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When it comes to the Confederates in the ACW how do you think they should be viewed? Should we view the people as all evil types with no love or compassion at all, or should we take how good or bad the people in it were individually?
When it comes to the Confederates in the ACW how do you think they should be viewed? Should we view the people as all evil types with no love or compassion at all, or should we take how good or bad the people in it were individually?
It should be viewed as a very bad and foolish idea, which sadly captured the loyalty of some good men.
A bit like Communism in that respect, though politically very different.
(good topic)
I believe the Confederacy should be viewed as basically in line with American history & ideology (not uniquely 'evil types'). The Confederate states resented a strong centralized government (like the Founding Fathers).. it was primarily an agrarian society (like America as a whole, had basically been for most of it's history up to that point). Their Constitution was a virtual replica of the US Constitution..They were slave-holding states (just like the Border states that stayed in the Union, and most of the Northern states were @ one point.)
My assertion is that the Confederacy didn't really believe anything that was anomalous to American thought or history. Even secession was an idea that was advanced at times in New England, and is essentially what the colonies did in the 1700s. It's just become a modern cultural trend (in my opinion) to selectively demonize the Confederacy: trying to dishonestly & singularly scapegoat them for America's racial sins. I mean how was the South anymore 'evil' than the slave-holding border states who fought for the North (?)
I mean how was the South anymore 'evil' than the slave-holding border states who fought for the North (?)
The Confederate states felt that the need to protect slavery and the economic, social and political benefits which arose from slavery, was important enough to justify breaking up the nation, by force of arms if necessary.
The border states did not.
If you believe that the secession was justified, then of course you will not see it as evil.
If you believe that the Confederate states had a moral obligation to honor the results of the 1860 election, as they pledged to do when they ratified the Constitution, then a case may be made that their actions were evil.
So it is this set of rationalizations vs that set of rationalizations with POV uber alles.
As a missed opportunity. The Union could have let the Southern states have their way, as quickly as possible before they changed their minds, and both would be happier ever after. It was a divide with its roots in Revolutionary days and it'll never heal until the two mentalities go their separate ways. As neighbor nations, we might have been great allies. As a union, we're just dysfunctional together. It's the marriage that should not have outlived the children's growing up.
As a missed opportunity. The Union could have let the Southern states have their way, as quickly as possible before they changed their minds, and both would be happier ever after. .
Rather a Pollyanna sort of view of matters.
Once it has been established that a nation may be fractured and compartmentalized via secession, you no longer have a nation, you have an ad hoc government, the authority of which is respected only to the degree that the citizens agree with a specific law.
Do you think that dividing the North and South into two entities would have been the end of internal conflict in both places? What if three decades after the formation of the Confederacy, the upper South states decided to emancipate their slaves? They do so and the slaves in the lower states now have a border to freedom which previously did not exist. They take advantage of this and angry Alabama slave owners demand that Tennessee return the runaways, and demand the right to send their own agents into Tennessee to hunt down the fugitives. Tennessee then refuses, standing on the doctrine of states rights to conduct their own affairs with regard to any fugitives in the state.
Well, there might be war, or maybe the states which freed their slaves decide to break away from the Confederacy and form their own nation? Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina and Virginia now unite and become the Consolidated States of America?
Further, let us say the gold standard/silver standard controversy which marked American politics in the 1890's results in the secession of several western states who set up the Amalgamated States of America.
Now instead of one powerful nation, there are four smaller, weaker ones. They war on one another, attempt to persuade states to break away from one organization to join another, back different sides in European controversies leading to fighting in America when those Europeans are waging war against one another.
I think that the assumption they would war on one another is fairly speculative, Grandstander, though I think you can make a better case that it would set a precedent leading to further fragmentation--though I would also contend that a precedent of further fragmentation also without war is reasonable, in that case. And I'm not so certain that the daughter nations would necessarily let European controversies spill over here.
(good topic)
I mean how was the South anymore 'evil' than the slave-holding border states who fought for the North (?)
I agree with this, if slaveholding was evil then it was evil whether in the North, South, or West. The evil is not washed away because the border state fought for the North.
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