The confederacy is a convenient villain for Americans today (Washington, Lincoln, European)
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The three impressions that I disagree with are these:
1. The confederacy was a proto-Nazi state
2. The North wanted to liberate slaves
3. The south fought to keep the institution of slavery.
1 - No, the confederacy obviously wasn't a proto-Nazi state. It was the United States 2.0, or at least it was in the mind of the ruling southern aristocracy. The Confederate Constitution was lifted directly from the United States Constitution, with some adjustments that gave more power to the states than the US Constitution allowed and that performed some minor housekeeping (e.g. one six year presidential term instead of multiple 4 year terms). The Confederate Constitution also protected the institution of slavery and allowed for its expansion into the Confederate territories, assuming that the Confederacy would obtain new territories. Many in the CSA envisioned carving out territories from land that eventually became New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Nevada, along with the presumption that additional lands could be conquered in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
2 - No, the North as a whole didn't start out wanting to liberate slaves. However, there was a loud and active Abolitionist movement that greatly concerned Southerners. Nearly every white person in the South lived in fear of servile insurrection, and had been doing so for over two centuries. Toss in the northerners who didn't want slavery expanding into federal territories and who definitely didn't want southerners bringing enslaved blacks into northern states, and some Southerners came to the conclusion that the North (which was really the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast) would eventually dictate limitations to the southern institution of slavery.
3 - Yes, the South did fight to keep the institution of slavery. The Confederate States of America was founded to preserve the outsized political power at the national level that southern elites had wielded since 1790, to preserve the southern institutions and social order that benefitted whites at the expense of non-whites, and to preserve the institution of slavery, including not only keeping slavery but also expanding it to new territories.
Slaves were incredibly important to their economy, to the point that most of the speculative value went to owning slaves.
This was terrible because it turned slaves into a market device. However slavery as an institution was also central to the souths main argument.
They said whites have a duty to uplift black people, in the end this was used for labor management, but there were many small landowners who worked alongside black slaves.
When the North came, they instituted share-cropping, and afterwards pitted black militias against white militias. This led to the Nadir, one of the worst periods of race history in America, and many blacks had their lives turned for the worse, especially house slaves.
So the question is, if there only interest was in slavery as an economic opportunity, why did they reject Lincoln's proposal to permanently institute slavery, and why did they offer the Europeans total abolition for military support. And why did the confederate soldiers (the vast majority of them) not hold any stake in slave ownership?
You have to remember the south was really run as a fuedal society at that point. Slavery was a dying institution without a future, it was self-defeating because it caused the south to not develop beyond an agricultural based/manual dependent economy. Many in the south new this. Robert E. Lee new this.
But at the same time the south was ruled by a small group of very rich land owners that wanted to hold onto what worked for them. Giving up slaves meant giving up power. The north, with their factories, had long since surpased the south as an economic powerhouse.
As to why the south and the symbols are so condemned today, even compared to a few decades ago when The Dukes of Hazard and the General Lee were American icons. Several reasons, some justified, some not:
Hate and white supremacy groups embracing confederate symbols to represent their causes
Social Media influences
Identity politics
"The Cancel Culture"
Demographical shift
Less focus on history in school, particularly contextual
I say this because its historical image has vastly changed in just the course of the past five years.
The Daughters of the Confederacy as well as the neo-Confederate movement made great strides to increase the visibility of "Southern Heritage" and expand literature in school about the subject.
snip (......etc......)
Things are never black and white.
What is this...a term paper?
The neo Confederate "movement" is an effort to rehabilitate the image of the Confederacy by elaborating on a few positives and glossing over the many negatives. They are not defending "the South", as OP and others might lead one to believe, but the Confederacy and the institution of slavery, its raison d'être. History is revised and revisited and viewed through many filters. This is just one. There are others that vilify the Confederacy. Some people are heck-bent to fight the Civil War all over again...ad nauseam. It is a game of Whac-a-Mole and nobody wins and it is divisive. It was over and settled 156 years ago. People today view slavery as a universal wrong. Those that try to defend it or explain it away as "not so bad", whether in 1860 or 2021, get tarred with the same fetid brush. Why continue this? Give it a rest.
3 - Yes, the South did fight to keep the institution of slavery. The Confederate States of America was founded to preserve the outsized political power at the national level that southern elites had wielded since 1790, to preserve the southern institutions and social order that benefitted whites at the expense of non-whites, and to preserve the institution of slavery, including not only keeping slavery but also expanding it to new territories.
This is true, but their view on slavery was more complicated than oppressing black people.
The aristocracy (as you call them) thought blacks would be uplifted until a time which they would gain liberation.
Practically speaking, the south was so dependent on cotton the abolition of slavery was impossible. But before textile mills in the north, slavery was also an institution related to "noblesse-oblige".
The fundamental difference between the north and south is the north was industrious and focused on wage labor, while the south had long standing family ownership of land, and was based on order and stability.
De Tocqueville spoke on this when he compared European Aristocracy to American democracy, and the pros/cons of each respective system.
In the end, they wanted to retain their values separate from the union. They even offered European nations abolishment of slavery in exchange for military support.
The North wanted them for their cotton fields, and made it a primary objective to seize the plantations and move the 'freed' blacks onto the "yankee" fields.
The neo Confederate "movement" is an effort to rehabilitate the image of the Confederacy by elaborating on a few positives and glossing over the many negatives. They are not defending "the South", as OP and others might lead one to believe, but the Confederacy and the institution of slavery, its raison d'être. History is revised and revisited and viewed through many filters. This is just one. There are others that vilify the Confederacy. Some people are heck-bent to fight the Civil War all over again...ad nauseam. It is a game of Whac-a-Mole and nobody wins and it is divisive. It was over and settled 156 years ago. People today view slavery as a universal wrong. Those that try to defend it or explain it away as "not so bad", whether in 1860 or 2021, get tarred with the same fetid brush. Why continue this? Give it a rest.
The neo-confederate movement started with the second KKK, which had nothing to do with the first KKK.
The goal was to use the confederacy to promote jim crow laws, which were started by the union.
The civil war did not liberate slaves, it made their lives worse for many years. The opposition in the north to slavery was not for freeing blacks, but to end the experiment of racial mixing and send blacks back to Africa.
Many neo-confederates today are also neo-Nazis, two groups that were complete opposites. So what do neo-confederates today have to do with the old confederacy? Nothing, they are just using the imagery for racist purposes.
You have to remember the south was really run as a fuedal society at that point. Slavery was a dying institution without a future, it was self-defeating because it caused the south to not develop beyond an agricultural based/manual dependent economy. Many in the south new this. Robert E. Lee new this.
But at the same time the south was ruled by a small group of very rich land owners that wanted to hold onto what worked for them. Giving up slaves meant giving up power. The north, with their factories, had long since surpased the south as an economic powerhouse.
As to why the south and the symbols are so condemned today, even compared to a few decades ago when The Dukes of Hazard and the General Lee were American icons. Several reasons, some justified, some not:
Hate and white supremacy groups embracing confederate symbols to represent their causes
Social Media influences
Identity politics
"The Cancel Culture"
Demographical shift
Less focus on history in school, particularly contextual
"other" (i.e. various)
De Tocquville wrote about this in his pros and cons of democracy vs aristocracy:
Both have their good sides and bad sides, many confederate soldiers were fighting for a way of life while not being slave owners.
The south was more like a European Aristocracy, and it did not want to become like the North, or at least not in the same way. The North invaded to guarantee access to cotton farms in the south for their factories.
I agree that villainizing the South by conflating the region with its past institutions and their fight to preserve those institutions as part of its whole, is a terrible trend.
A trend that is given a lot of life by the fact that there are many in the South (and the country as a whole) who react to such vilification by unabashedly downplaying if not cherishing those institutions and the socially divided country that has resulted.
Well, yes. Now that Manson is dead, we NEED another villian to focus our hatred.
I am really enjoying this thread, great points being made and explained. But being the "history" forum, what is missing is today's tie-in to modern vilification of the Confederacy and the rise of BLM. The recent trend of comparing anything "Conservative" to the Nazi's is in the exact same vein: And that is to promote Communism, without ever saying the Word. What the proponents don't talk about, is that Communism has killed far more innocent people than the Nazi's (or the slave traders, for that matter) could have dreamed of. Stalin took down what, 20 million of his own, and even he is a Piker compared to Chairman Mao, many estimates are between fifty and a hundred million lives lost to the implementation of Communism in China.
It's beyond interesting that McCarthy was right all along. Anyway, back to your local scheduled programming, thanks for this thread.
This is true, but their view on slavery was more complicated than oppressing black people.
The aristocracy (as you call them) thought blacks would be uplifted until a time which they would gain liberation.
The institution of American Slavery wasn't about oppressing Black people. It was about economically exploiting a group of humans and part of that exploitation required that some justification be found for performing such an act. Either it was because Blacks were supposedly inferior (which is what Thomas Jefferson and others argued), or that the Bible gave white people dominion over Blacks, or that enslaved Blacks had it better than free English factory workers in Manchester, or it was just the natural order of things, or some other BS.
But first, it was about the money.
Second, it was about power. Back in 1600's Virginia, splitting Blacks from poor whites divided the group of have-nots, to the benefit of the haves and have mores (according to Edmund S Morgan, see American Slavery, American Freedom).
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Practically speaking, the south was so dependent on cotton the abolition of slavery was impossible. But before textile mills in the north, slavery was also an institution related to "noblesse-oblige".
The South was dependent upon cotton only to the extent that it provided the most profit to maintain the Southern upper class culture. Slave owners didn't feel a sense of "noblesse-oblige" to their slaves - I wonder if you even understand the term?
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The fundamental difference between the north and south is the north was industrious and focused on wage labor, while the south had long standing family ownership of land, and was based on order and stability.
New England was manufacturing, but this was because their land was played out and their merchant marine was destroyed in the War of 1812.
The Middle Atlantic was still agricultural, but it wasn't the singular crop economy that the South had created.
The Midwest was becoming the breadbasket to the world, shipping its corn and wheat to Europe, and its beef and pork from meat packing plants in Chicago to the US cities in the Midwest and North East. Younger than the Tidewater south, there were still family farms passed down from one generation to the next - just not as many generations.
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De Tocqueville spoke on this when he compared European Aristocracy to American democracy, and the pros/cons of each respective system.
Tocqueville spoke of the entirety of the United States, not just the Southern states.
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In the end, they wanted to retain their values separate from the union.
They wanted to maintain their culture, which was highly dependent upon slavery. Consider that after Emancipation, the South continued to produce cotton, even to today.
On top of that, the Southern elites wanted to retain their control of national politics. For 80 years, the South wielded power at the national level far above what its should have had via their percentage of the national population. When a non-Southerner won the Presidency without any Southern support, it was a clear signal to the Southern elites that their time as a dominant national political power was over - time to set up another national order where their power could still rule a nation.
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They even offered European nations abolishment of slavery in exchange for military support.
Only at the very end of the Civil War did the South consider emancipation, and then it was to refill the ranks of the depleted Confederate Army by offering freedom to slaves that enlisted. Even then, it was rejected - one Southern politician objected to the plan, stating that if Black slaves were to make good soldiers then the entire concept of Southern society was wrong (paraphrasing here, but look it up if you'd like).
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The North wanted them for their cotton fields, and made it a primary objective to seize the plantations and move the 'freed' blacks onto the "yankee" fields.
The US federal government did seize the plantations of Southerners who were caught aiding the Confederacy, and they did employ the slaves formerly owned by such Southerners to continue to grow cotton. It helped bring cash to the local economy, kept everything from grinding to a halt and kept the local populace from becoming totally dependent on a financially strapped national government. It was ad-hoc and it wasn't continued after hostilities ceased.
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I've got to ask, just where did you pick up all of your misinformation about the US South prior to 1865?
Slavery was not a dying institution. It was a thriving institution; it was big business in Richmond where an estimated 20,000 slaves were exported south. The breeding farms in VA of slaves is only now being fully explored. Slavery was so much a part of the economy and culture , that the Civil War it was reinstated in a different form: convict leasing. The Black Codes were enforced and violators were swept up into a system where the local government would lease out the convicts to farms, factories and the railroads. Hundreds of thousands were swept up, most of the remainder were left as destitute share croppers; those that did do better in the end were kept in their place or eliminated through violence.
And yes, it was "race" based like Nazi's, the difference is that the Germans worked people to death and exterminated them in camps, the southerners first bred them and then worked them into the ground as animals. There is no way to paint a pretty picture of it, there is no way to excuse it.
The longer slavery existed, the more evil it became. It evolved from a necessary evil, to a Biblically based system and once that happens all rational discourse ends.
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