Some dare call it freedom split from Oh Pooh its Confederate History Month

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The staunch Union defenders on these boards hammer away constantly at "slavery, slavery and nothing but slavery", and will invariably quote some Confederate talking about slavery or the declaration of causes as if that's all they ever said and assume that ends all discussion, while conveniently ignoring everything else they ever said. And did you yourself not just bring up the Cornerstone speech in relation to Alexander Stephens? That's the first place you went when you saw his name. It illustrates my point.
^^^ This. Well said Anderson. I tried to articulate this same point on another thread. These same people try to put the causes of the war inside a neat little box so even millennials can understand that the war was only about slavery according to them. It is ridiculous and a vast oversimplification of one of the most complex issues in American history. But if it makes ya'll feel better then go right ahead and keep saying it over and over again. But remember, just because you keep saying it repeatedly doesn't make you right...

CASE IN POINT..... LOOK AT THE VERY NEXT POST BELOW. It didn't take long before it happened again, did it?
 
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Obvious not, the craven thing to do would have been to submit to Northern domination. But our Confederate heroes didn't bend the knee gracefully, they dared take the chance for independence and self-rule. That is the reason the one of us that still care have Confederate Flag Days, Confederate Memorial Days, and Confederate History Month.
If you are going to commemorate something, make sure it's for an honorable undertaking, fighting at keeping a whole race enslaved is not it!

Kevin Dally
 
It would be too time consuming to lecture someone who knows little or nothing about ante-bellum U S history at this venue. And then again, you would never be satisfied with a pro-Southern point of view – it would only lead to repeating myself over and over again. Instead let me recommend someone in the vein of Allan Nevins and his Ordeal of the Union series. Nevins writes with a pro-Northern slant so that should suit you, but he doesn't chunter on with the anti-South rubbish of the post-1960 revisionists like James McPherson and comrades.

Anti "South"...or anti CONFEDERACY? There IS a big difference you know!

Kevin Dally
 
If you like we can continue this debate on one of the numerous preexisting threads about the above subject.
Interesting that no one can define what freedom Confederate troops fought for and lost.
Leftyhunter


Well, Lincoln's, and the Republican's policy was to attempt to keep slaveholders from taking their property (slaves) in to the Federal Territories (Extension of slavery), which the Supreme Court IIRC had ruled barring slaveholders from taking their property (slaves) into the Territories as unconstitutional.

Had Lincoln been able to over turn the SCOTUS decision and blocked the slaveholder from taking their property (slaves) into the Territories, while allowing other Americans to take their property (Horses, cows, wagons, mules, guns, RV's,......lol...lol......Okay maybe not RV's), they (Confederates/Southerners/slaveholders) would have been denied their constitutional right.............

It would have been a tough row to hoe for Lincoln to get that done however...............But who knows.


Respectfully,
William
Confederate National Flag.jpg
 
^^^ This. Well said Anderson. I tried to articulate this same point on another thread. These same people try to put the causes of the war inside a neat little box so even millennials can understand that the war was only about slavery according to them. It is ridiculous and a vast oversimplification of one of the most complex issues in American history. But if it makes ya'll feel better then go right ahead and keep saying it over and over again. But remember, just because you keep saying it repeatedly doesn't make you right...

A park ranger (from New York, by the way) at the Vicksburg National Military Park once made a pretty convincing case that the war was about money. People do not fight to the death for political ideals or to free other people, he said. They fight their pocketbook. As a lifelong idealistic Yankee, I thought that a pretty interesting observation -- and he could back it up with hours and hours of examples and details, as he'd given 30+ years of his life to studying and explaining the war.
 
A park ranger (from New York, by the way) at the Vicksburg National Military Park once made a pretty convincing case that the war was about money. People do not fight to the death for political ideals or to free other people, he said. They fight their pocketbook. As a lifelong idealistic Yankee, I thought that a pretty interesting observation -- and he could back it up with hours and hours of examples and details, as he'd given 30+ years of his life to studying and explaining the war.
Booklady, your statement leads me to wonder if you have not studied the SOCIAL aspect of what slavery meant to a lot of southerners...

Alabama soldier James Williams said: "Confound the whole set of Psalm singing 'brethren' and 'sistern' too, if it had not been for them...preaching abolitionism from every northern pulpit...(I)...would never have been soldiering." Pvt. James Williams, 21 AL, to wife, Dec. 20, 1861, Fort Gaines, AL.

German immigrant fighting for the 7th Texas who called on other adopted Southerners to stand by "'your own countrymen and race' against the 'murder and arson, hanging and stealing' that were sure to accompany the 'liberation of the half-civilized cannibal." Pvt. Joseph Bruckmuller, 7 TX, Address delivered to other prisoners at Ft. Douglas Prison, Chicago, June 1862, Joseph Bruckmuller Notebook, Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin)

Texas soldier warned his wife that Union victory meant abolition, and abolition meant “lying supinely upon our backs," while "the fair daughters of the South [are] reduced to a level with the flat-footed thick-liped Negro." Pvt. John Street, 9 TX, to wife, Feb. 25, 1862, Tishomingo Co., MS.

Captain Elias Davis of the 8th Alabama vowed "to fight forever, rather than submit to freeing negroes among us...."

"To think we have been fighting four years to prevent the slaves from being freed, now to turn round and" make them soldiers was "outrageous." He continued: "if we are reduced to that extremity...stop the war at once and let us come home for if we are to depend on the slaves for our freedom it is gone anyway." Pvt. Grant Taylor, 40 AL, to wife, Jan. 11, 1865, Spanish Fort, AL.

"Independence without slavery, would be valueless...the South without slavery would not be worth a mess of pottage." Caleb Cutwell, Texas.

“I am convinced the institution of slavery is now virtually destroyed & with it we lose the great object for which the Confederacy was made, and without which there never would have been a Confederacy”
Lt. O. C. Orange 19th Texas Infantry

“One Georgia recruit fretted about rumors that slaves who thought the war meant freedom were already discussing ‘whom they would make their wives among the young [white] ladies.’” Thomas, private in a Ga. Regiment, to mother, 10 May 1861.

"Better, far better! endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar." William M. Thomson to Warner A. Thomson, Feb. 2, 1861.
A captain in the 8th Alabama also vowed "to fight forever, rather than submit to freeing negroes among us. . . . [We are fighting for] rights and property bequeathed to us by our ancestors.' " Elias Davis to Mrs. R. L. Lathan, Dec. 10, 1863.

"Some of the boys asked them what they were fighting for, and they answered, 'You Yanks want us to marry our daughters to the [n-word]s." Chauncey Cook to parents, May 10, 1864.

"If Atlanta and Richmond fell we are irrevocably lost and not only will the negroes be free but . . . we will all be on a common level. . . . The negro who now waits on you will then be as free as you are & as insolent as she is ignorant." Allen D. Chandler to wife, July 7, 1864.

"Even though he was tired of the war, wrote a Louisiana artilleryman in 1862, I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person. There is too many free [n-word]s. . . now to suit me, let alone having four millions.' " George Hamill Diary, March, 1862.

I'd say that they fought to keep things as they were, not much said about "money" in these quotes.

Kevin Dally
 
Booklady, your statement leads me to wonder if you have not studied the SOCIAL aspect of what slavery meant to a lot of southerners...

Kevin Dally

Thank you for your reply and all that is in it. I am only just beginning to study, which accounts for why I was in Vicksburg talking to the park ranger and why I am here now. There are currently four books about Gettysburg on my coffee table.
 
Well, Lincoln's, and the Republican's policy was to attempt to keep slaveholders from taking their property (slaves) in to the Federal Territories (Extension of slavery), which the Supreme Court IIRC had ruled barring slaveholders from taking their property (slaves) into the Territories as unconstitutional.

Had Lincoln been able to over turn the SCOTUS decision and blocked the slaveholder from taking their property (slaves) into the Territories, while allowing other Americans to take their property (Horses, cows, wagons, mules, guns, RV's,......lol...lol......Okay maybe not RV's), they (Confederates/Southerners/slaveholders) would have been denied their constitutional right.............

It would have been a tough row to hoe for Lincoln to get that done however...............But who knows.


Respectfully,
William
View attachment 130686
We really don't know what Lincoln would have done in the above regard because the secessionists were already violently revolting. We do know that early in the war Southern slave owners could retrieve their slaves behind Union lines.
Leftyhunter
 
Thank you for your reply and all that is in it. I am only just beginning to study, which accounts for why I was in Vicksburg talking to the park ranger and why I am here now. There are currently four books about Gettysburg on my coffee table.
I will admit, I'd be interested in what all that Ranger had to say. I'd say you have really got yourself hooked on the subject!

Kevin Dally
 
The staunch Union defenders on these boards hammer away constantly at "slavery, slavery and nothing but slavery"...

That's because they want to equate secession with war and don't want to admit that secession need not have led to war. Even their leader Eric Foner admits it is a "good question" to ask "Why didn't the Northern states simply let the Southern states leave in peace?"

In his YouTube Civil War lectures professor Foner admits he doesn’t know how to explain why few Northerners were willing to avoid Civil War by letting the Southern states secede peaceably. After noting that the publisher of The New York Tribune, Horace Greely, advised that the erring sisters be permitted to leave in peace Foner says:

Why not just let them go? Good question! You can adduce answers [such as] The American Mission, Unionism, Nationalism. Very few people in the North said, “Let them go.” Why? [To answer that] requires us to do what no historian has ever successfully done.​

Foner’s inability to understand why Northerners were unwilling to let the South secede reflects his gigantic blind spot. He is unable to admit to himself that the reason Northerners wanted to “save” the Union lies in selfish economics, not altruistic abolitionism.

First, Southern cotton alone accounted for about 60% of all United States exports and all Southern exports represented about four-fifths of the country’s total. A truncated federal union composed solely of Northern states could not hope to maintain a favorable international balance of payments. The situation would be worse if the Northern states tried to match the anticipated low tariffs in the new Confederacy. Ten days before South Carolina led the cotton states into secession on December 20, 1860, the Chicago Daily Times editorialized on the calamities of disunion:

In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would be idle…We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins…If [our protective tariff] be wholly withdrawn from our labor…it could not compete with the labor of Europe. We should be driven from the market and millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment.

Second, if the Confederacy were to survive as a separate country its import tariffs would certainly have been much lower than those of the federal union if the Northern states retained protective tariffs. President Jefferson Davis announced in his inaugural address, “Our policy is peace, and the freest trade our necessities will permit. It is…[in] our interest, [and those of our trading partners] that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon interchange of commodities.”

Low Confederate tariffs would confront the remaining states of the abridged Union with two consequences. First, since the federal tax base relied chiefly upon the tariff the government would lose the great majority of its tax revenue. Articles imported into the Confederacy from Europe would divert tariff revenue from the North to the South. Additionally, the Confederacy’s low duties would encourage Northern merchants to import European goods by smuggling them across the Ohio River, or the Northwestern states might secede themselves to form a third country in order to unilaterally set low import duties from the Southern Confederacy. Second, a low Confederate tariff would make Southerners more likely to buy manufactured goods from Europe as opposed to the Northern states where prices were inflated by protective tariffs.

Thus, after the opening shots at Fort Sumter the Northern states chose to fight to “preserve the Union” because they wanted to avoid the anticipated economic consequences of disunion—not because they had a mystical love for a Union with a people they hated. In January 1861 The Philadelphia Press editorialized, “It is the enforcement of the revenue laws, not the coercion of the state that is the question of the hour. If those laws cannot be enforced, the Union is clearly gone.” In When in the Course of Human Events author Charles Adams reasons:

If trade were to shift to the Southern ports because of a free trade zone, or extremely low duties relative to the North, then [the] great cities [of the Northeast] would go into decline and suffer economic disaster. The image painted by these editorials [from newspapers of Northeastern cities] is one of massive unemployment, the closing of factories and businesses, followed by unrest, riots, and possibly revolution. The inland cities of the North would also go into decline, like Pittsburgh, where duty-free British steel and iron products would cripple the American steel industry.

Foner’s depiction of Southern immorality leads him to the delusion that Northern war motivations could be nothing less than noble.
 
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I was thinking the same thing. That's some pretty broad generalization to take a dozen quotes and apply them to an entire segment of society.
How many quotes do YOU have of confederate soldiers saying it wasn't slavery? I want quotes from 1861-65, not AFTER!

I'm waiting!

Kevin Dally
 
It would be too time consuming to lecture someone who knows little or nothing about ante-bellum U S history at this venue. And then again, you would never be satisfied with a pro-Southern point of view – it would only lead to repeating myself over and over again. Instead let me recommend someone in the vein of Allan Nevins and his Ordeal of the Union series. Nevins writes with a pro-Northern slant so that should suit you, but he doesn't chunter on with the anti-South rubbish of the post-1960 revisionists like James McPherson and comrades.

Side-step.

Break a sweat and try to present your case.
 
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