The Confederacy was About Slavery

Try doing google searches on "the american system of economics". It actually did exist but was killed off in the late 1800s and early 1900s; we need to bring it back.

I'm sorta busy right now...hmmm can you cite an example?

Buggy whips?

The biggest part of the problem was and remains money. The idea of using gold as a basis for money is like running naked or killing things with your teeth for food and the present system of allowing banks to manufacture money from thin air and charge all of us interest for it is worse. People who've figured this one out in the past include Ben Franklin and most of the colonials, Lincoln, William McKinley, and Adolf Hitler.

The British/international banking system is so much of a drag on economies that particularly in the case of a large industrialized state like Germany or England, you'd only need to get out from under it for four or five years and your economy would start to turn upwards exponentially. Germany was a total basket case in 32 , and was out of the depression altogether by 34 or 35 and the world's strongest economy by 37 or 38.

Granted you don't want a guy like Hitler having that sort of power but there has to be a happy medium between that and what we're doing.

At its most fundamental basis, the Civil War was about power.

Powerful interests in the South were not prepared to allow powerful interests in the North to eliminate an essential component of their power: Slavery.

Without slavery, the entrenched power base of the South would have been greatly reduced.

The agrarian economy of the South would never have weathered the elimination of slavery. It might have reestablished itself in some semblance of the eventual agrarian society of the Midwest, but not, most assuredly, without a reshuffling of the individual Southern powers. They weren't about to take the chance that they would survive the tumult intact.

Notwithstanding the inane rhetoric of the Confederate VP, the Civil War was not about a bunch of Southerners risking all because they were committed to a notion that it was God's will that blacks serve whites.

If there had been an alternative to war that allowed the Southern powerful to retain their power, while still eliminating slavery, there would have been no Civil War. Of course, there wasn't.

The notion that the South and all who fought for the Confederacy were the personification of evil, is silly, not to mention Manchean --- the bane of Liberals everywhere.

However, it should not be minimized that the Southern powers were quite easily prepared to continue to enslave people to preserve their power, and it is this fact that utterly corrupts any romantic notion that the South fought the war for state's rights or freedom in any sense of the word.

The Civil War was about power, but it is impossible to set the issue of slavery to the margins of any consideration.

However...this doesn't mean the Confederate Flag is a symbol of slavery and racism.

OK. The flag is merely a symbol of (white) power.

it is much more a symbol of minority power, which is why it has often been adopted by rebels.

Your Aryan spin is you may have supported slavery but you freed them. Isnt that lovely ? So much for so few.....this why you are superior to blacks isnt it ?Absolute rubbish ! It is an act of war to station troops on foriegn soil. It is a further act of war to fail to remove those troops when ordered to do so. If North Vietnam had of declared war in 1970, would it have been them who started it ? The South recognised they had been living in a state of war since the North had committed acts of war, and were simply stating the obvious.You mean might is right.
Lincoln had very little political mandate to do anything. If it hadnt of been for the secession, he would have had a very unremarkable Presidency and like JFK probably wouldnt have got re-elected.
Slavery was a fact of life and it can be woven into any tale about why the Civil War occured but do you think anyone cared anough about them to kill more people than all the other wars put together ? It they loved the black man so much, why did real civil rights take another 100 years just to be law ? If they were prepared to make that sacrifice, why not finish it ?

Ionus:


You called it right from the start, Set. No sense wasting time going back and forth with the likes of this.

Right, it is certainly easier to hold on to your myths if one is never compelled to demonstrate that reality supports them. Of course the cost of the head in the sand maneuver you have down is that you don't learn anything....

All youve done here is paraphrase my very post that stated this fact. Slavery WAS the issue, civil rights was not .
I really suggest that you put some distance tween you and your skinhead mentors. Maybe then you might apply some real scholarship rather than merely repeat the limited , trite,(and brazenly ignorant) views onto which youve latched .

I mentioned Shelby Foote . As a southern hiastorian, one of his last speeches was at Rice University in celebration of the events of the Trans Mississippean Campaign and the Allegiance of the "civilized tribes" to the Confederacy/

His speech was entitled "Slavery , and the mathematics of racism" Hie entire point was how the Civil War was about slavery, completely and symmetrically.
Your "if this, then that..." attempts at an arguemnt arent even worth reply since history is an analysis of WHAT HAPPENED, (no really, Im sorry that you wish to imply that its all arbitrary, based upon how loud you can yell or whatever names you want to toss around).
I think that now, you will go on a multipaged Seriatem reply rant to try to merely insult those who have the gall to disagree with the great ANUS, self proclaimed Scholar of the American Civil War.

Yes good ol set ! There is a racist if ever there was one. he is beligerant self opinionated and prone to vicious verbal atatcks. All we have to do is point him in the right direction and we have ourselves a bonafide racist.

So they wanted to get rid of slavery because it was inhumane but civil rights was not on the agenda ? How does that work ? How many do you think died to free the slaves in this half arsed solution ?Back to your old form. Couldnt help it could you ?Has he surrendered his humanity and reached infallibility ? You agreeing with him couldnt make him feel very comfortable.
You really cant handle any disagreement can you ? Why are you that insecure ? Want to put me on ignore and sulk ?

Lincoln himself was an abolitionist but not a believer in equality of the races. The issu of slavery was that it was inhumane for a civilization. CDivil rights was a child of later times. If you notice, the 13th amendment mentions NOTHING of suffrage or civil rights.

I only respond in kind. WHen you start acting like an asshole, I just like to remind you of your leading body part

He was a noted historian from the SOuth. Hed been bothered by the "states righters" hiding behind that statement and "Southern tradition" to explain the base of the War when, according to most all reasonable minds, it was all the issues that surrounded the industry of slavery.


Scuse me, You are the one whose jumped in with some poorly crafted argument about whatever was your explanation of the Civil War. Youve a habit of attacking people who dont agree with you at which time you get petulant and childish. When I use your "keyboard name" of ANUS, I know it pisses you off and I consider it a gentle reminder that youre not debating, your just screaming obscenities at the passing crowd. I always love disagreement. I love debating with people like set because he gets passionate AND crafts great arguments. YOU, my AUstralian correspondent friend only get passionate. You dont present anything of value and you become violent in place of any quality scholarship. All Ive heard from you is names at people who have valid differences. A shouting match isnt a debate and all you do is holler like some bully who thinks that people will cower in your verbal attack.
ALl I do is collect Anus"isms (I have a collection of your attempts to insult others (including me) with titles that show your jealousy of people whove attained some of their own credibility by hard work in reearching a topic. (Something that Ive noted about you is that you are quite lazy when it comes to debate). You claim that others arent "historians", yet when I posted a quote from a historian who ws recognized as one of the best when it came to Civil War social realities, you upped the ante to state that , as a historian he wasnt infallible.

I believe that Shelby Foote is a far more credible source than you. When he presented his speech at Rice U, he was there in part, to discuss the entire "revisionism" associated with several group attempts to sanitize the Confederacy"s motives to a small group of right wingers who wish to remove all references to slavery so they can continue this crap about "the war of Northern Aggression", when it was the forced end to slavery that the southern states feared. Even the North, in its accomodations to prevent war, and as a last ditch effort, provided for the continuation of slavery unopposed, in orer to keep the border states of Kentucky,Maryland, and Delaware (and later West Virginia) from becoming part of the Confederacy. The fact that every reason for the civil war is focused upon slavery surely must occur to you. SO I assume then, (Im applying forensics here) from your own questioned documentary evidence, that your own interpretation is based upon beliefs other than pure intellectual curiosity .


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Well, Boss, Mystery Man took a shot at defending that stupidity, but to his credit, he did not persist. What we've got left are two contrarians who want to argue the point because they can, and because they both enjoy a fantasy of being champions of unpleasant truths. Their other common trait is profound ignorance of the subject.

That "war of Northern agression" crap is a case of the Confederate apologists and white supremecists taking a page from the National Socialist playbook. It's another example of the use of the big lie. If you shout something loudly enough and long enough, people will begin to believe it. After the Brits agreed to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, they continued to hold Detroit and Florida until the United States satisfied the claims of British subjects for losses and damages arising out of the revolution. Yet these clowns expect us to believe that these coteries of political terrorists should be allowed to seize Federal property without compensation, and no one should have said "Boo" to them.

The state of South Carolina raised troops and laid siege to the Federal installations in the harbor at Charleston--and the act of raising said troops and levying war was a clear violation of the third paragraph of Article One, Section ten of the constitution. Troops of Alabama and Florida, equally raised and maintained in violation of the constitution, seized Federal property. An armed mob attempted (and failed) to drive Lt. Slemmer and his detachment out of Fort Barrancas. After Slemmer and company had spiked the guns and destroyed all of the powder they were unable to carry out to Fort Pickens in the harbor, and had themselves removed to Fort Pickens, Florida and Alabama troops occupied Forts Barrancas and McCrae. Forces of the state of South Carolina fired on Star of the West as she attempted to enter the harbor at Charleston to reinforce and re-supply Major Anderson.

All of that took place before January 10, 1861. President Buchanan took an oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States, just as Mr. Lincoln would do on March 4, 1861. Subsequently to those acts, and prior to Mr. Lincoln's inauguration, seven states formed a confederacy at Montgomery, Alabama, which clearly violates the first paragraph of Article One, Section ten of the constitution. No American President could knuckle under to a pack of terrorists like those--it would be political suicide. You can easily imagine how a modern President would be treated if he or she caved in to this kind of threat, the more so as the enemy were obviously unable to match the United States in arms. Yet we are to believe that somehow it was Mr. Lincoln's fault, that the South was forced into a war, that the war was not about the institution of slavery, and that the South were the innocent victims of Yankee aggression.

I suspect that there are any number of yahoos who do swallow bullshit like that. After all, Lee and Jackson are veritable saints in the American military pantheon, which is also no accident, but the product of an intentional and concerted propaganda campaign beginning with Jubal Early in the 1870s after the death of Lee.

Essentially, what happened is that the South started a war they couldn't win. Their collective mouth wrote checks their collective ass couldn't cash. It would be laughable and pathetic were it not for the fact that it cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, while hundreds of thousands more were maimed for life.

But the big lie is alive and well. This thread isn't worth the candle any longer, because all we've got is a pack of fools largely ignorant of the subject they are arguing, and two of them inferentially acknowledging that slavery was the cause of the war. Don't doubt for a moment that they will continue to babble about issues they don't understand, and to continue to argue with them will be to feed the trolls. I'll not indulge in that any further.

Didn't you, long ago, start a thread about the existence of different makeup shades for ladies constituting prima faciae (pun mine ) proof of racial discrimination? Or maybe it was the existence of straightening products for "black hair" - don't rightly recall now, and it doesn't matter, since some lady in your family (of whatever color) must have told you to drop that topic on which you know less than nothing. Now you venture into another app of the same wrongheaded principle, summarized in the old saying: "It ain't what you don't know, it's what you know that just ain't so".

Large-scale mechanized agriculture became possible in the middle of the 19th century due to the many inventions of the industrial revolution. Slaves were no longer economically valuable, and would have to be let go anyway, whatever the crop - in the Southern States it was mostly cotton, but that's immaterial. The importation of slaves into the US had been banned since 1808 - learn some history for a change - so only natural reproduction locally could be counted on to increase the supply of same, and that turned out to be profoundly uneconomical (see above). It would make as much sense - or even more - to say that the Confederacy was about a code of honor, or about crinolines, or about cotton, as to say it was about slavery, which would have become extinct anyway due to economic factors. To sum up, I see nothing wrong with Southerners flying their old flag - and I see plenty wrong with ahistorical hypocrites criticizing them for it. The South fought with great bravery, suffering the highest casualty rate of any war in recorded times.

"Decrying" their right - or anybody else's right - to hold Civil War battle re-enactments is contrary to the 1st Amendment, btw.

P.S. what's your excuse for not knowing there's no such thing as "state's rights"?! Ebonics won't wash out, unlike the makeup

I'm impressed that we got to four pages before someone started throwing around racial slurs.

I suppose I may have missed some due to folks being on ignore.

please try to keep up.

Snood just made the very same point.