Reply With Quote
Say what you want, but WC has a point. The Civil War was the beginning of the end for states rights and the introduction of the federal income tax.
It's not sympathy with slavery. Don't confuse things please. It's about States Right. Plain and simple. The south was wrong to want slavery. I will not defend slavery, just the states rights part.
Say what you want, but WC has a point. The Civil War was the beginning of the end for states rights and the introduction of the federal income tax.
The Civil War was about slavery, pure and simple. Davis and Stephens were both on record saying that slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Problem was, the seven states that were most heavily influenced by slavery were going to be dwarfed in the Senate and in Presidential elections by 27 non-slavery states. And exactly that happened in November of 1860 when Lincoln was elected.
The Civil War killed every eighth man that put on a grey uniform because a bunch of rich slaveowners saw every major candidate in the 1860 election seeking to abolish slavery. The Missouri Compromise was forty years earlier, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was six years earlier, and Dred Scott was three years earlier. They even were shortsighted enough to divide the Democratic party in half, putting up their own candidate against Stephen Douglas, whose family were slaveowners and would have been much more lenient than Lincoln on this issue.
Secession occurred because the only way slavery was going to exist was in another country by the time that election was over. People didn't travel much in the 1860's, and news really didn't either. Most people in the North - unless they were influenced by abolishionist-style journalism - could care less about the slaves in the South. They were busy being domestics and canal diggers for four bucks an eighty-plus hour workweek and most didn't have their letters anyway. Not to mention that South Carolina is a uva long way from Boston on horseback. Heck, they probably could have related to the black slaves if given the idle time to do so. And not every Southerner lived in Tara, either. Most were poor farmers and laborers, too.
That's like a bunch of people on the moon trying to tell us what to do with our property. And that's exactly what slaves were.
So, just like with anything else, personal greed of a few decided the fate of a great many. Sure, there were states rights issues - the moon analogy. But the driving force behind what a few desperate rich white guys did was to keep the ins ution of slavery viable when it rightfully was going out of style.
It is hard to believe that there is anyone left defending Bush. He is spending lives and billions and horrific causalities and an exhausted Army on Iraq while OBL is in Pakistan and the Taliban are rising again in Afghanistan.
It's not like I have any high hopes for the Democrats. Any real chance they've had so far they have caved in to Bush.
"States Rights"
.. was and always will be a code word for racism. It was for George Wallace in the 60s, and still is. The southern states wanted the "right" to continue ins utionalizing racism with that right being abrogated by the Feds.
The real Repug revolution in the south was when the Repugs convinced the southern racist/discriminating whites, who had been voting Dem when they were poor, but started rising economically in the 70s, to realize that the Repugs were really the anti-black party and to start voting Repug. That was fundamental to the Repug election success in the last 25 years.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions