confederacy wasn't racist. IF thousands of black soldiers had fought in the Civil War, why were they treated so badly afterwards? Jim Crow, Civil rights movement, lynchings, etc.?
Please if you come to New Jersey with all the Confederate crap you'll get beaten to a pulp. And I will laugh when it happens too.
The South in 1860, much like today, was backward and reactionary and still living in some cuckoo land where there would always be this permanent slave class to do all of their work for them. I don't expect them to have 21st century values - just mid 19th century.[/quote]
In your fantasy world, which is the only culture of any significance you have, Southerners are the evil obstacle to making your world perfect. Our forefathers saw this clearly. It was that kind of society and people that they fought to be free of!
Y'all have no heritage of your own and do not know what a heritage is. Y'all believe in your own self-interest and fashionable abstractions.
Yeah DC but being anti slavery isn't just a modern notion but one that was around at the time; perhaps it was a modern value for the time but one that people were exposed to and had the choice to accept or reject.
While the notion was around at the time, it was a notion that had just gained prevalence. So you have to accept that some people were resistant to the notion, and even if they embraced the notion that slavery was wrong, you can understand that in the South's case, freeing the slaves had implications that went well beyond humanitarian concerns.
It takes time for new attitudes, even as they gain prevalence, to take hold, especially when they involve significant financial investment. I'm not defending slavery, but even as a slaveholder arrives at the conclusion that owning slaves is wrong, he has to consider his family's financial well-being, and how to go about freeing the slaves while protecting his finances. He also has to deal with how his decision affects his community. Is the community prepared to deal with these fellow human beings as freed men? Is he going to rent them their quarters, and pay them cash for their labor? Are they going to leave the South, perhaps for the opportunities out West, the gold and silver mines, the railroads? It is clear to us that the slaves should have been freed to pursue whatever opportunities they wished, but that is a modern sensibility. Even people who advocated freeing the slaves from bondage were not necessarily advocating freeing them to pursue whatever. The Northern states had passed many laws restricting freed slaves, from owning property to pursuing various professions, to even living in certain communities. The North did this first. So, I do disagree with you about the "modern notion" being around at that time.
Personally, I think a hundred years from now, we'll have a completely different notion of homosexuality. And someone then might say, hey, the "modern notion" was around in 2010. And they'll be right, but society takes its sweet time in catching up to "modern notions".
Okay, thank you for admitting that the Confederates fought for slaves. Slavery was the MAIN reason why they fought, Digusting but true.
Yes, but it was most prevalent in the South. Racism has and still is more prevalent in the south. I've never said that there wasn't any racism in the North. Such things are fiction.
LOL I think these neo-confederates use these "Black Confederate Soldiers" as a myth to make it seem like the Confederacy wasn't racist. IF thousands of black soldiers had fought in the Civil War, why were they treated so badly afterwards? Jim Crow, Civil rights movement, lynchings, etc.?
Please if you come to New Jersey with all the Confederate crap you'll get beaten to a pulp. And I will laugh when it happens too.
GOOD MORNING, ma'am! (said with downward sweep of plumed, gray slouch hat!)
Furthermore, when my ancestors fought-- they fought against the hegemony of the ELITES, against the ever worsening power of the northern Leviathan & FOR liberty.
Arguing that few owned slaves, as the confederate general cited above did, and thus the war was not about slavery is self serving at best. First, because most did not make the decision to go to war and those who did were far more commited to slavery as an institution than the population as a whole. That was what was meant (in part) by the expression common in the South at the time "rich man's war, poor man's fight."
But its deceptive in another respect as well. Simply because most southerners did not own slaves did not mean most did not benefit from them. Slavery was central to the cotton economy and that in turn drove the economic well being of most in the region. The ending of slavery was bound to have vast negative impact on a wide range of southerners who owned no slaves. Moreover, slavery was an ideal in the south that went beyond direct personal gain. It was seen as a way for white southerners to raise themselves up economically. Bedford Forest, who made a fortune running slaves was an obvious example of this ideal in practice, there were others. The fact that few actually did so is besides the point, most northern whites never owned factories or large amounts of property but the ideal of being able to do either was central to the value system there.
Slavery also played a central cultural feature in southern social values. In part this reflected raw fear of what freed blacks would mean. For much of its history southerners believed firmly that true freedom for blacks would lead to murder and rape of whites. This continued well into the 1960's and the collapse of overt southern racism can be tied to realization (at last) that southern blacks were not going to go on rampages of murder and rape if given full rights in the community.
Still, even more important socially was that the inferior status of blacks gave poor whites the sense that they were better than at least someone in a society where status was far more important than the rest of the US and less tied to income (as compared to place in a hiearchy). That is why Jim Crow was commonly supported most vigerously by poor whites (and not economic elites) - it meant that the "white man" (invariably the poor, low status white man) reserved his prefered place in the social hiearchy.
For these reasons whites, including those who owned no slaves, had a signficant investment in slavery.
While the notion was around at the time, it was a notion that had just gained prevalence. So you have to accept that some people were resistant to the notion, and even if they embraced the notion that slavery was wrong, you can understand that in the South's case, freeing the slaves had implications that went well beyond humanitarian concerns.
I understand that people act in their economic interest and I think it's the most reliable of motives. I think the southerners rebelled to protect slavery because it was in their economic interest to do so and I've no doubt that most Federals who fought to preserve the union did so to protect their economic interest.
That's why I'm a trade unionist and a liberal; because such things are in my economic interest. I leave the moral arguments of modern liberalism to others. Indeed, I think it's the modern emphasis of "social" liberals on the moral issues rather than self interest that has weakened modern liberalism. But that's another story.
I understand that people act in their economic interest and I think it's the most reliable of motives. I think the southerners rebelled to protect slavery because it was in their economic interest to do so and I've no doubt that most Federals who fought to preserve the union did so to protect their economic interest.
That's why I'm a trade unionist and a liberal; because such things are in my economic interest. I leave the moral arguments of modern liberalism to others. Indeed, I think it's the modern emphasis of "social" liberals on the moral issues rather than self interest that has weakened modern liberalism. But that's another story.
I can respect your point of view.
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