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"Could have," that's your rebuttal? We have to deal in facts. This is the History forum and I can only draw conclusions from what actually happened.
The problem with southern sympathizers who won't acknowledge that slavery was at the center of the conflict is they are looking for something to be proud of, something that was worth fighting for and for them to end slavery is not it. They would much rather try to prove that over 250,000 (95,000 combat)people from the south died in a war as pawns for the wealthy planter class because someone thought they found a loop hole in the tenth amendment.
I have read many diaries of southerners and confederate soldiers and some of them seem to think they didn't benefit from the slave system at all. One diary entry confesses that the plantations are run for "the benefit of Negroes and Planters.. ....mic still rolling around on the floor.
I’m not Southern and there’s nothing for me to apologize for.
It’s history. You either deep dive and read up on all the issues at play, or you get distracted by just one issue and forget everything else thinking the one topic you deeply researched was the sole reasoning behind a war.
Notice the slave holding states that were not dependent on cotton or tobacco didn’t secede. Slavery as legal in Washington D.C. during the beginning of the war. The deeper into the plantation economy itself you get, the stronger the case for secession. Virginia’s articles of secession doesn’t even mention slavery at all other than the context of slave holding states as a whole.
That comment is as dumb as saying "Take away oil from Saudi Arabia and it would likely have succeeded"
There's no way to know that,
but it is a fact that the South was very wealthy thanks to slavery, just like Saudi Arabia with oil.
Look at any modern secessionist movement and you’ll see the same hallmarks that made up the southern secessions. Replace the term slavery and apply any other term and you end up going down the same path.
If this a trend you can’t spot in historical research, then history simply becomes a collection of trivial knowledge.
Actually I want to know why you believe it is "over emphasized" or a "small" issue when it was the direct issue and slavery is involved in all the reasons you cite.
I think you doing your best to not admit that slavery was the major issue of the war probably for some personal reason related to your political views in the modern era. The moral issue of slavery was not a huge factor until 1863 but the economic and political and traditional/cultural aspects of slavery to the south was the reason for the war. It was the primary issue in 1860 for the south to secede, nothing else because without it they would have no reason.
That is why it K-12 education in the US says the war was "about slavery." It was.
People like you confuse more naive, unlearned people into thinking that slavery wasn't the economic, political, traditional/cultural cause when it was because you refuse to acknowledge that it wasn't "minor" and you insert your modern context into 19th century politics when all of them admitted (save NC) that it was about slavery. It is all over their articles of secession.
Agree it's problematic when folks don't get the history correct, it's not a partisan issue, it's a good history issue. Particularly when using the past to validate or legitimize or to rationalize their own present day political beliefs. In historical analysis, it's called 'Presentism':
Quote:
...The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first citation for presentism in its historiographic sense from 1916, and the word may have been used in this meaning as early as the 1870s. The historian David Hackett Fischer identifies presentism as a fallacy also known as the "fallacy of nunc pro tunc". He has written that the "classic example" of presentism was the so-called "Whig history", in which certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British historians wrote history in a way that used the past to validate their own political beliefs. This interpretation was presentist because it did not depict the past in objective historical context but instead viewed history only through the lens of contemporary Whig beliefs. In this kind of approach, which emphasizes the relevance of history to the present, things that do not seem relevant receive little attention, which results in a misleading portrayal of the past. "Whig history" or "whiggishness" are often used as synonyms for presentism particularly when the historical depiction in question is teleological or triumphalist.[3]...
It's pretty clear that your position won't be changed by anything that I say. That's why I suggested that one should undertake the research on their own. You're more likely to believe what you are able to discover for yourself.
Upon secession, Fort Sumter was Confederate territory, not Union. The Confederates were more than willing to allow the union troops at Fort Sumter to leave peacefully. The attack happened because the Union troops refused to leave, and instead, attempted to re-arm and re-supply the fort.
As I've said before, when a bully backs you into a corner, and you punch him as a result, you didn't start the fight. He did.
Jefferson Davis could have learned from George Washington.
After the Revolution. Great Britain continued to occupy forts in the United States, notably in New York and the future Michigan.
President Washington could have gone to war to liberate the forts. Instead he waited them out, used diplomacy, sent the former Secretary of State John Jay to negotiate and eventually the Jay treaty was signed. The forts came into American possession peacefully.
Unfortunately for the South, Jefferson Davis was less wise. Davis ordered Beauregard to attack the fort, against the advice of his own Secretary of State Robert Toombs. Toombs warned that attacking Fort Sumter would stir up the North and turn Northern friends of the South into enemies. He was right.
Why did Davis do it? Perhaps it was because there was negotiations in Congress to find ways to bring the seceded states back into the Union (like the Crittenden Compromise). So the South started the War.
Jefferson Davis could have learned from George Washington.
After the Revolution. Great Britain continued to occupy forts in the United States, notably in New York and the future Michigan.
President Washington could have gone to war to liberate the forts. Instead he waited them out, used diplomacy, sent the former Secretary of State John Jay to negotiate and eventually the Jay treaty was signed. The forts came into American possession peacefully.
Unfortunately for the South, Jefferson Davis was less wise. Davis ordered Beauregard to attack the fort, against the advice of his own Secretary of State Robert Toombs. Toombs warned that attacking Fort Sumter would stir up the North and turn Northern friends of the South into enemies. He was right.
Why did Davis do it? Perhaps it was because there was negotiations in Congress to find ways to bring the seceded states back into the Union (like the Crittenden Compromise). So the South started the War.
Take slaves out of the equation completely and the South would have likely succeeded anyway.
Maybe in some parallel universe but not in the one we inhabit. There are many different minor issues but they all lead back to slavery. You can cut it anyway you want but it always comes back to the basic issue.
Sectionalism in the US was always a point of friction (and still is to a small extent) but holding the Union together was always in everyone's interest. Secession in the south would never have been popularly supported to the point of war if you pretend slavery never existed. The states would not have had enough in common.
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