The Confederacy was About Slavery

Robert e lee must have had a lot of hatred in his heart to desire war as much as he did being he was as smart as he had been

Who knows what was in the heart of the commander of the confederate army? Or any of them, in fact, that fought to maintain the institution of chattel slavery in the united states? I doubt, if we could use a time machine and somehow interview the commander, officers and rank and file, that many of them would say they fought because of hate. I suspect that by and large the men in that army found their inspiration to take up arms and fight to the death for much more mundane "reasons" - much as the rank and file of soldiers do today.

They probably were told that they were fighting to keep the enemy from taking away their way of life. Their politicians and leaders - who were directly profiting from slave trade - probably told them they were fighting for "freedom", or "the American dream", or some other gosh golly notion. And oh yeah - they probably threw in some demonized descriptions of those damn Northerners, just to squeeze that last morsel of murderous patriotism out of them.

Just like the wars today that are really fought to expand empire or get cheaper petroleum, the civil war was fought to maintain the cheap industry of the slave business and all the wonderful affluence it afforded a relative few.

Was Robert E. Lee a hateful person? Why in the world would that make one **** of difference? Slavery was hateful. War is hateful.

Well yeah, since slavery was the fundament of the Confederacy's power they were intertwined. But that isn't the assertion that Finn had made, though.


No. It's more like the coin being backed by the institution of slavery.


Where did I make these suggestions, exactly? Talk about jumping on a high horse. You give Finn a run for his money with your straw men.

I was reading about how John Brown's capture, trial and hanging had an immense effect upon splitting the national opinion about the institution of slavery (at least in 1859). The authors of the book (which was about Darwin and the abolition movement) claimed that Brown was accepted as a "saint" to much of the non-lave holding pqrt of the nation but was reviled as "the devil" in the SOuth.

Brown became a symbol for both sides and was not in a small part a"theme" that permeated many of the Articles of Secession of several of the Confederate states.

A dandy example of how Americans take simple historical fact and whip it up into wild propaganda.

Infra: No. It's more like the coin being backed by the institution of slavery.

Always stating the obvious like you are making some profound statement.

You are hateful

How do you figure?

Thanks for asking, Ed. I was fixing to ask the same thing.

Yeah, I read some of Mary Chesnut's diary and on her very first entry muses on Lincoln's recent election, "now that the black Republicans have the power I suppose they will Brown us all," in reference to his raid on Harper's Ferry to instigate a slave revolt.

Which makes your analogy inapt.

Them there "pasty-faced mechanics" from the north would sing:

John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave
But his truth is marching on.

. . . to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Desertion rates in the Confederate armies were higher than those in the Federal armies, and actually rose after the bounty system was abolished. Huge sections of the south remained loyal to the Union, most notably western Virginia and eastern Tennessee. Those boys in the mountains didn't own any slaves, and most of them would be damned before they'd die for a slave owner. Literally dozens of regiments were raised in western Virginia and eastern Tennessee to serve in the United States army. I personally don't think they were fooled by that old horseshit their leadership was feeding them.

Caught your attention?

No its not that you are a hateful person but the way you word things can be mistaken as hatred and so forth..

I doubt it. Snood's alright, you're a very dull attention seeking pretentious little no mark. Nobody is going to pay any attention to you.

Finihed "The Book that Changed America".. It wasnt a page turner but, like many opinion books about "what history was about", it had a fairly good thesis.
I was always a bit behind the curve to understand why US naturalists like Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz hated each others guts and saw Abolition from two different poles.(Louis Agassiz was a US developer of "Scientific racism")

Listen. I am ******* bored. If i were attention seeking i would try to be movie star.

That "scientific racism" sh*t was really insidious. I am reminded of Kipling's the white man's burden, from a poem he wrote addressing the Americans after the Spanish War. People ate that crap up. Theodore Roosevelt condemned Margaret Sanger for advocating birth control, and called her a race traitor. After all, you need lots of little white babies to grow up and take up the white man's burden. What with the Lily Whites and the second Klan in 1915, it was a really ugly society.

You dance around just how ugly was the US. T Roosevelt was a supporter of the Native American genocide. He was a big supporter of the Philippine genocide, the take over of the lands the US pretended to liberate from Spain.

The entire US, save for a small percentage of decent people were always big on slavery/subjugation of Blacks, Native Americans, Cubans, Filipinos, ... .

Saying the people of the South were evil for their slavery illustrates that the entire US was equally evil for their genocides since the origins and those that continue up to this day.

QED.

Why don't you try to be something other than a dozy wazzock? Just a thought.