What if the Confederacy had been allowed to secede peacefully?

[C_Clayton_Jones]

What if the Confederacy had been allowed to secede peacefully?

It would have returned to the Union shortly thereafter peacefully, having been an unmitigated failure.

 

[MuadDib]

The fact is the war WAS NEVER ABOUT SLAVERY.

Yes, it was. Many factors played a role, but all were grounded in the issue of slavery.

No.

Anyone who thinks that slavery had nothing to do with the war is wrong and anyone who thinks that slavery had everything to do with it is just as wrong. It's role in causing the war should not be underestimated, but it is vastly overestimated by most.

The role of slavery in causing the war had much more to do with the agitations of the radical abolitionists and the concerns over encroachment on the Constitution, and much less to do with the actual freeing of slaves and abolishing the peculiar institution.

The Constitutional question wasn't about simply freeing the slaves. The concern was that had ever had anything to do with people's private property and that if the Constitution could be amended to allow the federal government to free your slaves, what else could the federal government seize or take away.

The vast majority of slaves were owned by the wealthiest 6% of the population and only 14% of the population owned any slaves at all. Do the math and you'll find that 86% of Southerners owned no slaves at all. Some of the largest slaveholders in the South were free blacks. The Southern middle class absolutely hated the institution of slavery because they saw it as an obstacle to their prosperity.

The abolitionists seemed to be more concerned with extremist agitation than they were in actually abolishing slavery. The South is often blamed for being uncompromising about slavery, but in fact is was the abolitionists themselves who were refusing to negotiate any reasonable compromise. Europe and the northern states all abolished slavery by compensated or graduated emancipation, but the abolitionists had shut down any discussion of that by 1849.

The reason that it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write had very little, if anything, to do with keeping them dumb and enslaved. It was because the abolitionists kept publishing pamphlets encouraging the slaves to rise up and kill their masters. If they couldn't read, then they wouldn't be able to read those pamphlets. Still, a lot of slaveowners taught them to read and write anyway. Robert E. Lee's wife and daughter ran an illegal school at Arlington.

John Brown is considered as one of the major triggers of the war, but look at what he was doing. He took over a federal arsennal in Harper's Ferry, VA (now WV) trying to incite a slave rebellion and arm the slaves with weapons from the arsennal. It failed, no slaves showed up or rose up, and Brown was captured, tried, convicted, and hanged.

You can't win hearts and minds to your cause by trying to incite mass murder.

The slavery issue was being fought mainly by the radical abolitionists in Massachusetts and the fire eaters in South Carolina. Most people on both sides didn't give a damn about slavery. They were thinking about and fighting over entirely other things. Revisionist history has made slavery much more of an issue today than it was then.

Taxes and tariffs had been a hot-button issue practically from the founding and led to the Nullification Crises in the 1830's. The tariff issue settle down for a few years, but gradually creeped back in.

During the Crimean War (1853-1856), Southern agriculture was booming. European farmers were feeding the armies and Southern agriculture was feeding the civilian population. When the war ended, the demand for Southern agriculture declined and the nation's economy slumped. In 1857, the economy took further hits when the Dred Scott decision nullified the Missouri Compromise, threw the slvery debate there back into question, and caused the railroads' vast land holdings in the midwest to devalue. Then the New York office of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Co. closed because of embezzlement and its closure almost caused a run on the banks.

The nation's economy fell into a severe recession. Congress actually did the right thing and passed the Tariff Act of 1857 which lowered the tariff rates and the economy stablized in 2 years.

Just as the economy stablized and began a recovery, Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont proposed a massive tariff increase called the Morrill Tariff. Southerners knew they would once again bear the brunt of tariffs on imports and exports. Even though the entire South only had a GDP of about 1/5 of the state of New York alone, the South was funding 87% of the federal government's total revenue through these tariffs.

Lincoln was what we today would call a "tax and spend Liberal". The Whigs nearly bankrupted the state of Illinois in the 1840's through subsidies of private enterprises while Lincoln was serving in the state legislature.

In his 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln campaigned in favor of the Morrill Tariff. That was why Southerners didn't like him and that was why he did not appear on the ballots in any of the Southern states. It had nothing to do with Lincoln's stance on slavery. Read the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, his campaign speeches, and his First Inaugural Address. Lincoln was saying he was not an abolitionist and had no intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed.

There was a concern about Lincoln being elected as a Republican, however. The Republican Party was founded almost entirely on the abolition issue alone. When the socialist Revolutions of 1848 in Europe failed, many of its participants, known as the Forty-Eighters, were exiled or fled for their lives and emigrated to the US. They entered the Whig Party and split it over the slavery issue. Owning property is contrary to socialist ideals and Marx specifically opposed slavery in his Communist Manifesto. It was these socialist anti-slavery Whigs that formed the Republican Party. When Lincoln won solely on the Northern vote, the South wanted nothing to do with his economic policies and that's what triggered secession.

The Forty-Eighters played a significant role in Lincoln's election and were handsomely rewarded by Lincoln with large tracts of land by the Homestead Act. A lot of them had military experience in the armies back in Europe and from the Revolutions of 1848. Many of these revolutions were attempted military coups, so they had military experience and were appointed by Lincoln as generals in the Union army and offices in the Lincoln administration. There were entire companies and regiments in the Union army from the midwest comprised of these socialist emigrants and they even held their socialist meetings around the campfires.

It's not farfetched to say that the Civil War was the socialist revolution of America and it succeeded where the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe had failed.

 

[PrometheusBound]

We would all be speaking Russian because we wouldn't be a United States because democrats think people are property

Capitalists think people are property. If you own a man's work, you own the man.

 

[PrometheusBound]

The CSA's economic system was largely slave based agriculture and export dependent.

Had the Rpublic allowed the CSA to go its own way the war between the USA and CSA would likely have happened shortly after it happened, anyway.

the CSA had its eyes on the American West, Mexica and central America and the Caribean.

Sooner or later the USA and the CSA would have gone to war over some expansionist policy or the other.

Why, when we never had a war with Canada?

 

[PrometheusBound]

My state abolished slavery in the 1820s.

The South would have likely kept it going through the 20th century.

It was the only way to get Blacks to work. Otherwise, they would have taken off after payday and not come back to work until they had blown their paychecks on degenerate partying.

 

[PrometheusBound]

It is if there was no reunification that is the fascinating concept to speculate on though. And I'm pretty sure if that had happened, Mexico would have become much more heavily involved.

It was about slavery. The separated because Lincoln a known abolitionist was nominated.

It was about tariffs. Lincoln was a typical Republican. The abolitionists had no social conscience; there function was to provoke the South into seceding, which would have guaranteed permanent and higher tariffs. The Robber Barons kept all the profits from the higher prices they could charge because of the tariffs on their foreign competition.

Henry Ward Beecher, a typical Abolitionist whose sister wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, said about the White working class, "If a man can't live on bread and water, he doesn't deserve to live." 97% of the Abolitionists had the same snobbish cruelty about Whites in sweatshops.

The same false-flag attitude has prevailed since the 1960s. Proof is that the disparity in wealth between the upper class and the majority has widened since the Civil Rights for the Uncivilized Act in 1964. Blacks are puppets of the rich. Notice how they always blame "White People" instead of the 1%. The strategy of our criminal ruling class of thieves and traitors was to have their brats take over the Democratic Party, neglect the unions, and purposely promote a disgusting Liberal agenda for the sole purpose of provoking White working people to vote Conservatism, which neglects the anti-Liberal agenda and is only interested in economic class supremacy.

 

[PrometheusBound]

This subject shows the absolute failure of our education system. Only a fool thinks slavery had very little to do the Civil War. Yes it was about economics a economy built on slavery . There was no War of Northern Aggression it was a war of Southern petulance. In order for there to have been no war the Confederates have to not have attacked Fort Sumter. If there was no war there would have been no United States of America most likely be some Baltic state of some socialist or communist dictator much worse than the one we have now.

As usual, Right Wing attacks on education and the lack of "critical thinking" really mean that if people don't agree with your simple-minded bootlicking dogmas, they are uneducated.

 

[PrometheusBound]

Try to imagine what would have happened if the eleven states of the Confederacy had been allowed to secede peacefully from the United States in 1861.

The South has always been the problem child of the United States. I think what remained of the United States would have been better off without the South. If the United States had been able to peacefully unite with Canada the results would have been even better.

In the South slavery impeded the development of industry, and of labor saving agricultural machinery. The vast majority of whites did not own slaves. Those who did not own slaves usually had a lower standard of living than their skills would have earned for them in the North.

Negro slavery discouraged the development of a work ethic among Southern whites, because they thought hard work was something slaves did.

An additional advantage of letting the Confederacy go peacefully is that the Negroes would have remained slaves. They would not have been able to move to the North and turn downtown areas of Northern cities into crime ridden slums.

Stormfront misses you.

If you want to play that game, "Idi Amin misses you." Or Pol Pot, if I want to unfairly associate you with the ultraLeft.

 

[Foxfyre]

It was about slavery. The separated because Lincoln a known abolitionist was nominated.

It was about tariffs. Lincoln was a typical Republican. The abolitionists had no social conscience; there function was to provoke the South into seceding, which would have guaranteed permanent and higher tariffs. The Robber Barons kept all the profits from the higher prices they could charge because of the tariffs on their foreign competition.

Henry Ward Beecher, a typical Abolitionist whose sister wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, said about the White working class, "If a man can't live on bread and water, he doesn't deserve to live." 97% of the Abolitionists had the same snobbish cruelty about Whites in sweatshops.

The same false-flag attitude has prevailed since the 1960s. Proof is that the disparity in wealth between the upper class and the majority has widened since the Civil Rights for the Uncivilized Act in 1964. Blacks are puppets of the rich. Notice how they always blame "White People" instead of the 1%. The strategy of our criminal ruling class of thieves and traitors was to have their brats take over the Democratic Party, neglect the unions, and purposely promote a disgusting Liberal agenda for the sole purpose of provoking White working people to vote Conservatism, which neglects the anti-Liberal agenda and is only interested in economic class supremacy.

Be careful with the quotes there--they sometimes malfunction. And it attributes Thanatos' words to me. He's the one who - rather uncouthly - demands that Lincoln was an abolitionist. I have consistently argued that Lincoln was not only not an abolitionist, but I have provided ample evidence that had the South not seceded, there would have been no emancipation proclamation from Lincoln and no 13th Amendment would have even been suggested, much less passed at that time.

See? In the above quote your words appear to be via Thanatos. His words appear to be mine.

 

[MuadDib]

It was about slavery. The separated because Lincoln a known abolitionist was nominated.

Quite incorrect. Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He said so on a number of occasions.

Lincoln supported repatriation and colonization. He was a member of the American Colonization society along with his mentor Henry Clay of Kentucky. His plan was to load all of the blacks, free or slave, on ships and send them to Monrovia in Africa or colonies in South America. He even met with a number of black leaders during the war trying to sell them on the idea of repatriation.

 

[PrometheusBound]

I'm all for "honest" history, but I'm not sure what PC has to do with it. There is a Lincoln myth (the Sandberg biography was its apex) which has its own historiography separate from Lincoln himself. The last fifteen years have been the best for Lincoln scholarship since the Nineteenth Century because of the publication of "Herndon's Informants" and the books that followed it.

I must confess that I never took any American history course in college, although history was my second major, I have published in the field of American economic history (Mississippi land tenure 1870--1970), and have an extensive Lincoln collection. I try to keep up.



You are are close to making a distinction without a difference. The Antebellum South did not tolerate dissent on the slavery issue. The post offices refused to accept northern papers that did not support or ignore slavery, churches replaced wavering clergy, slave codes were enforced in opposition to the will of individual slave masters, and Lincoln was not on the ballot in any states south of Virginia and Kentucky. Slavery was supported or tolerated by virtually every southern citizen.



I agree.



Perhaps the most striking attribute of Lincoln's mind was the rapidity and intellectual ruthlessness with which he adapted his thought to new conditions. Lincoln's position o the race question evolved rapidly and the Lincoln of 1858 is not the Lincoln of 1862 who began the year exploring compensated emancipation in the border states an ended the year with emancipation. Nor was either of those Lincoln's the Lincoln of 1865.

Lincoln was the most formidable constitutional scholar in American history with the possible exception of James Madison (just read the Coopers Union speech or the First Inaugural Address). He was not a great admirer of the Constitution, making the point that the Union pre-existed the Constitution and created the states ("Four score and seven years ago..."; do the math). He held the Founding Fathers in greater esteem (just read his very first speech, the Springfield Lyceum address).



That's a matter of controversy. Some parts of the South rebelled against the Confederacy and were loyal to the Union. In fact the Union Amy contained white volunteer regiments from every slave state except South Carolina. If you add the number of white Southerners in the Union army to the number of black troops (3/4's of which came from slave states) they equaled the entire manpower utilized by the Confederacy. In my book, the good Southerners fought for the Union. If you want to talk about distorted history, run those numbers by white Southerners today.



We disagree. Slavery would have continued in the Confederacy at least a hundred years if the Confederacy had lasted that long. An I beliee that is the consensus view among historians.

Livelong & prosper, Jamie

I see the Lincoln Myth persists and the hatred of the southern man does too. Is it any wonder America continues to allow flawed leaders to prosecute wars over and over again...

If Lincoln were the great statesmen some still believe he was, why did he not avert a war that destroyed half the nation causing terrible death and suffering? War is ALWAYS a failure of leadership. Lincoln failed spectacularly, by any reasonable analysis. He made it clear to the Southern states, in his inaugural speech, that the Federal government would war on them if they did not abide by federal laws. Then purposely set up events at Ft Sumter to get it all started...Not much statesmanship here.

War is ALWAYS the health of the STATE. It is a tactic used by all tyrants to expand the power of the central state, at the expense of everyone else. One would think Americans would understand this, after all the disastrous wars it has allowed corrupt leaders to prosecute.

As President Buchanan supposedly famously stated...."there is a disease in the public mind"...as he left the looming disaster for his successor. Once the public has a diseased mind, corrupt leaders can easily influence it leading to war. The Civil War was the consequence of diseased minds, both in the North and South.

Thomas Fleming's book, A Disease in the Public Mind, clearly lays this out. That disease allows corrupt leaders to use it for their nefarious intentions...and Lincoln was no different.

Our Founders were brilliant and enlightened men. But, they made two huge mistakes. They allowed slavery to continue and believed a piece of paper would prevent evil men from doing evil things.

So you think Lincoln should have just bent over and taken it up the ass for a slave nation? Sorry but real American presidents dont bow to evil empires.

Do you want a halo for your warm and fuzzy illusion of moral superiority?

 

[PrometheusBound]

The fact is the war WAS NEVER ABOUT SLAVERY.

Yes, it was. Many factors played a role, but all were grounded in the issue of slavery.

John Brown is considered as one of the major triggers of the war, but look at what he was doing. He took over a federal arsennal in Harper's Ferry, VA (now WV) trying to incite a slave rebellion and arm the slaves with weapons from the arsennal. It failed, no slaves showed up or rose up, and Brown was captured, tried, convicted, and hanged.

You can't win hearts and minds to your cause by trying to incite mass murder.

The slavery issue was being fought mainly by the radical abolitionists in Massachusetts and the fire eaters in South Carolina. Most people on both sides didn't give a damn about slavery. They were thinking about and fighting over entirely other things. Revisionist history has made slavery much more of an issue today than it was then.

Taxes and tariffs had been a hot-button issue practically from the founding and led to the Nullification Crises in the 1830's. The tariff issue settle down for a few years, but gradually creeped back in.

During the Crimean War (1853-1856), Southern agriculture was booming. European farmers were feeding the armies and Southern agriculture was feeding the civilian population. When the war ended, the demand for Southern agriculture declined and the nation's economy slumped. In 1857, the economy took further hits when the Dred Scott decision nullified the Missouri Compromise, threw the slvery debate there back into question, and caused the railroads' vast land holdings in the midwest to devalue. Then the New York office of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Co. closed because of embezzlement and its closure almost caused a run on the banks.

The nation's economy fell into a severe recession. Congress actually did the right thing and passed the Tariff Act of 1857 which lowered the tariff rates and the economy stablized in 2 years.

Just as the economy stablized and began a recovery, Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont proposed a massive tariff increase called the Morrill Tariff. Southerners knew they would once again bear the brunt of tariffs on imports and exports.

There was a concern about Lincoln being elected as a Republican, however. The Republican Party was founded almost entirely on the abolition issue alone. When the socialist Revolutions of 1848 in Europe failed, many of its participants, known as the Forty-Eighters, were exiled or fled for their lives and emigrated to the US. They entered the Whig Party and split it over the slavery issue. Owning property is contrary to socialist ideals and Marx specifically opposed slavery in his Communist Manifesto. It was these socialist anti-slavery Whigs that formed the Republican Party. When Lincoln won solely on the Northern vote, the South wanted nothing to do with his economic policies and that's what triggered secession.

The Forty-Eighters played a significant role in Lincoln's election and were handsomely rewarded by Lincoln with large tracts of land by the Homestead Act. A lot of them had military experience in the armies back in Europe and from the Revolutions of 1848. Many of these revolutions were attempted military coups, so they had military experience and were appointed by Lincoln as generals in the Union army and offices in the Lincoln administration. There were entire companies and regiments in the Union army from the midwest comprised of these socialist emigrants and they even held their socialist meetings around the campfires.

It's not farfetched to say that the Civil War was the socialist revolution of America and it succeeded where the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe had failed.

Just the opposite about 1848. The plutocrats were afraid it would happen here, so they started a war to kill off the bravest of the working class and also free the slaves to work as scab labor up North.

The reason the cheap-labor scam didn't work was that Blacks are incapable of doing industrialized jobs, which is also the reason the South didn't industrialize.

 

[MuadDib]

I'm all for "honest" history, but I'm not sure what PC has to do with it. There is a Lincoln myth (the Sandberg biography was its apex) which has its own historiography separate from Lincoln himself. The last fifteen years have been the best for Lincoln scholarship since the Nineteenth Century because of the publication of "Herndon's Informants" and the books that followed it.

I must confess that I never took any American history course in college, although history was my second major, I have published in the field of American economic history (Mississippi land tenure 1870--1970), and have an extensive Lincoln collection. I try to keep up.



You are are close to making a distinction without a difference. The Antebellum South did not tolerate dissent on the slavery issue. The post offices refused to accept northern papers that did not support or ignore slavery, churches replaced wavering clergy, slave codes were enforced in opposition to the will of individual slave masters, and Lincoln was not on the ballot in any states south of Virginia and Kentucky. Slavery was supported or tolerated by virtually every southern citizen.



I agree.



Perhaps the most striking attribute of Lincoln's mind was the rapidity and intellectual ruthlessness with which he adapted his thought to new conditions. Lincoln's position o the race question evolved rapidly and the Lincoln of 1858 is not the Lincoln of 1862 who began the year exploring compensated emancipation in the border states an ended the year with emancipation. Nor was either of those Lincoln's the Lincoln of 1865.

Lincoln was the most formidable constitutional scholar in American history with the possible exception of James Madison (just read the Coopers Union speech or the First Inaugural Address). He was not a great admirer of the Constitution, making the point that the Union pre-existed the Constitution and created the states ("Four score and seven years ago..."; do the math). He held the Founding Fathers in greater esteem (just read his very first speech, the Springfield Lyceum address).



That's a matter of controversy. Some parts of the South rebelled against the Confederacy and were loyal to the Union. In fact the Union Amy contained white volunteer regiments from every slave state except South Carolina. If you add the number of white Southerners in the Union army to the number of black troops (3/4's of which came from slave states) they equaled the entire manpower utilized by the Confederacy. In my book, the good Southerners fought for the Union. If you want to talk about distorted history, run those numbers by white Southerners today.



We disagree. Slavery would have continued in the Confederacy at least a hundred years if the Confederacy had lasted that long. An I beliee that is the consensus view among historians.

Livelong & prosper, Jamie

I see the Lincoln Myth persists and the hatred of the southern man does too. Is it any wonder America continues to allow flawed leaders to prosecute wars over and over again...

If Lincoln were the great statesmen some still believe he was, why did he not avert a war that destroyed half the nation causing terrible death and suffering? War is ALWAYS a failure of leadership. Lincoln failed spectacularly, by any reasonable analysis. He made it clear to the Southern states, in his inaugural speech, that the Federal government would war on them if they did not abide by federal laws. Then purposely set up events at Ft Sumter to get it all started...Not much statesmanship here.

War is ALWAYS the health of the STATE. It is a tactic used by all tyrants to expand the power of the central state, at the expense of everyone else. One would think Americans would understand this, after all the disastrous wars it has allowed corrupt leaders to prosecute.

As President Buchanan supposedly famously stated...."there is a disease in the public mind"...as he left the looming disaster for his successor. Once the public has a diseased mind, corrupt leaders can easily influence it leading to war. The Civil War was the consequence of diseased minds, both in the North and South.

Thomas Fleming's book, A Disease in the Public Mind, clearly lays this out. That disease allows corrupt leaders to use it for their nefarious intentions...and Lincoln was no different.

Our Founders were brilliant and enlightened men. But, they made two huge mistakes. They allowed slavery to continue and believed a piece of paper would prevent evil men from doing evil things.

So you think Lincoln should have just bent over and taken it up the ass for a slave nation? Sorry but real American presidents dont bow to evil empires.

What part of Lincoln not being an abolitionist do you not understand?

Lincoln didn't give a damn about the slaves. He did give a damn that when the Southern states seceded, they took 87% of the federal government's revenue with them. Lincoln had a huge economic problem on his hands.

As for "evil empires", are you talking about the one that burned people's homes and businesses, stole their personal possessions, raped the women, stole their food, and oiled their fields?

 

[Foxfyre]

I see the Lincoln Myth persists and the hatred of the southern man does too. Is it any wonder America continues to allow flawed leaders to prosecute wars over and over again...

If Lincoln were the great statesmen some still believe he was, why did he not avert a war that destroyed half the nation causing terrible death and suffering? War is ALWAYS a failure of leadership. Lincoln failed spectacularly, by any reasonable analysis. He made it clear to the Southern states, in his inaugural speech, that the Federal government would war on them if they did not abide by federal laws. Then purposely set up events at Ft Sumter to get it all started...Not much statesmanship here.

War is ALWAYS the health of the STATE. It is a tactic used by all tyrants to expand the power of the central state, at the expense of everyone else. One would think Americans would understand this, after all the disastrous wars it has allowed corrupt leaders to prosecute.

As President Buchanan supposedly famously stated...."there is a disease in the public mind"...as he left the looming disaster for his successor. Once the public has a diseased mind, corrupt leaders can easily influence it leading to war. The Civil War was the consequence of diseased minds, both in the North and South.

Thomas Fleming's book, A Disease in the Public Mind, clearly lays this out. That disease allows corrupt leaders to use it for their nefarious intentions...and Lincoln was no different.

Our Founders were brilliant and enlightened men. But, they made two huge mistakes. They allowed slavery to continue and believed a piece of paper would prevent evil men from doing evil things.

So you think Lincoln should have just bent over and taken it up the ass for a slave nation? Sorry but real American presidents dont bow to evil empires.

What part of Lincoln not being an abolitionist do you not understand?

Lincoln didn't give a damn about the slaves. He did give a damn that when the Southern states seceded, they took 87% of the federal government's revenue with them. Lincoln had a huge economic problem on his hands.

As for "evil empires", are you talking about the one that burned people's homes and businesses, stole their personal possessions, raped the women, stole their food, and oiled their fields?

Just one gentle correction. I don't think I agree that Lincoln didn't care about the slaves. From what I read of his own words and what othes who knew him say about him, he was 100% anti-slavery. That would suggest that he did care.

But what he was not willing to do was to go against the Constitution and states rights in that regard. He was a segregationist as were almost all people of his generation and culture, both black and white. He was opposed to extending slavery any further than it already existed, but before the South seceded and the war ensued, he had no intention of ending what did exist.

But once the war did break out, he didn't want the social problem of thousands of uneducated, unemployed slaves coming north, he did not want to intermingle the races, and he was very much afraid that England and France would go to the aid of the South. The Emancipation Proclamation was a military tactic, and was not out of any desire to free the slaves. It was intended to stop the flow of black people fleeing north and he hoped, given their freedom, that they would join with the Union Army and defend that freedom where they were - in the South.

Didn't work out too well as he hoped. But I'm pretty sure that was the intent.

 

[Toro]

The CSA's economic system was largely slave based agriculture and export dependent.

Had the Rpublic allowed the CSA to go its own way the war between the USA and CSA would likely have happened shortly after it happened, anyway.

the CSA had its eyes on the American West, Mexica and central America and the Caribean.

Sooner or later the USA and the CSA would have gone to war over some expansionist policy or the other.

Why, when we never had a war with Canada?

You did.

And you lost, big time!

[youtube]Ety2FEHQgwM[/youtube]

 

[Unkotare]

The fact is the war WAS NEVER ABOUT SLAVERY.

Yes, it was. Many factors played a role, but all were grounded in the issue of slavery.

No.

.

Yes. Every other issue related to the war originated from and was manifested by the issue of slavery. Many of the finest political minds our country has ever produced labored over and over through the course of decades to craft compromises that would allow the Union to persist in the face of the fundamental contradiction that slavery in the United State represented.

 

[Hoffstra]

...The fact is the war WAS NEVER ABOUT SLAVERY....

funny, every declaration of secession by the CSA states said slavery was a major part of it.

if slavery didn't exist in the USA there would have never been a civil war.

 

[Foxfyre]

...The fact is the war WAS NEVER ABOUT SLAVERY....

funny, every declaration of secession by the CSA states said slavery was a major part of it.

if slavery didn't exist in the USA there would have never been a civil war.

That may be, but it did exist, and it was allowed by the Constitution that becomes the governing authority of all states that join the union. And it was not slavery but the punative measures the North used to impose on the South by do gooders opposing slavery that compelled the Southern states to withdraw. Would those punative measures have been inflicted if there was no slavery? Probably not. But it was not the South's misconduct toward the North that caused the Civil War but rather it was the North's determination to control the South that caused the Civil War.

If thee had been no power struggle in Europe at the time, there would have been no WWI. If Nazi-ism and Fasism didn't exist, there would have been no WWII. If communism didn't exist, there would have been no war in Korea and no Vietnam War. If Muslim fanaticism didn't exist, there would be no war in Afghanistan now.

If Lincoln had been willing to allow the South to withdraw peacefully and do its own thing, there would have been no Civil War.

 

[rdean]

Yes, it was. Many factors played a role, but all were grounded in the issue of slavery.

John Brown is considered as one of the major triggers of the war, but look at what he was doing. He took over a federal arsennal in Harper's Ferry, VA (now WV) trying to incite a slave rebellion and arm the slaves with weapons from the arsennal. It failed, no slaves showed up or rose up, and Brown was captured, tried, convicted, and hanged.

You can't win hearts and minds to your cause by trying to incite mass murder.

The slavery issue was being fought mainly by the radical abolitionists in Massachusetts and the fire eaters in South Carolina. Most people on both sides didn't give a damn about slavery. They were thinking about and fighting over entirely other things. Revisionist history has made slavery much more of an issue today than it was then.

Taxes and tariffs had been a hot-button issue practically from the founding and led to the Nullification Crises in the 1830's. The tariff issue settle down for a few years, but gradually creeped back in.

During the Crimean War (1853-1856), Southern agriculture was booming. European farmers were feeding the armies and Southern agriculture was feeding the civilian population. When the war ended, the demand for Southern agriculture declined and the nation's economy slumped. In 1857, the economy took further hits when the Dred Scott decision nullified the Missouri Compromise, threw the slvery debate there back into question, and caused the railroads' vast land holdings in the midwest to devalue. Then the New York office of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Co. closed because of embezzlement and its closure almost caused a run on the banks.

The nation's economy fell into a severe recession. Congress actually did the right thing and passed the Tariff Act of 1857 which lowered the tariff rates and the economy stablized in 2 years.

Just as the economy stablized and began a recovery, Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont proposed a massive tariff increase called the Morrill Tariff. Southerners knew they would once again bear the brunt of tariffs on imports and exports.

There was a concern about Lincoln being elected as a Republican, however. The Republican Party was founded almost entirely on the abolition issue alone. When the socialist Revolutions of 1848 in Europe failed, many of its participants, known as the Forty-Eighters, were exiled or fled for their lives and emigrated to the US. They entered the Whig Party and split it over the slavery issue. Owning property is contrary to socialist ideals and Marx specifically opposed slavery in his Communist Manifesto. It was these socialist anti-slavery Whigs that formed the Republican Party. When Lincoln won solely on the Northern vote, the South wanted nothing to do with his economic policies and that's what triggered secession.

The Forty-Eighters played a significant role in Lincoln's election and were handsomely rewarded by Lincoln with large tracts of land by the Homestead Act. A lot of them had military experience in the armies back in Europe and from the Revolutions of 1848. Many of these revolutions were attempted military coups, so they had military experience and were appointed by Lincoln as generals in the Union army and offices in the Lincoln administration. There were entire companies and regiments in the Union army from the midwest comprised of these socialist emigrants and they even held their socialist meetings around the campfires.

It's not farfetched to say that the Civil War was the socialist revolution of America and it succeeded where the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe had failed.

Just the opposite about 1848. The plutocrats were afraid it would happen here, so they started a war to kill off the bravest of the working class and also free the slaves to work as scab labor up North.

The reason the cheap-labor scam didn't work was that Blacks are incapable of doing industrialized jobs, which is also the reason the South didn't industrialize.

That's ridiculous. No way white confederate conservatives would put "machinery" into the hands of slaves. Not when they could exploit them so much better doing menial work.

 

[rdean]

You're a citizen, aren't you? Did you vote? Did your friends and neighbors? Do you think obama got elected just by voters in Northern states? Do you think that voters made that mistake - twice - because of some imaginary division relative to a war that ended with the crushing of a traitorous, evil rebellion over 150 years ago? The American Civil War is over, let it go. And if you don't think that a whole lot of people in whatever state you live in didn't make the mistake of voting for obama, you're crazy.

We are one country, whether you personally like it or not. Get used to the idea or get the fuck out and go live in some other country. And no, we're not breaking off a piece of this country for fools sucking on ancient sour grapes to occupy. Tough shit, go look elsewhere.

Not really. Unfortunately, there are Libtards in the South too.

However, Obama's idol, Lincoln, was elected even though he did not appear on the ballots in any of the Southern states because of his support for the Morrill Tariff.

obama's "idol" is FDR. He just invokes the name of Lincoln for crass political purposes.

I suspect it's more likely, if he has an "idol", it would be Reagan. Considering how kindly he talks about Reagan. Clearly he has Reagan on a pedestal.