The War of Southern Aggression

[Oddball]

"Everybody did it" is no case.

The man was a stone racist who cared next to nothing about the plight of the blacks, and was only concerned about his place in the history books.

Well, he got that place....The greatest mass murderer of the 19th century.

 

[Old Rocks]

"Everybody did it" is no case.

The man was a stone racist who cared next to nothing about the plight of the blacks, and was only concerned about his place in the history books.

Well, he got that place....The greatest mass murderer of the 19th century.

Only in your fevered little mind, Dooodeee...... For the rest of the world, he stands as the man that preserved the Union and freed the slaves.

The South, through it's crimes against humanity, through it's aggresive military policies brought destruction upon itself for exactly the same reason that the Nazis did. The crime that they defended, slavery, is second only to genocide in the litany of man's crimes against his fellow man.

 

[Oddball]

He "preserved the union" at gunpoint and "freed" the slaves to become sharecroppers and victims of Jim Crow.

All the leftist wackaloon re-writing of history can't whitewash the rank ethnocentrism, mammoth ego and body count of Lincoln.

1/2 million young men dead, millions more wounded and cities burned to the ground are the real "crimes against humanity".

 

[Rogue 9]

"Everybody did it" is no case.

The man was a stone racist who cared next to nothing about the plight of the blacks, and was only concerned about his place in the history books.

Well, he got that place....The greatest mass murderer of the 19th century.

Bullshit, and you know it. The man was a product of his time, and his efforts did drastically improve the world. Emancipation came about through his actions, and the republican form of government was preserved on the bargain.

I don't think you quite grasp the geopolitical realities of the mid-19th century; hereditary rulership and aristocracy were still major political forces at that time, forces far greater than republicanism and bent on seeing it destroyed as a threat to their power base. European autocratic rulers wanted the Confederacy to succeed in order to break up the United States as a world power and clear the way for resumed colonization of the Western Hemisphere. The only thing that prevented the British Empire from immediately intervening on the part of the Confederates was Britain's opposition to slavery; the Emancipation Proclamation made their interference politically impossible, but there were significant forces in the British government prior to it pushing for recognition of the Confederacy. Napoleon III desperately wanted the Confederacy to succeed, confidently predicting that such an event would precipitate further breakups because the illusion that he believed the ability of a free people to rule themselves was would be dispelled. (He had every reason to believe it was an illusion; the French Republic, after all, was at that point no more and in fact France was ruled by Napoleon himself.) There's no reason to believe he was wrong; after all, the precedent the Slave Power was attempting to set was that losing an election is grounds for secession. If that precedent had been set, and minorities became empowered to break up the government whenever they chose, the United States would have Balkanized and been powerless against the European colonial empires that were then sweeping Africa because the Americas were denied to them by the United States. (In fact, Emperor Napoleon took advantage of the Civil War to back the Habsburg dynasty's conquest of Mexico while the U.S. was distracted; more would have come.) The Union victory in the Civil War saved the free world as we know it; the Confederacy would have destroyed it, however unwittingly.

He "preserved the union" at gunpoint and "freed" the slaves to become sharecroppers and victims of Jim Crow.

You can lay the last part squarely at the feet of Andrew Johnson, not Lincoln. Booth's assassination of Lincoln both made things harder on the South (Lincoln had the influence to reign in the punishing measures leveled by the Republican-dominated Congress, while Johnson, a Democrat despite being Lincoln's vice president, did not) and permitted Johnson to end much of the Reconstruction policies related to improving the condition of the freedmen, which he did with gusto, crippling the Freedmen's Bureau and vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (which was passed over his veto, though not for his lack of trying to prevent it).

 

[Oddball]

He was a victim of coicumstance!!

What.....ever!!!

 

[Rogue 9]

He was a victim of coicumstance!!

http://mikegothard.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/curly-thumb-300x374-21.jpg[img]

What.....[I][B]ever!!![/B][/I][/quote]
Yes, ignore the entire point. Way to win a debate, champ. :razz: At any rate, Lincoln's personal views [I]still[/I] don't affect the end result of the Union cause, which was emancipation and preservation of the free institutions that are now the dominant power in the world, something that [I]would not be[/I] if the United States were broken up before it became a world power, so I'm not sure why you're harping on it; it's really not the point.

 

[Oddball]

I ignore nothing.

The "Union cause" was total war, as Lincoln was the CiC.

His ethnocentrism and aggressive motivations for conquering the CS are verifiable matters of recorded history, for those willing to doff the blinders of hero worship to see.

 

[Rogue 9]

I ignore nothing.

The "Union cause" was total war, as Lincoln was the CiC.

His ethnocentrism and aggressive motivations for conquering the CS are verifiable matters of recorded history, for those willing to doff the blinders of hero worship to see.

And the Confederate States' aggressive policies and blatant disregard of human rights and liberties are also verifiable matters of history. They deserved destruction for their policies, and lo and behold they got it. The entire motivation for the rebellion was the preservation of slavery. Claiming it was the tariff is a joke; the tariff in 1860 was at its lowest level in decades. If that was the reason, they'd have seceded long before. No, as I have already thoroughly demonstrated through the declarations of the Confederate governments in this thread, their motivation was chattel slavery, for which they deserve nothing but scorn from posterity.

And "total war?" That's a joke; total war is by definition indiscriminate, which even at its most harsh the Union war policy wasn't. As for "ignoring nothing," you ignore the fact that Confederate victory would have meant the re-ascendance of monarchist and imperial governments and the end of self-rule by free citizenry before the century was out; it would have been proof positive that a republican government cannot sustain itself.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

I ignore nothing.

The "Union cause" was total war, as Lincoln was the CiC.

His ethnocentrism and aggressive motivations for conquering the CS are verifiable matters of recorded history, for those willing to doff the blinders of hero worship to see.

And the Confederate States' aggressive policies and blatant disregard of human rights and liberties are also verifiable matters of history. They deserved destruction for their policies, and lo and behold they got it. The entire motivation for the rebellion was the preservation of slavery. Claiming it was the tariff is a joke; the tariff in 1860 was at its lowest level in decades. If that was the reason, they'd have seceded long before. No, as I have already thoroughly demonstrated through the declarations of the Confederate governments in this thread, their motivation was chattel slavery, for which they deserve nothing but scorn from posterity.

And Lincoln ran on a platform of raising the tariff, and while it was Buchanan that signed the actual Morrill Tariff Lincoln certainly supported it.

Morrill Tariff - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As for the Declarations of Secession, how about South Carolina's Address to the Slaveholding States:

And so with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress, is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.

Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States by Convention of South Carolina

 

[SpidermanTuba]

“The War of Northern Aggression” is a popular phrase among Confederate apologists, referring to the supposed outrageous aggression shown by the Union to bring the otherwise peaceful Confederate States back under its rule. But how true is it?

Its very true. The Union burnt to the ground two major southern cities. Sherman stole food and valuables from civilians on his way to Savannah, leaving many a poor farmer with nothing to survive on.

The North invaded the South. That makes them the aggressor.

 

[Ravi]

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it..."

~Abraham Lincoln

Dud is a cherry picker.

Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.
I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.
As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.
Yours,
A. Lincoln.

 

[Ravi]

And in this he was no worse than the vast majority of his contemporaries, and far better than most. [quote="Abraham Lincoln]Certainly the negro is not our equal in color—perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black.

Lincoln was a free-labor ideologist, and it was for this reason that he opposed slavery. Was he a racist? Hell yes, but try to find me a significant number of people who weren't in 1860.

In any case, this is totally irrelevant and works against you in any case; if you want this to turn into a relative comparison of the racial attitudes of the opposing leaders, it still comes out the worse for the Confederates, because while Lincoln wasn't up in arms to give freedmen full political rights, Davis was up in arms to keep blacks in slavery, and to put ones who weren't in slavery to begin with in it on the bargain. The Confederacy made no distinction between escaped slaves and free blacks whom they captured during the war; all were either put in bondage or shot for the express crime of servile insurrection whether they'd been slaves or not.[/quote]Yes, this is all a red herring on Dud's part. It is admirable that even though Lincoln did not believe blacks were equal to whites he also believed they had a right not to be enslaved.

 

[editec]

Let us never forget that not every southerner supported the seccussion.

Whole states refused to succeed, and counties -- even counties in the deep South -- did not WANT their states to succeed.

This fact seems to be overlooked every time this issue comes up.

Just as there were copperheads in the North, there were supporters of the Republic in the South.

Another reason this civil war was so tragic, in my opinion.

Both sides drafted men whose POV was in opposition to fighting for their respective government's cause, ya know.

Plenty of these brave souls died for something that they not only didn't believe in, but actively opposed.

 

[JakeStarkey]

The libertarian secessionists once again have failed to revise history.

Keep it up, guys: keep twisting and keep getting corrected.

 

[Oddball]

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it..."

~Abraham Lincoln

Apparently, Abe never heard of a duplex.

 

[paperview]

I ignore nothing.

The "Union cause" was total war, as Lincoln was the CiC.

His ethnocentrism and aggressive motivations for conquering the CS are verifiable matters of recorded history, for those willing to doff the blinders of hero worship to see.

And the Confederate States' aggressive policies and blatant disregard of human rights and liberties are also verifiable matters of history. They deserved destruction for their policies, and lo and behold they got it. The entire motivation for the rebellion was the preservation of slavery. Claiming it was the tariff is a joke; the tariff in 1860 was at its lowest level in decades. If that was the reason, they'd have seceded long before. No, as I have already thoroughly demonstrated through the declarations of the Confederate governments in this thread, their motivation was chattel slavery, for which they deserve nothing but scorn from posterity.

And Lincoln ran on a platform of raising the tariff, and while it was Buchanan that signed the actual Morrill Tariff Lincoln certainly supported it.

Morrill Tariff - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As for the Declarations of Secession, how about South Carolina's Address to the Slaveholding States:

And so with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress, is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.

Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States by Convention of South Carolina

Kevin, the South had already seceded when the Morrill Tariff was passed.
The previous Tariff of 1857 was quite favorable to the South; no doubt pre-secession, the Tariff talk played a role, but most of the reasons given were slavery related. As Rogue states correctly, the Tariffs had been historically low in 1860.

In the snippet you provide from the Dec. 1860 SC convention, yes, Taxation is addressed, but a better portion of it deals with how important their slaves were to them in the whole matter. In fact, in their actual Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, pretty much most of it was about Slavery.
But to draw on your citation...a few paragraphs later from your quote above:

"[At the time the Constitution was written] There was then, no Tariff � no fanaticism concerning negroes.

It was the delegates from New England, who proposed in the Convention which framed the Constitution, to the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, that if they would agree to give Congress the power of regulating commerce by a majority, that they would support the extension of the African Slave Trade for twenty years.

African Slavery, existed in all the States, but one. The idea, that the Southern States would be made to pay that tribute to their Northern confederates, which they had refused to pay to Great Britain; or that the institution of African slavery, would be made the grand basis of a sectional organization of the North to rule the South, never crossed the imaginations of our ancestors. The Union of the Constitution, was a union of slaveholding States. It rests on slavery, by prescribing a Representation in Congress for three�fifths of our slaves."
​

The believed the Union rested on Slavery. They believed the Founders never could have imagined any proposed abolition of the system of bondage and their way of life.

"But if African slavery in the Southern States, be the evil their political combination affirms it to be, the requisitions of an inexorable logic, must lead them to emancipation. If it is right, to preclude or abolish slavery in a territory�why should it be allowed to remain in the States? The one is not at all more unconstitutional than the other, according to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. And when it is considered, that the Northern States will soon have the power to make that Court what they please, and that the Constitution has never been any barrier whatever to their exercise of power�what check can there be, in the unrestrained councils of the North, to emancipation?
​

In Ironies of Ironies, above they cite the Dred Scott decision, the one that states even Free Blacks could never be and never were Citizens of this country. ..
More than of third of the populace of the South were Non-Citizens, yet they carry on about Freedom and Liberty, Contentment and Happiness:

"Indeed, no people ever expect to preserve its rights and liberties, unless these be in its own custody. To plunder and oppress, where plunder and oppression can be practiced with impunity, seems to be the natural order of things. The fairest portions of the world elsewhere, have been turned into wilderness; and the most civilized and prosperous communities, have been impoverished and ruined by anti�slavery fanaticism. ...
The very object of all Constitutions, in free popular Government, is to restrain the majority. Constitutions, therefore, according to their theory, must be most unrighteous inventions, restricting liberty.
....Contentment, is a great element of happiness, with nations as with individuals. We, are satisfied with ours.​

What they were concerned about, more than anything, was losing their free labor and subjugating their Non-Citizens, their Africans :

"We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor�by which our population doubles every twenty years�by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land�by which order is preserved by unpaid police, and the most fertile regions of the world, where the white man cannot labor, are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African..."
​

 

[paperview]

“The War of Northern Aggression” is a popular phrase among Confederate apologists, referring to the supposed outrageous aggression shown by the Union to bring the otherwise peaceful Confederate States back under its rule. But how true is it?

...

The North invaded the South. That makes them the aggressor.

Oh Really?

Timeline from the SC Convention forward:

December 20, 1860: South Carolina convention passes ordinance of secession.
December 24, 1860: Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis introduces a "compromise" proposal which would effectively make slavery a national institution.
December 26, 1860: Major Anderson moves Federal garrison in Charleston, SC, from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter.
January 3, 1861: Georgia seizes Fort Pulaski. <---NOTE: THEY SEIZED THE FORT BEFORE THEY SECEDED.
January 4, 1861: Alabama seizes U.S. arsenal at Mount Vernon. <---NOTE: THEY SEIZED THE FORT BEFORE THEY SECEDED.
January 5, 1861: Alabama seizes Forts Morgan and Gaines. <---NOTE: THEY SEIZED THE FORT BEFORE THEY SECEDED.
January 6, 1861: Florida seizes Apalachicola arsenal. <---NOTE: THEY SEIZED THE ARSENAL BEFORE THEY SECEDED.
January 7, 1861: Florida seizes Fort Marion. <---NOTE: THEY SEIZED THE FORT BEFORE THEY SECEDED.
January 8, 1861: Floridians try to seize Fort Barrancas but are chased off.
January 9, 1861: Mississippi secedes.

Star of the West fired on in Charleston Harbor <-- FIRING ON A SHIP - A CLEAR ACT OF WAR
THE STEAMSHIP "MARION." SEIZED BY THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA TO BE CONVERTED INTO A MAN-OF-WAR.
January 10, 1861: Florida secedes.

Louisiana seizes U.S. arsenal at Baton Rouge, as well as Forts Jackson and St. Philip.
January 11, 1861: Alabama secedes.

Louisiana seizes U.S. Marine Hospital.
January 14, 1861: Louisiana seizes Fort Pike. <---NOTE: THEY SEIZED THE FORT BEFORE THEY SECEDED.
January 19, 1861: Georgia secedes.
January 26, 1861: Louisiana secedes.
January 28, 1861: Tennessee Resolutions in favor of Crittenden Compromise offered in Congress.
February 1, 1861: Texas secedes.
February 8, 1861: Provisional Constitution of the Confederacy adopted in Montgomery, AL.

Arkansas seizes U.S. Arsenal at Little Rock.
February 12, 1861: Arkansas seizes U.S. ordnance stores at Napoleon.
February 18, 1861: Jefferson Davis inaugurated as President of the Confederacy.
March 4, 1861: Abraham Lincoln inaugurated as 16th President of the United States.
March 21, 1861: "Cornerstone speech" delivered by Alexander Stephens. (This is where the Confederate V President lays it out clearly: Slavery is the Cornerstone of the Confederacy.)

April 12, 1861: Fort Sumter fired upon by Confederates.
THE WAR OFFICIALLY BEGINS.

 

[Rogue 9]

“The War of Northern Aggression” is a popular phrase among Confederate apologists, referring to the supposed outrageous aggression shown by the Union to bring the otherwise peaceful Confederate States back under its rule. But how true is it?

Its very true. The Union burnt to the ground two major southern cities. Sherman stole food and valuables from civilians on his way to Savannah, leaving many a poor farmer with nothing to survive on.

The North invaded the South. That makes them the aggressor.

Wow. Did you even read what I wrote? First off, if Sherman's march in 1864-65 is your example of aggression, I would just like to point out that this postdates a certain campaign of Lee's that ended at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1863. Second, since unlike some people around here I'm not a dishonest fucktard, the Union had been invading the Confederacy since 1861, but the Slave Power's partisans had been cutting off great swathes of United States territory since 1860 and if that's not enough for you had begun shooting at United States-flagged ships and U.S. federal forts before the federal government even called out the militia. Third, it was Southern aggression that had driven the government-rending controversy in the first place for the previous three decades at least. I conclusively proved this in no uncertain terms in the opening post of this thread, and you think you can dismiss it all with a one-liner about the late stages of the war?

 

[JakeStarkey]

One, no state had a right to secede

Two, no group of states had a right to secede and form a new nation.

Three, the war was predicated on southern aggression toward the rest of the country.

Fourth, the Union was the issue and slavery the cause of the war.

Fifth, the great moral outcome of the war was the crushing of the South.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Let us never forget that not every southerner supported the seccussion.

Whole states refused to succeed, and counties -- even counties in the deep South -- did not WANT their states to succeed.

This fact seems to be overlooked every time this issue comes up.

Just as there were copperheads in the North, there were supporters of the Republic in the South.

Another reason this civil war was so tragic, in my opinion.

Both sides drafted men whose POV was in opposition to fighting for their respective government's cause, ya know.

Plenty of these brave souls died for something that they not only didn't believe in, but actively opposed.

Which is one reason why a military draft is immoral, and completely opposed to the ideas of a free nation.