The Confederacy was About Slavery

I was referring, not to your eventual acceptance that the Confederacy was about slavery, but to your assertion that Foofie's opinions aren't denialism.

Then you need to stop your "If the shoe fits" crap.

If you want to accuse someone of something, come out with it and stop this coy nonsense.

But you can't shed the crap from your arguments can you? Eventual

My very first post in 2010 was a statement of agreement with the thread's premise.

Foofie isn't denying that slavery was at the core of the Confederacy.

I feel all slimy, filthy when that idiot bitch Foofie/Miller quotes one of my posts. She should just back to Boston and making attacks on Black politicians.

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The problem with this narrative is that is is a concomitant of the lost cause myth. It implies that the north started the war, and also that slave-owners had a lick of economic common sense. Clearly, neither proposition is true. The south started the war, at a time when the status quo was still limping along. Furthermore, tariffs had always been opposed in the slave states, which wanted to live in a rosy past that had never really existed. Before the revolution, the factors, the agents in London would send small ships to the North American coast, which could tie up in inlets or rivers where plantation owners would load their tobacco, and unload the goods they had previously ordered. They were getting raped in the butt. They got less for their tobacco than they would in other European nations, and they were being sold shoddy goods at inflated prices. When George Washington returned from commanding the Virginia militia in the French and Indian War, just looking over the books of Mount Vernon convinced him they were being cheated. He stopped growing tobacco, he paid off the highway robber in London who had been Lawrence Washington's factor and his own (he had just cleared the debt before the revolution), and he diversified his crops. (See the biographies by Freeman and Flexner.)

But most southern planters liked the situation as it was--they could play the grand man, and disdain mere bookkeeping. Their entire, insular, minority culture was interwoven with slavery. They had wanted to extend slavery with the new territories gained in the Mexican War. They were infuriated that California had been admitted to the Union as a free state. Even these dopes understood the economy of slavery wasn't very lucrative, but with new slave states, they could sell slaves to a new set of dopes, like the ones in Texas after 1845. This was about a dream of the past and a past which had never really existed. They had been robbed by sharp traders in London since Rolfe had introduced a worthwhile strain of tobacco to Virginia, and shipped his first crop in 1614. This lost cause myth bullshit is just another version of that same "head-in-the-sand" dreamscape.

Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's second Vice President, and his successor, was a slave-owner and Senator from Tennessee. Before secession began, he warned his colleagues that if they left the Congress, slavery was doomed. He was right. If that war had never taken place, it would not have been until Arizona entered the Union in 1912 that an amendment to end slavery could have passed the Senate. To this day, the slaves states could effectively block the ratification of such an amendments. These were not reflective men, and Johnson's advice was ignored. They were hot for war, it was part and parcel of that fantasy world which they inhabited that one southern white trash, barefoot, half-starved infantryman would whip any ten "pasty-faced mechanics" (a favorite term of opprobrium in the south). It's no different than that bullshit about superior southern military skill (Ah-hahahahahahahahaha). That's gospel in the lost cause myth, and it's demonstrably false. These are people don't live in the real world--they didn't in 1861, and they don't today.

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Oh no, what if Finny comes at me with his devastating rejoinder, shut up!

To be unambiguous about it, Foofie is a denialist.


You wrote, "at its most fundamental basis, the Civil War was about power," and then proceeded with weaselly rationalizations that mentioned slavery but did not discount your starting assertion.

Eventually, you seem to have dropped that assertion. Or have you?


That's not my reading of Foofie's opinions.

Yes! I understand exactly what you mean about not living in the real world. Part of my impetus for asking the question was just to verify for myself how some people here think - how readily they could include an unthinkable crime against humanity like slavery into their guess about alternative outcomes. Thanks for the thorough, thoughtful answer. I think I told you that I genuinely enjoy reading your Civil War stuff. How old are you, anyway? You sure you didn't see all that stuff firsthand?😉

You, meaning you and other Americans do this deep denial regularly, Snood, but you stunning hypocrites have the gall to point fingers at others.

Not at all, it's always about power.

Why do you think the Southern elite had slaves? Because they just enjoyed seeing fellow humans enslaved? Of course not. Slaves meant wealth which meant power.

I should add that you and some of your like minded confreres here seem bound and determined to designate the South (then and now) as evil incarnate.

There is no possible excuse or acceptable justification for slavery but it was a practice throughout the world for thousands upon thousands of years. Was every civilization in which it was practiced (e.g. Egypt, Rome, Greece, Persia, Mali, China etc etc etc) irredeemably evil? If so, then what a horrible heritage mankind has.

It's particularly ironic when moral relativists announce that any behavior is an absolute evil.

There is a regional bigotry woven into this thread that is noxious.

No, not quite first hand. But I clearly remember the run-up to the civil war centennial, which is when I first got interested in the subject. Thank you for your kind remarks.

They were evil, Finn. But they were no different than the people of the north who didn't care that there was slavery in the south. After the "emancipation", the north was as happy with Blacks being nothings in the USA no matter where they were, south or north.

All the people of the US have been exceedingly evil, Nazi evil, for well over two centuries. You only have to look at how supportive, by and large, the citizenry are to the continued slaughter of innocents the world over.

When you actively support this level of evil you can't be anything but evil.



You are talking about ancient history for most of that. And those peoples were base liars, pretending to be the savior of mankind, the savior of the oppressed, the shining beacon of freedom like the stunningly hypocritical USA, now being described by the stunningly hypocritical Finn.

Naturally one cannot "divorce slavery from the reason why the South seceded and thus became the Confederacy"; however, that is just part of the reason that the south, I believe, had their fill of northern political/economic thinking. I was taught in the early 1960's, in American History, that tariffs prevented the south from getting less expensive goods from Europe, rather than buy goods from the north. Plus, northern abolitionists (mostly Evangelical ministers) were irritating the plantation owners with bible tracts trying to explain the sin of slavery. But, getting back to slavery as the issue, slavery existed since the agrarian south began. The Confederacy was just about, in my opinion based on reading, about finally having the autonomy from a north that by the 19th century had a veritable separate culture. And, as I've read that the south had a culture of honor, so aside from men dueling with pistols at dawn in front of a courthouse, there was collective rancor for each concession past, present or future that the south felt mistreated them and their way of life. It was, in my opinion, like any bad marriage (not made in Heaven).

You're generalizing in order to circumvent the fact that the Confederacy was about slavery.

Yeah, there's power and it's acquired through different means. For the Confederacy it was acquired specifically through the slave trade.

And you're being argumentative, without a foundation.

What it seems to you stands in stark contrast to what the reality is. I designate the Confederacy to be hot headed SOB's that couldn't read the writing on the wall. I designate the Confederacy apologists to be denialists.



M'kay. As far as self-righteous, straw man rants go, you've outdone yourself.

However, why did it take so long to secede, when slavery existed since the inception of the agrarian south? My point is that by that point in the 19th century it was finally obvious that there could be no reconciliation with a north that was just a separate culture. Secession was just the proverbial divorce of a very bad marriage.

And, if one is looking for what is "immoral" today, one might notice that few really can, or do, commiserate with the southern Black's feelings about the continuation of Confederate symbolism throughout the south. But if you want the moral high ground, you should possibly not lecture to a Jew that knows that his religion celebrates the Hebrews escape from bondage in the Passover story. Like regardless of whether that whole story was true or not, Jews know that Moses was a Black man, having not stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb in the Pharohs (Black Africans - Arabs came much later) royal court. And, Jews also know that if Jews are mostly considered white (or whitish?) today, it was also by rapes, just not on plantations, but in Czarist Russia.

And, by having the "Confederacy being about slavery" it is then logical to answer any future effort for Black reparations with the statement that that debt was paid in the blood of the Union. This is a topic fraught with all sorts of strong feelings. Perhaps, I am really not qualified to participate, since my family came here about 15 years after the end of the Civil War, and I have no dog in this hunt, so to speak. I am just concerned about keeping the divisions in this country tamped down, since there seems to be today a real alienation between folks. Or, at least a lack of wanting a country that was known to reward those that "could do," or as Woody Allen said, if they couldn't do they taught, and if they couldn't teach they taught gym.

The foundation is the history, a good deal of it presented in this thread. Your reading of it is starkly dissimilar to mine, apparently.

"Starkly?" Don't be ridiculous

I repeat There is a regional bigotry woven into this thread that is noxious.

Do you really think I give a fig whether or not you agree? You're hardly likely to indict yourself.

This concern of yours impels you to opine contrarily to the history of the issue. Deceit merely enables denialism. You're being an enabler--with the Zionists as well.

Given that your charge against me is based on your straw man rant, the amount of figs you give is irrelevant.