Slavery as the Primary Cause of the Civil War: the Real Lost Cause Argument.

[uaskme]

James Lut


Actually James Lutzweiler assertion is undercut by the Yangtze River Patrol thread in st least two ways. James Lutzweiler never even mentioned the Yangtze River Patrol. The Yangtze River Patrol from 1854 through at least 1865 appears to have consisted of only four small ships of less then 500 sailors in all. The exact sources are listed on my thread. If you or James Lutzweiler can find evidence that the Yangtze River Patrol was larger then please post the sources.
James Lutzweiler had not provided any evidence that China which per previously posted sources only accounted for two percent of American foreign trade is somehow the major theme if American history.
James Lutzweiler had not answered my question how if seizing California and establishing a Southern TRR was the main reason for the ACW then how was all that supposed to be accomplished by sending just one thousand one hundred men to seize at a minimum the present day states of New Mexico,Arizona and at least San Bernardino and Los Angeles Angeles County California.
Leftyhunter

Your having a good argument with yourself. I would hate to get between you and your argument. LOL

 

[uaskme]

All of this -threats of extermination, disfranchisement, land confiscation- took place well after secession. How does discussing them further our attempt to understand whether or not slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War?

Actually Not. John Brown's Raid made the threats of starting a Race War in the South, more that just crazy people talking. He was Well Financed and Well Supported. Perpetrators always lie about their crimes. Republicans and Abolitionist used Brown as a Martyr. Should tell us something.

If someone threatens you, is it you responsibility to with 100% probability that it is real. The Upper South, knew they were going to be attacked by a hostile force. Did they not have the right to respond. 30 years of Rancor between the Sections, was ample proof that the Federal Government led by the Republicans was going to be Hostile to them. The Treatment of the States who wanted to stay neutral is evidence enough, they were correct in their analysis.

 

[uaskme]

No one claims that slavery was limited to the South and was not a national disgrace. What is asserted is that while some states saw fit to end the practice through at least a lengthy, gradual process, other states chose to cling to the practice and even destroy the Union and establish a new nation so that they could practice slavery in perpetuity and extend its reach.
We should, indeed, recognize the national 'sin'; but we ought not forget that some failed to see it as a 'sin', but rather saw it as "a positive good".

There were MANY, pro Slavery Northerners. It is estimated that only in the Single Digits those who want Immediate Abolition. So all those Others, would technically be Pro-Slavery. That would include the DoughFace Lincoln. If you were willing to postpone Abolition for 50 or 100 years, you would be Pro Slavery. Lincoln also vowed not to touch it where it lay, and to enforce the FSL.

And, all during this period, Yankee Merchants were Human Trafficking and and making money, hand over fists, with Commodity trading, all attached to Slavery, In my eyes, anyone who used Sugar was ProSlavery.

 

[OpnCoronet]

As previously noted, the primacy of Slavery to both Secession And the War is quite clearly marked out by carefully recorded historical events and actions(not to mention the words and thoughts of their contemporaries.

Excluging slavery, What was denied SC in TRR's, California or, even, the China Trade, that required an Independent South, even at the cost of Civil War?

 

[ForeverFree]

And so, we have seen your analysis of how to interpret History. You Cherry Pick, what you see as good and eliminate the rest. Is it not important that the North had NO Intention to disturb Slavery when they marched South? Is it not important the North Had No Intention of letting the Emancipated Negroes remain here after Emancipation? Lincoln used Slavery as a negotiable Principle, up until the Spring of 65. Lincoln repeatedly stated that Emancipation was a War Measure.

Is it not Important, that the Republicans bartered away all of the gains, of the Negro, that only a few of them agreed in principle to begin with? Is, it not important the the Republicans, leading the Federal Government, lead the Country back to White Supremacy, by Nullifying the Civil Rights Acts, Banning the Chinese, a whole race of people, and led the massacres of the Native Americans.

I'm sorry, I don't see how the White Man or the Federal Government can take but very little credit for Saving the Negro, Chinese, or Native American. I think people who try to put forth this Narrative, and doing a disservice to the accomplishments these minority groups, did for themselves. No Historian, that I have read, has ever proclaimed that the North would in anyone's wildest dream, have fought a War for the Negro.

War would of ended Slavery, no matter what happened. The Institution started to unravel as Confederates used Slaves to build fortifications. So, the Context of these events have meaning. But I guess in the end, the TOV conquers all.

1) Your post fills me with sadness. I am reminded of the saying "no good dead goes unpunished."

2) RE: I'm sorry, I don't see how the White Man or the Federal Government can take but very little credit for Saving the Negro, Chinese, or Native American. I think people who try to put forth this Narrative, and doing a disservice to the accomplishments these minority groups, did for themselves.

Why do you say this to me? Nothing in my post says that minorities did nothing to free themselves. In fact, I explicitly said in my post that "But the point is that the Union, in alliance with African Americans, ended slavery in the United States." Of course African Americans had a role in this. That's not the point of this thread, though.

Meanwhile, I think I have made as many posts and threads as anybody on the subject of African American agency during the Civil War. I feel like I am being lectured-to about something for which I have championed in this forum. Your comments are depressing and upsetting.

3) RE: Is it not important that the North had NO Intention to disturb Slavery when they marched South? Is it not important the North Had No Intention of letting the Emancipated Negroes remain here after Emancipation? Lincoln used Slavery as a negotiable Principle, up until the Spring of 65. Lincoln repeatedly stated that Emancipation was a War Measure.

You mischaracterize my comments. I said this:

...it would be inaccurate to say that emancipation was solely a construct of moral imperative. Northerners and Southerners should certainly be taught that racism pervaded the North and South. But that doesn't mean that the end of slavery was any less significant or momentous, or that we should look at emancipation as something that just happened and nobody deserves credit for it. We should allcelebrate emancipation and have a realistic understanding of how it occurred.​

​

I would think that sentiment would be embraced by all. We'll see. ​

...and this...

There is another issue, which is: can northerners feel proud that they helped to end slavery, since that was not a wartime goal of the Union when the war started?​

​

I know people who say they shouldn't, and it does seem like there are people on this forum who feel that way.​

​

I feel that, regardless of the fact that that emancipation was prompted by military necessity, it nonetheless was a significant and momentous event in US history. It is no less significant and momentous because it happened due to the exigencies of war.​

​

And it's not like emancipation was inevitable. Military necessity should have driven Confederates to adopt emancipation as well. But Confederates would not adopt that policy ~ and even then, only partially so ~ until their putative nation was on the brink of collapse. Differing social and cultural worldviews between the sections helps explain the differences in timing, scope, and extent of their policies.​

​

I have no problem saying that US emancipation policy was driven mainly by wartime necessity, and only partially out of moral idealism. That makes me no less happy that the institution ended. ​

Note that I am not saying that Northern attitudes and policies toward race and slavery before and at the start of the war were unimportant, at all. My point is that nonetheless, white Unionists deserve some credit for their role in emancipation, such as it was.

4) Rather than speak for the people of the era, I want to tell of two things that African Americans themselves did. In this post I refer you to a happening in May 1865. In Charleston, SC, African Americans held a memorial for Union soldiers, most of them white at The First Decoration Day; these are excerpts from an article by David W. Blight:

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how we remember it.​

​

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war’s devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.​

​

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”​

​

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”​

​

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”​

​

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.​

So, I ask you: do you condemn these black folks who gave honor and credit to white Union soldiers, and placed their freedom within the context of the service and sacrifice of those soldiers? Do you feel they are doing a disservice to what minority groups did for themselves to gain freedom? Do you denounce them for being exponents of the TOV?

- Alan

 

[ForeverFree]

And so, we have seen your analysis of how to interpret History. You Cherry Pick, what you see as good and eliminate the rest. Is it not important that the North had NO Intention to disturb Slavery when they marched South? Is it not important the North Had No Intention of letting the Emancipated Negroes remain here after Emancipation? Lincoln used Slavery as a negotiable Principle, up until the Spring of 65. Lincoln repeatedly stated that Emancipation was a War Measure.

Is it not Important, that the Republicans bartered away all of the gains, of the Negro, that only a few of them agreed in principle to begin with? Is, it not important the the Republicans, leading the Federal Government, lead the Country back to White Supremacy, by Nullifying the Civil Rights Acts, Banning the Chinese, a whole race of people, and led the massacres of the Native Americans.

I'm sorry, I don't see how the White Man or the Federal Government can take but very little credit for Saving the Negro, Chinese, or Native American. I think people who try to put forth this Narrative, and doing a disservice to the accomplishments these minority groups, did for themselves. No Historian, that I have read, has ever proclaimed that the North would in anyone's wildest dream, have fought a War for the Negro.

War would of ended Slavery, no matter what happened. The Institution started to unravel as Confederates used Slaves to build fortifications. So, the Context of these events have meaning. But I guess in the end, the TOV conquers all.

1) Your post fills me with sadness. I am reminded of the saying "no good dead goes unpunished."

2) RE: I'm sorry, I don't see how the White Man or the Federal Government can take but very little credit for Saving the Negro, Chinese, or Native American. I think people who try to put forth this Narrative, and doing a disservice to the accomplishments these minority groups, did for themselves.

Why do you say this to me? Nothing in my post says that minorities did nothing to free themselves. In fact, I explicitly said in my post that "But the point is that the Union, in alliance with African Americans, ended slavery in the United States." Of course African Americans had a role in this. That's not the point of this thread, though.

Meanwhile, I think I have made as many posts and threads as anybody on the subject of African American agency during the Civil War. I feel like I am being lectured-to about something for which I have championed in this forum. Your comments are depressing and upsetting.

3) RE: Is it not important that the North had NO Intention to disturb Slavery when they marched South? Is it not important the North Had No Intention of letting the Emancipated Negroes remain here after Emancipation? Lincoln used Slavery as a negotiable Principle, up until the Spring of 65. Lincoln repeatedly stated that Emancipation was a War Measure.

You mischaracterize my comments. I said this:

...it would be inaccurate to say that emancipation was solely a construct of moral imperative. Northerners and Southerners should certainly be taught that racism pervaded the North and South. But that doesn't mean that the end of slavery was any less significant or momentous, or that we should look at emancipation as something that just happened and nobody deserves credit for it. We should allcelebrate emancipation and have a realistic understanding of how it occurred.​

​

I would think that sentiment would be embraced by all. We'll see. ​

...and this...

There is another issue, which is: can northerners feel proud that they helped to end slavery, since that was not a wartime goal of the Union when the war started?​

​

I know people who say they shouldn't, and it does seem like there are people on this forum who feel that way.​

​

I feel that, regardless of the fact that that emancipation was prompted by military necessity, it nonetheless was a significant and momentous event in US history. It is no less significant and momentous because it happened due to the exigencies of war.​

​

And it's not like emancipation was inevitable. Military necessity should have driven Confederates to adopt emancipation as well. But Confederates would not adopt that policy ~ and even then, only partially so ~ until their putative nation was on the brink of collapse. Differing social and cultural worldviews between the sections helps explain the differences in timing, scope, and extent of their policies.​

​

I have no problem saying that US emancipation policy was driven mainly by wartime necessity, and only partially out of moral idealism. That makes me no less happy that the institution ended. ​

Note that I am not saying that Northern attitudes and policies toward race and slavery before and at the start of the war were unimportant, at all. My point is that nonetheless, white Unionists deserve some credit for their role in emancipation, such as it was.

4) Rather than speak for the people of the era, I want to tell of two things that African Americans themselves did. In this post I refer you to a happening in May 1865. In Charleston, SC, African Americans held a memorial for Union soldiers, most of them white at The First Decoration Day; these are excerpts from an article by David W. Blight:

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how we remember it.​

​

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war’s devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.​

​

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”​

​

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”​

​

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”​

​

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.​

So, I ask you: do you condemn these black folks who gave honor and credit to white Union soldiers, and placed their freedom within the context of the service and sacrifice of those soldiers? Do you feel they are doing a disservice to what minority groups did for themselves to gain freedom? Do you denounce them for being exponents of the TOV?

- Alan

 

[byron ed]

Reason says that the TRR could not be the cause of secession.

Reason doesn't have much to do with it. It's merely a repeated back-door attempt to defer from slavery being the primary cause of secession and the war. If the TRR precept can be sold, it is hoped someone will be swayed that Secession and the war were not primarily caused by slavery. In other words Lost Cause.

We can expect the attempt to be repeated as many times in this coming year as it has been over the past year, and it will be met with reason as many times this coming year and it has been over the past year, just to be prepared.

 

[Old_Glory]

Thanks for your response.
Are you suggesting that since Davis did not use the word slavery in his Inaugural Address that it must not have been a factor in secession?

I am suggesting that your evidence is faulty. Davis stated the reason the Confederacy was formed clearly in his speech. The statement I posted was echoed by nearly all of the senators in their farewell speeches to Congress. Not only does his speech not match your evidence, he even stated the Confederacy's chief interest was cotton and not slavery.

The Civil War was the North and South's fault. Slavery in America was the North and South's fault.

Any other conclusion is merely an extreme position to the North or South.

 

[uaskme]

1) Your post fills me with sadness. I am reminded of the saying "no good dead goes unpunished."

2) RE: I'm sorry, I don't see how the White Man or the Federal Government can take but very little credit for Saving the Negro, Chinese, or Native American. I think people who try to put forth this Narrative, and doing a disservice to the accomplishments these minority groups, did for themselves.

Why do you say this to me? Nothing in my post says that minorities did nothing to free themselves. In fact, I explicitly said in my post that "But the point is that the Union, in alliance with African Americans, ended slavery in the United States." Of course African Americans had a role in this. That's not the point of this thread, though.

Meanwhile, I think I have made as many posts and threads as anybody on the subject of African American agency during the Civil War. I feel like I am being lectured-to about something for which I have championed in this forum. Your comments are depressing and upsetting.

3) RE: Is it not important that the North had NO Intention to disturb Slavery when they marched South? Is it not important the North Had No Intention of letting the Emancipated Negroes remain here after Emancipation? Lincoln used Slavery as a negotiable Principle, up until the Spring of 65. Lincoln repeatedly stated that Emancipation was a War Measure.

You mischaracterize my comments. I said this:

...it would be inaccurate to say that emancipation was solely a construct of moral imperative. Northerners and Southerners should certainly be taught that racism pervaded the North and South. But that doesn't mean that the end of slavery was any less significant or momentous, or that we should look at emancipation as something that just happened and nobody deserves credit for it. We should allcelebrate emancipation and have a realistic understanding of how it occurred.​

​

I would think that sentiment would be embraced by all. We'll see. ​

...and this...

There is another issue, which is: can northerners feel proud that they helped to end slavery, since that was not a wartime goal of the Union when the war started?​

​

I know people who say they shouldn't, and it does seem like there are people on this forum who feel that way.​

​

I feel that, regardless of the fact that that emancipation was prompted by military necessity, it nonetheless was a significant and momentous event in US history. It is no less significant and momentous because it happened due to the exigencies of war.​

​

And it's not like emancipation was inevitable. Military necessity should have driven Confederates to adopt emancipation as well. But Confederates would not adopt that policy ~ and even then, only partially so ~ until their putative nation was on the brink of collapse. Differing social and cultural worldviews between the sections helps explain the differences in timing, scope, and extent of their policies.​

​

I have no problem saying that US emancipation policy was driven mainly by wartime necessity, and only partially out of moral idealism. That makes me no less happy that the institution ended. ​

Note that I am not saying that Northern attitudes and policies toward race and slavery before and at the start of the war were unimportant, at all. My point is that nonetheless, white Unionists deserve some credit for their role in emancipation, such as it was.

4) Rather than speak for the people of the era, I want to tell of two things that African Americans themselves did. In this post I refer you to a happening in May 1865. In Charleston, SC, African Americans held a memorial for Union soldiers, most of them white at The First Decoration Day; these are excerpts from an article by David W. Blight:

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how we remember it.​

​

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war’s devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.​

​

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”​

​

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”​

​

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”​

​

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.​

So, I ask you: do you condemn these black folks who gave honor and credit to white Union soldiers, and placed their freedom within the context of the service and sacrifice of those soldiers? Do you feel they are doing a disservice to what minority groups did for themselves to gain freedom? Do you denounce them for being exponents of the TOV?

- Alan

No, but I think your analogy, giving credit to Whites for Freeing the Negro is irrelevant Edited. Blacks fought for their Freedom. Blacks were recruited, to save White Lives. Two different Concepts.

 

[uaskme]

1) Your post fills me with sadness. I am reminded of the saying "no good dead goes unpunished."

2) RE: I'm sorry, I don't see how the White Man or the Federal Government can take but very little credit for Saving the Negro, Chinese, or Native American. I think people who try to put forth this Narrative, and doing a disservice to the accomplishments these minority groups, did for themselves.

Why do you say this to me? Nothing in my post says that minorities did nothing to free themselves. In fact, I explicitly said in my post that "But the point is that the Union, in alliance with African Americans, ended slavery in the United States." Of course African Americans had a role in this. That's not the point of this thread, though.

Meanwhile, I think I have made as many posts and threads as anybody on the subject of African American agency during the Civil War. I feel like I am being lectured-to about something for which I have championed in this forum. Your comments are depressing and upsetting.

3) RE: Is it not important that the North had NO Intention to disturb Slavery when they marched South? Is it not important the North Had No Intention of letting the Emancipated Negroes remain here after Emancipation? Lincoln used Slavery as a negotiable Principle, up until the Spring of 65. Lincoln repeatedly stated that Emancipation was a War Measure.

You mischaracterize my comments. I said this:

...it would be inaccurate to say that emancipation was solely a construct of moral imperative. Northerners and Southerners should certainly be taught that racism pervaded the North and South. But that doesn't mean that the end of slavery was any less significant or momentous, or that we should look at emancipation as something that just happened and nobody deserves credit for it. We should allcelebrate emancipation and have a realistic understanding of how it occurred.​

​

I would think that sentiment would be embraced by all. We'll see. ​

...and this...

There is another issue, which is: can northerners feel proud that they helped to end slavery, since that was not a wartime goal of the Union when the war started?​

​

I know people who say they shouldn't, and it does seem like there are people on this forum who feel that way.​

​

I feel that, regardless of the fact that that emancipation was prompted by military necessity, it nonetheless was a significant and momentous event in US history. It is no less significant and momentous because it happened due to the exigencies of war.​

​

And it's not like emancipation was inevitable. Military necessity should have driven Confederates to adopt emancipation as well. But Confederates would not adopt that policy ~ and even then, only partially so ~ until their putative nation was on the brink of collapse. Differing social and cultural worldviews between the sections helps explain the differences in timing, scope, and extent of their policies.​

​

I have no problem saying that US emancipation policy was driven mainly by wartime necessity, and only partially out of moral idealism. That makes me no less happy that the institution ended. ​

Note that I am not saying that Northern attitudes and policies toward race and slavery before and at the start of the war were unimportant, at all. My point is that nonetheless, white Unionists deserve some credit for their role in emancipation, such as it was.

4) Rather than speak for the people of the era, I want to tell of two things that African Americans themselves did. In this post I refer you to a happening in May 1865. In Charleston, SC, African Americans held a memorial for Union soldiers, most of them white at The First Decoration Day; these are excerpts from an article by David W. Blight:

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how we remember it.​

​

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war’s devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.​

​

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”​

​

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”​

​

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”​

​

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.​

So, I ask you: do you condemn these black folks who gave honor and credit to white Union soldiers, and placed their freedom within the context of the service and sacrifice of those soldiers? Do you feel they are doing a disservice to what minority groups did for themselves to gain freedom? Do you denounce them for being exponents of the TOV?

- Alan

No, but I think your analogy, giving credit to Whites for Freeing the Negro is irrelevant Edited. Blacks fought for their Freedom. Blacks were recruited, to save White Lives. Two different Concepts.

 

[WJC]

It is estimated that only in the Single Digits those who want Immediate Abolition. So all those Others, would technically be Pro-Slavery. That would include the DoughFace Lincoln.

That is not necessarily correct. We know that only at most an estimated 15% supported the Abolition Movement. I have seen nothing that accurately breaks down the other 85%. Most likely the majority considered it someone else's problem while the remaining small number supported slavery.
As to "Doughface Lincoln", I have never heard him referred to as a Southern sympathizer before: I expect that this will come as a great surprise to some of our membership.
As for slavery, there can be no doubt of Lincoln's well-documented abhorrence of the practice.

 

[unionblue]

Thanks for your comments. Okay everyone, start packing your bags because we are going on a guilt trip.

Why?

Besides denial of historical fact and the failure to actually educate based on that fact, what is there to feel guilty about?

 

[WJC]

That's fine and dandy except they were on the side that said things like this-

"The adoption of the measures I advocated at the outset of the war, the arming of the negroes, the slaves of the rebels, is the only way left on earth in which these rebels can be exterminated. They will find that they must treat those States now outside of the Union as conquered provinces and settle them with new men, and drive the present rebels as exiles from this country....They have such determination, energy, and endurance, that nothing but actual extermination or exile or starvation will ever induce them to surrender to this Government. —Thaddeus Stevens, U.S. House of Representatives, January 8, 1863

In January 1863. The opportunity for peaceful resolution of issues had largely passed. And yet, in spite of this anger, there still was an opportunity for a just peace as late as February 1865.

 

[GwilymT]

That's fine and dandy except they were on the side that said things like this-

"The adoption of the measures I advocated at the outset of the war, the arming of the negroes, the slaves of the rebels, is the only way left on earth in which these rebels can be exterminated. They will find that they must treat those States now outside of the Union as conquered provinces and settle them with new men, and drive the present rebels as exiles from this country....They have such determination, energy, and endurance, that nothing but actual extermination or exile or starvation will ever induce them to surrender to this Government. —Thaddeus Stevens, U.S. House of Representatives, January 8, 1863

Wait, a radical abolitionist said radical things about the people fighting a war against the United States in order to preserve the very institution that said radical abolitionist dedicated his political life to destroying?

 

[Tailor Pete]

Reason doesn't have much to do with it. It's merely a repeated back-door attempt to defer from slavery being the primary cause of secession and the war. If the TRR precept can be sold, it is hoped someone will be swayed that Secession and the war were not primarily caused by slavery. In other words Lost Cause.

We can expect the attempt to be repeated as many times in this coming year as it has been over the past year, and it will be met with reason as many times this coming year and it has been over the past year, just to be prepared.

edited by moderator jerseybart for off topic content

With that more clearly stated, I contend that, while there is no proof as yet to support the theory that political wrangling over the TRR INDIRECTLY precipitated the conflict, I could certainly see where such an effort COULD have resulted in the war that tore at the very heart and soul of our Nation.

The long-term results of which created a Capitalist's paradise. A TRR that benefitted Industrial concerns, and a national environment that made it even easier for Industrialists to influence the political system. Folks, this theory, no matter how far fetched, certainly seems viable, and could have only worked with slavery, and it's abolition, as being the major causes of the ACW.

 

[Tailor Pete]

With such spirited debate, it seems only logical that 'active moderation' is a must. Thank you for moving in this direction!

 

[uaskme]

That is not necessarily correct. We know that only at most an estimated 15% supported the Abolition Movement. I have seen nothing that accurately breaks down the other 85%. Most likely the majority considered it someone else's problem while the remaining small number supported slavery.
As to "Doughface Lincoln", I have never heard him referred to as a Southern sympathizer before: I expect that this will come as a great surprise to some of our membership.
As for slavery, there can be no doubt of Lincoln's well-documented abhorrence of the practice.

What would you call a politician who vowed to leave Slavery alone, where it stood. And to enforce the FSL. Eric Foner says Lincoln is more of a Pro Slavery Democrat Politically. He was against Immediatism. Wanted a slow gradual Emancipation of at least, 50 years. He extended DCs Abolition thru the weekend, so his Friend could remove his Slave, before enactment. Then, felt sorry for the Whites who had lost their Labor. All of this adds up to be Pro Slavery. His Words.

 

[Mosby]

I agree with this. Not just the TRR, but tariff increases were to the benefit of some northern business interests, and would be passed if the southern states seceded, regardless of who won the war. The Homestead Act was of interest to many ordinary northerners and also would be passed if the southern states seceded.

 

[leftyhunter]

Because there was much more to the conflict than just slavery.

Such as? Not tariffs because who is going to have their son die to pay a few cents less on an item. Not states rights since no one can identif what state right was lost that can never be reclaimed. Not a TRR since Congress was about to fund two TRR's just before the ACW started.
Not big government since big government didn't even start until the election of FDR seventy odd year's latter.
Leftyhunter

 

[leftyhunter]

edited by moderator jerseybart for off topic content

With that more clearly stated, I contend that, while there is no proof as yet to support the theory that political wrangling over the TRR INDIRECTLY precipitated the conflict, I could certainly see where such an effort COULD have resulted in the war that tore at the very heart and soul of our Nation.

The long-term results of which created a Capitalist's paradise. A TRR that benefitted Industrial concerns, and a national environment that made it even easier for Industrialists to influence the political system. Folks, this theory, no matter how far fetched, certainly seems viable, and could have only worked with slavery, and it's abolition, as being the major causes of the ACW.

Who is going to send their son to fight and die over the path of a railroad? Congress was willing to fund two TRR's one from the South and one from the North. Southern politicians were quite articulate of why they wanted to secede and they never mentioned California or a TRR.
Leftyhunter