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There were many issues that caused the civil war. Slavery was a big one, but lets face facts. Northern Whites were not all that concerned about the welfare of black slaves. Your average Union soldier wasn't fighting and dying because they felt ending slavery was worth the sacrifice of their life. Some may have felt that way, but certainly not all or most.
It was a different day. Loyalty to state was right there with loyalty to country. Kelly is correct in that the Civil war was absolutely the result of a failure to compromise or to seek consensus.
Neo-Confederate bunk. The anti-slavery Republican Party dominated the national election in the northern free states. A key platform issue was prohibiting slavery in U.S. territories and therefore in new states.
The election of Abraham Lincoln and the takeover of the federal government by the Republicans, and the increasingly unwillingness of northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, were repeatedly cited by the slave-owning leaders of the Confederacy in their secessionist documents.
If northerners didn't care about slavery, Lincoln never would have been able to pass a Constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
Kelly's comments about "compromise" were ignorant. Northern and southern leaders had nothing left about which to compromise, unless he believes the Union should have allowed the Confederacy to abolish the Constitution by military force.
For a current U.S. leader to make such a statement, shouldn't they be expected to explain what compromise this leader imagines was possible?
As for Lee, he was an honorable man in some respects, but he also was a slave owner who tortured escaped slaves. This was not admirable by today's standards, nor by the standards in much of the North in 1860. Lee also led a rebellion that was the bloodiest military conflict in American history, regardless of the relatively small population of the nation in the 1860s. Was this an honorable action, given that Lee opposed secession, and well understood that the primary motivation of the war was to preserve the institution of slavery? Virginians such as George Thomas had no problems defending the Union.
Only a neo-Confederate sympathizer would hold Lee on a moral pedestal with no qualms, and he certainly was not universally admired in the North. Without the intervention of Ulysses S. Grant, Lee surely would have been tried for treason along with other southern leaders.
Kelly deserves ridicule and scorn for his comments IMO.
<<The Washington Post has already written about what historians think of Kelly’s thoughts, their assessments ranging from “dangerous” to “kind of depressing.”>>
You cannot judge the past and its people by the standards and insights of today. I am thankful that Lincoln and other US government officials had more wisdom, insight and compassion and were more focused on reunification and healing the wounds of four long years of tragic civil war than in self-righteousness, vindictiveness and punishment.
How about we judge the Confederates by the standards and insights of the time.
Civilized people viewed slavery and treason as wrong back in the day as well. Lots of southerners fought and died on the Union side.
As to who was going to feed those pitiful families if their men were hung or imprisoned, who fed them during the years their men were off fighting for slavery?
Lot of southerners got caught up in a terrible situation not of their doing. But others did it on purpose and they suffered no consequences for it.
Now we have monuments to these traitors. We have the WH riling up their racist base to cover their own treason by carrying on about how how honorable Lee was.
I usually agree with your positions, but you are off the mark here.
You may want to read about the Nuremberg trials and the ratlines, the escape routes for Nazis heading to Argentina and elsewhere where they lived under aliases and didn't go around bragging about being Nazis.
Travel to Germany. Find the monuments to Hitler, Hiss, Goebbels, etc. See how many swastikas you see waving in the breeze.
Davis, Lee, ... none of them stood trial for their treason. These traitors lived out their lives, sans slaves of course, without paying the penalty for all the lives lost and ruined, the dreadful damage they did to the nation.
Despite Lincoln and the rest of the nation trying their best to let bygones be bygones, we've still had generations of hatred.
And now we have Kelly carrying from the WH about Lee being honorable. Disgusting.
Enough already.
Just a little bit of revisionist history.
The Nuremberg trials were for those considered to be war criminals, for those who violated the agreements of how war can be conducted and treatment of prisoners and civilians.
In the case of the civil war, yes we could have put every Confederate soldier captured on trial and shot them. We elected not to because that would have only caused more hate and possibly led to a second civil war.
As it was the North did plenty to ensure further discontent in the South. Read about the carpet baggers.
The Northern victors basically did all they could to rape the south of it's wealth after the war.
Anyone who believes that the average Union soldier fought because they thought freeing the slaves was worth dying for is delusional. The same is true of anyone who thinks that the average confederate soldier fought because they wanted to keep their slaves. The average confederate soldier didn't have slaves. The average confederate fought because they felt that the Federal government was over reaching their authority. Remember back then there was a deep attachment and loyalty to state. We can't uses today's priorities, loyalties or social structors to define what the USA was in the 1860's. I doubt that very many Northerners felt that blacks were equal in any way to them.
The whole let bygones be bygones idea may have started out a generous idea but it certainly was not put into practice by all or even most of the carpetbaggers sent south to govern the defeated south. The south was punished and bled after their surrender.
There were many issues that caused the civil war. Slavery was a big one, but lets face facts. Northern Whites were not all that concerned about the welfare of black slaves. Your average Union soldier wasn't fighting and dying because they felt ending slavery was worth the sacrifice of their life. Some may have felt that way, but certainly not all or most.
It was a different day. Loyalty to state was right there with loyalty to country. Kelly is correct in that the Civil war was absolutely the result of a failure to compromise or to seek consensus. Diplomacy failed.
By today's standards Lee was a traitor to the United States. Back then State's rights were a major concern and the threat of big government and excessive taxation were as well. WE may have won the civil war but lost on the last 2. Now we are an entitlement driven welfare state.
Robert E Lee was a mentor to many of our great military leaders of the day. One can praise an enemy and still respect them, nothing wrong with that.
Neo-Confederate bunk. The anti-slavery Republican Party dominated the national election in the northern free states. A key platform issue was prohibiting slavery in U.S. territories and therefore in new states.
...
I think you are being hasty in your judgment of that post. There are important points in it which should cause us to reflect upon it. I wish I had more time today to give it better attention ...
Of course we all know that slavery is and was a great evil, and that was not lost on most Americans in those years either.
We know that the basic economic structure in the south depended upon slavery, while some (or perhaps many) people in the north and in Europe benefitted from it secondarily. The people of northern states were not always so willing to go to war (and possibly die) to end slavery. The motivation in the north (for or against the war) was much more complicated than most people seem to realize.
Then can you explain these historical facts contributed by another poster.....
Abraham Lincoln repeatedly stated his war was caused by taxes only, and not by slavery,.."My policy sought only to collect the Revenue (a 40*percent federal sales tax on imports to Southern States under the Morrill Tariff Act of 1861)." reads paragraph 5 of*Lincoln's First Message to the U.S. Congress, penned July 4, 1861.
Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd, 1862. It stipulated that if the Southern states did not cease their rebellion and start paying their taxes by January 1st, 1863, then Proclamation would go into effect. When the Confederacy did not yield, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863.
The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the states in rebellion,...it only freed 31. million of the over 4 million slaves.....
Lincoln did not claim slavery was a reason even in his Emancipation Proclamations on Sept. 22, 1862, and Jan. 1, 1863.* Moreover, Lincoln's proclamations*exempted a million slaves under his control from being freed (including General U.S. Grant's four slaves) and offered the South three months to return to the Union (pay 40*percent*sales tax) and keep their slaves.* None did.* Lincoln affirmed his only reason for issuing was:* "as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said (tax) rebellion."
in his first inaugural address, Lincoln declared that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.”
Lincoln declared war to collect taxes in his two presidential war proclamations against the Confederate States, on April 15 and 19th, 1861: "Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein."
On Dec. 25, 1860, South Carolina declared unfair taxes to be a cause of secession: "The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three-fourths (75%) of them are expended at the North (to subsidize Wall Street industries that elected Lincoln)."
even into the reconstruction era, which Johnson failed at miserably , the issue was taxes....all the land procured after the war, (to be given to the blacks)(which Johnson gave back to the plantation owners) would not have been able to collect taxes on for years......
the ""northern""" state of Maryland didn't abolish slavery until 1864......hmmm imagine that
I usually agree with your positions, but you are off the mark here.
You may want to read about the Nuremberg trials and the ratlines, the escape routes for Nazis heading to Argentina and elsewhere where they lived under aliases and didn't go around bragging about being Nazis.
Travel to Germany. Find the monuments to Hitler, Hiss, Goebbels, etc. See how many swastikas you see waving in the breeze.
Davis, Lee, ... none of them stood trial for their treason. These traitors lived out their lives, sans slaves of course, without paying the penalty for all the lives lost and ruined, the dreadful damage they did to the nation.
Despite Lincoln and the rest of the nation trying their best to let bygones be bygones, we've still had generations of hatred.
And now we have Kelly carrying from the WH about Lee being honorable. Disgusting.
Enough already.
Travel to the South. Show me how many former concentration camps, complete with gas chambers, you find.
I am well aware of the Nuremburg trials and all that followed the defeat of Nazi Germany. This situation was entirely different from what occurred after Appomattox.
Yes, I know about Andersonville. Yes, slavery was atrocious. Yes, the South should never have seceded. Yes, the Civil War was a great tragedy for our nation.
But the Confederacy never had a policy of exterminating anyone or any group of people, for any reason. Even the cruelest of slaveholders had no intention of completely - or, it should go without saying, even partially - eliminating the black race. Why would they shoot themselves in the economic foot?
The majority of those who were imprisoned and/or died in the death camps of Nazi Germany were civilians. All were innocent. All were persecuted for their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, disability, political views, or sexual orientation. They were killed or allowed to die after being "sorted" to eliminate the young, the old, the weak, the disabled - the rest were worked to death before dying or being brutally murdered.
Slavery, horrible as it was, does not begin to compare. Those who were enslaved did not face a government policy of deliberate torture and extermination, and if a slaveholder was found to engage in such behavior, he or she would have been prosecuted. Yes, justice was limited for those who were enslaved, but slaveholders were not allowed to kill those they enslaved at random, without consequences.
Slaves were viewed as an economic investment as well as a work force. Why, then, would any typical slaveholder deliberately torture, kill, damage or fail to care for his "investment"? Read the newspapers and diaries and journals of the day - those who did such things were viewed with horror and shunned by their fellow citizens, and frequently (though not often enough) prosecuted. No, most slaves were not cosseted and experienced much fear, sorrow and tragedy in their lives - but they were not systematically murdered for the supposed crime of being who they were, unlike the millions who died in the death camps.
Your comparison is invalid.
BTW, Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the war. You might want to look into it before claiming otherwise.
I'm not going to defend General Kelly - his clueless comments seem to reveal a lack of nuanced knowledge of the past, and I don't care for some of his other statements about contemporary matters. I'm not even going to defend Robert E. Lee, other than to say the obvious: he was a complex, contradictory man, with much that was good and much that was not in his character. But your blanket condemnation of the South as equating with Nazi Germany is extremely revisionist and more than inaccurate. It just isn't the case, and never was.
Goes back to what Kelly said " “I think we make a mistake as a society, and certainly as individuals, when we take what is accepted as right and wrong, and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more and say, ‘What Christopher Columbus did was wrong.’”
We can not judge the past by the present anymore than we can judge the present by the past. Our laws, codes of conduct, morals and social mores are too divergent.
If you believe that the entirety of the civil war was about slaves, rape and lynching of black men, women and children you really need to educate yourself. The civil war was probably one of the most complex wars of all time. As well concluding someone as a low rent ahole for stating their opinion, an opinion I see no untruth in (by the way he was not glorifying Lee), speaks more to your character than anyone else.
Do you believe that people thought whipping, beating, rape and murder were OK to do to other human beings as long as their skin was the right color? That is just a BS copout. Take a look at these pictures and tell me that would have seemed like a normal thing to do to another person during the 1800s.
I did not equate the Confederacy to Germany. I was responding to a post that we didn't even do that to Nazi Germany.
The Nazis in Germany were most certainly put on trial and many escaped to avoid that.
Davis was captured in 1865, wearing his wife's shawl as luck would have it.
He was accused of treason and imprisoned at Fort Monroe. There were attempts to try him for treason, however President Andrew Johnson issued a general pardon in 1868 for all those who fought for the Confederacy, and that was that.
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