American Civil War, yet again

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Sologdin, DG,

well, the US was itself an indefensible racist regime for longer than the CSA. for consistency's sake, we should be tearing down the emblems of the surviving myopic patriotic imaginary and replacing them with cosmopolitan iconography.

This is part of where the desire for Confederate apology comes from. Dispite the long history of US racism, Northern participation not just in slavery but the Slave trade, and the legality of Slavery in the North throughout the Anerican Civil War people still feel the need to wave Northern cultural and martial superiority over Southerners.

Even recognizing that it was slavery that made Lincoln's election fighting words for the lower South, that smugness gauls.

[DanteGabriel]

Sologdin, DG,

This is part of where the desire for Confederate apology comes from. Dispite the long history of US racism, Northern participation not just in slavery but the Slave trade, and the legality of Slavery in the North throughout the Anerican Civil War people still feel the need to wave Northern cultural and martial superiority over Southerners.

Even recognizing that it was slavery that made Lincoln's election fighting words for the lower South, that smugness gauls.

Northern smugness may gall, but imagine how galling it is when people from states that rebelled in order to preserve slavery, states that are largely beneficiaries of federal government largesse, continue to celebrate a despicable cause and treat the government like an oppressor. Yes, the North was complicit in all of these crimes, but the fact remains that Southern elites forced a treasonous rebellion in defense of slavery and continue to propagate lies and whitewashing for their "noble cause."

I may be a biased Left Coaster/Yankee, but I have little sympathy for hurt feelings about Northern smugness -- not while Southern resentment continues to poison the entire country.

[Mad Monkey]

Sologdin, DG,

This is part of where the desire for Confederate apology comes from. Dispite the long history of US racism, Northern participation not just in slavery but the Slave trade, and the legality of Slavery in the North throughout the Anerican Civil War people still feel the need to wave Northern cultural and martial superiority over Southerners.

Even recognizing that it was slavery that made Lincoln's election fighting words for the lower South, that smugness gauls.

Doesn't it then make more sense to argue that the north wasn't better than the south, than to argue that the Civil War has nothing to do with slavery? It seems to me like the latter simply reinforces anti-Southern prejudice. I have a hard time really trusting or respecting someone who tries to erase slavery from the history books. Obviously blaming the whole South for this is silly and stupid, but I think it would be more effective to call out Northern smugness and regional condescensison when it happens rather than clumsily trying to whitewash history.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

DG,

You think I'm unaware of those facts? I'm not justifying the deification and romanticizing the "Lost Cause". I'm saying the smug superiority that ignores the beam in the North's eye is fruatrating. Perhaps we should each look to the histories of own glass houses.

MM,

I've never claimed the American Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. It's a foolish claim as are efforts to miminize Slavery's place among the causes.

[DanteGabriel]

DG,

You think I'm unaware of those facts? I'm not justifying the deification and romanticizing the "Lost Cause". I'm saying the smug superiority that ignores the beam in the North's eye is fruatrating. Perhaps we should each look to the histories of own glass houses.

I think it's possible to be aware of the North's own dirty laundry while still being appalled by continued Southern celebration of a treasonous, racist rebellion and the very real negative effects that celebration and historical revisionism has on current politics.

What's a bigger problem, Scot? People who hold views like Naario who vote for leaders with those same views, or Northerners who feel superior when they see these views propagated and such leaders elected?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

DG,

If they are celebrating the racism and desire to enslave its absolutely worse. But that's not what they are doing. They are attempting to sanitize the American Civil War and the cause of Southern independence. They are attempting to claim it wasn't about racism and the desire to hold slaves, they are lieing to themselves to attempt to make the cause of Southern independence a noble one when it was like all wars... a fight for power.

So, in that sense Narrio and those like him are worse because they refuse to see the truth of the "Lost Cause". They lie to themselves and attempt to sanitize a pile of excrement.

This relative indictment in no way excuses Northern racism and support for slavery that goes largely unnoted and uncommented upon in favor of excorcating the South for its evils claiming they were so much worse.

[Zorral]

OK, let's clarify the whole Confederacy and Civil War thing...

There was no "Civil War."

This is a topic in which the victors truly did rewrite history.

I know, at this point you're rolling your eyes and getting ready for a laugh, but here's the historical facts.

1. Lincoln never ran on the basis of anti-slavery. Throughout his campaign as president, he always supported the continuation of slavery in the South.

2. There was much more than the issue of slavery on the line. The South was heavily taxed to the point of generating almost no profit on their exports. The issue of slavery was always a state issue, not a country issue, hence the president could not make any of the states do anything. It was when it became clear that the government would attempt to illegally force the states to abandon slavery, which was unconstitutional, that it became clear states rights were no longer respected by the government. Lincoln heavily disrespected the constitution and our national rights, much like Obama does now.

3. The Confederate States did not fight to keep their slaves. Only about 5% of the southern population owned any substantial number of slaves. Most of them fought for the indepence of their states, which seems a ridiculous notion nowadays, but back then, the U.S. government did not have as much power over states. That happened after the "Civil War."

4. When the Confederate States broke from the Union, all the leaders, except for Alexander Stevens, actually opposed the continuation of slavery in the long run. They expected it would slowly die out, and planned on helping it along without completely decimating the economy. Lincoln never insisted that slavery be abolished before the Civil War.

5. The South did not start the Civil War. Fort Sumter, now a Confederate-owned property, was occupied by Union troops, another country's troops. The confederacy asked again and again for the union troops to remove themselves from the fort, but they refused. Lincoln then sent more troops into another country to reinforce a fort, an obvious act of enmity. The confederates fired upon Fort Sumter, killing no one, causing no bloodshed. Lincoln used this as his excuse to engage in war upon the Confederacy. He had to be the good guy in this war, so he needed the confederacy to "strike" first.

6. The South never invaded the north or burnt their lands. They wanted nothing from the north except to be left alone. The north engaged in scorched earth policies that have crippling the US economy to this day.

7. Europe, and the Pope, favored the cause of the Confederacy over the Union up until the Emancipation Proclamation.

8. The Emancipation Proclamation never freed a single slave and was illegal. A president did not have the right to chance state law, so it actually did nothing at all ever. BUT, it turned the Civil War into the moral war we see it as today. After this, no european country could back the Confederacy without being seen as supporting slavery, considered a distasteful tradition elsewhere in the world.

The Confederacy was not some evil empire intent on the continued enslavement of blacks for time immemorial. Go read a book on the actual accounts of the Civil War. Not just your high school history book.

Every single point is wrong, except the one that states Lincoln didn't run on an anti-slavery platform. His platform was anti-expansion of slavery, which the slavepower had already begun a shooting war in Kansas to do.

The most important state's rights the war was about was again the slave power expanding slavery even into the states in which slavery was abolished. Etc. etc. etc.

If the slave states had accepted no expansion there would have been no need for a war at all. But they would not, because without the constant expansion of slavery their economy would collapse, particularly all those fine southerners who lived by the selling of their "overstock" slaves, which Virigina, Mother of Slavery, had been doing already by the end of the colonial era. Note that the economies of all the slave states did collapse with emancipation, because the slaves were worth far more than anything else. Note: Mississippi had more millionaires than any other state at the start of the Civil War. With emancipation the state became the poorest state and did not recover from that ever. The land was worthless without slaves. And the slaves, with their reproductive capacity enslaved into perpetuity, were worth far more than the land. Even in Mississippi with its millionaires the productive value of the land was officially valued far less than the land worked in free states without slaves -- small family farms' land in the north was more productive than those vast cash crop slave plantations, and the small poor southern farmer with one slave, or no slave.

People who couldn't rent out slaves to other people lost their income streams and all the rest. A single slave's uncompensated labor, particularly an artesanally skilled slave such as a carpenter, supported an entire household of white people. And so on and so forth. In every way every single person in the south lived by slavery in some aspect or another, right down to supplying the wretched pig fat and corn meal which was the only diet provided by owners to most of the slaves for centuries.

Slavery and the slave trade were multi-faceted, and every part of both generated income streams.

The War of Southern Aggression was about nothing but slavery and the expansion of it. Shoot, by the 1850's the most fire eating secessionists were proposing that anyone who wasn't rich, who owed money, etc., could rightfully be made a slave, which scared the north crazy. That, along with the Fugitive Slave Act, in which bounty hunters could point to anyone, declare him / her an escaped slave to be taken back down south -- when every generation the general population of slaves sported ever lighter skin, with reports from witnesses at slave auctions seeing white-skinned people for sale, it could be your daughter they pointed at. They pointed at many free people -- it was infuriating the north.

Read the speeches and the constitutions of the confederacy: slavery is right at the top.

How anyone can say this war wasn't about slavery, is impossible to understand -- except after all these years of revisionism and the cooperation of the entertainment biz in the revisionism. Plus white supremacy, bigotry and racism, of coursem and a refusal to even look at the facts.

My own relatives's letters and journals from Wisconsin and Iowa said it was about slaver and that was why they enlisted.

[Zorral]

Grant always referred to the Civil War as the War of the Rebellion (see his Memoirs and letters, etc. for this). He also made no bones that the Mexican War was about nothing else than expansion of slavery and he hated it, though he performed very well in that war.

Slaves often referred to it as the Slavery War, or contrarily, the Freedom War (see the wpa interviews among other documents -- and many, many books -- for this).

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

A foolish question on my part.

[DanteGabriel]

This relative indictment in no way excuses Northern racism and support for slavery that goes largely unnoted and uncommented upon in favor of excorcating the South for its evils claiming they were so much worse.

No one is excusing Northern racism, so what do you want, Scot? Moral equivalency between the side that fought to preserve slavery and the side that fought to defeat the rebellion? I'm sorry, I'm not going to say both sides were morally equal. And I don't think it's just because of my Yankee bias.

Or is it just that you want more time devoted to decrying Northern racism? If that's what you want, I'm not sure how different this is from Miodrag complaining that crimes against Serbia in the Balkan wars don't get equal time in the media.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

DG,

No, not equvilency. Simply the recognition that Northern hands were far from clean.

[DanteGabriel]

DG,

No, not equvilency. Simply the recognition that Northern hands were far from clean.

Northern hands were very dirty.

Meanwhile, Southern elites continue to propagate vicious, self-serving lies about their ancestors' racism, treason, and rebellion that poison American politics and culture today.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

DG,

Some do, yes.

[MerenthaClone]

Well, that's settled. Everyone, everywhere, was shitty in some way or another, some more than others. Lets all go home.

[Galactus]

Doesn't it then make more sense to argue that the north wasn't better than the south, than to argue that the Civil War has nothing to do with slavery? It seems to me like the latter simply reinforces anti-Southern prejudice. I have a hard time really trusting or respecting someone who tries to erase slavery from the history books. Obviously blaming the whole South for this is silly and stupid, but I think it would be more effective to call out Northern smugness and regional condescensison when it happens rather than clumsily trying to whitewash history.

Well, no, because it wasn't true.

The North was not a nice place, but it was better than the south by pretty much all criteria. Claiming otherwise is indefensible: You don't have to artificially try to put them on an equal footing in order to recognize the flaws of the one.

Just like you don't have to claim that the US was as bad as the Soviet Union in order to criticize american conduct during the Cold War.

[Galactus]

Shoot, by the 1850's the most fire eating secessionists were proposing that anyone who wasn't rich, who owed money, etc., could rightfully be made a slave,

Well, that was mostly just FitzHugh, and he was considered crazy even by other southerners. (probably because he actually bothered with a serious, theoretical defence of slavery, which kind of forced southerners to draw some conclusions that clashed uncomfortably with their self-image)

[Galactus]

I for one am pretty interested to see how ND tries to spin this on his return...

You think he'll return? Usually these kinds of people just kind of melt away when confronted with actual criticism.

[Prosesskrift]

I chose to believe that the knowledge and intelligence of the main posters of this thread made him recognize his own ignorance. He's probably too busy applying for a position at the ACLU to respond.

[TerraPrime]

I chose to believe that the knowledge and intelligence of the main posters of this thread made him recognize his own ignorance. He's probably too busy applying for a position at the ACLU Southern Poverty Law Center to respond.

:rofl:

[all swedes are racist]

Somebody needs to write an alternative history where Giuseppe Garibaldi commands the Union's armies of Siamese war elephants as they face off against the Confederacy's deadly zorse cavalry.

Indeed!

It could also involve

Sweet Zombie Jesus yes! I'd like to nominate MinDinner and Myshkin to coauthor. I will donate to a kickstarter campaign to see this happen