American Civil War, yet again

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

On my mother's side I'm decended from 18fh century Irish Catholic immigrants. On my father's side 18th century German speaking Moravian immigrants. No Cavaliers here.

[Ken Stone]

If I lived back in the early 19th century I would have definitely owned slaves. Think about it. There were no microwave meals or fast food joints. If you wanted to eat you had to prepare and cook it all yourself. There were no washing machines. If you wanted your clothes cleaned you had to get a big metal board and scrub them all individually. Oh, and good luck mowing your lawn. There were no lawn mowers dummy. You had to push spinning blades around your yard. You know what you had to do if you wanted light and it was dark? You had to have the forsight to make a stupid candle. That's right, make one. And guess what happened when your car broke down. Ha! Tricked you! There were no cars. You had to own a horse and clean it and feed it and put a saddle on it when you wanted to go some where. Life was one big pain in the ass after another. Owning a couple of slaves made everyday life a lot easier.

[SkynJay]

. Why do Republicans hate the ACA so much? Because a worker who is not beholden to his job for his health insurance is a worker who is a little less under their thumb. /quote]

When ACA numbers came in and it was learned that some people dared to leave their employers and chase their dream George Will described it as 'chasing butterflies,' and implied they were doing it on the back of hard working miners. The party of 'small businesses job creators' dismayed by people going out and starting small buisnessess.

[Mad Monkey]

If I lived back in the early 19th century I would have definitely owned slaves. Think about it. There were no microwave meals or fast food joints. If you wanted to eat you had to prepare and cook it all yourself. There were no washing machines. If you wanted your clothes cleaned you had to get a big metal board and scrub them all individually. Oh, and good luck mowing your lawn. There were no lawn mowers dummy. You had to push spinning blades around your yard. You know what you had to do if you wanted light and it was dark? You had to have the forsight to make a stupid candle. That's right, make one. And guess what happened when your car broke down. Ha! Tricked you! There were no cars. You had to own a horse and clean it and feed it and put a saddle on it when you wanted to go some where. Life was one big pain in the ass after another. Owning a couple of slaves made everyday life a lot easier.

That's true, but most people couldn't afford slaves.

[Zorral]

Zorral, no one in this thread has been denying that northern states were/are racist, participated in slavery, etc, I live in a state, south of the Mason-Dixon line that had slavery until 1864 and fought on the Union side in the Civil War, no one is denying the crimes of the north here. However it's not the north that decided they could not possibly function without slavery, it's not the north the decided secession was the answer in order preserve a racist, immoral way of life and that fighting a war over this was a good idea. Furthermore, it's not the north that had Jim Crow laws and rampant lynching. Was/is the north racist? Yes. Segregated? Yes. However that being the case doesn't in any way lessen the awfulness of the behavior of the south which has been much, much worse for a very long time now.

You missed the point --the point was not defending the south by making the north look bad. I'm speaking of historical facts, such as the very Constitution itself was a slave ownership document, which the southerners got passed by threatening to take their marbles and go home if they did not get. Personally, I still believe the other states should have called their bluff, because -- they still need more than they had to fight Indians -- because what they had all went to policing slaves (the well armed militia!) and keeping them down.

I suppose now I must state I don't support the south's Indian policies, but I'm talking about history and how things happened and why.

The real point probably is how the south got secession in the first place, which was a few stages, starting with the embedded slavery in the Constitution via voting by wealth, which included then, the 3/5th clause of slaves, i.e. wealth, which gave the south control of the federal government most of the time until Lincoln.

In the south, and most particularly South Carolina, one could not even stand for important office unless one held a certain amount of capital in slaves, land and / or bank account. As the south's economy ran almost entirely on credit, few had the bank account so you know what qualified most of the candidates. Moreover, despite Jacksonian populist democracy, in the south only property owners of a certain amount (meaning land and mostly slaves) were allowed to vote at all, for anything, except again, for dog catcher, er, slave catcher.

Secession basically took place already in 1850 when despite all attempts by the slaveholders, California came in as a free state. That was when the first secession convention for the south took place, in Nashville. (The very first secession convention, which failed big time, was held in New England to protest the War of 1812). Because by then the Big Slaveholders completely controlled all government and other institutions of the slave society that the south was, you got secession.

Because of slavery they'd been living for so long where everyone around them had to agree when they said down was up and up was down, they ran the whole region off the cliff. It is NOT good to be a slave owner. It is even worse to live in a slave society, which the south was entirely by the 1830's. Not even Rome was a slave society. Everything in the south was about slavery. Totally twisted.

[Horza]

That's true, but most people couldn't afford slaves.

Indeed. Slaves weren't really analogous to household labour saving devices, outside of the small percentage in domestic service. These people were being used as industrial inputs, as livestock, rather than consumer goods.

[all swedes are racist]

My great aunt Betty tried to prove that we were descended from English royalty. She discovered that we were kicked out of England for writing dirty poetry and for horse thieving.

I come from a very noble people.

Hah! Still, doesn't mean they weren't nobles...

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

ES,

Is your family originally from Georgia?

[The Marquis de Leech]

I am not sure how possible that would have been for us at the time. We imported a lot of food from the US. It's certianly something I've heard before, I've just never really understood why they would think it.

They thought it because they thought their cotton production had the UK by the balls. They were quite arrogant about it too.

But with the UK finding other sources of cotton, importing food from the US, and intense public distaste for slavery, Britain was never going to get involved. Not to mention the fear of losing Canada.

[Crazydog7]

My Grandfather’s Grandfather owned people take a second and realize how horrifying that statement is.

Then take any argument that you might have about the justice of the southern cause and ram it up your ass. It is very scary how successful the “lost cause” has been at adapting itself.

In spite of the best efforts of some to spin the war as some sort of constructional question rather then a conflict over slavery that argument is crap. The Southern aristocracy were a bunch whining jerks who had been threatening to leave the country for one reason or another ever since the nullification crisis but besides all that the founding document of the confederacy includes a provision for the practice of slavery.

As per your assertion that the “south never invaded the north” I wonder what the Citizens of Lawrence Kansas, York Pennsylvania, New York or St. Albens Vermont would say to that?

I think all White men born south of the Mason Dixon and can trace their ancestry back that far flirt with Lost Cause Mythology at some point but when you come right down to a nation of 9 million people 4 million of whom were held in captivity could not compete with a country that had 18 million people. Instead of seeing this in the light of clear rationality some people can’t deal with it and have to grasp at straws as to how the confederacy was somehow morally in the right. I’ve always thought that the main problem is that lost cause mythology necessitates a southern white population that was uniformly loyal to the new government. This is utterly false from the very beginning there were very strong anti-confederate pockets throughout the south, Tennessee actually contributed more white men to the union cause then the southern (if only just) but there were also groups in Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina and the entire fucking state of West Virginia.

Many of us have read many books about the Civil War "not in our history class" here is the one I always post when these kind of threads come up.

http://www.amazon.com/Thrilling-Narrative-Memoir-Southern-Unionist/dp/1557288119/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1400310418&sr=8-4&keywords=A+thrilling+narrative

[Seli]

My Grandfather’s Grandfather owned people take a second and realize how horrifying that statement is.

...

My grandfather's grandfather owned people as well. It was weird to discover that and think about the concept. It helps that it happened in what is now a different country (Surinam), and that it never was a family tradition. He immigrated, worked at and owned a share in a plantation in the decades before abolition (1863). And of course whatever my ancestors did over there probably pales in comparison to what they did in slave trade and in the far east.

I think Ormond's analysis is important, because it helps us to resist the urge to devolve into a type of us-vs.-them thinking. Like everything else, the rating of a particular policy position on the conservative/progressive axis is relative to your position on that particular axis yourself.

So, for example, with regards to marriage the axis would look something like this:

"As-is" marriage----->Same-sex marriage----->Remove all restrictions---->Dissolve the institution

(Conservative) (Moderate-conservative) (Moderate-progressive) (Progressive)

...

You'd have to consider the goal and the ideas behind a policy as well. You have people who talk about dissolving state marriage because they think that it is a religious institution (conservative), because they think it isn't necessary anymore (progressive), or because they think people can arrange things better on their own (libertarians).

[paddington]

They thought it because they thought their cotton production had the UK by the balls. They were quite arrogant about it too.

But with the UK finding other sources of cotton, importing food from the US, and intense public distaste for slavery, Britain was never going to get involved. Not to mention the fear of losing Canada.

Yeah that is always what I'd been led to understand.

It seems that a leadership of CSA just kind of ignored reasons why Britian wouldn't get involved in a direct sense, for the one reason Britian might.

It just feels a little too much like wishful thinking.

[Lummel]

The American Civil War seems to be one of those conflicts that has never ended.

No sooner was the last musket laid down than the first pen was taken up to refight the war again, just this time on paper and memory. The likes of Jubal Early got in and started forming myths, eviscerating the likes of Longstreet who had the temerity to accept that the war had been lost and to attempt to assist in reconstruction.

At first the myth making was explicitly about immediate political objectives, mobilising support to overturn reconstruction and to achieve Democratic majorities, but more generally rewriting history to form a Southern history of the confederacy that whitewashed over the messier realities of resistance to the war effort - sometimes even at state-level, iirc something like 80% of the conscription exemptions came from Georgia, not to mention the realities of a slave economy.

Its interesting as an outsider to see that process is still ongoing through the claims about black confederates or the re-imagining of the confederacy as some kind of proto-libertarian state as opposed to actually what it was - the nearest thing to war communism so far seen on North-American soil. And the discussion about the importance of slavery is all part of that. If you can separate slavery from the history of the south then you have created a palatable form of southern-nationalism with a deep root but which preserves the traditional structures of power and authority. :dunno:

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Lummel,

the nearest thing to war communism so far seen on North-American soil.

Most people don't acknowledge the way the CSA government attempted to run it's economy but that statement is quite accurate.

[Elder Sister]

ES,

Is your family originally from Georgia?

I 'think' they might have been, but am not positive.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

ES,

Again, interesting. The reason I ask is that Georgia was founded as a penal colony like Australia. So if your ancestor came over for the reasons you think Georgia would make sense.

[Elder Sister]

Scot, I think the horse thief was hanged in England, but the dirty poetry author was sent here. I'll ask my mom. She'll be thrilled that I'm sharing this history with the Internet. :D

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

:thumbsup:

[paddington]

Scot, I think the horse thief was hanged in England, but the dirty poetry author was sent here. I'll ask my mom. She'll be thrilled that I'm sharing this history with the Internet. :D

Could be a debtor. Or a really, really saucey poem. Much more intresting than being some noble.

[The Marquis de Leech]

I wonder if there's any way of tracking down the actual poem itself.