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Save yourselves! Do not watch that video! I am afraid you will hurt yourself laughing when you hear the hostess ask if the United Daughters of the Confederacy serves only Confederate war veterans, or veterans of some other war!
Save yourselves! Do not watch that video! I am afraid you will hurt yourself laughing when you hear the hostess ask if the United Daughters of the Confederacy serves only Confederate war veterans, or veterans of some other war!
Where does one even begin...
The significance of the UDC lies not in its present-day clout, which is negligible, but in its lasting contributions to history— both for good and for ill. From its inception in 1894 up through the 1960s, the UDC was the South’s premier social and philanthropic organization, an exclusive social club where the wives, sisters, and daughters of the South’s ruling white elite gathered to “revere the memory of those heroes in gray and to honor that unswerving devotion to principle which has made the confederate soldier the most majestic in history,” as cofounder Caroline Meriwether Goodlett grandly put it. At first, the UDC provided financial assistance and housing to veterans and their widows, offering a vital public service at a time when for all practical purposes most local and state governments in the South were nonfunctional and/or broke. Later, as the veteran population aged, the UDC built homes that allowed indigent veterans and their widows to live out their days with some measure of dignity. Long before there was such a thing as the National Park Service, the UDC played a crucial role in preserving priceless historic sites, war cemeteries, and battlefields across the South. At the same time, it embarked on a spree of monument building: most of those confederate monuments you can still find in hundreds of courthouse squares in small towns across the South were put there by the local UDC chapter during the early 1900s. In its way, the UDC groomed a generation of Southern women for participation in the political process: presidents attended its national convocations, and its voice was heard in the corridors of the U.S. Capitol.
Most of you are forgetting the arrival of the boll weevil in the late 19th century, which devastated the Southern cotton belt. Slavery mushroomed in the South because of cotton and the boll weevil would have ruined the same plantations had the civil war not happened. Once slaves no longer became financially viable, it would have quickly ended as the value of slaves would have declined dramatically and with planters no longer able to afford to maintain, feed and equip their slave forces, emancipation would have been a convenient way out of their problems.
That would have been the English textile mills, who were the customers for southern cotton. Unfortunately for the South, public sentiment in England was strongly anti-slavery, so England cut off support for the South at secession.
Actually Britain never cut off support for the South, at least completely. The ships of the southern navy, the CSS Alabama comes to mind. The British also had little compunction smuggling in the Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle to the rebels (yes it also supplied the Federal government with the weapons as well). But you are right anti-slavery sentiment amongst the working and tradesmen and even sectors of the elite of Britain was very strong and kept Britain from officially recognizing the Confederacy.
The South was going to be overwhelmed by the huge and growing population of the North that was fueled by immigration, and which didn't like slavery (didn't like blacks, either, but that's not the issue), and when that happened, slavery would be swept away. The South couldn't attract immigrants in large numbers because most immigrants refused to compete with slave labor. Europeans chose northern ports of entry. Most ships also came to northern ports because that's where the commerce was. By the 1850s, the Southern slaveholders had already made their section an economic backwater and a social anachronism.
Secession was the only way the South could keep slavery long term, and the North would not ever sanction that. No country willingly gives up its territory without a fight. Whether it happened in 1861 or 1881, there would have been war when the South tried to leave.
The south got its immigration earlier, especially Irish, as successive waves of mostly country folk were forced off of their land, and then later as the scot-irish were then forced off the land they'd been invited to settle as English lords organized their estates in Ireland. But these were largely rural people and the US was equally rural. When cities became manufacturing hubs, and the 'excess poor' arrived, there was a ready made place for them in the industrial north. The south didn't really need more poor people. They had plenty of poor non-slaves already.
If you were an immigrant from eastern europe who had fled slave like conditions as eastern serfdom existed LONG past other places, would you want to go to a place where it was the norm? And those who came in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, which were all about ending inequity and personal rights, would you embrase a place where both were selective? The south *could* have been stopped in expanding, instead of the war, and allowed to sink into the third world in time. It's leaders with their heads firmly in the past, and their own perception, would make it like one of the south/central american states where the Spanish ruling class controlled everyone and the non ruling class behaved or rebelled.
That they were not allowed to leave has been one of the reasons why we are such a large country with such diversity, and that young men who only knew their own little place were shown a much wider world and ceased to think of themselves as only from where they were born is why we can hold together, for we have a wider identity than just where you live.
Slavery would certainly have ended by NOW, regardless. However, without the Civil War, slavery would have continued on for far too long so the War was kind of a necessary evil.
What I find hard to believe is this North vs South mentality that still exists today. As if Slavery is an albatross that only the South must bear! Slavery is a black eye on the entire US, North and South. The entire country shoulders the blame.. it does not belong to the South alone.
Most of you are forgetting the arrival of the boll weevil in the late 19th century, which devastated the Southern cotton belt. Slavery mushroomed in the South because of cotton and the boll weevil would have ruined the same plantations had the civil war not happened. Once slaves no longer became financially viable, it would have quickly ended as the value of slaves would have declined dramatically and with planters no longer able to afford to maintain, feed and equip their slave forces, emancipation would have been a convenient way out of their problems.
That's a awfully good point!
And you are right; the cotton crop was destined to be ruined, big time. Seems like one way or the other, Mississippi was going to see the sun set on her role as Crown Jewel.
Slavery would certainly have ended by NOW, regardless.
Last night I was thinking about this in context of the Cold War, for the life of me I couldn't imagine how the U.S. could wage an ideological war against the Soviets if slavery was still in place, but then I remember that the U.S. for some two decades tried to make the argument of Western superiority only to have the Soviets throw Jim Crow back in our governments face.
After the Civil War Blacks were forced to sign labor contracts. Many jurisdictions passed laws that made it illegal if you were not under contract with planter. You might be charged with loiterring or vagrancy and then be sent pick cotton as a convict.
"At the turn of the century the group of black women most subject to sexual exploitation and abuse were those who lived under the system of quasi-slavery known as “peonage.”Under contract labor laws, which existed in almost every southern state, a laborer who signed a contract and then quit his or her job could be arrested. The horrors of this system of forced labor (as well as the equally horrific system of convict labor) are detailed in this stark, turn-of-the-century personal account of life under the “peonage” system in the South, published in the Independent magazine in 1904. Although this account by an African-American man did not focus especially on the sexual exploitation suffered by his wife and others, his report described how his wife was forced to become a mistress to the plantation’s owner."
"I went off to a neighboring plantation and hired myself out to another man. The new landlord agreed to give me forty cents a day and furnish me one meal. I though that was doing fine. Bright and early one Monday morning I started for work, still not letting the others know anything about it. But they found it out before sundown. The Captain came over to the new place and brought some kind of officer of the law. The officer pulled out a long piece of paper from his pocket and read it to my new employer. When this was done I heard my new boss say “I beg your pardon, Captain. I didn’t know this ****** was bound out to you, or I wouldn’t have hired him.”So I was carried back to the Captain’s. That night he made me strip off my clothing down to my waist, had me tied to a tree in his backyard ordered his foreman to give me thirty lashes with a buggy whip across my bare back, and stood by until it was done. After that experience the Captain made me stay on his place night and day—but my uncle still continued to “draw” my money."
"And I stayed I signed a contract—that is, I made my mark—for one year. The Captain was to give me $3.50 a week, and furnish me a little house on the plantation—a one-room log cabin similar to those used by his other laborers."
These excerpts are from long after the Civil War. This doesn't sound like freedom to me. Slavery was something that was legislated in over 200 years. I would argue that the legislation has never stopped it is just very slow and we don't notice it.
It's interesting how slavery grew out of indentures, and when it ended it went back to them. Those 'contracts' were as fake as the ones those picked up in 'sweeps' on the London street were forced to put their mark before they were loaded onto the ship to sail as owned labor. Just as the farming out of the massive excess prision population in Britan was before the Revolution a rival in earnings for the slave shipping companies who ran both 'trades', it provided another means of cheap labor on one side and lots of money for those who ran it on the other.
So deprived of slavery, the south, still stuck in its old mindset, revived its origion and reainvented the indenture system. It is interesting that the 13th amendment *also* outlawed indentures and many decades later a case of a man who's death due to his captivity, who was white, was the straw that broke the system as the system violated the indenture portion of the thirteenth amendment.
Maybe a program of paying the plantation owners and essentially buying the freedom for the slaves could have prevented that horrible war. And the cost in real monetary terms (not to mention lives) would have been a lot less.
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Would slavery have ended without the Civil War?
