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We all know that slavery was not the only reason for the war, but it did play a part. If nothing else, it fired up abolitionists and got people to fight. Also, anyone in the South who thinks it was a good system is ignorant. Very few whites actually owned slaves or owned large plantations. It was a small, elite group of white men, and they controlled everything. The system would have failed eventually without the war. The war just hastened its end.
The war was very clearly about slavery. The Bill of Secession passed by the legislature of each of the states of the Confederacy mentioned slavery as a reason for the action they were taking.
William Walker was a genius with a Napoleon complex. He tried to set up states or republics similar to Texas in Sonora Mexico and Nicaraugua, before being executed in Honduras.
Other southerners worked in the new territories of California, Arizona and New Mexico.
After the war, many former Confederate Soldiers came west to the gold camps in Nevada, Idaho and Montana as well as the later Alaskan and Yukon gold rushes.
Many went home and found everything they had once owned had been destroyed, so they packed up the wife, kids, and extended family and moved to the unorganized territories or new states.
Many went home and tried to just survive the reconstruction.
I have heard stories of former Confederate Soldiers joining foreign troops like the French Foreign Legion in the English, French and German empires of the late 1800's.
As a group though, many just went home and tried to live their lives as best they could.
Soldiers on the losing side of a war go where they can to forget, to make a living, to just get by as they aren't the celebrated hero's with flags and parades, veteran benefits can be minimal, some feel they failed by losing the war, and want to just forget it ever happened.
No matter the causes of the war, the guys that served and sacrificed for their cause still did their duty and should be remembered that way.
As has been posted here multiple times, this is not what the State's leaders proclaimed in speeches and written declarations. It was very much about slavery--not whether it could continue, but it's expansion to the western territory and survival in the south. Every Southern State mentions the attack on slavery as the impetus for succession. It's hard not to believe the written word of the actual leaders of the time period. Sure, we can argue state rights versus federal, but it was a division over the expansion of slavery that was the crux of the argument. Southern states felt the federal government had no right to limit or restrict slavery; therefore, they claimed state rights. If we look at root cause, slavery and its expansion was the issue.
That is a dubious assertion. Those states had no desire to expand slavery into new states or territories. Why would they agitate for competition against their own existing slave labor force?
So it had nothing to do with the EXPANSION of slavery, as I already noted, yes they all recognized the importance of slave labor to their economies. They did recognize the hostility to slavery as a factor that political association with the north was no longer practical as a matter of ideology and belief (again, going back to the concept of sovereign states forming a Republic voluntarily...this is the core of the states rights issue).
Labor within their OWN political association. Why would they care if some new state allowed slavery? It has no impact on them, and in fact is worse for them if they do allow slavery, because now they have another competitor.
The was was very clearly about slavery. The Bill of Secession passed by the legislature of each of the states of the Confederacy mentioned slavery as a reason for the action they were taking.
Yah, so what, so it mentions slavery...that's because the hostility to slavery is an EXAMPLE of the reason for secession, which is that the basis for political association is no longer desirable or practical. Its merely an example. Its like people who read something into the Second Amendment that isn't there, that simply because a militia is given as an example of the things necessary to the security of a free people, that the only purpose of recognizing the right to keep and bear arms is to form one. Its a backwards view of the intention of the statement.
Likewise, secession is simply saying "We no longer see things eye to eye....our political association is thus not working for me...so I'm leaving."
That's all secession statements are. Some gave no reasons at all. They don't have to provide an exhaustive list although its good form to do so, as indicated by the Declaration of Independence as a model. Why is it taken as a maxim that anyone has the right to force people into political association or to keep one they have joined in the past, when the founding documents themselves recognize that a natural right of man is the freedom of political association? How quickly we forget what the natural rights of man were once recognized to be. This is fundamental stuff.
I don't know if I'd call them bad guys. Despite what popular culture and public schools try to tell everyone, the Civil War was about a lot more than just slavery. In many ways, the South was fighting for the same things the Founding Fathers believed in. The corollary would have been the Founders losing to Britain.
Only about 5% of southerners owned slaves.
The South did not actually initiate the conflict...it was initiated via provocations by the North - the thesis was that the North did so in order to eradicate slavery - that is demonstrably untrue.
It is true that the major cotton producing states were the first to secede. Again this was in response to aggression (blockade) and not necessarily over slavery, although they all recognized that the North's platform of abolition or preventing expansion of slavery was detrimental to their economic interests.
Slavery has been a scapegoat for the conflict, but was not the central issue. The central issue remains one of state's rights and the proper behavior and role of the federal government in its relationships with sovereign states - our republic was intended to be a political association of sovereign states, not a dictatorship ruled by DC. Unfortunately that is what it has been ever since the war and now we have a truly illegitimate government that cannot even abide its own laws and does not heel to any of the checks and balances placed upon it by the Founders.
Time for it to go.
This is just right wing neoconfederate bull manure. First of all, about 20% of southern families owned slaves. Probably 3 or 4 times that percentage or more would have liked to own slaves if they could have afforded them. Many Southerners who couldn't afford to buy slaves rented them from their owners, for all kinds of work, from household help to factory labor. Others made their livings by managing plantations for slave owners or by arranging the purchase and transporting of slave-produced staples from the interior to the coasts, so the percentage of Southerners who benefited economically from slavery was significantly higher than just the percentage of slave owners.
It's no accident that the Confederate constitution specifically protects slavery, even against the vaunted and beloved doctrine of "states' rights" :
Article I Section 9(4):
Quote:
No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
Article IV Section 2(1)
Quote:
The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Article IV Section 3(3)
Quote:
The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several states; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form states to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states.[
As for "aggression", it was the Confederate states that declared themselves no longer part of the Union (beginning in January, 1861), that seized federal property including forts (January-April ,1861), and that fired on the US flag in Charleston Harbor (April 12, 1861), all of which happened before Lincoln proclaimed the naval blockade of southern shipping on April 19, 1861.
That is a dubious assertion. Those states had no desire to expand slavery into new states or territories. Why would they agitate for competition against their own existing slave labor force?
So it had nothing to do with the EXPANSION of slavery, as I already noted, yes they all recognized the importance of slave labor to their economies. They did recognize the hostility to slavery as a factor that political association with the north was no longer practical as a matter of ideology and belief (again, going back to the concept of sovereign states forming a Republic voluntarily...this is the core of the states rights issue).
Labor within their OWN political association. Why would they care if some new state allowed slavery? It has no impact on them, and in fact is worse for them if they do allow slavery, because now they have another competitor.
Southern states wanted slavery to spread to the new territories as they became states in order to maintain at least a balance in the Senate of slave vs. free states. If new territories were added without slaves, when they became states the Senate would quickly be slanted against slavery which could lead to the legal overturning of the practice. This is very basic History 101.
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