9 dead in ‘hate crime’ shooting at historic African American church in Charleston

Clay_Allison

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I don't think anyone would argue that slavery played a role, the Kansas - Missouri situation that predated the war was huge and the free-slave balance of power was the biggest deal going for over two decades previous to the war.
 

L.T. Fan

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You should.
Okay. I will explain to you what should be obvious. Clay made a comment. You responded to it. I expanded on your comment to Clay. Both were addressing Clay's orginal comment.
 

BipolarFuk

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Five myths about why the South seceded

Five myths about why the South seceded

By James W. Loewen

One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we’re still fighting it — or at least fighting over its history. I’ve polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States’ rights? Tariffs and taxes?

As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war’s various battles — from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — let’s first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.

1. The South seceded over states’ rights.
Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.

On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.

South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed “slavery transit.” In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their cook along. No longer — and South Carolina’s delegates were outraged. In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.

Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

The South’s opposition to states’ rights is not surprising. Until the Civil War, Southern presidents and lawmakers had dominated the federal government. The people in power in Washington always oppose states’ rights. Doing so preserves their own.

2. Secession was about tariffs and taxes.
During the nadir of post-civil-war race relations — the terrible years after 1890 when town after town across the North became all-white “sundown towns” and state after state across the South prevented African Americans from voting — “anything but slavery” explanations of the Civil War gained traction. To this day Confederate sympathizers successfully float this false claim, along with their preferred name for the conflict: the War Between the States. At the infamous Secession Ball in South Carolina, hosted in December by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure,” The Washington Post reported.

These explanations are flatly wrong. High tariffs had prompted the Nullification Controversy in 1831-33, when, after South Carolina demanded the right to nullify federal laws or secede in protest, President Andrew Jackson threatened force. No state joined the movement, and South Carolina backed down. Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them. Why would they? Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.

3. Most white Southerners didn’t own slaves, so they wouldn’t secede for slavery.
Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.

However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy now.

Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.” Given this belief, most white Southerners — and many Northerners, too — could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Henry Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. “The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.” Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.

4. Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.
Since the Civil War did end slavery, many Americans think abolition was the Union’s goal. But the North initially went to war to hold the nation together. Abolition came later.

On Aug. 22, 1862, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune that included the following passage: “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.”

However, Lincoln’s own anti-slavery sentiment was widely known at the time. In the same letter, he went on: “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.” A month later, Lincoln combined official duty and private wish in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

White Northerners’ fear of freed slaves moving north then caused Republicans to lose the Midwest in the congressional elections of November 1862.

Gradually, as Union soldiers found help from black civilians in the South and black recruits impressed white units with their bravery, many soldiers — and those they wrote home to — became abolitionists. By 1864, when Maryland voted to end slavery, soldiers’ and sailors’ votes made the difference.

5. The South couldn’t have made it long as a slave society.
Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them — or forced them to abandon slavery?

To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it.

As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of that war, let us take pride this time — as we did not during the centennial — that secession on slavery’s behalf failed.
 

Smitty

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I don't think anyone would argue that slavery played a role, the Kansas - Missouri situation that predated the war was huge and the free-slave balance of power was the biggest deal going for over two decades previous to the war.
Of course it played a role. But of course, the Civil War would have happened without slavery being an issue, since we know that Lincoln was going to let the South keep their slaves.

But if Jiggy gets off by posting some more sound bytes, he should go for it.
 

Jiggyfly

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Of course it played a role. But of course, the Civil War would have happened without slavery being an issue, since we know that Lincoln was going to let the South keep their slaves.

But if Jiggy gets off by posting some more sound bytes, he should go for it.

Yeah sound bytes.:lol

Never have you been so totally proven wrong, but keep up the good fight I would expect nothing less.
 

Smitty

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Yeah sound bytes.:lol

Never have you been so totally proven wrong, but keep up the good fight I would expect nothing less.
You proved something in this thread? Where? I didn't see anything that disproved the fact that the War would have occurred even without slavery being an issue.
 

Clay_Allison

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Of course it played a role. But of course, the Civil War would have happened without slavery being an issue, since we know that Lincoln was going to let the South keep their slaves.

But if Jiggy gets off by posting some more sound bytes, he should go for it.
I don't think it's possible to imagine a version of 1850s and 60s America where slavery wasn't an issue. who knows what the political landscape would have been like without that issue dominating politics at the time.
 

L.T. Fan

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I don't think it's possible to imagine a version of 1850s and 60s America where slavery wasn't an issue. who knows what the political landscape would have been like without that issue dominating politics at the time.
Yes it was an issue as a matter of history but the question is how much of an issue was it compared to the other factors and would the seccession by the southern states have happened anyway? If I read Schmidtty's points correctly he thinks the war was inevitable regardless of the slavery issue. It's an academic exercise that can be presented both ways.
 

Jiggyfly

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Yes it was an issue as a matter of history but the question is how much of an issue was it compared to the other factors and would the seccession by the southern states have happened anyway? If I read Schmidtty's points correctly he thinks the war was inevitable regardless of the slavery issue. It's an academic exercise that can be presented both ways.
Schmitty has posted nothing academically to back up his point.

He has now backtracked to Lincoln would allow slaves which still does not address the point of the south being upset that Lincoln wanted to cap the number of slave states.

Which takes us back to the original question of slavery being the root cause of the civil war.

I have even posted generals and senators of the confederacy stating this as their motivations how is that up for debate?
 

Smitty

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Lincoln's position on slavery was one of the things I said originally. That's not backtracking.

Maybe with your whirlpool of questionable logic, you confused even yourself. No one said slavery wasn't a factor; what I said was that the Confederate flag wasn't "inherently" a symbol of racial hatred since the other factors were bigger and the people fighting on the ground went with the belief that they were fighting oppression themselves.

Whether or not that was reasonable for them to believe that, maybe you'd like to debate, but the above point remains.

As for "academic" sources; you've provided nothing but a few quotes and I can easily do the same, but it's irrelevant if you find a publication that say Slavery caused the civil war... That's the overly simple and therefore not accurate way to look at the events surrounding the Civil War.
 
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Jiggyfly

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Lincoln's position on slavery was one of the things I said originally. That's not backtracking.

Maybe with your whirlpool of questionable logic, you confused even yourself. No one said slavery wasn't a factor; what I said was that the Confederate flag wasn't "inherently" a symbol of racial hatred since the other factors were bigger and the people fighting on the ground went with the belief that they were fighting oppression themselves.

Whether or not that was reasonable for them to believe that, maybe you'd like to debate, but the above point remains.

As for "academic" sources; you've provided nothing but a few quotes and I can easily do the same, but it's irrelevant if you find a publication that say Slavery caused the civil war... That's the overly simple and therefore not accurate way to look at the events surrounding the Civil War.
Ok what "other" factors where bigger?

You have yet to post anything showing this is remotley correct.

And its nice that you can wave away direct qoutes from conferderate leaders as irrelevant.
 

boozeman

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A thread both Schmatty'd and Jiggy'd.

Wow.
 

townsend

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Bipo posted about it, and I'm sure a simple google search will find it, but it sounds as though Jefferson Davis and the heirarchy below him were quite overt in the statements about the war being about slavery and a white supremacist philosophy.

Even if Lincoln swore to allow the south to keep slaves that wasnt a long term solution for slave states. The north didn't want slavery and a new president might just as easily threaten the institution. The threat of a secession over slavery had been going for a while then, I believe the secession was a plan to bury the conversation once and for all.

Much as any war has nuance, I'm sure this one did. The north was awfully terrible in it's own way. I can even understand rebels and sons of rebels clinging to the flag as a symbol of hope and defiance during the oppression of reconstruction.

That being said, the war would not have happened if not for the incredible economic motivations of slavery.
 

skidadl

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I'm a fan of white supremacy.


Unless it somehow helps me to believe in brown supremacy. Then I'm all for that.
 

Cotton

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I'm a fan of white supremacy.


Unless it somehow helps me to believe in brown supremacy. Then I'm all for that.
I know you're joking but we have a senior VP here at Tech that absolutely operates this way. Pisses me off.
 
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