The Confederacy was About Slavery

"The human creature or being, as representative of the species, or as distinguished from other animate beings,animals,or things; The Human Race;Mankind.

I am really taken back at the responses in this thread. Why does it matter how many Americans believe if the confederacy was about slavery? This is a matter of world history, not just some matter of American opinions.

Why is this so difficult to digest? Why are people afraid to admit this? What is it exactly that they don't like about the implication? It seems that the concerns on the matters of slavery and the confederacy are more focused, by some, on anything but the sale of humans as livestock. Disgusting.

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The war's aftermath, all the way through the 20TH Century, likely has much to do with it. Institutionalized racism went mostly unchecked, in one form or another, throughout vey broad areas of the nation.

hey i got it in my email to from people in my church against evolution
caption so that's why there's no birth certificate

why doeas everything have to be racist it's a joke?

Myth #1: The Civil War wasn't about slavery.

The most widespread myth is also the most basic. Across America, 60 percent to 75 percent of high-school history teachers believe and teach that the South seceded for state's rights, said Jim Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" (Touchstone, 1996) and co-editor of "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The 'Great Truth' about the 'Lost Cause'" (University Press of Mississippi, 2010).

"It's complete B.S.," Loewen told LiveScience. "And by B.S., I mean 'bad scholarship.'"

In fact, Loewen said, the original documents of the Confederacy show quite clearly that the war was based on one thing: slavery. For example, in its declaration of secession, Mississippi explained, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world … a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization." In its declaration of secession, South Carolina actually comes out against the rights of states to make their own laws — at least when those laws conflict with slaveholding. "In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals," the document reads. The right of transit, Loewen said, was the right of slaveholders to bring their slaves along with them on trips to non-slaveholding states.

In its justification of secession, Texas sums up its view of a union built upon slavery: "We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable."

The myth that the war was not about slavery seems to be a self-protective one for many people, said Stan Deaton, the senior historian at the Georgia Historical Society.

"People think that somehow it demonizes their ancestors," to have fought for slavery, Deaton told LiveScience. But the people fighting at the time were very much aware of what was at stake, Deaton said.

"[Defining the war] is our problem," he said. "I don't think it was theirs."

3. Most white Southerners didn't own slaves, so they wouldn't secede for slavery.

Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.

However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy now.

Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: "It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians." Given this belief, most white Southerners -- and many Northerners, too -- could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Henry Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. "The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy." Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.