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If you dont want to lie to people, then stop pretending the Civil war was about slavery, it was about state rights to leave the union PERIOD.. it would very well have been ANY ISSUE..
Lincoln didn't want the country to fall apart, it's been known that he wasn't exactly "anti-slavery", but seeing what he would have to become in order to defeat the south he changed his tune.
Sorry, if I want to learn history I turn to history books and preserved originals.
Not some MSM story.
Do some yourself and work to clear up your simplistic approach. Start here, with the words of a more rigorous thinker than I:
"Many Southerners call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression”, and they’re close to being right. The history of the Civil War is one of a power struggle between political and economic elites, over money and control of an industry —like almost every single war that has ever been fought. The moral reasons that are trotted out to justify the war in propaganda terms, things like “they hate us for our freedoms”, “they want our land”, “they worship a false god and seek to wipe out our religion”, “they want to subjugate us to their system”, or in this case “we have to ride to the rescue of the slave population”, are lies. They are always lies, and these lies exist to sell the war to the common people who have to fight and die in it while the elites sit pretty far from the front lines. Guns ‘n’ Roses said it right when they said “I don’t need your civil war, it feeds the rich while it buries the poor”. The power elites of the North never cared about the lives of the slaves, they weren’t interested in playing hero for subjugated people they didn’t even consider human, though it was useful to them to be percieved as heroic.
"So what was the war really about? Believe it or not, it all boiled down to something very simple:
"Commodity prices for the cotton cash crop.
"I say believe it or not because it is difficult to wrap your head around the idea that so much blood could be spilled and so much destruction wrought over something so simple, but it was very important to the rich whose fortunes depended on the market surrounding cotton. The equivalent of billions of dollars (adjusted for inflation) were at stake, and the rich elite with a stake in that market were willing to do whatever it took to protect and advance their position in what was the primary profit industry of the time.
"To understand this, you have to go back to at least a century prior, to before the United States itself. The North had a poor climate for growing crops, but they had a vital sea port in the New York Harbor. They had a head start in infrastructure development having been colonized much longer than the South. So the way it played out in those early days was that the North ended up with the port and urban unfrastructure and a higher population, and the South had a lower population and little development but a ton of arable land. Southern people with money acquired large amounts of land and built plantations to grow the cash crop cotton, which was the base raw material for the textiles industry which was king in those days. Think of cotton like what oil would become later, a precious resource people made fortunes from and the control of which were immensely valuable. The Southern plantation owners sold the cotton to the North which had the infrastructure to resell to England, which in turn sold to continental Europe. It was a huge industry.
"The South was low in population, and was the low man on the totem pole in the textile industry with the highest labor cost due to the immense amount of backbreaking manual labor involved in planting, harvesting, and processing raw cotton to be packaged and shipped for sale. They had to provide this raw material at a wholesale price that allowed two layers of middlemen to make a profit as well, and they had no choice because they lacked the port infrastructure to ship overseas themselves or to sell to the English directly. So how could they meet production quotas and the massive amount of labor needed at the commodity prices their business partners demanded? It seemed impossible. Enter slavery.
"Remember, the South had no seafaring capacity, they couldn’t go get slaves from overseas. They were sold those slaves from the very same people who they sold their cotton to, meaning the North made the money coming and going. They imported slaves from overseas, sold them to the Southern plantation owners, and bought the cotton commodities to resell overseas. They were making out like bandits. In the process, poor Southern whites were locked out of the labor market in the only major industry that existed. They were forced to settle for a hardscrabble existence as subsistence farmers perpetually in debt to the local banks who held foreclosure over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.
"It’s important to note that at no point is any of this motivated by hatred of black people, those theories came later to justify the crime after the fact. The calculation to use, abuse, and discard these human beings was entirely an economic one, and the concept that these were lesser, inhuman beings barely more than livestock animals was invented to defray the blame for what was obviously a horrific crime against humanity. The elites didn’t care, they neither hated nor loved black people, and never did. They used, abused, and discarded human beings for their own profit and power because that’s what the elite has always done to the lower classes. It has been that way since at least feudalism and to this day has not changed. The elites didn’t need to justify their use and abuse of humans for their own peace of mind, they were perfectly happy doing so with no illusions attached. They needed the “blacks are an inferior species” myth to cover their asses, nothing more. They didn’t care at all either way just so long as the money and power gravy train kept flowing in their direction.
"Fast forward to the 19th century. A new nation stands where the colonies once did, but the same base economic structure is still in place. The South produced cotton to sell to the North (which had production facilities by this point so they could process the raw cotton into cloth and thus make a smaller, more valuable and easy to ship product they could charge more for, increasing their profit margin without passing on a share ot their Southern suppliers, one source of tension), the North sold to the British who sold to mainland Europe just like before. However, some things had changed.
"One, the nation expanded westward and the Louisiana purchase brought with it a vital new aquisition: the Port of New Orleans. With that in the South, suddenly there was capacity to ship their product overseas that Southern plantation elites had never had before. Add to that the fact that Britain was also industrializing and liked the idea of buying raw material and pricessing it themselves for the additional profit. That change in situation meant that it was possible for the South to deal with Britain directly and cut out the Northern middlemen entirely. The Southern and British elites stood to win big, and the Northern ones stood to lose it all.
"There was only one barrier to this, the fact that all trade treaties must be negotiated and approved by the Federal government. Prior to Western expansion, the North and South were rather balanced against each other in numbers of states and thus control of Congress. The addition of new Western states changed the game. That is the basis for the struggle over whether new states could and would be “Slave States” or “Free States”. The economy of those new states had nothing to do with the cotton production industry and thus they didn’t need or want slaves per se. Nor did the Southern elites really care if they had slaves or not. What mattered was control of Congress, as the status of “Free State” or “Slave State” pretty much determined which side the new state would fall into. It wasn’t about slavery, it was about which coalition the new states would join and how it would affect the balance of powet in Congress. If the South couldn’t win and keep Congress, they couldn’t get the trade treaty they needed to sell to Britain directly. Northern control of Congress would make that impossible, as no Northern politician would vote to cut the economic legs out from under the rich elites of their own region.
"When the North rammed through the law that no new states could be “Slave States”, they guaranteed that the South would never control Congress again. They would never be able to get the trade treaty they needed. At that point, the Civil War was inevitable. It was that law, not Fort Sumter, that started the Civil War. The South would be forevermore subjugated to the political and economic control of the North, and rather than submit to this they chose to rebel. If they were an independent nation, they could make whatever trade agreements they wanted and nobody in the North could say or do anything about it. The war was on.
"NONE of this was for the benefit or detriment of black people, the elites pulling the strings saw them only as livestock, as living farm equipment and nothing more. The North didn’t care about saving them, and the South didn’t care about subjugating them beyond the economic benefit of doing so. The moment something better and cheaper came along, which would in the form of steam engines and new machinery such as the cotton gin and early tractors, they’d happily abandon slavery in favor of the better cheaper option. It was all about profit and power, and any other justification is an out and out lie.
"So what about the flag and Rebel pride? Look at it from the perspective of the majority of poor Southern whites who did the fighting and dying. They were by and large illiterate and struggled just to survive. They had no stake in protecting slavery because slavery was actually bad for them. It kept them from being able to get work on the cotton farms —the original “dey took er jerbs!” situation. They would have been better off if all the slaves had been shipped back home the very next day. They had nothing whatsoever to gain and everything to lose. And lose they did. To them, the Union army was an invading force that burned, slaughtered, raped and pillaged as they progressed. Which is accurate, as that’s how invading armies rolled back then and to a large degree that still happens. To them, they were already poor and miserable and here come these Northern marauders destroying what little they had. Ofthen they didn’t even know why. They were illiterate, remember? They sure as hell weren’t up on current events in the political and economic elite circles that would allow them to understand what was happening. All they knew was that they were being invaded and destroyed.
"Organized racism in the South didn’t arise until Reconstruction, when people were encouraged to look at the black slaves as the scapegoats for their suffering. The North was happy to proclaim “we fought this war to rescue those poor innocent slaves!” and the Southern elite was happy to repeat that in the form of “you suffered and died and lost everything because the invader wanted to rescue these (subhuman) people”. Add to that the classic divide and conquer tactic of keeping the poor whites in line by creating a subclass below them to divert nager and resentment onto, and you have the formula for the hatred that has still not yet burned itself out.
"Thus, to me the Confederate Flag represents the people who carried it into battle, rebels trying to protect their homes and people and the right to economic and political self-determination. The South has always been screwed over economically and politically by the more powerful North, and the Rebel flag was about breaking free of that domination. Yes, there was a horrible human toll in the form of slavery that existed at the time and as part of the economic system of the day, but that horror existed prior to the Rebellion and was only proximate to it. Slavery was only a side issue to the real causes, which I outlined above and were entirely political and economic. They would have occurred with or without slavery, though the issues surrounding slavery certainly made things worse.
"If I had my way, the Rebel Flag would be taken up by the working class of all races, reclaimed as a symbol of what it actually was then, a struggle of economic underdogs against more powerful dominators. It would become the symbol of the Rebellion we really need, which is the common man and woman of all races against the elite that screw us all and suck us dry of our blood and sweat without the slightest mercy or care. A worker’s rebellion.
Sorry, if I want to learn history I turn to history books and preserved originals.
Not some MSM story.
Lincoln had one concern..to preserve the union.
Speaking of preserved originals, try reading the secession papers, and the confederate constitution. Those documents alone dispel the "states' rights" bullshyte.
If you dont want to lie to people, then stop pretending the Civil war was about slavery, it was about state rights to leave the union PERIOD.. it would very well have been ANY ISSUE..
LOL The flag doesn't make people racist, people make the flag racist, getting rid of the flag will not change racism one bit. The people crying over the flag are the people keeping racism alive and well.
To begin with, because you have chosen to selectively attribute only the most negative, racial motives associated with the history and meaning of this flag to those people who display it or identify with it. You pretty much have to be obsessed with racism to assess this with such a narrow racist view. Somehow you have become willfully ignorant of the fact that this was the flag for an entire country, short lived though it was. And of course there is a more modern sense of regional identity as well that many people in the South express by their presentation of this flag. There were also a substantial number of other meanings. So your overly narrow, insulting, harshly condemning racist view is incomplete and therefore not accurate, to say the least
Everything seen through the prism of race. Relentless name calling, hatefulness, personal attacks and invocations of racial epithets. If these aren't the hallmarks of a racist, then I don't know what is.
And the South continues to have a sense of regional identity to this day. You clearly have a negative, insulting opinion towards people who you identify as associating with that regional identity, or who identify themselves by that regional identity. This is classic bigotry, although the politically correct left considers it acceptable to be bigoted towards people that it does not approve of. But regardless of what the leftist echo chamber hypocritically thinks or says about this, people who have this attitude, including apparently you, are bigots nevertheless.
I'm from the South and have a history degree from a Southern University. The elderly professor who taught my Old South and Civil War and Reconstruction classes was a direct descendant of a Civil War general who was buried in his uniform. Most of the Confederate soldiers were poor - they had no slaves. But they fought and died for their homes and their way of life. Their brave sacrifice is still worth honoring. I think I'll send the Sons of Confederate Veterans a nice donation - or pick something up on their on-line gift shop.
Do some yourself and work to clear up your simplistic approach. Start here, with the words of a more rigorous thinker than I:
"Many Southerners call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression”, and they’re close to being right. The history of the Civil War is one of a power struggle between political and economic elites, over money and control of an industry —like almost every single war that has ever been fought. The moral reasons that are trotted out to justify the war in propaganda terms, things like “they hate us for our freedoms”, “they want our land”, “they worship a false god and seek to wipe out our religion”, “they want to subjugate us to their system”, or in this case “we have to ride to the rescue of the slave population”, are lies. They are always lies, and these lies exist to sell the war to the common people who have to fight and die in it while the elites sit pretty far from the front lines. Guns ‘n’ Roses said it right when they said “I don’t need your civil war, it feeds the rich while it buries the poor”. The power elites of the North never cared about the lives of the slaves, they weren’t interested in playing hero for subjugated people they didn’t even consider human, though it was useful to them to be percieved as heroic.
"So what was the war really about? Believe it or not, it all boiled down to something very simple:
"Commodity prices for the cotton cash crop.
"I say believe it or not because it is difficult to wrap your head around the idea that so much blood could be spilled and so much destruction wrought over something so simple, but it was very important to the rich whose fortunes depended on the market surrounding cotton. The equivalent of billions of dollars (adjusted for inflation) were at stake, and the rich elite with a stake in that market were willing to do whatever it took to protect and advance their position in what was the primary profit industry of the time.
"To understand this, you have to go back to at least a century prior, to before the United States itself. The North had a poor climate for growing crops, but they had a vital sea port in the New York Harbor. They had a head start in infrastructure development having been colonized much longer than the South. So the way it played out in those early days was that the North ended up with the port and urban unfrastructure and a higher population, and the South had a lower population and little development but a ton of arable land. Southern people with money acquired large amounts of land and built plantations to grow the cash crop cotton, which was the base raw material for the textiles industry which was king in those days. Think of cotton like what oil would become later, a precious resource people made fortunes from and the control of which were immensely valuable. The Southern plantation owners sold the cotton to the North which had the infrastructure to resell to England, which in turn sold to continental Europe. It was a huge industry.
"The South was low in population, and was the low man on the totem pole in the textile industry with the highest labor cost due to the immense amount of backbreaking manual labor involved in planting, harvesting, and processing raw cotton to be packaged and shipped for sale. They had to provide this raw material at a wholesale price that allowed two layers of middlemen to make a profit as well, and they had no choice because they lacked the port infrastructure to ship overseas themselves or to sell to the English directly. So how could they meet production quotas and the massive amount of labor needed at the commodity prices their business partners demanded? It seemed impossible. Enter slavery.
"Remember, the South had no seafaring capacity, they couldn’t go get slaves from overseas. They were sold those slaves from the very same people who they sold their cotton to, meaning the North made the money coming and going. They imported slaves from overseas, sold them to the Southern plantation owners, and bought the cotton commodities to resell overseas. They were making out like bandits. In the process, poor Southern whites were locked out of the labor market in the only major industry that existed. They were forced to settle for a hardscrabble existence as subsistence farmers perpetually in debt to the local banks who held foreclosure over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.
"It’s important to note that at no point is any of this motivated by hatred of black people, those theories came later to justify the crime after the fact. The calculation to use, abuse, and discard these human beings was entirely an economic one, and the concept that these were lesser, inhuman beings barely more than livestock animals was invented to defray the blame for what was obviously a horrific crime against humanity. The elites didn’t care, they neither hated nor loved black people, and never did. They used, abused, and discarded human beings for their own profit and power because that’s what the elite has always done to the lower classes. It has been that way since at least feudalism and to this day has not changed. The elites didn’t need to justify their use and abuse of humans for their own peace of mind, they were perfectly happy doing so with no illusions attached. They needed the “blacks are an inferior species” myth to cover their asses, nothing more. They didn’t care at all either way just so long as the money and power gravy train kept flowing in their direction.
"Fast forward to the 19th century. A new nation stands where the colonies once did, but the same base economic structure is still in place. The South produced cotton to sell to the North (which had production facilities by this point so they could process the raw cotton into cloth and thus make a smaller, more valuable and easy to ship product they could charge more for, increasing their profit margin without passing on a share ot their Southern suppliers, one source of tension), the North sold to the British who sold to mainland Europe just like before. However, some things had changed.
"One, the nation expanded westward and the Louisiana purchase brought with it a vital new aquisition: the Port of New Orleans. With that in the South, suddenly there was capacity to ship their product overseas that Southern plantation elites had never had before. Add to that the fact that Britain was also industrializing and liked the idea of buying raw material and pricessing it themselves for the additional profit. That change in situation meant that it was possible for the South to deal with Britain directly and cut out the Northern middlemen entirely. The Southern and British elites stood to win big, and the Northern ones stood to lose it all.
"There was only one barrier to this, the fact that all trade treaties must be negotiated and approved by the Federal government. Prior to Western expansion, the North and South were rather balanced against each other in numbers of states and thus control of Congress. The addition of new Western states changed the game. That is the basis for the struggle over whether new states could and would be “Slave States” or “Free States”. The economy of those new states had nothing to do with the cotton production industry and thus they didn’t need or want slaves per se. Nor did the Southern elites really care if they had slaves or not. What mattered was control of Congress, as the status of “Free State” or “Slave State” pretty much determined which side the new state would fall into. It wasn’t about slavery, it was about which coalition the new states would join and how it would affect the balance of powet in Congress. If the South couldn’t win and keep Congress, they couldn’t get the trade treaty they needed to sell to Britain directly. Northern control of Congress would make that impossible, as no Northern politician would vote to cut the economic legs out from under the rich elites of their own region.
"When the North rammed through the law that no new states could be “Slave States”, they guaranteed that the South would never control Congress again. They would never be able to get the trade treaty they needed. At that point, the Civil War was inevitable. It was that law, not Fort Sumter, that started the Civil War. The South would be forevermore subjugated to the political and economic control of the North, and rather than submit to this they chose to rebel. If they were an independent nation, they could make whatever trade agreements they wanted and nobody in the North could say or do anything about it. The war was on.
"NONE of this was for the benefit or detriment of black people, the elites pulling the strings saw them only as livestock, as living farm equipment and nothing more. The North didn’t care about saving them, and the South didn’t care about subjugating them beyond the economic benefit of doing so. The moment something better and cheaper came along, which would in the form of steam engines and new machinery such as the cotton gin and early tractors, they’d happily abandon slavery in favor of the better cheaper option. It was all about profit and power, and any other justification is an out and out lie.
"So what about the flag and Rebel pride? Look at it from the perspective of the majority of poor Southern whites who did the fighting and dying. They were by and large illiterate and struggled just to survive. They had no stake in protecting slavery because slavery was actually bad for them. It kept them from being able to get work on the cotton farms —the original “dey took er jerbs!” situation. They would have been better off if all the slaves had been shipped back home the very next day. They had nothing whatsoever to gain and everything to lose. And lose they did. To them, the Union army was an invading force that burned, slaughtered, raped and pillaged as they progressed. Which is accurate, as that’s how invading armies rolled back then and to a large degree that still happens. To them, they were already poor and miserable and here come these Northern marauders destroying what little they had. Ofthen they didn’t even know why. They were illiterate, remember? They sure as hell weren’t up on current events in the political and economic elite circles that would allow them to understand what was happening. All they knew was that they were being invaded and destroyed.
"Organized racism in the South didn’t arise until Reconstruction, when people were encouraged to look at the black slaves as the scapegoats for their suffering. The North was happy to proclaim “we fought this war to rescue those poor innocent slaves!” and the Southern elite was happy to repeat that in the form of “you suffered and died and lost everything because the invader wanted to rescue these (subhuman) people”. Add to that the classic divide and conquer tactic of keeping the poor whites in line by creating a subclass below them to divert nager and resentment onto, and you have the formula for the hatred that has still not yet burned itself out.
"Thus, to me the Confederate Flag represents the people who carried it into battle, rebels trying to protect their homes and people and the right to economic and political self-determination. The South has always been screwed over economically and politically by the more powerful North, and the Rebel flag was about breaking free of that domination. Yes, there was a horrible human toll in the form of slavery that existed at the time and as part of the economic system of the day, but that horror existed prior to the Rebellion and was only proximate to it. Slavery was only a side issue to the real causes, which I outlined above and were entirely political and economic. They would have occurred with or without slavery, though the issues surrounding slavery certainly made things worse.
"If I had my way, the Rebel Flag would be taken up by the working class of all races, reclaimed as a symbol of what it actually was then, a struggle of economic underdogs against more powerful dominators. It would become the symbol of the Rebellion we really need, which is the common man and woman of all races against the elite that screw us all and suck us dry of our blood and sweat without the slightest mercy or care. A worker’s rebellion.
"A man can dream, can’t he?"
Even the states themselves outline the primary reason for leaving the Union as their perceived threat to the end of slavery.
Did you even bother to read my post? OF COURSE the southern elites wrapped themselves in grandiose declarations of the defense of the instituion which had enriched them. OF COURSE the northen elites adopted abolition as their moral crusade, after they had wrung all the profit they could from slavery and turned instead to importing penniless immigrants from Europe.
The point remains that the ordinary largely illiterate Southerner saw himself as defending his land from invasion. And the ordinary northern soldier saw himself as fighting for a higher cause that justified any level of brutality -- as later, in Vietnam and the current various locations in the middle east.
Rich people fooling poor people into slaughtering each other for economic superiority: This is news to you?
Did you even bother to read my post? OF COURSE the southern elites wrapped themselves in grandiose declarations of the defense of the instituion which had enriched them. OF COURSE the northen elites adopted abolition as their moral crusade, after they had wrung all the profit they could from slavery and turned instead to importing penniless immigrants from Europe.
The point remains that the ordinary largely illiterate Southerner saw himself as defending his land from invasion. And the ordinary northern soldier saw himself as fighting for a higher cause that justified any level of brutality -- as later, in Vietnam and the current various locations in the middle east.
Rich people fooling poor people into slaughtering each other for economic superiority: This is news to you?
Did you read the link I gave you?
I don't know what is left to refute really, it's all right there.
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I'm from the South and have a history degree from a Southern University. The elderly professor who taught my Old South and Civil War and Reconstruction classes was a direct descendant of a Civil War general who was buried in his uniform. Most of the Confederate soldiers were poor - they had no slaves. But they fought and died for their homes and their way of life. Their brave sacrifice is still worth honoring. I think I'll send the Sons of Confederate Veterans a nice donation - or pick something up on their on-line gift shop.
