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 whembly wrote:

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 whembly wrote:
In the aftermath of these horrific murders, I'm saying that we should be praising the victim's families' reaction at the court hearing AND how the community responded. Like this:

Spoiler:

But, no... the media is talking about that stupid flag.

So, in this thread about the flag, you are telling us we should not be talking about the flag, but rather about something else. That is… weird.

*rubs temple*...*sigh*...*soldier on*...

All I'm saying, is that we need to remember that this story began with the people of Charleston and of SC uniting together in support of the victims of a shooting.

The flag controversy( which is an old controversy) is an attempt to deflect this story and pit us against one another.

I read that there is some speculation that the Charleston shooter may have been inspired by the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding states rights to refuse to print the Confederate Flag on license plates.

I saw that on CNN, no idea whether there's any real evidence that it's true. By the apartheid South African flag and other similar African flag he wore on his jacket in the imfamous creepy guy photo, and others have said there's some photos around of him with the rebel flag, it would seem this guy did have a fetish for white supremacist governments and their iconography.

It's really only natural that people who want the rebel flag removed from government buildings and such would use this moment as an opportunity to seize the initiative.

 Jihadin wrote:
Well....we actually haven't had a good American Civil War debate in awhile

Surprised that the Tarrifs imposed on the South by the "North" hasn't be brought up yet?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jasper76 wrote:

I read that there is some speculation that the Charleston shooter may have been inspired by the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding states rights to refuse to print the Confederate Flag on license plates.

I saw that on CNN, no idea whether there's any real evidence that it's true. By the apartheid South African flag and other similar African flag he wore on his jacket in the imfamous creepy guy photo, and others have said there's some photos around of him with the rebel flag, it would seem this guy did have a fetish for white supremacist governments and their iconography.

It's really only natural that people who want the rebel flag removed from government buildings and such would use this moment as an opportunity to seize the initiative.

CNN has gone off the rails lately...

They're now arguing that every Confederacy monument/statue needs to be removed.

 Polonius wrote:


It's not a coincidence that the Civil War occured right around the time of rapid industrialization and immigration to the North, which tilted both the population and economy of the country from the historically aristrocratic south to the capitalist north. The US was dominated by Southern Elites since before the US was independent, through roughly 1840 or so.

In many ways, the tragedy is that chattel slavery probably only had another generation in it as an economic force. It might have remained profitable in the deep south, but the mechanization of agriculture and the mass production of lower end craftsman made goods would have kicked the chair out of a slave economy. Brazil and Russia didn't free the slaves/serfs out of kindness. There is some evidence that landowners enjoyed higher incomes, albiet with less overall weath, under sharecropping than they did under slavery. Probably isolated instances, but slaves are expensive and completely unregulated labor is really cheap.

I believe it was actually the election of 1860, which saw Lincoln, or the congressional elections just prior to it in the 1850s. .. I was looking for an article I had read on the subject (couldnt find it), and came across an interesting summary.... Basically, the Democratic party divided itself in 1860, and could not come up with one candidate. The "Northern Democrats" suggested a Stephen A. Douglas, from Illinois who was a staunch supporter of "Popular Sovereignty", which was a policy that basically said, when a new state/territory is admitted to the union of the United States, the people of that territory will determine whether slavery shall exist or not. Apparently, according to an Electoral College map of 1860, Mr. Douglas managed to win Missouri in his presidential campaign... and nothing else. Lincoln won all the Northern States, plus Oregon and California. Interestingly, 3 states were won by a "Constitutional Union Party" (headed by a slaveowner from TN) who's stance was basically "we're not taking any stances". Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia went that route, while the rest of the Southern States went to the "Southern Democrats" nominee.


Anyhow, I seem to remember it wasn't the Presidential election that truly caused the secession, it was that beginning of industrializing, combined with the Irish and German Immigrants flooding into New York and Pennsylvania that turned politics upside down. The Northern States suddenly had more delegates, and thus more ability to affect changes, and while the Southern states didn't necessarily "lose" many seats, they certainly lost the majority of their voting and legislating power.

@whembley: Yeah, I really don't trust CNN as a news source (nor any of the cable news stations, come to think if it), so I feel the need to add a caveat whenever I mention something I saw on CNN or read on their website.

 Manchu wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Manchu wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
The Civil War happened because it was bound to happen whether it was by slavery or not.

This statement makes no sense.

There is an argument by some historians that eventually the (then) wealthier agrarian south would eventually conflict with the industrializing north no matter what. It doesn't explain why other ag states didn't join (Kentucky, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, etc).

Plus, the agrarian vs industrial argument is meaningless absent slavery. As you yourself point out, it was never an issue of pastoral life generally but of slavery particularly.

 Asherian Command wrote:
It is a common thing among historians to say that.

No, it isn't.

Yes, actually, it is. One of the best professors I had in college vehemently stood behind that idea and our entire semester on the civil war was devoted as to why. One of Lincoln's well-known lines is "if I could prevent the civil war by freeing all the slaves, I would. If I could prevent the civil war by freeing none of the slaves, I would." The war was not all about slavery, as many believe. I paraphrased the quote a bit, as I don't remember it 100%, but look it up; never too old to continue learning!

If true, I hope his job was not teaching you history. Counterfactual arguments are ahistorical. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I have to assume that you misunderstood the point he was trying to make. Based on the quotation you cite, that point seems to have been that Lincoln did not see how the war could be prevented. The quotation does not support the idea that the war was not about slavery.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
The war was not all about slavery, as many believe.

No, it was just the underlying cause on which all other "causes" were laid upon.

I mean, it doesn't get any clearer than Alexander Stephens speech in Savannah shortly before the start of the war:

"Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone 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."

People seem to regularly misunderstand their Civil War courses in my experience. My class on the subject was also heavily focused on "why did it happen" but Slavery was always front and center in any examination of that question.

Is the Civil War's roots more complicated than the words "it was about Slavery?" Yes it is. But it was still about slavery.

It was part of the civil war, yes. But the civil war would have happened with or without slavery. I won't deny it even played a large part. But the war would have happened regardless. And Stephens was also, I assume, making that speech in front of tons of plantation owners. You want their support, talk about keeping slavery.

Manchu, I'll leave these links here for you. Yes, again, slavery is PART of the issue. But there are other parts, evidenced in the links.
http://americanhistory.about.com/od/civilwarmenu/a/cause_civil_war.htm
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-american-civil-war/causes-of-the-american-civil-war/

Slavery, as an institution, was not truly the cause of the war. The North did not march down there to free the slaves because the felt that it was the right thing to do (as we would witness in post-War America for a century or more).

Slavery was, however, symptomatic of the root causes of the war, which were, in the main, two-fold. First, at the time, several states held to the belief that they alone had the right to determine what the laws in their state would be. This is often called the "State's Rights" issue. That a state should be free to choose whether or not they were a "slave state" or a "free state" was, as is often mentioned, a contentious issue at the time. In fact, it still is today, just on topics different than slavery.

The second issue was an economic one.The factory-owners of the North felt (wrongly, as it so happens) that the plantation-owners of the South had an unfair advantage in the labor pool by using slaves, rather than hiring people and paying them a wage. There was, unfortunately, several things wrong with this belief. One, slaves were really, really, really expensive to buy. Two, slaves actually only worked a few months out of the year (agricultural slaves, that is, the ones planting and picking tobacco, cotton, etc. So-called "house slaves" are a different matter entirely, but a much smaller part of the picture) while the factory workers in the North were employed year-round. Three, you couldn't really fire a slave like you could a wage-earning worker and, further, the owner of a slave was financially-responsible for maintaining his investment. That is to say, the costs of feeding, clothing and providing medical care for your slaves fell on the slave-owner... who, at the time, was not about to piss away the several hundred dollars (in that time, equivalent value of tens of thousands of dollars today) he'd spent on a slave by letting them starve or get sick or whatever.

Slaves were *expensive* to keep. Economic analysis of the antebellum South indicates that it would have been more profitable to plantation owners to hire white sharecroppers during the planting and harvesting seasons, and then fire them when the work was done, than to keep slaves... but tradition is a very, very powerful social element in the South. Always has been.

So, the North, thinking that the South was making money hand-over-fist with their "free" labor, got a bit pissy. Mind you, the North was as racist as the South was at the time, for those slaves who escaped the South and made it to the North often could not find work at all and, if they did, they were paid less than whites for the same work. This would remain true until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (and remains true to an extent even today in some areas).

So, both yes and no, slavery was the cause of the war, but not for the reasons most people think. It was a symptom of the underlying causes, but not the central cause, if that makes any sense.

 Wyrmalla wrote:
The American Civil War was over slavery? I thought the issue that the South had was that they opposed all the states being bunched together under a central government. Hmn, I suppose the route causes were many, but saying that it was all down to that one thing is a gross simplification. For one the Union had plenty of people who supported slavery, hell Lincoln's opposition began with him just bowing down to public pressure on the matter (what was his line, "nobody wants you here, go back to Africa"). That and both sides treated foreigners pretty poorly in general (even when under the same flag things didn't get better fast, look at the railroad). Frankly that war had jack all to do with slavery, apart from to the politicians and those with money invested in the plantations, etc. The average guy was fighting for their state and the people they knew more than anything (Custer was originally going to lead the Union, but his home was in the South.).

I have about 4 years of letters from a great uncle who fought in the Civil War for the North. From his statements quite a few in the Union army didn't care about slavery, but were fighting for the preservation of the Union. In fact he talked of Blacks getting union soldiers in trouble and the ill feelings held against the Blacks by the Northerners in return. It's quite an illuminating books worth of writings from then.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
It was part of the civil war, yes. But the civil war would have happened with or without slavery.

If there was no slavery, the South would have been in completely different circumstances from the get-go, and likely would never have developed into a region capable of, or even interested in, conducting a Civil War-era war to secede from the Union.

They felt their rights as individual states were being trampled by an overruling federal government and they felt the need to secede. Slavery was part of that argument, but not all of it. Those links I provided are fairly decent reads, and they're educational sources.

Also, not to target you Manchu, but that history teacher was one of the best damn teachers I ever had.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
It was part of the civil war, yes. But the civil war would have happened with or without slavery.

Image removed --yakface

Would be my normal response, but we have one of these 2-3 times a year, and no one ever learns so I'm gonna save myself the time and just say it was totally about slavery on the off chance someone will listen this time

Go ask a history professor. I've left links. Go find an expert and ask at this point.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Go ask a history professor. I've left links. Go find an expert and ask at this point.

The problem with that is that history is not a hard science. It is all, when you get right down to it, opinions which are somewhat based on evidence. People can look at the same piece of evidence and come to two different conclusions.

There are enough discussions online about it to see evidence though, unless willfully ignoring it. Those two things I pulled were the second and third link from a quick google search.

Think we all agree it took balls the size of the Titanic made of solid steel to stand in a line facing each other and fire .52cal musket balls/bullets at each other. Then work themselves up into a bayonet charge.

Weapon technology was more advance then the tactics being used.

I think if Lee had not been forced to battle at Gettysburg the ACW would lasted a bit more longer then needed

 LordofHats wrote:

 timetowaste85 wrote:
It was part of the civil war, yes. But the civil war would have happened with or without slavery.

--image removed--

Would be my normal response, but we have one of these 2-3 times a year, and no one ever learns so I'm gonna save myself the time and just say it was totally about slavery on the off chance someone will listen this time

Not according to the letters I have that were written by someone in the middle of it. Slavery was definitely the cause for some of the people there, but there were quite a few that could have cared less about slaves.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Go ask a history professor. I've left links. Go find an expert and ask at this point.

Any history professor worth their salt will tell you "it was about slavery" (may or may not then go into a more detailed triad following, but half the professors I know are as tired of fielding this nonsense as I am).

In short (because I never learn)

There would be no Civil War without slavery. Slavery and its spread into new territories was the driving economic factor that drove the North and South apart. A US without Slavery is a US so radically different from reality that anything concerning it belongs in fantasy fiction, not history. Hell the entire structure of Congress was driven in part by the existence of Slavery (Slaves totally count as people when it comes to voting in the Federal Government , 3/5s of a person... Even though Slaves have no rights or protections at all...)

The states rights bit was about slavery (and the claim that the South was the one being oppressed is complete hogwash). Yeah. the Federal government was totally trampling on the right's of Southern States. That's why the Federal government was constantly passing laws to support plantation owners, telling northern States they had no choice but to support the South's right to own slaves, and gutting any government policy that harmed cash crop business interests while throwing up barriers to Northern merchants and industrialists. The South trying to pretend they were being oppressed by the government is a rampant hypocrisy. The Democratic party held an absolute stranglehold on Federal politics from 1820-1856, and the South always got what it wanted in the end.

"It was about Slavery" is not a condemnation that the North was in the right and the South in the wrong either. Frankly, both sides had become completely unreasonable as to the issue of slavery and American society. Slavery was going to die anyway. There were people who knew it then, but the rabbling masses of politics by and large overruled them and created an increasingly hostile political landscape that eventually saw the South say "Screw you guys, I'm going home!" and the North respond "Aw nah you didn't!"

It was about Slavery. I don't know why people jump through logical hullahoops trying to explain it isn't. For example;

So, both yes and no, slavery was the cause of the war, but not for the reasons most people think. It was a symptom of the underlying causes, but not the central cause, if that makes any sense.

Everything in your post Psienesis, is a short story of why it was about slavery. The economic and political conflict that arouse in the US in the 1850's saw Slavery as a center point of the growing conflict.

The North had it's own version of slavery with child labor, extremely hazardous working conditions, starvation wages, etc.that far eclipse anything today.

Two wrongs don't make it right

Relapse wrote:
The North had it's own version of slavery with child labor, extremely hazardous working conditions, starvation wages, etc.that far eclipse anything today.

Honestly, until the Haymarket Affair, no one in the US gave a gak US Labor relations would rapid replace Slavery as a political center point during the Reconstruction period and late 19th cenutry, but prior to the Civil War no one cared.

Free Soilers and Northerns are large weren't overly concerned about the ramifications of slavery on industrialization. Their interests were focused on agriculture and farming, as at the time that was still the core industry of the US (and would be up to the turn of the century), and the paranoid fear that super rich southern slave owners would buy up all the new land and work it with slaves, which was never gonna happen but I think I went out of my way to say the North was just as unreasonable as the South here

And yet American chattel slavery was really bad. I don't understand why people keep trying to downplay how bad it was. The effects are still being felt today.

Because Southern Apologism is hip.

 LordofHats wrote:

Any history professor worth their salt will tell you "it was about slavery" (may or may not then go into a more detailed triad following, but half the professors I know are as tired of fielding this nonsense as I am).

My most recent one attributes the ACW to a mosquito.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Manchu, I'll leave these links here for you. Yes, again, slavery is PART of the issue.

Let's review the so-called top five reasons for the Civil War mentioned in your link:

(1) Economic and social differences between the North and the South ... this is about the South's economic dependence on slavery.
(2) States versus federal rights ... most importantly, basically so much so to the exclusion of all else, the right to maintain slavery.
(3) The fight between Slave and Non-Slave State Proponents ... speaks for itself.
(4) Growth of the Abolition Movement ... again, res ipsa loquitur.
(5) The election of Abraham Lincoln ... because he was widely seen as anti-slavery.

Got any more reasons why the Civil was was not about slavery? Oh, that's right the other link ... which says it's an oversimplification to claim that the Civil War was about slavery but then immediately qualifies the supposed other reasons as being inseparable from the issue of slavery:

By April 1861, slavery had become inextricably entwined with state rights, the power of the federal government over the states, the South’s ‘way of life’ etc. – all of which made a major contribution to the causes of the American Civil War.

News flash: slavery was inextricably entwined with these issues long before 1861.

(7): Onerous tariffs on the south agri industry:
http://www.emarotta.com/protective-tariffs-the-primary-cause-of-the-civil-war/

 Manchu wrote:

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Manchu, I'll leave these links here for you. Yes, again, slavery is PART of the issue.

Let's review the so-called top five reasons for the Civil War mentioned in your link:

(1) Economic and social differences between the North and the South ... this is about the South's economic dependence on slavery.
(2) States versus federal rights ... most importantly, basically so much so to the exclusion of all else, the right to maintain slavery.
(3) The fight between Slave and Non-Slave State Proponents ... speaks for itself.
(4) Growth of the Abolition Movement ... again, res ipsa loquitur.
(5) The election of Abraham Lincoln ... because he was widely seen as anti-slavery.

Got any more reasons why the Civil was was not about slavery? Oh, that's right the other link ... which says it's an oversimplification to claim that the Civil War was about slavery but then immediately qualifies the supposed other reasons as being inseparable from the issue of slavery:

By April 1861, slavery had become inextricably entwined with state rights, the power of the federal government over the states, the South’s ‘way of life’ etc. – all of which made a major contribution to the causes of the American Civil War.

News flash: slavery was inextricably entwined with these issues long before 1861.

Manchu right on the money. Makes me wonder if he has a copy of my Power Point Slides I've used during my time as a EOA at brigade level. Stay out of my NCOPD/EOA files there Manchu.....

This is a study I think is relevant – it’s on the political legacy of American slavery.
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/msen/files/slavery.pdf

It’s 50 pages of text, but you can cheat and just read the abstract;
“We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. These results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of contemporary racial threat. To explain these results, we offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of racial attitudes. We argue that, following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce existing racist norms and institutions to maintain control over the newly free African-American population. This amplified local differences in racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations.”

To put it simply – it isn’t about the war but what came afterwards. Wealthy Southern Whites had their economic and social institutions position threatened when they lost the overt, state enforced power of slavery, so to maintain them they reinforced existing racial ideas. They couldn’t own people, but with state and social support they could control them well enough to make sure most of the wealth of the farms stayed in their hands.

In this sense the relevance of the Stars and Bars isn’t in its relation to the confederacy, where it was afterall a battle flag, but in its relation to its adoption by the KKK. The South isn’t so much living in the shadow of the Civil War, but in the shadow of the Reconstruction.