As I have said before, Lincoln radically OPPOSED slavery

[unionblue]

Tommy, at no time will I consider an honest question on this board inflammatory. The whole purpose of signing up on this discussion board, the first time I have ever done so anywhere, is to learn. And I will say that I have learned more on this board about the Civil War in the last month than in all my previous years on the planet! I can hardly wait to get to work (I work midnights at the Post Office) and log-on to this site. So please take no offense at my opinions and beliefs, but again realize I came to them on my own through some very careful study from a very wide field of sources.

One thing I wish to make clear is that I do not like the idea of "shooting the messenger" or the person or source where I get my information just because I may not like him personally or disagree with his particular politics. I feel that limits you and also says in a whisper you are afraid to hear other points of view.

I began my journey into the wilderness of Civil War debate a relative virgin, just another poor Northern boy, born and raised in Ohio where history was a couple of paragraphs a day for each major event in our history. The Civil War was no different, I.E. started at Ft. Sumter, was about slavery, Lincoln got shot, PERIOD. Nothing about causes, politics, rulings, elections, customs, etc. I graduated High School enlisted into the Army for 20 years and that was the extent of my CW background.

When I began reenacting back in 1993, I was pretty much a blank page for all the historical backgound I knew about the war. Why I got interested in it at all is mainly due to my friend and loyal opposition, Ron Goodwin, my dearest friend from Mississippi.

Ron started talking to me, giving his views on the war (inbetween times cracking jokes about Lincoln) to include many things I did not know about. Black Confederate soldiers, the legality of secession (more bad jokes about Lincoln), and other areas that got me curious. This developed into countless, long-drawn out, passionate arguments and debates on many car trips to various reenactments around the country. I remember one trip we got so involved in a discussion that we missed a turn and ended up much to our surprise in another state (instead of driving home)!

Ron has caused me to purchase three separate six tall bookshelves with nothing but Civil War reference books, magazines, movies and articles just so I can keep up with him. And during the course of all the reading and research and debates, Ron is the most responsible for my attitudes and opinions on the late War of Rebellion. Before I met him, I honestly had no thoughts about it whatsoever.

So what's my point? I will not shoot Ron when he brings me information in the form of an article, book or other type of research. I will not dismiss it out of hand just because it comes from OldReb. I will almost know that I won't like what he has to present, but I won't just say it can be blown off because it is Ron presenting it. Or someone like Harry Jaffa. Or Karl Marx.

And Tommy, sometimes the facts are delivered in a not too pretty package. Does that mean the facts are no good? If Jaffa or others that we do not like make a statement that there is no such thing as gravity does that make the fact any less true? I will tell you that I am no big fan of Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Jaffa's big opponent on all things Civil War, but I cannot dismiss him when he presents information. I will check his information out and see if it is correct, JUST LIKE I DO JAFFA'S. You don't have to be a fan of Hitler's when you do research on him.

Now, as to the rest of your post. Yes, Lincoln was a politician and he was the highest paid lawyer in Illinois. And then the rest of your paragraph is nothing I can agree with. I will go along with the idea the Lincoln saw the eventual death of slavery, if it could be contained, but I will not go along with the idea that he meant to touch where it already existed. And the tariff angle just doesn't have any impact on me mainly because of statements from seceeding Southerners themselves that they said it wasn't "the" question, but slavery was.

The idea that the North had wage slaves and that they liked being rich, yep, I'll agree. But a wage slave could move on and take a chance somewhere else. A slave can't. Most in the North felt that they had a chance or maybe their children might and that there was more opportunity to advance. As for paying the tariff and I would like to know where the 80% figure comes from, the South had to pay for maintenance on roads, forts, ports and installations in their part of the country too, did they not?

The Declaration is NOT a Declaration of secession from England. At no time did the American colonists claim any kind of legal right to separate from England. It was Rebellion and they knew it. They took their chances and were fortunate enough to win. And remember that when Lincoln said in a speech that, "any people anywhere, being inclined and HAVING THE POWER, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better..." he was still talking about REVOLUTION not Secession.

As for your idea that some in the North felt that the South could leave, that is historical fact, I know that one prevailing attitude was, "let 'em go, they'll be back" or some such. A poem of the period appeared in the London Punch, taken from a Northern paper, in early 1861 which stated;

SECESSION AND SLAVERY

Secede, ye Southern States, secede,
No better plan could be,
If you of ******s would be freed,
To set your ******s free.
Runaway slaves by federal law
At present you reclaim;
So from the Union straight withdraw
And play the Free Soil game.

What, when you've once the knot untied,
Will bind the Northern men?
And who'll resign to your cow-hide
The fugitives again?
Absquatulate, then, slick as grease,
And break up unity,
Or take your president in peace
And eat your humble pie.

But if your stomachs proud disdain
That salutary meal
And you, in passion worse than vain,
Must rend the commonweal,
Then all mankind will jest and scoff
At people in the case
Of him that hastily cut off
His nose to spite his face.

As for Mr. Greeley, he too, was entitled to his opinion. Research him a bit and you'll find he almost had a different one for each day of the war. I do agree with you the majority of the North might have stood for the idea of the South leaving peacefully. But that didn't happen either. When the South pulled the trigger at Ft. Sumter, it united the North in a way nothing else could.

Now, I too, have taken a bit of space and time here but there is one thing I want you to be sure of. You have your opinion and I have mine. I feel they both have been honestly arrived at and deserve to be heard, mulled over and torn apart in the spirit of friendship and mutual learning. I hope, my friend Mental Nomad, that you trust me in believing that is my truest wish.

Until that time...
Unionblue

Jim,
I see your point. Perhaps the semantics seem extreme. I can see how you could feel it was strictly rhetoric.

But my issue is, I kept hearing "I just can't understand how the south..etc" I was trying to help those who don't get it to understand. I was trying to establish how southerners felt....how does the popular war song back then go?...There's a man in the white house with blood on his mouth"

Murder is unlawfilly killing of another...The south saw it as just that. Murder..they were raised on certain ideals..And were being killed for them. Warfare I suppose is considered justifiable homocide. Yet did Lincoln declare war? Or just wage war. Total war. Justifiable? Not to the southerners. To them it was unlawfull. Therefore murder. They felt it, they said it, they wrote it. They screamed it. You can argue the legitmacy of the war, justify why Lincoln did this or that or why you think he was right...but none of that will get you one step closer to understanding the average southerner.

Tricky thing is..it is about feelings..the men in congresses, the men in uniforms with stars on lapels can coldly (or heatedly) argue the semantics in the constitution, the legitamcy of legal precedents and procedure, which branch of government controls what..the rich can think how will this affect my profit margin...but when push came to shove..to the average southerner it is about feelings as much or more than anything else.

Now I have an example....I recently read someone say they get a chuckle out of reading how New Orleans howled under Butler...I can understand that....but I could not help but feel saddened because the first thing Butler did was hang a man for taking down a flag. Ended a human life by strangulation. To me I did not think that was funny. To me that was clear cut case of murder. You can argue legality and rationalise it was ok cause he had authority or point out how wonderfully effective it was at detering people from expression til the cows come home. I know the southerners then had to have felt it was murder. Pure and simple.

So all that said...I understand what you say how what you consider "nonense" to invalidate any weight my statements might make. I see your point and regardless of my interest in brevity I should have been much more careful in my choice of words.
Actually, I am glad that you pointed it out to me. Because if you hadn't I would have blithely thought nothing of it.

Neil,
Sorry if you felt I was shooting a messenger strictly because I do not like him. What I have against Jaffa is that he does not deal in facts. If you are going to use him, you should understand since he is known to misquote and outright fabricate I would tend to dismiss it out of hand. Or I'm forced to go substantiate if what he says is true or not...which is a pain in the butt. Unlike many of you, I loathe research. it is why I like honest debate..exchange of facts not misinformation...not scoring points..If it is strictly based on opinion, I'd be glad to listen to him or you quote him all day, but when it comes to facts (not interptretation of) it is a different story.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo is not much better..he has misquoted to suit his arguements on occassion as well..personally I see a flag go up when I read his quotes as well..I won't use them unless I have substantiated them elsewhere.

As to wage slaves...Move on to where? To what? with what? to take what chance? Go starve down the street?..Labor is something I have studied and debated often with communinists friends in various chat forums.(No..I'm not a communist..I was debating communists but I do feel there is a lot of truth to what they say)..it is well nigh impossible to realise how severe the degradation and depravation was then...
Just as a side note..the southern arguement of slave vs wage slave was like this...

I buy a car..You lease one..who is going to have reason to take better care of the car?

To from the southern veiw...it was case of pot calling kettle black

It has always bothered me that the ones in the north that screamed the loudest in moral outrage were often the one who exploited the poor the most. specially children..(Children were supposed to take chances elsewhere?)They still do...just now it is overseas.

[unionblue]

Mental, I try not to take anyone of my sources at face value, but I do tend to use them to point me in the direction of the facts. I must say, I too, can find tracking down all these facts and stories a bit of a pain. But it is like hunting gold and it's a real charge to find that occasional nugget. But without research and fact, then is just all opinion and point scoring. If I get hit with a fact that proves me wrong, I will admit it. I won't like it, but I will admit it. A case in point was Ron telling me about Black Confederate soldiers. Ouch! That one really hurt!

I find your comment on wage slaves a bit interesting. Move where? How about out West? It wasn't always the rich who moved into new lands, but persons looking for new prospects. (And I would hope I would take care of my lease, especially if it decided to up and drive off to a new and better location!) And one last point. A person is not a car. I don't see a car having hopes, fears, love of family and praying for a better future.

And kids did pay a price back then, didn't they? By any chance have you ever heard of a PBS series called "Frontier House?" It documents the experiences of three 20th century families who try and duplicate life on the frontier (1880's) for six months with no outside help. Lot of interesting history and info provided during that series of programs!

I find your comment on communists interesting. Before Marx was perverted by the big Guys (Stalin, Lennin, etc.) I too thought the theory had some merit. And a lot of truth mixed in among the land mines. (This coming from a an Army Intelligence Operator who spied on the Soviet Empire for 20 years!) Seems a shame to me that THAT experiment did not get a fair chance. Would have been interesting to see what type of society would have developed, if it had stuck to its early principles.

Until that time,
Unionblue

Neil,
I agree many poor did fill out the expanded areas..but sad fact is...if you will do research, you will see by the very nature of being poor you could not move. You could not afford to. They knew it and expolited it.
my point about cars..yes...they aren't people...but the people in the north were leasing..there was no investment in labor, so saftey, working conditions and wages etc were not a consideration. They were fodder. The attitude then was very much...if you don't like it leave, knowing full well they couldn't afford to. And it was standard practice in 19th century to hold wages if you quit.

As to communism...the soviet union wasn't communist. It was nothing but a word by the time Stalin had gained control.... But look at labor in the first part of the 20th century in the US...unions were the evil of all mankind..the Red Menace..the thought of worker's having rights or a fair wage or safe working conditions was blasphemy...sound familar? The same people opposed to slavery got rich by oppressing a far larger amount of people...in a way the south saw as bad or worse than slavery...wage slave is not just a catchy phrase. It is a fact. One the north had exploited to perfection for a century prior to the civil war. Oppression is oppresion by any name. Many union soldiers fought for the money...they saw it as an oppritunity of such that it was risking death over...that should give an idea of what it was like to be part of the moral northern work force. That should show how little chance there was to...move on and take chances elsewhere or how fruitless it was to do so. That said, perhaps you can glean how the south did not think the north had reason to take a higher moral ground.
Kathy Lee Gifford comes to mind...acting one way while getting rich off something evil in itself.

[blackirish]

Interesting conversation concerning the differences in the labor systems north and south. Only a careful look at the institution of slavery as it existed in the south can accurately bring out the differences. Slaves had no freedom under the southern system. No freedom to move about without written permission. No freedom to protect himself if he was assaulted by a white. No freedom to protect his family should they be assaulted by a white. No freedom to gather with other slaves without permission. No freedom to voice his own opinion. No freedom to have a family that was his own, as any and all of them could be sold at any time without his consent. No freedom to have possessions. No freedom to testify in court on their own behalf. The list is quite extensive but I think the point is easily seen.
The point is often made in discussions such as this one that it was not in an owners interest to mistreat the source of his labor. While this is true, it overlooks the two basic problems that southern slaveowners had. 1) Any successful labor system is based on incentive. The slaves in the south had no incentive. The incentive may be as simple as work or get fired, but this was a point of leverage that slaveowners did not have. In normal social systems the removal of a person's freedom is often one of the first punishments for breaking the law. This was another point of leverage that southern slaveowners did not have as the slave STARTED at this point. It became requisite to resort to corporal punishment as the first inducement to work and correct behaviour.
2) Many of the slave codes were built around the fear of insurrection. This was a very real and prevalent fear in many areas of the south that was at the base of the whole system. If your source of labor is simultaneously seen as the possible source of your own demise, well.... I think you can see why there was such a neccessity for complete and total subservience.

blackirish

Rick,
I find it undenialable that the problem with incentive was a major sticking point with slave owners. It was a major reason that it was not cost effective. Your profit margin is much greater to exploit a over crowded work force that has to work for little or nothing or starve. That way you can set the amount your cost will be and there are endless numbers to draw upon. Whereas with slavery you paid a greater cost for the labor that had no real incentive to to start with as you said. You could not fire them, blacklist them and sure couldn't starve them. About all you could do was reward them and failing that, sell them.


And as the fear of insurrection. I agree. It was a very legitamant fear....especially after Cato's conspiracy, Prosser, Vesey (this one really caused some worry), Murrel, Nat Turner, John Brown et al...all which had happened within living memory, or close to it.

I think the general concenus in the south was that abolishinists were doing all they could to incite such occurances.

example..prominant Garrit Smith..
"Several factors of interest reflect on Smith's reaction to Harper's Ferry. First, the August 1859 letter speaks directly to the fear that Southern white men would have for the protection of women in case of insurrection. Smith was immediately criticized when this letter was published for advocating rape and murder, a criticism that would have been as painful to him as it was valid. For a man who had always held himself out as driven by Christian values, the conflict around this point appears to have been great. In his biography of Smith, Hammond refers to Smith's apparent guilt over this:

He afterward told me of the hallucinations that possessed him. he thought himself the wickedest man in the world. he thought he had indeed been guilty of seeking to incite the slaves to servile insurrection, to murder their masters and outrage southern women, as the aristocratic Fifth avenue committee had charged. (p.73)"

If you read Lincoln's speech in New Haven I believe it is...the ones that lists where laughter, great laughter and applause occured...when he mentions John brown there is "Great laughter"....the south saw nothing funny at all about anything regarding John Brown.

From a southern point of veiw there was a very serious lack of moral ground for the north to stand upon. Much less legally.
And the anti slavery mentality in the north was one that generated fear in the south, not only finacial or property rights or anything...but a very real, viseral fear for the people they loved......Their wives, their children.





(Message edited by mental_nomad on July 11, 2002)

[jgallagher109]

Tommy, thank you for your response.

I wish I had more time to respond, but I did just answer for another verbal barb I threw at you in the Lincoln Quote thread in Campfire chat if you have a moment..

You guys are making me question too many things!!

Jim

Rick, you wrote, "Many of the slave codes were built around the fear of insurrection. This was a very real and prevalent fear in many areas of the south that was at the base of the whole system. If your source of labor is simultaneously seen as the possible source of your own demise, well.... I think you can see why there was such a neccessity for complete and total subservience. "

What were the race riots in New York in 1863 all about then? Why did the whites in New York hang African-Americans from lampposts and then set them on fire? Why did they beat them and kick them into insensibility and then hang them or shoot them? That is why Beast Butler got sent to New York in 1864 - to keep the race riots in check during the reelection of Lincoln. Yeah, like anybody had a chance at ousting the Great Emancipator, regardless of how tired they were of the war. I did not see any bills being entered in Congress to say, "Hey, I'm sick of reading the dead lists, let's vote to end the war and let the South get on with it."

And I disagree with the statement, "Any successful labor system is built on the incentive program..." Where is that in effect in today's Politically Correct job market? There are no incentives today, unless you become CEO of some company that has Arthur Anderson doing your books. The slave was, for the most part, not always, but for the most part, a carefully cared for piece of property. The average slave in 1860 cost about $1,000. That was a chunk of change back then when a bale of cotton might not sell of $90.00 (1,200 pounds at $0.07/pound). I agree with the list of non-rights the slave lived under. I am not sure where this was spelled out for your research and would like to read it myself, but I do agree. However, in Mississippi law in 1817, at statehood, there was a law passed that stated, the slaveholder would provide acceptable housing, one-half steer or hog each 6 months, one-quarter acre of land for a vegetable farm, fresh clothing in the summer and winter including shoes in the winter for the slave and his family, and a fresh supply of water that is adequate for all needs. Additionally it was prohibited for a slaveholder to sell a man's wife or children from that wife if they were married in a Christian marriage celebration with the slaveholder or any member of his family in witness thereof. (Mississippi Rule of State Regulations, passed in Congress, Dec. 1817, repealed by Constitutional Convention 1878.)

Can you show me where the mill owners of Massachusetts and Connecticut lived by the same set of ethics?

yours,
oldreb

[blackirish]

Mental Nomad,
I agree. The support of and financing for John Brown's raid was reprehensible. I think there is a general misunderstanding of just how much this one incident further polarized the country. Not so much for the incident itself, but how the reaction in the North horrified southerners. The idea of an insurrection or racial war such as had happened in Haiti might seem remote if you lived in a section of the country where whites outnumbered blacks 10-1, but it you lived in a section where it was 1-1, or even a preponderance of blacks compared to whites, it was a very different thing indeed.
In the South before and during the war there is a direct correlation between support of the war and ratio of blacks to whites in residence. In areas where this ratio was small there was little support for the war and even downright defiance against it. Especially after the first Confederate Conscription acts excluded persons who owned over a certain amount of slaves. You didn't have to own slaves to realize that the manumission of slaves was going to turn the economic system in the south on its ear. Along with this came the general consensus opinion that there would undoubtedly be recriminations against whites by blacks for 80 years of forced servitude.

blackirish