| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 9:30:03 AM | That doesn't prove to me that whites were actually slaves in this country.
Exactly. Contrary to what our buddy FreedomFighter/IrishFreedom/Liveordiefordixie
might believe... the Irish were never slaves in America. Treated like sh!t
when they came here to escape the Potato Famine in the 1800s... yes.
Slavery? I don't think so.
Being an indentured servant was their choice, sure it sucked but they got to leave
eventually. Of course it wasn't fair... but it was a choice they made in hope to better
their situations. Concidering the Irish were treated worse than dog piss then and
couldn't get decent jobs probably made the Servant gig look a lot better than dying
on the streets.
But still that is not the same as Blacks being kidnapped from Africa and forced into life-long
slavery, and generations of their children being born into the same situation.
Most Irish got out of their servatude after a few years and had a better life
for their familes. How many blacks of the time were able to do that? Sh!t how many
blacks were able to lead lives of equality before the 1960s? If they lived in the
south they sure as hell didn't. So comparing Slavery to Indentured Servants is asinine.
Not like I'm surprized, seeing as it came from that moron.
And seems to me the Spanish had to pretty good in the early days of the
Americas.... until the US started fighting with them for more land.
Natives to Mexico may have been slaves to the Spanish.... but Spanish
as slaves to Americans? Thats a new one to me. | |
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Jivin
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Joined: 2/10/2005
Msg: 27 | |
| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 10:11:08 AM |
i am buff and am trying to open up a friendly disscussion of the wars causes results and meaning anyone interested?
What does you being buff have anything to do with it? I am also buff, but I go around telling everyone. | |
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Jivin
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Joined: 2/10/2005
Msg: 28 | |
| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 11:36:33 AM | | You can't even form a basic complete sentence and I'm the stupid one? | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:02:41 PM | | I question the motives of the person who started this thread. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:03:30 PM | ^^^^ And you would be smart in doing so....  | |
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Jivin
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Joined: 2/10/2005
Msg: 31 | |
| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:07:38 PM | | I thought 'Civil War' was a war where no one dies and the fighting is all done through diplomatic reasoning. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:23:41 PM | there seems to be 2 issues arising here:
1) the cause of the american civil war
2) slavery
on the first: the american civil war was fought on the principle of states' rights...and their desire to secede if they were denied these rights by the united states "federal" government. many factors came into play as the country moved towards full scale conflict...abolitionists lobbied for an end to slavery and the southern system/economy based on slavery, the north's increasing industrializing economy, and a bunch of political wagering. but ultimately, the southern states seceding from the union b/c they felt that they were being told what to do by the north. this remains a significant ideal within the us political system - the rights of states - and continues to be a very relevant and strongly held position by many states, not only in the south but all over the us.
on the second: slavery has existed for thousands of years...the egyptians had many slaves from the various african tribes, the jews, etc. the romans did, the turks, the celts, britons...actually, pretty much wherever you find flourishing civilizations in history, you will have encountered slaves. BUT just because you can find it all over, does NOT excuse the enslavement of people based on their ethnicity, religion, sex...or anything. if, as the american constitution says, all men are entitled to equal rights under the law, then americans should be held accountable to that standard.
but more importantly, as a human race, we should all be held accountable to fundamental human rights. and i agree, there are many examples of slavery around the world...sweat shops, child labour, child prostitution, the subjugation of women are just some of the examples where slavery remains a vibrant and profitable system. it's incredibly sad that even in this day and age, we do these kinds of things to other people.
as for african americans seeking restitution and reparation for years of slavery and their entitlement to such: frankly, their ancestors were done wrong and they continue to feel the brutal sting of racism. i don't know how you repair decades of wrongdoing and hurt. but to at least acknowledge that what the us did in its history to oppress and terrorize this group is a necessary and fundamental part of the healing. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:37:56 PM | Ummm: liveordie? You said it was a war of agression by the North.
Historically, the military development and manoevres support that idea. However, only in the early stages of the war. The strategy of the south was one of necessity: ease out the possibly aggressive occupying force. There is no doubt of coming clashes and the preparations for them by both sides. I leave this to the students of the bloody conflict.
However, with regards to the concept of natural justice and the freedom of man: the South was headed for, and fully deserving of the military punishment they received from the North.
And if the confederacy won? A slave based economy? Are you insane?
Get the f#ck outta here!  | |
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Jivin
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Joined: 2/10/2005
Msg: 34 | |
| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:40:12 PM | | I think this topic is a good one and is certainly worthy of discussion but I don't think we can take DixieCupBoy too seriously as I think he is a "buff" regarding anything that has a Confederate flag on it.... | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:49:17 PM | ^^JIvin, I hear you, but I'd rather discuss reform of the Inner City, a fundamental wholistic approach to education of the socially disadvantaged, and a movement towards an open healing of the deep racial divide in North America.
The civil war is a dead issue. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:50:43 PM |
a buff stupid as i enjoy learning about the civil war man this site is nothing but uneducated people who never question anything
We question a lot of things. For example, I question why you apparently seem to think everything bad that happens is the fault of Jewish people. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 12:56:48 PM | | The Civil War was indeed a war of Northern aggression... However, in looking back it appears good that it happened. War should be a last resort sort of thing and under the agreements that were in place at that time there can be no argument that the North was right for doing what it did. Legally, it's a slam dunk case for the south... BUT it's doubtful the slaves would have been freed any other way... | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 2:02:11 PM | oH... I should add: there's no such thing anymore as "races". There are only light and dark skinned people. Humans have been comingling and cohabitating for the better part of a million years. I doubt if there's one light skinned person without a dark skinned ancestor or vice versa anymore...
It's a very backward idea. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/25/2005 8:48:28 PM | Does anyone know what percentage of Americans owned slaves at the time the Southern States seceded? Just curious. I am guessing less than 10 percent. I have heard that the Confederate Army was made up of poor Southern boys who could barely afford shoes let alone slaves. They were fighting a rich mans battle, but I guess that is true in every war. The North not satisfied with winning the war, decided to put the Southerners through the indiginity and atrocities of a period in history misnamed "Reconstruction". It is left out of most history books.
A note about the Irish. There is a tradition of Irish policemen in America. The reason being that a century ago the Irish could not get jobs as anything else because nobody wanted them here. Nobody wanted to be a policeman either as at the time, it was a short career as you would more than likely become a statistic. The Irish jumped on the profession as they had little choice elsewhere. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/26/2005 6:14:15 AM | The number of Southern folks who owned slaves is probably under 5%, it was the wealthy land owners who had over 95% of the slaves to act as laborers. The upper middle class had a small number of slaves to act as servants, and some middle class merchants might have a single slave to work in the business. Most folks simply could not afford a slave.
I am a white Southern male, and my ancestors fought for the South, with a distant cousin or two on the side of the Union. While I am proud of the honor and fortitude the Confederate forces exhibited on the battle field, and understand and agree with many of the issues of states rights, I thank God that the South lost and the abomination of slavery was cast from our nation.
Many folks say the South is still 'fighting the Civil War', but to me the remnants of the emotions of that time are more due to the Reconstruction than the war. Most of our nation (thank God) has never experienced being 'conquered' and occupied by another power. Most of the economic basis for the South was destroyed by the war or the freeing of the slaves, then with the Reconstruction thousands of 'carpet-baggers' (their travel bags were made of a type of carpet) came south to pick over what was left, leaving very little to the local peoples including the newly freed slaves.
Millions of acres of land, with homes and other dwellings thereon, were 'taken' by these folks via 'back taxes'. The Reconstruction government assessed back taxes on all property for the four years of the war, payable immediately upon pain of forfeiture. Virtually no one had access to cash money (remember all Confederate money is now toilet paper), and almost every family had lost at least one family member in the fighting, many times it was either the main bread winner or an older son whose labor helped work the family enterprise.
If any of the properties taken this way had been redistributed to the new freedmen, via the '40 acres and a mule' promise, then there might have been a certain amount of justice to the process. That didn't happen though, the wealth just moved from old white Southern families to new white Yankee carperbaggers, and the slaves (and many poor whites) were left to fend for themselves.
Then when Reconstruction was over (all the wealth was redistributed to new owners), the occupiers left and the social mores of the South were allowed to return very closely to what they were before the war. The new freedmen were still treated as less than human, paid half what a white worker earned, and what few political seats/positions they had gotten during Reconstruction were quickly stripped from them, as was their right to vote.
The war: the most common answer when Rebel troops were asked why they were fighting was "they are down here". General Lee turned down the command of the Union forces because he could not fight against his family, friends and neighbors in Virginia. We need to remember that in 1861 the notion of a 'Union' was weak and not important to most folks, their primary loyalties were to the states. They called themselves Maine men, or Virginians, not necessarily Americans. So when the soil of their respective states was threatened they fought, poor Southern whites may not have had two nickles to rub together, but they had their pride and weren't about to allow someone to march into their state and tell them how to live. Would you? Half a million Americans died in that conflict, more than all our other wars combined.
The sad reality of the Civil War is that although slavery was technically abolished, the plight of most black Americans improved not one bit, and it was another 100 years before the (and here's that word again) Civil Rights movement accomplished the real 'freeing' of the black people. We still have a lot of work to do, racism is still alive, but we are finally starting to move into the future together as one people. Maybe by 2025 the real fruits of the Civl War and Civil Rights movement will be ready for picking, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for ALL.
Sorry for being long-winded, but this is a complicated subject with a history that one must understand before the reality can be seen.
MajMike | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 2/26/2005 10:08:23 AM | Even if the South had won the war, slavery was on the way out due to industrial advances. You have to question whether Reconstruction actually made things worse for Blacks. Because of the Carpetbaggers, the KKK was formed. If the South had merely been left alone to lick their wounds and rebuild their land and their dignity, things might not have got so bad.
There is an interesting book that explores the modern day Confederacy called "Confedrates in the Attic". It is very enlightening and at times hilarious. Some of the people explored are bigoted rednecks as you would expect but others are intelligent people with interesting POV's. As for why the War is still an issue in the South? The War was fought mostly in the South. Everywhere a Southerner turns he sees a reminder of the fight that his ancestors lost. Battlefields, etc. In the Northern States besides Pennsylvania, there are no such reminders. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 1/3/2008 10:39:30 PM | RDtoo..you are so right about the reminders here..I went to one of the furnaces here that was destroyed by invading union soldiers..
I took the tour..walked the woods to the slaves quarters..and they have plaques detailing the events of that day..the union army did kill slaves that day..then burned what they could to the ground..I go there and I can feel the "history"..its like you can smell fear,death..it is truly eerie
There is a Confederacy Museum here in Montgomery,AL that is packed with Southern & Northern civil war items....why was the war called civil & there was nothing civil about it? | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 1/4/2008 6:49:49 AM | I love how people chant slavery as the main cause of the war. I disagree with revisionists 100%. The main cause of the war was Lincoln himself. He was a business-protectionist.
Slavery was dieing out by the time the war started. In 1857 Virginia (a slave holding state) was working on an amendment banning slavery. The south was watching the Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) and saw the winds of change. Additionally, it was only the big plantations that owned slaves. They were not as common as you think.
Lincoln, a failed one-term congressman, would never have been elected had it not been for his career-long devotion to protectionism. Columbia University historian Reinhard H. Luthin's "Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff," published in the July 1944 issue of The American Historical Review. As I document in The Real Lincoln, the sixteenth president was one of the most ardent protectionists in American politics during the first half of the nineteenth century and had established a long record of supporting protectionism and protectionist candidates in the Whig Party.
In 1860, Pennsylvania was the acknowledged key to success in the presidential election. It had the second highest number of electoral votes, and Pennsylvania Republicans let it be known that any candidate who wanted the state’s electoral votes must sign on to a high protectionist tariff to benefit the state’s steel and other manufacturing industries. As Luthin writes, the Morrill tariff bill itself "was sponsored by the Republicans in order to attract votes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey."
The U.S. House of Representatives had passed the Morrill tariff in the 1859-1860 session, and the Senate passed it on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. President James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian who owed much of his own political success to Pennsylvania protectionists, signed it into law. The bill immediately raised the average tariff rate from about 15 percent (according to Frank Taussig in Tariff History of the United States) to 37.5 percent, but with a greatly expanded list of covered items. The tax burden would about triple. Soon thereafter, a second tariff increase would increase the average rate to 47.06 percent, Taussig writes.
Lincoln literally promised in his first inaugural address a military invasion if the new, tripled tariff rate was not collected.At the time, Taussig says, the import-dependent South was paying as much as 80 percent of the tariff, while complaining bitterly that most of the revenues were being spent in the North. The South was being plundered by the tax system and wanted no more of it.
"The power confided in me," he said, "will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion--no using force against, or among the people anywhere. We are going to make tax slaves out of you," Lincoln was effectively saying, "and if you resist, there will be an invasion." | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 1/4/2008 6:51:24 AM |
on the first: the american civil war was fought on the principle of states' rights...and their desire to secede if they were denied these rights by the united states "federal" government.
The biggest right in question, being slaves. Which is why it was actually placed in the confederate consitution that no act of congress could restrict the ownership of slaves. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 1/4/2008 7:34:33 AM | First off the winner writes the history.
Little known fact both Lincolns wife and Grants wife owned slaves until the end of the war.
25% of the black population in the south died after the civil war. Why because the southerns couldn't afford to take care of themselves let alone the ex slaves anymore. The north didn't care if the people they SAID they freed died or not down in the south.
The KKK was founded by Forrest. His intentions were to help the the black people. Others came into the organization and decided to change things. When Forrest saw that the way the Klan was going he left it.
The unrest between the North and the South started way back in the 1820's. It was not over slavery.
What do you call it when you meet people coming to the new country and tell them they have to fight in the war to stay in this country. By the way that was not the south that did that.
You'll find cotton played a big part in the war...not the picking of it either but the money it brought in and the taxes made off of it.
Remember also the south was farming..the north was industry. The industrial states were having a hard time not many jobs. Most of the tax money was being used in the north for improvements while little money spent in the south. Most of the tax dollars came from the south.
We didn't need a war to end slavery in the south. With the invention of the cotton gin it would of made slaves more costly to own than the cotton gin. Since only the wealthy owned slaves they would of been able to afford the cotton gin.
If slaves were treated so badly then why did many slaves stay with their owners and even help the families during the war. Why did some stay even after the war? Why did the north not set up plans to help the freed black person if that was what the war was about?
We came to this country for freedoms from England...we had a tea party to protest taxes. We decided to break away from England. All that was considered a good thing.
But when the south decided to break away from the north it was wrong..yet the south wanted away from the north for many of the same reasons that America wanted away from England.
Perhaps we write the history of the civil war and are to be taught it by government standard text books because if we look today...we see alot of the same things going on..our rights are being taken away slowly..we are taxed up the ying yang ...so next time you buckle up..not because you want to..but because you have to..and you look at your pay stub and see all those taxes and wonder where its all going...you might be seeing some of your southern side coming out
Check out the little known facts...sometimes you have to dig deep but isn't a lot of stuff worth its weight always below the surface of things? | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 1/4/2008 7:52:39 AM | Napay..I do admire beauty & brains..the history most people spout is based on myths & lies..very few facts..you have posted FACTS..Thank you!
I admire people that dig deep ..for the TRUTH..not a bunch of pcism and emotional lies..anyone else have facts on this war that are not know history?..I really enjoy learning something new every day.. | |
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Posted: 1/4/2008 8:33:04 AM | | Very good post Nappy, So many people in the world dont know the truth. Think of it, I am sure Lincoln didnt want it to go down in history that he suppressed southerners. When the south broke away, he knew he was losing a big chunk of money that he was spending on the north. And if he was so against slavery, why didnt he abolish slavery in the north? He had control there the entire time of the war. But he waited until the war was over.He said he would allow slavery if the south came back to the union..I read somewhere(cant find it now) that the south was willing to do away with slavery but wanted to do it slowly as to make life easier on them. Teech them how to take care of themselves., not just set them out. Lincolns most likey purpose was to bring down the south, to not back out of his threat, of freeing them. | |
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Posted: 1/4/2008 8:40:42 AM | | In the 1500's when Native American Indians(Apaches) defeated a couple of the Spanish settlements in what is now Arizona and took prisoners, guess who made who into slaves. Do I hear any bills, asking the highly rich casino owning people to give the now Mexicans money???? And you want to talk brutal, i bet there is no spanish descendants left from these slaves. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 1/4/2008 2:29:19 PM | I had no idea that there were so many misconceptions about the American Civil War and Lincoln.
It is true that slavery was NEVER the primary issue of the conflict. However, it was a part of every issue.
Expansion: free state vs. slave state.
Political power: 2/3 clause and equal representation. Slave states were not as heavily populated, so they were losing the power in both the House of Representatives and in deciding the Executive leadership.
Econmics: Late Agrarian (Slave driven) economy vs. Industrialized (Capitalism).
Philosophical: Federalist vs. Antifederalist. One nation or many?
And then, of course, slavery.
Lincoln did not want war, and the reconstruction would have been much much easier, had he not been assasinated. Lincoln never considered the south to have separated from the Union, he considered it the traitorous actions of the leaders, not the people.
It is called a Civil War, when it is consolidated withing one nation's territory. Has nothing to do with ferocity. | |
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| the civil war
Posted: 1/4/2008 4:43:10 PM | I don't worry about the last American Civil War. I worry about the next one.
Which I figure will happen in the next 10 to 25 years. | |
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