"Slavery was the primary, central, cause of secession"

[rika60607 215]

You just like arguing, don't you?

I do not like poverty. I do not like that people are paid less than a minimum wage or work in horrible conditions.

Still, while slavery does exist in the world, the workers you are talking about are not slaves (I assume here that you are talking about the US...).

Do you really want to argue over definition of slavery?

"poverty?"

Is that what makes you 'feel better' about what it really is, is calling it something different?

Oh come now. You are smarter than that.

So working in ####### conditions, 15 hour days, making a few dollars a day is "poverty" and not slavery?

I see. Now I know how people sleep better at night knowing these things. They sum it up with "poverty."

[Obama 2012 1,714]

You just like arguing, don't you?

I do not like poverty. I do not like that people are paid less than a minimum wage or work in horrible conditions.

Still, while slavery does exist in the world, the workers you are talking about are not slaves (I assume here that you are talking about the US...).

Do you really want to argue over definition of slavery?

Not arguing it at all. I am stating it for what it is.

You can be a slave to your environment/conditions. It's still slavery. I'm not just talking what goes on in the US. I'm talking about how we benefit from it at home and abroad.

We live our lives freely at the suffering of others. It's the way it has been for a very long time and will never change unless we are willin to sacrifice our standard of living.

[SMR 368]

By ROBERT S. MCELVAINE | 3/28/11 6:35 AM EDT

“Slavery was the primary, central, cause of secession,” Barbour told me Friday. “The Civil War was necessary to bring about the abolition of slavery,” he continued. “Abolishing slavery was morally imperative and necessary, and it’s regrettable that it took the Civil War to do it. But it did.”

Now, saying slavery was the cause of the South’s Lost Cause hardly qualifies as breaking news — it sounds more like “olds.” But for a Republican governor of Mississippi to say what most Americans consider obvious truth is news. Big news.

It’s significant for two reasons: First, it sounds like Barbour is indeed running for the GOP presidential nomination. Second, it suggests that Mississippi has changed considerably since the 1960s.

...

Many white Mississippians—though not nearly as many as in the past—still insist that secession was about “freedom” and states’ rights, not slavery. Those people are part of the Republican base in Mississippi — and elsewhere in the South.

...

“We are continuing to move away from the old myths of the Civil War,” former Mississippi Gov. William Winter told me recently, “the myth that it was not about slavery, that it was about states’ rights and control by the central government.”

“If we know anything about history,” the former governor continued, “if we read about the background of secession, we know that, of course, it was about slavery. The Southern states at that point would not have seceded but for the issue of slavery.”

Now Barbour, the sitting governor, has dared to make a similar statement.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/52026.html

The reason I believe that the Civil War was not about slavery is not that secession was not about slavery. It more or less was. However, neither Lincoln as an individual nor the North collectively went to war to free the slaves or stop slavery. The North went to war to assert the authority of the federal government and to assert that states did not have the authority to secede. Further, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation as a measure of economic warfare, not as an assertion of human rights.

[Peikko 1,575]

Not arguing it at all. I am stating it for what it is.

You can be a slave to your environment/conditions. It's still slavery. I'm not just talking what goes on in the US. I'm talking about how we benefit from it at home and abroad.

We live our lives freely at the suffering of others. It's the way it has been for a very long time and will never change unless we are willin to sacrifice our standard of living.

Do you know anything at all about history? So far you are making a great case of proving that you know ###### about history or what slavery actually is.

[rika60607 215]

Slavery includes ability of the master to kill, sell, limit freedom of movement etc.

There are places in the world where some slavery still exists, but (only?) several millions people are enslaved, mostly it is illegal, too.

Are you saying US is benefiting from slavery? Well, if people were informed that this particular food or garment is a result of slave labor, I am sure most would not buy it, no matter how cheap. I know I would not. I am sure that the world would not crumble if Thailandease sex slave girls were suddenly not available

Talking about slavery to environment/conditions/decease is only a figure of speech.

Not arguing it at all. I am stating it for what it is.

You can be a slave to your environment/conditions. It's still slavery. I'm not just talking what goes on in the US. I'm talking about how we benefit from it at home and abroad.

We live our lives freely at the suffering of others. It's the way it has been for a very long time and will never change unless we are willin to sacrifice our standard of living.

[faithinGod 8]

would US be what it is today without slavery/free labor?i`m not an expert but probably not.

But that does not make slavery moral.

The right to freedom is given to any human being at birth,a human can not be owned by another human, anything that takes that right alone away (not to speak about many other rights that slaves didnt/don`t have)makes slavry imoral.

I don`t know how somebody can consider the imorality of taking someone`s right to be free away arguable.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Do you know anything at all about history? So far you are making a great case of proving that you know ###### about history or what slavery actually is.

I don't even know if I should recognize your lacking contribution to this thread. I suppose I am, but my point is, if you actually have a point to make and a position to take, then please do. I'm sure you don't as usual. You'd rather taunt others and play 'cool' while refusing to ever state an open position on an issue.

I suppose if you ever did, it would make you weak and vulnerable in some way. We couldn't have that, now could we?

[Danno 1,228]

Seems a little odd anyone would take as "heartfelt" comments made about topics such as race... from a politician and one seeking national office at that..

What could have been his other acceptable viewpoint?

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

The reason I believe that the Civil War was not about slavery is not that secession was not about slavery. It more or less was. However, neither Lincoln as an individual nor the North collectively went to war to free the slaves or stop slavery. The North went to war to assert the authority of the federal government and to assert that states did not have the authority to secede. Further, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation as a measure of economic warfare, not as an assertion of human rights.

This is probably the most balanced post in this thread IMO. +1

[justashooter 430]

typical liberal #######. tell a lie enough times and people might believe it.

the civil was was all about state's rights to seceed. the secessions occured because of punitive export tarrifs that a northern controlled congress had levied between 1830 and 1855 on unprocessed goods including cotton and tobacco. taxes in the south were unfairly high, so southern states left the union. enough said.

slavery in USA was extremely rare until the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1830's. prior to that slaves were household servants and garden workers to the wealthy, and of no use on the farm. they could not be taught how to correctly pick tobacco, and cotton was an uneconomical crop until mechanised methods of removal of the seeds were developed by pioneers like whitney. just as so assuredly slavery was on the out by 1860. mechanical pickers had been developed that were more economical than slave labor, so importation of slaves came to an end and sale value of slaves was falling rapidly. slavery would have been economically unviable by 1875 and died a natural death had the civil war not brought it to an end sooner.

slavery was not a factor in the civil war until lincoln began to run out of money in 1863. the federal budget in those times was not what it is today. most of the soldiers that fought on both sides were paid cash for 90 day conscriptions by private individuals who organized them into companies and joined the fray as paid "volunteer" units. one such volunteer was my grandmother's grandfather, edmund holsopple, who served in the 54th PA volunteers from 8-16-1861 thru 11-16-1864, was shot in battle, and served as a prisoner at harrison. he died in 1919 and is interred at custer's cemetery in somerset pa. his enlistment contract remains among the family papers. his gradfather, henry holtzapfel, was killed in the war or 1812. while in service to the 1st virginia militia on a scouting trip near chilichoate ohio he and another scout were captured by indians and burned at the stake, alive.

regardless, by 1863 the only money available to lincoln was abolitionist money. he had tapped out all other sources, and was loathe to use abolition money, as an emancipation proclamation was a required part of the deal. lincloln did not want to interfere with the slavery issue, which he felt best managed on a state by state level. nonetheless, he picked up the snake to suffer it's venom, more divisive than the issues of taxation that preceeded. this in the interest of preservation of the nation's unity.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

The South continues to refuse to acknowledge what the Civil War was really about....

Like It Or Not, Historians Agree Slavery Caused U.S. Civil War

(excerpt)

"Of course, when South Carolina did secede, there was enormous celebration, dancing in the streets and so on," said James McPherson, a Princeton Civil War historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history Battle Cry of Freedom.

But something about the Charleston event of 2010 strikes an odd tone.

"They didn't know what was going to happen to them," McPherson said of the original revelers. "Now we do know what happened to them, and maybe a celebratory note is not very appropriate."Scholars today are mostly of one mind about why South Carolina seceded and what caused the war. But Americans, even a century and a half later, still deeply disagree with each other and historians, many of them embracing a Civil War story about self-government and "states' rights" that reveals more about America in 2010 than what actually occurred in the 1860s.

This disconnect between scholarship and public memory has traced a curious evolution over past 150 years, and now on the eve of the sesquicentennial, it threatens to complicate any honest national conversation about the significance of the war's anniversary.

"Probably 90 percent, maybe 95 percent of serious historians of the Civil War would agree on the broad questions of what the war was about and what brought it about and what caused it," McPherson said, "which was the increasing polarization of the country between the free states and the slave states over issues of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery."

How can any commemoration these next four years make no mention of that?

"One hundred and fifty years ago Christmas Eve day, everyone knew why South Carolina was seceding because they said so — it's a wonderful document," said James Loewen, a sociologist and co-editor of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.

Four days after South Carolina seceded on Dec. 20, 1860, the state adopted a second document titled "Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." Loewen considers the record, central to his new collection, one of the five most important documents in the history of the country, launching as it did a seminal chapter in America's ongoing struggle to define itself.

"So why does nobody ever read it?" he asked. "Everybody knew [secession was] about slavery. This document is all about slavery."

In it, South Carolina laments the election of a new president "whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery." State leaders indeed sound incensed about "states' rights," but not in the way most people think today.

"They are against states' rights," Loewen said. "And they name the states and they name the rights that really upset them."

Specifically, South Carolina spells out grievances with 13 Northern states that had passed local laws that "render useless" the federal Fugitive Slave Act. South Carolina is miffed at New York for denying slaveholders the right to transport slaves through its territory, and at Ohio and Iowa for refusing to surrender escaped slaves charged with crimes in Virginia. It's angry at several Northern states for giving freed blacks citizenship and even the right to vote (a decision that was then the responsibility of the states, not the federal government). These northern laws were essentially an attempt to hold federal slave policy at bay — using states' rights.

Today, the "states' rights" shorthand for the war is both a staple of U.S. history textbooks and a slogan of groups that sidestep mention of exactly which states' rights were in debate in 1860.

"The whole question of 'states' rights' is sometimes misunderstood; that is, states' rights are more a means than an end itself. 'States' rights' for what purpose?" McPherson said. "Slavery was the substantive issue of the 1850s leading up to the Civil War, just like health care reform is today."

Writing about this disconnect earlier this year when Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed Confederate History Month, PoliticsDaily.com Editor Carl Cannon quoted the Confederacy's vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, on the new nation's raison d'être:: "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."

The North did not, however, go to war to dismantle slavery, as the South did to preserve it. The North fought to preserve the Union, a motivation that, over the course of the war, became inextricably tied to the question of what that Union would look like after the fighting was over — would it be free or not?

This is the history on which McPherson's 90 percent to 95 percent of serious historians agree.

"That's why we published this reader," Loewen said. "Any neo-Confederate or plain old American who wants to say, 'No, no, it's about states' rights,' has the problem that they're not arguing with me. They're arguing with the people in South Carolina who seceded; they're arguing with the convention in Mississippi."

Americans in the 1860s knew these facts. When, Loewen asks, did they start to forget them?

A concerted effort to rehabilitate the Confederate cause began in the 1880s, says Melvin Patrick Ely, a scholar of free and enslaved African-Americans at the College of William & Mary, and the great-grandson of a Confederate veteran himself.

"But to say it's a 'concerted effort' is not the same as saying the proponents of it were insincere," Ely said. "You can be mistaken and yet also be sincere and earnest. The cult of the 'lost cause,' the cult of the Confederacy in the late 19th and early 20th century, in my view, was not an attempt to falsify history, it was an attempt on the part of some people to propagate their sincerely held view of what history had been."

Why they sincerely held that view, he adds, is a separate question.

Most Americans by the turn of the 20th century accepted that slavery should no longer exist — "Nobody wants to put up a monument to somebody in 1900 and inscribe on the pedestal, 'Died Defending Slavery,'" Ely said. But Americans in the North and South had largely come to think of Reconstruction, and the resulting 14th and 15th amendments, as a failure. (That birthright citizenship guaranteed in the 14th amendment is suffering renewed political attacks to this day is one consequence, historians argue, of our failure to accurately read history — and to hold politicians to its lessons.) By the early 20th century, many white Americans had concluded blacks just weren't ready for citizenship yet after all.

In the post-Reconstruction era of national "reunion," Yale historian David Blight says the country came back together around the idea of the common valor of soldiers on both sides of the war, around a common economy and around the imperial adventures of America as it began to grow into a world power.

"But primarily — and this is complex — but primarily the country reunified ultimately by the 1890s and the turn of the 20th century around white supremacy," Blight said, "around the Jim Crow system, which took deep hold in the South but also in the North."

Some historians call this era the most racist in American history — even more so than the age of slavery. This racism, and the new narrative of an unfortunate war between brothers, took hold in popular fiction, in presidential speeches, in monument building. The story of the emancipation of 4 million slaves — and of the 200,000 blacks who fought for the Union army — "all but vanished from the national story by 1900, 1910," Blight says. For several decades to come, most children would not even read much about it in their textbooks.

Northerners were complicit in this retelling of history, as were historians of the era, said Marquette professor James Marten, president of the Society of Civil War Historians.

In the years since the Civil Rights era, historians have coalesced around the account outlined by McPherson and supported in records like those Loewen has collected. "It's cut-and-dry," Loewen says. Two generations of historians have made the case "thoroughly and conclusively and persuasively," Blight says.

Grade-school textbooks have not entirely caught up (a crusade of Loewen, who also wrote the best-seller Lies My Teacher Told Me). This fall, Carol Sheriff, a history colleague of Ely's at William & Mary, discovered in her daughter's fourth-grade Virginia textbook a passage about the "thousands" of blacks who fought for the Confederacy. Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue also celebrated this relatively new narrative about the war in a 2008 state proclamation (using a historic inaccuracy arguably worse than not mentioning slaves at all in state Civil War proclamations).

The claim, sourced by the Virginia textbook's author from a Sons of Confederate Veterans website, is roundly refuted by historians. The Confederate army did not permit blacks to serve as soldiers until late March of 1865, weeks before Richmond fell. But the idea that Southern blacks had fought throughout the conflict would undercut the very premise that Southern whites went to war to continue enslaving them.

"Public memory is always about the present as much as it is about the past," Blight said. "When you ask why people keep denying the war was about slavery, you just have to ask them what purpose does that argument serve in their own lives now?"

http://www.miller-mc...-slavery-26265/

Edited March 29, 2011 by 8TBVBN

[justashooter 430]

so 1 guy holds a copy of 1 document from among the thousands of ducuments that were created in a tumultuous time, and suddenly this means that everybody has been lying about the truth for 150 years. yeah, serious historians agree, but nobody else agrees with them.

this is like saying that michelle obama's note in memo from yesterday that she does not like rockey road ice cream will be interpreted 150 years from now to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that her dislike for rocky road is the only reason that obama was a 1 term president. i mean, shoot, EVERYBODY likes rocky road!

[Obama 2012 1,714]

The South continues to refuse to acknowledge what the Civil War was really about....

Like It Or Not, Revisionists Agree Slavery Caused U.S. Civil War

(excerpt)

http://www.miller-mc...-slavery-26265/

fixx0red!

[mawilson 2,133]

So working in ####### conditions, 15 hour days, making a few dollars a day is "poverty" and not slavery?

Yes. You don't understand the difference?

[ready4ONE 5,400]

fixx0red!

Hmmm... A 5%er huh...