Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
And Still, the confederacy would not give up it's slaves. Even for independence.
Check mission of Duncan Kenner.
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
Davis was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice (slavery) but was the Confederacy????
The confederate congress and the Va. legislature, would not free even those slaves willing to fight to preserve the confederacy.
His body or skin looked more like the hide of an alligator than of a human being. The large leaders in his legs had been cut just above the heels. The slave owners called this hamstringing, to keep them from running away. This old darky's body was one mass of scars from head to foot where he had been lacerated with whip and bloodhounds. He told me of the cruelties of his master; how his master had cut his flesh to pieces with the whip; how he had tried to run away to get away from these cruelties; how the bloodhounds caught him and tore his flesh so he came near dying; how , when he was caught and brought back to is master, his master hamstrung him, and how he finally escaped one night to a large swamp and by wading around in the water the hounds could not track him. He found a little island in the swamp and had lived alone for fourteen years....
...He was the most pitiful sight I have ever seen. His skin was so calloused a mosquito could not penetrate it.
"Three Years with Wallace's Zouaves; The Civil War memoirs of Thomas Wise Durham" P 98.
This was a man... a human being. I want you all to think about this next time you say "Slavery wasn't all that bad" or that the southerners rarely mistreated their slaves. If this happened to even one man, isn't that bad enough? It's hogwash.. B.S. And you all know it. Look this man in the eye, and tell HIM "it wasn't that bad... at least you weren't in Brazil..."
__________________ "In mortal combat, a man may and will become so infuriated by the din and dangers of a bloody fight that his heart will turn to stone and his every de sire [be] for blood."
John Hadley, 7th Indiana after the battle at Port Republic
YOU check it and then you post your research IF you want to use this to support a view of yours.
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
We might expect that "your" man was an exception. That mostly the owners were kind and treated their folks well. And that might be true. But the freedom to treat "your" man as he was treated kinda stands out, doesn't it? If you are justified in hamstringing a bad ****** or cutting off an ear, or slitting his nose. It gets a bit hard to say "well, it was legal."
ole
Sorry. Developing a bad mood today. Will stay away for a while.
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
Oh. For a moment, I thought the world was rallying to your cause, to help stamp out the holocaust of negro servitude in the hellish South!
After all, you guys make SUCH a BIG DEAL out of SLAVERY!
I just figured everyone was on board with that...
Geo
Beowulf,
So what you are trying to say without really admitting it, is the South DID try to get foreign recognition, but failed. That the South tried repeatedly to gain such recognition, but due to the fact it would not give up the institution of slavery, England and France would not extend such recognition.
When the South insisted on trial by combat as the way to gain recognition as a free and independent country, if failed and it's insistance to keep and protect slavery was the greatest obstacle that prevented it from reaching this desperately sought goal.
The thing the South did not realize is that slavery was being slowly stamped out the "holocust of negro servitude" by the rest of the world because they DID consider it a big deal.
The South was trying to freeze a period of history into place, to stop a trend that was beginning to sweep the rest of the country and the world. The idea that human beings could not be placed into forced servitude or be bought and sold as a type of property. Because the South wanted to stand still, the rest of the world passed it by.
Yes, "Us guys" make a BIG DEAL out of slavery and can really find nothing amusing about it or it's practice. Nor do we wish to diminish it's history and it's central place as a cause of the Civil War as some do.
The pity is some will never be "on board" with that proven, recorded, historical fact.
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
YOU check it and then you post your research IF you want to use this to support a view of yours.
Unionblue
The 1st Lt. rank is only an honorary title.
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
We might expect that "your" man was an exception. That mostly the owners were kind and treated their folks well. And that might be true. But the freedom to treat "your" man as he was treated kinda stands out, doesn't it? If you are justified in hamstringing a bad ****** or cutting off an ear, or slitting his nose. It gets a bit hard to say "well, it was legal."
ole
Sorry. Developing a bad mood today. Will stay away for a while.
If slavery was not that bad, why was there an underground railroad? Why were the Southerners so concerned about a slave revolt? Happy, comfortable people do not revolt? Clearly the Southerners were aware of enough slaves being mistreated enough to want to do violence and in such numbers to pose a significant threat.
If slavery was such a benevolent and charitable institution, why were the slaves flocking to the Union army when it passed through? Why were poor southern whites not selling their children into slavery so they could have a better life?
I have no doubt that some slaves were treated well - some even almost like one of the family. But they were still slaves. They could be bought and sold. Their children taken from them and shipped off to a far, even cruel place. The lowest factory worker in the North could at least hope for a better life for his children. The only hope for a better life for the slave's children was emancipation.
__________________ "There must be more historians of the Civil War than there were generals figthing in it... Of the two groups, the historians are the more belligerent." David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (1961)
Battalion, really must start reading real history. Does he, even know about the Kenner mission, or has he merely heard about it somewhere?
Davis was very pessimistic about the chances of success for the mission, because, he (Davis) admitted that the Confederate Gov't had no authority to bind its member states to an emancipation policy and the there was no guarantee that such a policy would ever secure apprroval at the state level.
As Davis had already noted, If the Confederacy failed, "Died of a Theory' should be written on it's tombstone.
I tend to agree with UnionBlue's response that you should do your own research. However, just in case anyone thinks you have a point:
Duncan Kenner was a Confederate Congressman from Louisiana. In 1863 he went home to visit during a recess, barely escaping capture by a Union raid because of a warning from one of his slaves. When he returned to Richmond, impressed with how badly things were going, he proposed to Davis that the Confederacy offer to emancipate the slaves in exchange for British/French recognition and support.
Davis either wasn't impressed, or didn't think the Confederate Congress would go along with it. In any case, he did nothing about it until LATE DECEMBER, 1864, when the Confederacy was about to collapse and Lincoln's election ensured another major offensive by the Union in the Spring.
On December 27, 1864, Secretary of State Benjamin dispatched Kenner to Europe to try to negotiate this deal with the British and French. Kenner carefully traveled under an alias to New York and took ship for Europe, arriving in February 1865. He went to Paris and met with Mason and Slidell.
Mason's recation was to angrily declare he'd have nothing to do with such an offer. But Slidell and Kenner managed to convince him that he had no choice. They then went to see Napoleon III, who gave them a bunch of sympathetic noises, said he could not act unless England acted first, and sent them away.
They then traveled to London, where they met with British diplomats. They listened politely, and the British gave them no encouragement and sent them away. At least one account seems to have said the Confederates only hinted they might emancipate the slaves (since this would require Confederate Congressional approval (at a minimum), they really couldn't even make the promise openly.
Now supposedly, the responses they got indicated that the French and British policies were not based on slavery. Probably true: Napoleon III wasn't doing anything unless it was to his/France's benefit, and that would be true for British policy as well.
But note that even here, with their backs to the wall and the building on fire, the Confederates were just vaguely coming to terms with the thought of emancipation. I'm sure the British and French thought they were pretty desperate lunatics if they thought this offer, in 1865, had a chance. They probably burst into laughter as soon as the Confederate representatives left.
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
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