History deliberately being changed

I'm getting that "I'm in Oz!" feeling again.
Is that because you are wearing your read shoes again?:D
I see there are lots of posts and this thread is getting too complicated.
I would ask mods here - Would that be a bad idea to start a new thread? For example: What if Colonies Wouldn't Introduce Slavery on Their Territories?
 
Is that because you are wearing your read shoes again?:D
I see there are lots of posts and this thread is getting too complicated.
I would ask mods here - Would that be a bad idea to start a new thread? For example: What if Colonies Wouldn't Introduce Slavery on Their Territories?

I've been thinking such a thread would be a good idea.
 
If you don't have slavery, you can still have the product, just not at the previous price point or production level. Plus, folks are working for themselves on their own plots, NOT the plantation owner. If folks tried to make a go of it in the Badlands, with short growing seasons, arid conditions, little soil, long winters, and few resources, why would they not be more inclined to try growing anything in the South?

I'm not convinced that slavery was necessary for the Southern cash crops at the time. It was however the most profitable means of production for those with the most wealth. Plus it gave them enormous leverage (fewer free white laborers/farmers to contend with electorally, plus the magnified 3/5 representation and two senators garnered with lower population density.) Big business' interests often don't correlate with national interests, and plantations were big business. Big business is good at tricking the little guy into supporting things that are against the little guy's interests...see the ACW.

This is absolutely nice. :smile: Great post.

My grandfathers raised cotton. All the kids worked, chopped cotton and picked. If you have 15 kids, it's a going proposition if prices are even decent. :smile: In my great-great maternal granddad's case, he bought land and gave it to the kids who farmed it. They all swapped around and helped each other. Why would this not work?
 
If not for slavery there wouldn't be many southern states due to the climate.

Yes it could have but I would say that at the time few people on either side from the North or South entered that conflict with fate of slaves on their mind.
So whites can't work or farm in the climate of the south? No poor free whites working in Southern states?
 
wilber6150 said:
So whites can't work or farm in the climate of the south? No poor free whites working in Southern states?

Yeah, on the one hand we're told whites aren't suitable to work in the south, then on the other hand we're told that most southerners didn't own slaves. So, I guess everybody was on welfare?
 
I always like the trope - and I can't find it to save my life - that poor whites made corn-whisky which they traded to slaves for food. Another version of welfare?
Anybody know the source?
 
Yeah, on the one hand we're told whites aren't suitable to work in the south, then on the other hand we're told that most southerners didn't own slaves. So, I guess everybody was on welfare?

There were land owning whites who subsistence farmed with cotton as a cash crop that had no slaves-borrowed/leased slaves as needed.
There were skilled white labor, sometimes in competition with skilled slave labor.
Then there were landless unskilled laborers so called white trash that just got by.
 
So whites can't work or farm in the climate of the south? No poor free whites working in Southern states?
They can if they are born to the climate. Also there is a difference between inhabited and cultivated and uninhabited and uncultivated areas in the South which were harder for pioneers to survive and acclimate to.
A main reason for fewer states would be the fact that the driving force behind a push for a new arable land were planters.
Not individuals not yeomen but planters or planters to be.
Without slave workforce at their disposal such enterprise wouldn't be highly rewarding and profitable for them.
Without slaves = no planters = no push for new land = less states.
 
They can if they are born to the climate. Also there is a difference between inhabited and cultivated and uninhabited and uncultivated areas in the South which were harder for pioneers to survive and acclimate to.
A main reason for fewer states would be the fact that the driving force behind a push for a new arable land were planters.
Not individuals not yeomen but planters or planters to be.
Without slave workforce at their disposal such enterprise wouldn't be highly rewarding and profitable for them.
Without slaves = no planters = no push for new land = less states.
The Native Americans and the initial pioneers in those areas seemed to have gotten along fine without a large population of slaves coming with them and working the soil.. Using slaves aside from maybe the Carolina coast line was a economic choice not a mandatory one..
 
We have Lee the marble statue and Lee the human being.
There is a debate about Lee "owning" slaves. He was responsible for his wife's slaves - almost 100. Since they were his wife's, the claim is made Lee did not "own" slaves. Some investigations show he "owned" four or five slaves at various times.
Regarding the slaves of George Washington Parke Custis, Lee had five years to free them (his understanding). The human beings he was responsible for (the slaves) thought they were to be freed immediately, Lee had to disabuse them of that fact.
Rather surprisingly, instead of saying Yes sir, the human beings tried to flee Lee's care and head for Washington City.
Lee was annoyed with this, recaptured some of these human beings and had them whipped.
Wesley Norris, one of those recaptured, wrote about the whipping, which included his sister:
http://fair-use.org/wesley-norris/testimony-of-wesley-norris
My name is Wesley Norris; I was born a slave on the plantation of George Parke Custis; after the death of Mr. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy; it was the general impression among the slaves of Mr. Custis that on his death they should be forever free; in fact this statement had been made to them by Mr. C. years before; at his death we were informed by Gen. Lee that by the conditions of the will we must remain slaves for five years; I remained with Gen. Lee for about seventeen months, when my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away, which we did in the year 1859; we had already reached Westminster, in Maryland, on our way to the North, when we were apprehended and thrown into prison, and Gen. Lee notified of our arrest; we remained in prison fifteen days, when we were sent back to Arlington; we were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.
Lee finally freed all his slaves as per above, Dec, 1863. I have yet to see any data about how many people he actually owned by then.
Lee had an extremely low opinion of black people, and after the war while President of Washington University, he wanted to take the franchise away from blacks. I quote:
Privately Lee remained bitter and worked to obstruct societal changes brought about by the war, including the enfranchisement of African Americans. (Encyclopedia Virginia)
New Edit:
I posted all of this before I saw the post on the slave whipping referenced above. The question originally was: was the "American Experience Show" factual.
So my question is first, was the historians correct or question two is history changing?
The historians were (are) correct. History doesn't change: the facts arranged, revealed, or suppressed by historians are always there.
Would you be surprised to know that Adolph Hitler loved small children and dogs? So he must have been a good man at heart.
Another German, Leopold von Ranke is famous for saying he had to tell history as it actually happened. But if Bobby Lee is the marble man then you better not detract from that.
But now I will get off my hobby horse of defending Lincoln, disliking Lee, and genuinely hating Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Pickett and consider they were lucky not to tried for war crimes.
 
They can if they are born to the climate. Also there is a difference between inhabited and cultivated and uninhabited and uncultivated areas in the South which were harder for pioneers to survive and acclimate to.
A main reason for fewer states would be the fact that the driving force behind a push for a new arable land were planters.
Not individuals not yeomen but planters or planters to be.
Without slave workforce at their disposal such enterprise wouldn't be highly rewarding and profitable for them.
Without slaves = no planters = no push for new land = less states.
These assertions are unsupportable. First, "born to the climate" would suggest some biological affinity for a climate and preclude someone born north of 48 degrees from adapting to someplace farther south. Human have been migrating back and forth for millennia without regard to some sort of natural trait. No one is born to the climate.

Second, the drive west for new lands was as much a yeoman-farmer imperative as it was a planter and corporate one. Land ownership represented wealth and independence. Slave labor was just one way of exploiting the land. In slave states even small farmers had use for a slave or two in lieu of sons to help work the farm. In a slaveocracy acquiring slaves to work a farm or a business, even one or two, was a path to prosperity. Planters used gang labor in crops like rice, cane, and cotton where many hands were needed, often all at once, to produce the crop.
 
We have Lee the marble statue and Lee the human being.
There is a debate about Lee "owning" slaves. He was responsible for his wife's slaves - almost 100. Since they were his wife's, the claim is made Lee did not "own" slaves. Some investigations show he "owned" four or five slaves at various times.
Regarding the slaves of George Washington Parke Custis, Lee had five years to free them (his understanding). The human beings he was responsible for (the slaves) thought they were to be freed immediately, Lee had to disabuse them of that fact.
Rather surprisingly, instead of saying Yes sir, the human beings tried to flee Lee's care and head for Washington City.
Lee was annoyed with this, recaptured some of these human beings and had them whipped.
Wesley Norris, one of those recaptured, wrote about the whipping, which included his sister:
http://fair-use.org/wesley-norris/testimony-of-wesley-norris
My name is Wesley Norris; I was born a slave on the plantation of George Parke Custis; after the death of Mr. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy; it was the general impression among the slaves of Mr. Custis that on his death they should be forever free; in fact this statement had been made to them by Mr. C. years before; at his death we were informed by Gen. Lee that by the conditions of the will we must remain slaves for five years; I remained with Gen. Lee for about seventeen months, when my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away, which we did in the year 1859; we had already reached Westminster, in Maryland, on our way to the North, when we were apprehended and thrown into prison, and Gen. Lee notified of our arrest; we remained in prison fifteen days, when we were sent back to Arlington; we were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.
Lee finally freed all his slaves as per above, Dec, 1863. I have yet to see any data about how many people he actually owned by then.
Lee had an extremely low opinion of black people, and after the war while President of Washington University, he wanted to take the franchise away from blacks. I quote:
Privately Lee remained bitter and worked to obstruct societal changes brought about by the war, including the enfranchisement of African Americans. (Encyclopedia Virginia)
New Edit:
I posted all of this before I saw the post on the slave whipping referenced above. The question originally was: was the "American Experience Show" factual.
So my question is first, was the historians correct or question two is history changing?
The historians were (are) correct. History doesn't change: the facts arranged, revealed, or suppressed by historians are always there.
Would you be surprised to know that Adolph Hitler loved small children and dogs? So he must have been a good man at heart.
Another German, Leopold von Ranke is famous for saying he had to tell history as it actually happened. But if Bobby Lee is the marble man then you better not detract from that.
But now I will get off my hobby horse of defending Lincoln, disliking Lee, and genuinely hating Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Pickett and consider they were lucky not to tried for war crimes.
1. They were not his wife's slaves. They belonged to the estate of George Washington Parke Custis.

2. There is an entire thread on the Norris account. Some of us are not convinced.

3. I can't believe I'm even responding now that the thread has been Godwinned. Really now, sir.
 
These assertions are unsupportable. First, "born to the climate" would suggest some biological affinity for a climate and preclude someone born north of 48 degrees from adapting to someplace farther south. Human have been migrating back and forth for millennia without regard to some sort of natural trait. No one is born to the climate.

Second, the drive west for new lands was as much a yeoman-farmer imperative as it was a planter and corporate one. Land ownership represented wealth and independence. Slave labor was just one way of exploiting the land. In slave states even small farmers had use for a slave or two in lieu of sons to help work the farm. In a slaveocracy acquiring slaves to work a farm or a business, even one or two, was a path to prosperity. Planters used gang labor in crops like rice, cane, and cotton where many hands were needed, often all at once, to produce the crop.

Think disease. Folks from Northern areas would not have the resistance to tropical diseases.
Think temperature. While folks have migrated back and forth, it has not been great distances at a time.
Dying from heat was a big problem for folks in the South until the advent of AC along with Yellow Fever until screen wire plus DDT.

Diseases
The South was a more deadly environment for everyone, whether they were white or black, slave or free. Although yellow fever and malaria were both serious killers, Negroes usually contradicted yellow fever in a milder form, and suffered fewer fatalities than whites. Africans from West Africa also carried a resistance to some types of malaria in their blood.

Even today heat is a big killer. And the South has lots of it. Image pre AC Days.

Heat: A Major Killer
Heat is one of the leading weather-related killer in the United States, resulting in hundreds of fatalities each year. In the disastrous heat wave of 1980, more than 1,250 people died. In the heat wave of 1995 more than 700 deaths in the Chicago area were attributed to heat, making this the deadliest weather event in Chicago history. In August 2003, a record heat wave in Europe claimed an estimated 50,000 lives
Without the social and governmental controls imposed by the big planters, small time slavery is impracticable. Big planters opposed the Homestead acts because it broke the land up in small parcels and yeoman farmers were generally free labor. Generally speaking while big slaver owners wanted western lands they also unwilling to move where their slave investment was not protected in advance. Look at the history of Kansas.
 
Those assertions as you call them are but facts of life.


I come from a pre AC era. I remember hook worm infections. Yellow fever and malaria was way before my time, but it may have killed more Yankee soldiers than Southern bullets.

CDC - Hookworm

www.cdc.gov/parasites/hookworm/‎
Jan 10, 2013 - Hookworm was once widespread in the United States, particularly in the southeastern region,


Of the 620,000 soldiers who perished during the American Civil War, the overwhelming majority died not from gunshot wounds or saber cuts, but from disease. And of the various maladies that plagued both armies, few were more pervasive than malaria--a mosquito-borne illness that afflicted over 1.1 million soldiers serving in the Union army alone. Yellow fever, another disease transmitted by mosquitos, struck fear into the hearts of military planners who knew that "yellow jack" could wipe out an entire army in a matter of weeks. In this ground-breaking medical history, Andrew McIlwaine Bell explores the impact of these two terrifying mosquito-borne maladies on the major political and military events of the 1860s, revealing how deadly microorganisms carried by a tiny insect helped shape the course of the Civil War.
 
Think disease. Folks from Northern areas would not have the resistance to tropical diseases.
Think temperature. While folks have migrated back and forth, it has not been great distances at a time.
Dying from heat was a big problem for folks in the South until the advent of AC along with Yellow Fever until screen wire plus DDT.
I can see where people from one region might not have the same immunities as from another I seriously question the idea it is something inborn or genetic. Just people moving from farm to city and vice versa will experience this. That is a function of adaptation, not something inborn.

That Africans might have been resistant to some diseases is true - yellow fever, but not malaria, but I reject it as definitive for settlement of the West or warmer climes.
 
Last night i watched American Experience: Robert E LEE on Netflix and i was appalled. The historians on there claimed Lee was extremely racist and refused to free his slaves he inherited in marriage. It also claimed he stumbled upon a white man whipping a female slave and he told the guy to beat her good. I have always read that he freed his slaves and was against slavery altogether.

So my question is first, was the historians correct or question two is history changing?

You are correct to be appalled.
 
I find it disgusting how TV portrays what they want to on a subject, often using unconfirmed accounts to "prove" a point

In an unrelated thread I've explained how a General Grant brother-in-law was given special permission by President Lincoln to buy Cotton directly from Confederate General Kirby-Smith. If Lee and Davis were likewise tenuously connected in a comparable nefarious act, it's as certain as fleas on a yard-dog some Yankee historian would cite the connection as "proof".
 
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