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I for one, believe you gentlemen are still missing the point from the southern perspective. One slave was significant in the sense that slavery was obviously not the right thing to do, albeit it legal. Sam's 127 were certainly more significant at least in numbers and in the ability of the owner to become politically active because of his comparative weath than a sharecropper on 20 acres. The big boys in South Carolina with the vast rice plantations were also perhaps more significant than Sam's 127. A slave was a slave regardless of the number of warm bodies on his particular abode. Yes, blacks fought for the South, no not in significant (?) numbers, as did the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and a Frenchman or two. (Many of the Native Americans were enslaved just as significantly as the Blacks, yet they still fought for their homeland. HOMELAND, that's the reason the majority of folks from the South fought in the civil war. I'm surprised there still seems to be a challenge grasping this concept.
HOMELAND, that's the reason the majority of folks from the South fought in the civil war. I'm surprised there still seems to be a challenge grasping this concept.
Yankees are hung up with ideologies.....they do not understand "homeland"
Ulysses Grant owned slaves? Are you sure? Gee, I hadn't heard that before. You're a fountain of information there Battalion. Grant had one slave given to him by his dad-in-law, before Grant left for Illinois. And Grant freed him when he got to Illinois. Grants wife did own 3 slaves, a couple of whom she hired out.
TW
__________________ "In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed. There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one." Abraham Lincoln - August 18, 1864 Speech to the 164th Ohio Regiment
Ulysses Grant owned slaves? Are you sure? Gee, I hadn't heard that before. You're a fountain of information there Battalion. Grant had one slave given to him by his dad-in-law, before Grant left for Illinois. And Grant freed him when he got to Illinois. Grants wife did own 3 slaves, a couple of whom she hired out.
You're impressive in your intransigence. So, if I'm following you here, then, because Grants wife had 3 slaves, and under the theory of "common property", by definition Grant also owned the slaves, right? And that assertion, that Grant himself owned slaves, taken in context with your previous posts attempting to justify slavery by claiming that many hundreds or thousands of blacks who "fought" for the Confederacy, with guns, shooting at yankees, should then prove beyond a doubt, that your claim that blacks were truly happy in the slavery system is true, since they chose to fight for it. I think I linked that up correctly. I just was trying to track your reasoning on this and how you came up with your conclusions.
Ok... well, I'm turnin' in. Tired. G'nite. Sleep well in fantasy land.
TW
__________________ "In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed. There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one." Abraham Lincoln - August 18, 1864 Speech to the 164th Ohio Regiment
Our only point has been that Blacks weren't all in the slavery system and some (not many) actually fought for the South, not supporting slavery, just trying to survive and help their neighbors and their families survive that terrible mess. There was more to life than slavery. Still is.
Yankees are hung up with ideologies.....they do not understand "homeland"
That is pretty much proven false before you start. If there is one thing that it is pretty unshakable, it is that the Yankees fought for the concept of "the Union", which is just the then-current term for the United States of America, the "homeland".
It was the aggression of the seceding states against that "homeland" that brought all those volunteers streaming out of the North and West in 1861. Very few marched off for the primary purpose of freeing the slaves or collecting tariffs. But just as the Confederate Secretary of State warned his government, the attack on Ft. Sumter was "fatal" to the Confederate cause. It lost them all sympathy in the North, it forced the middle-of-the-road opinions to evaporate. As Stephen Douglas would put it within days, there were now only two sides: Patriots -- and Traitors.
The deliberate and violent assault by the secessionists made the people choose. There could be no more shilly-shallying on the issues. The Union was under attack, and the citizens had to choose between defending her and surrender. It didn't have to work out that way -- until the Confederates attacked Ft. Sumter.
Tim if you stretch the number of folks owning slaves up to 25 percent, which I doubt, that still leaves 75 per cent in the other category. That's a majority by most standards?
No one I know has ever said that a majority of Southerners owned slaves. But then, women couldn't vote, children couldn't vote. Widows often ended up with property in slaves, but married women in the South were usually not considered responsible for such.
You shouldn't doubt the 25% figure for families; a glance at the raw numbers for the slaveholding states makes it look like 26% and I presume the director of the Census of 1860 had a better grasp on the numbers than I do. In states like MS and SC, it looks like the family average might have approached 50%.
Census takers sometimes counted more than one slaveholder/family, but routinely counted only one. Also, slaves were taxable property, so it is assumed there might have been more slaves than counted.
But perhaps more significantly, slaves represented power, money and prestige to Southerners. What you are looking at here is that slave-owning families are typically families with property and influence. Politically, it is very hard to ignore: while about 25% of the NC families seem to have owned slaves, *ALL* of the members of the state legislature did. If you look at county-by-county votes on secession in places like TN, KY, VA, and NC you will find that the greater the percentage of slves in the county the more likely the county is to vote for secession or secession candidates. The counties with the fewest slaves usually are opposed to secession.
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