The Confederacy was About Slavery

Not even close . If you would kindly go away and read about indenture and what actually happened, then you wont be here making a fool of yourself by guessing . Chat when you get back .

There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

You're peddling a typical southern apologia, too. The fact that a minority of Southerners owned slaves doesn't alter the fact that the war was about slavery. That a minute handful of blacks owned slaves doesn't alter the fact that the war was about slavery. I didn't see where Snood said that it was "about white slave owners." Perhaps you can quote that passage for me.

To claim that slavery was a minor issue is to willfully ignore the central issue of the actions of the Southern states. I made the points about the fight at Pensacola, in Charleston harbor and the formation of the Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama--all occurring before Lincoln was inaugurated precisely because it was a unique reaction to an election. On more than one occasion before 1860, people whom Southerners did not approve of were elected President. So why did they have this reaction in 1860? The answer is obvious. The effect of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was not only to ruin the political prospects of Stephen Douglas in the future, it was also to make Lincoln the boogeyman to slave owners. The reaction of the mob in Pensacola, of the seven states in Montgomery and the authorities in South Carolina was clearly an hysterical reaction to the election of a man they saw as the standard bearer for abolition.

The South did not go to war over the tariff, the only other deeply divisive issue between North and South, and one which had been on the boil for generations. If you allege that there were more important issues than slavery, what were they? What is your evidence that these states started a war in 1860 because of those issues, and not because of slavery.

You're not this stupid--you do yourself a disservice to peddle this horseshit.

Early in this thread there are lots of good quotes worth revisiting.

you do know why that was dont you?

So stop trying to tack on reasons decades later. The states were pretty clear in their statements at the time. Slavery was a very large reason why.

Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.

The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.

After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.

Downs believes much of that is because at the time of the civil war, which raged between 1861 and 1865 and pitted the unionist north against the confederate south, many people did not want to investigate the tragedy befalling the freed slaves. Many northerners were little more sympathetic than their southern opponents when it came to the health of the freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists feared the disaster would prove their critics right.

"In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it. Some did not care and abolitionists, when they saw so many freed people dying, feared that it proved true what some people said: that slaves were not able to exist on their own," Downs told the Observer.

well we cant have you getting "slayed" all the time, now can we?

Those who defend the right of people to display the confederate flag, and decry the "pride in heritage" indicated thereby, and do civil war reenactments, and generally lionize the Confederacy and its memory, seem always to be in denial that the war was fought because some wanted to preserve the right to enslave. The following is taken from an article from Salon Magazine by Michael Lind. If there are any here on A2K who deny the centrality of slavery in the motives of the secessionists, who want to bury any mention of that ugly truth beneath some obfuscated twaddle about state's rights, I'd like to direct their attention, and encourage them to please reply, to this. Especially to the quote from the Vice-President of the Confederacy, taken from a speech in which he clearly states what the confederacy is based on:

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For generations, apologists for the Confederacy have claimed that secession was really about the tariff, or states’ rights, or something else -- anything other than preserving the right of some human beings to own, buy and sell other human beings.

That being the case, the education of schoolchildren in my state should include a reading of the Cornerstone Speech made by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, on March 21, 1861. With remarkable candor, Stephens pointed out that whereas the United States was founded on the idea, enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal," the new Confederacy was founded on the opposite conception:



The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically ... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.