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.
We can, however, point out that you are deliberately presenting it in a distorted way, and that you refuse to explain how you see a connection from the quote to your claim.
Why bother to do this? Simply skip all the misdirection and state what you actually mean in your own words.
We can, however, point out that you are deliberately presenting it in a distorted way, and that you refuse to explain how you see a connection from the quote to your claim.
Why bother to do this? Simply skip all the misdirection and state what you actually mean in your own words.
We can, however, point out that you are deliberately presenting it in a distorted way, and that you refuse to explain how you see a connection from the quote to your claim.
Why bother to do this? Simply skip all the misdirection and state what you actually mean in your own words.
Tim
Quote:
Originally Posted by Battalion
There is no distortion.
Then you will have absolutely no problem at all showing us how *YOU*, using your own words, can connect this quote to your claim. I have asked you to do this in 3 or 4 different threads now, and you have consistently avoided explaining yourself.
On face value, the quote you keep posting is about something completely different, with no connection to your claim. You seem to believe something else. The solution is simple: Describe the connection. If you continually refuse to do so, then we are forced by your own actions to believe you are deliberately distorting or concealing something here.
From the book, What This Cruel War Was Over, by Chandra Manning, Introduction, beginning at page 11, paragraph two:
"More important than differences in sources or approach, this book departs from other books about Civil War soldiers because it places its primary focus on what soldiers thought about slavery. It does so because soldiers themselves did so. Rather than discussing slavery as one among many topics that soldiers addressed during the war, this book rescues slavery from the periphery of soldiers' mental worlds, where subsequent generations have tried to relegate it, and returns slavery to its rightful place at the center of soldiers' views of the struggle. In so doing, it alters our view of the Civil War in several ways. It eliminates the need to explain away a war about slavery as either a war about something else or a war imposed on unwitting nonslaveholding soldiers (despite those soldiers own clear statements to the contrary) and instead helps unravel precisely why nonslaveholding Southerners would fight a war to protect slavery. Trying to understand why slavery mattered to the Confederate rank and file, rather than fabricating a view that we find more comforting or appealing, illuminates how and why enlisted Confederates held on as long as they did, and it also modifies our understanding of the timing of the war's end.
Seeking to understand, rather than deny or assume, the centrality of slavery also sheds light on how nineteenth-century Americans, especially Southerners, defined what it meant to be a man. While white Union soldiers did not articulate a clear relationship between slavery and manhood, white Southerners closely linked the two. A true man protected and controlled dependents, which for white Southerners meant that a man competently exercised mastery over blacks (whether or not he owned any) as well as over women and children. It also meant that a man took care of his family and sheltered his loved ones from harm, including the almost unimaginable harm that white Southerners feared emancipation would bring, because they assumed that slaves released from bondage would terrorize, murder, and violate vulnerable white women and children. Ironically, black Southerners (and even northern free blacks) also took for granted a relationship between slavery and manhood. For bondsmen, the institution of slavery made true manhood impossible because it robbed a black man of the ability to protect his family from sale or to shelter his loved ones from violence or sexual violation at the hands of white masters. While slavery was necessary to white Southerners' conception of manhood, in other words, it was antihetical to manhood among black men...
...Such was the world in which Civil War soldiers had come of age. To be sure, they did not spend night and day thinking about the slavery issue, and most probably preferred to push it as far from the forefront of their minds as possible, but once the war came, they could not, and more importantly, did not, ignore it. Some historians have criticized (implicitly or explicitly) the study of Civil War soldiers as something of an escape hatch offering authors and readers a way to avoid wrestling with difficult and sometimes painful ideological questions about the war. Even some veterans in their later years did their best to suppress the role of slavery, and even to deny that soldiers possessed any ideological awareness at all. Most famously, an aging Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., sighed three decades after the end of the war, "there is one thing I do not doubt...and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands." But that wistful sentimentalism flies in the face of the reality that soldiers confronted during the war itself. If we listen to what the soldiers had to say as they fought the Civil War, the men in the ranks do not allow us to duck the uncomfortable issue of human slavery, but rather take us right to the heart of it. They force us to look at it unflinchingly, and what is more, to see it as a national, not simply southern, issue that defined a war and shaped a nation."
Do we force ourselves to listen, or do we continue to duck?
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
Think I have Battalion figured out. He's not digging up articles and clipping them down to the juicy bits; he's copying them from some underground (or underrock) The-South-will-rise-again Bible, similar to but more sophisticated than the turn-of-the-century, "Catechism" -- sectarian talking papers.
So. Give him a break with demanding full context -- he's not seen the full context -- and asking for a statement in his own words -- he's not thought about it.
Just a thought.
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
From the book, What This Cruel War Was Over, by Chandra Manning, Introduction, beginning at page 11, paragraph two:
"More important than differences in sources or approach, this book departs from other books about Civil War soldiers because it places its primary focus on what soldiers thought about slavery. It does so because soldiers themselves did so. Rather than discussing slavery as one among many topics that soldiers addressed during the war, this book rescues slavery from the periphery of soldiers' mental worlds, where subsequent generations have tried to relegate it, and returns slavery to its rightful place at the center of soldiers' views of the struggle. In so doing, it alters our view of the Civil War in several ways. It eliminates the need to explain away a war about slavery as either a war about something else or a war imposed on unwitting nonslaveholding soldiers (despite those soldiers own clear statements to the contrary) and instead helps unravel precisely why nonslaveholding Southerners would fight a war to protect slavery. Trying to understand why slavery mattered to the Confederate rank and file, rather than fabricating a view that we find more comforting or appealing, illuminates how and why enlisted Confederates held on as long as they did, and it also modifies our understanding of the timing of the war's end.
Seeking to understand, rather than deny or assume, the centrality of slavery also sheds light on how nineteenth-century Americans, especially Southerners, defined what it meant to be a man. While white Union soldiers did not articulate a clear relationship between slavery and manhood, white Southerners closely linked the two. A true man protected and controlled dependents, which for white Southerners meant that a man competently exercised mastery over blacks (whether or not he owned any) as well as over women and children. It also meant that a man took care of his family and sheltered his loved ones from harm, including the almost unimaginable harm that white Southerners feared emancipation would bring, because they assumed that slaves released from bondage would terrorize, murder, and violate vulnerable white women and children. Ironically, black Southerners (and even northern free blacks) also took for granted a relationship between slavery and manhood. For bondsmen, the institution of slavery made true manhood impossible because it robbed a black man of the ability to protect his family from sale or to shelter his loved ones from violence or sexual violation at the hands of white masters. While slavery was necessary to white Southerners' conception of manhood, in other words, it was antihetical to manhood among black men...
...Such was the world in which Civil War soldiers had come of age. To be sure, they did not spend night and day thinking about the slavery issue, and most probably preferred to push it as far from the forefront of their minds as possible, but once the war came, they could not, and more importantly, did not, ignore it. Some historians have criticized (implicitly or explicitly) the study of Civil War soldiers as something of an escape hatch offering authors and readers a way to avoid wrestling with difficult and sometimes painful ideological questions about the war. Even some veterans in their later years did their best to suppress the role of slavery, and even to deny that soldiers possessed any ideological awareness at all. Most famously, an aging Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., sighed three decades after the end of the war, "there is one thing I do not doubt...and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands." But that wistful sentimentalism flies in the face of the reality that soldiers confronted during the war itself. If we listen to what the soldiers had to say as they fought the Civil War, the men in the ranks do not allow us to duck the uncomfortable issue of human slavery, but rather take us right to the heart of it. They force us to look at it unflinchingly, and what is more, to see it as a national, not simply southern, issue that defined a war and shaped a nation."
Do we force ourselves to listen, or do we continue to duck?
Unionblue
Wonder if 'slavery' was the primary subject in letters and diaries of the iron-mongers of Pennsylvania, the manufacturerrs of New England, the New York money-men?
...you know the ones that loaned the money for the war.
They have nothing to do with what I previously posted-
Exactly. And you don't see a problem with what you did?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Battalion
The purpose of posting that part of the article was to support that statement.
But you can only do that by taking a small part out of context.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Battalion
cash- "false impression of what they were writing about"
It's IN the article.
It's not what the editorial was about. You picked out a small part and ignored the rest, trying to leave the impression that what you quoted was the only or the main consideration for the writer of the editorial, when it was neither, only a subsidiary consideration. The editorial in its entirety doesn't support your claim.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about.
Let's say you post the following:
"The Southern soldier fought for his home and his family. There were several inducements to sign up to fight. Recruiters appealed to patriotism and often pretty girls would give kisses to boys who signed up to fight."
And then someone else said, "According to Battalion, Southern soldiers only signed up because pretty girls would kiss them if they did, then snipped out this part of your statement, "Pretty girls would give kisses to boys who signed up to fight" to prove it. What's the problem? It's IN your statement, right?
"Wonder if 'slavery' was the primary subject in the letters and diaries of the ironmongers of Pennsylvania, the manufacturers of New England, the New York money-men?
...you know the ones who loaned the money for the war."
Beats me Battalion, you want to post those letters and diaries of those folks so we can see what they said?
As of right now, I have the books and resources that show me the quotes from the soldiers diaries and letters and regimental newspapers and it pretty much is saying what they thought what they were fighting for.
Be happy to show them to you and give you references so you can check them out.
Sincerely,
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
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