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.
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
And as Opn pointed out, Davis had no authority over slavery in the CSA, so he had no authority to offer emancipation in return for recognition. He was being dishonest with the British and French.
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.
CSA Constitution: (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Since the CSA Constitution established an explicit right to own slaves, how does their federal government offer up emancipation without amending the four year old Constitution?
Cedarstripper
ooops....skip this post. I missed Cash's.
Last edited by cedarstripper; 03-05-2008 at 10:48 PM.
Reason: didn't want to be too redundant
If you think Lee would lead Union forces against any southerners you have no clue about Lee.
Regards,
Cash[/quote]
Uhh, actually, I do! Lee was a military man, and so long as Virginia remained in the Union, he was duty-bound to do the will of the Federal Army. He was a professional soldier. His obligation was not to the Southerners, but first to Virginia, and THEN to the Federal government.
He would have had to lead forces into the deep South, or else retire.
That he may have done, but if Virginia remained in the Union, he was duty-bound. Forget what he 'wanted'.
Quote
Originally Posted by Beowulf
"I tried to hire employees, but they said the benefits were better this way... early retirement... free housing... free medical... free food... great dating service... free child care... free transportation... free inservice training for a trade... plus, they are saving enough to buy back their own freedom in a few years, with no other bills!"
No, I don't own any slaves! Come on...
I was just playing on Battalion's tongue-in-cheek. (Humor is not one of the puritanical yankee's strong suits. It is as annoying to them as 'hospitality'!)
But I do know of some accounts of freed negroes selling themselves back into slavery to get money for various causes. Robert of Avenel, and later, Doc, who returned to the plantation after the 13th amendment...
Lucinda, a negress, remained with Letitia her entire life, and was the first black woman buried beside her mistress in Longwood Cemetery. I have visited her grave, and Letitia Burwell's grave, personally, when I visited there once some years ago.
So go ahead and tell us your horror stories about isolated incidents and try to pass them off as commonplace; that's an old yankee horror-story pattern which predates the most horrible yankee-storyteller of all, Stephen King, by some hundred odd years!
And don't ever own up to bringing the poor wretches over here, your own selves! Just get self-righteous about it in the 1860's and drone on ceaselessly about it from now on... to hide the fact that the yankees destroyed a country
in the process.
If you think Lee would lead Union forces against any southerners you have no clue about Lee.
Regards,
Cash
Uhh, actually, I do![/quote]
No, you don't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Beowulf
Lee was a military man, and so long as Virginia remained in the Union, he was duty-bound to do the will of the Federal Army. He was a professional soldier. His obligation was not to the Southerners, but first to Virginia, and THEN to the Federal government.
Not quite. Lee would follow Virginia, but he wouldn't lead an invasion of the south. He would resign his commission first. He would do so first because such an invasion would necessarily go through Virginia and second because he would not raise his arm against the south. He believed "the North" was in the wrong in the sectional crisis.
A refusal to do someone else's research/work for him is always in order, First Sergeant.
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
If you think Lee would lead Union forces against any southerners you have no clue about Lee.
Uhh, actually, I do! Lee was a military man, and so long as Virginia remained in the Union, he was duty-bound to do the will of the Federal Army. He was a professional soldier. His obligation was not to the Southerners, but first to Virginia, and THEN to the Federal government.
He would have had to lead forces into the deep South, or else retire.
That he may have done, but if Virginia remained in the Union, he was duty-bound. Forget what he 'wanted'.
Beowulf
Assuming Virginia had remained in the Union, I think Lee might have resigned rather than lead troops into South Carolina (there's a good chance NC would not have seceded if VA had not). Some people think Lee's statements and writings of the "Winter of Secession" imply that is what he would do.
But then Lee thought the War with Mexico was as unjust a war as there could be, said so clearly at the time -- and still obeyed his orders and left for Mexico, where he was one of the most celebrated of soldiers. I think, if push came to shove after VA chose to remain in the Union, Lee might have changed his mind. He did from time to time after a display of histrionics.
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.
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..."
The fault in your logic that you assume this was the rule, rather than the exception. This is a fault of your prejudice towards the Southerner and the institution in that he was more successful with slavery as an institution than the yankees were up North.
You might sell an abolitionist on isolated accounts like that, but you slip in that bit of opinion to suggest this was commonplace...
(When it comes to slavery, butter won't melt in the yankee mouth! Oh, how pious they were! My, yes!).
There was at least one camp over here during WWII, set up as a protection camp, if I am not mistake, as well as a myriad of German POW camps.... Are we to assume, by your logic, then, that the horrors of Dachau, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and Sobibor were also repeated here in the States? You see the fault in your logic...
We have all heard about Andersonville, and Camp Sumter... but no films about the Northern scenes of atrocity, where food was readily available! Yet the death rates were nearly identical...
By your logic, the North should have had much better conditions, and as they were so concerned about the people they had brought over here years earlier, and were now ever so much more humanitarian than the Southerners were in their camps .... Yet the numbers speak of a deliberate horror...
The Yankee, as an art form, does not impress with his
'concern' for the black man... it is a symptom of something far more sinister! He seems bent upon making excuse for his continued presence during the four years the South went nearly completely extinct!
From Letitia Burwell's Diary:
'My name is Letitia Burwell. I wish to leave a record of plantation life as it was. The truth may thus be preserved among a few, and merited praise may be awarded to noble men and virtuous women who have passed away...
Among the negroes, 100 on our plantation, many had been taught different trades. All were merry hearted. I never saw a discontented face. Many could read and in almost every cabin was a bible. The atmosphere of our own home was one of kindness and consideration.. I believe the maltreatment of one of our servants, we had never heard the word slave, would have distressed us beyond endurance. My mother and grandmother were almost always talking of the wants of the negroes; what medicine should be sent, who needed new shoes, clothes, or blankets. The principle object of their lives seemed to be in providing these comforts."
Sorry, timewalker, for a moment there I thought you misunderstood. The uncle and the ma'am would go on the block in a New York minute when the need came up. Don't know what you'd get for an aging slave. But when you're going broke, I'd guess the uncle or the ma'am would be worth something. And it would have all the pathos of selling the most favored horse.
Dolly, we hardly knew ya.
ole
__________________ 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
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