The Civil War was not fought over slavery. This is trivial to demonstrate.
Consider the Corwin Amendment:
The Corwin Amendment is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that has never been adopted, but owing to the absence of a ratification deadline, could still be adopted by the state legislatures. It would shield slavery within the states from the federal constitutional amendment process and from abolition or interference by Congress. Although the Corwin Amendment does not explicitly use the word slavery, it was designed specifically to protect slavery from federal power. The outgoing 36th United States Congress proposed the Corwin Amendment on March 2, 1861, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, with the intent of preventing that war and preserving the Union. It passed Congress but was not ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures.Yeah, yeah - Wikipedia. But the article plays it straight up.
So if the war was about slavery, why did both houses of Congress pass this amendment, and why did the President sign the bill, sending it to the States for ratification? And oh by the way, Congress passed this without the Representatives from the seceding States.
And Abraham Lincoln - the "Great Emancipator" himself did not oppose the Amendment.
So the War was all about slavery, but Congress was playing 6-dimension chess or something, right?
[rolls eyes]
I'm no fan of Haley, but she is also right that the question was a liberal plant. Her response might have been bad politics in 2023, but she is 100% correct on the facts.
But while facts are stubborn things, so is the ignorance and arrogance of the media (including the ostensibly conservative media). Remember, the history of that war as taught today is retarded.
17 comments:
Slavery was, and still is, evil, and it was then used to inflame the people of the Northern States against the Southern States, but I do not think that it was the reason that the Civil War was necessary.
There were THREE sides in the Civil War. The Northern States, the Southern States, and the Federal Government.
The Northern States had an internally focussed manufacturing based economy and wanted high and protective tariffs. The Southern States had a raw materials export based economy, trading with Europe, and wanted low tariffs.
Because the Federal government was primarily dependent on tariffs and import / export duties for its funding, the Federal Government could not survive the secession of the Southern States and the loss of their revenue.
This is also shown by the 10+ years that it took after the Civil War to absorb the Greenback Dollar wartime inflation back into the gold coin economy.
Had the secession been accepted, there would still have been conflict between North and South over the Western territories, but that would have been much later.
Ft Sumpter was about Federal preparations to enforce tariffs at Charleston, the highest volume port on the continent at that time.
American history is whatever certain people want it to be. As you said, the Civil War was NOT about slavery. Slavery was merely a catalyst used to get Northerners pissed off at the South. PLENTY of Northerners owned slaves. The issue that spurred the secession of the South was unequal representation in Congress, resulting in unequal distribution of tax revenue. Of course, you KNOW that isn't taught in school anymore...
And not to forget a quote from Abram Lincoln himself:
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."
Yes, she was right. So? The Sheeple have been so ingrained with the 'truth' that Slavery was the #1 cause of the American Civil War of Northern Aggression and Southern Secession that after the war, New Jersey, New York and several other Northern States (you know, the good guys who fought for Freedom of Slaves) still had over 30,000 slaves owned and the last wasn't freed until 1868.
Slavery was part of the many causes of the war, it was not the single issue that started it.
Try telling this fact to people and it's like trying to tell a normal college student that Hamas is bad, that North Korea is a hellhole, that the ChiComs are not our friends, that abortion is murder and on and on.
Can you find anything in the Declaration of Secession of South Carolina that isn't connected to slavery? It seems pretty clear to me from the plain words they wrote, what they were mad about:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
"And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act. "
"In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made."
"For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery."
David,
You make a good point but that is somewhat subsumed by the fact that the entire economic basis of the Southern states was based on labor that belonged to Capital. The States advanced the notion that they were entitled to the labor they bought fair and square in strict accordance with the rules and anybody trying to set all of that aside and destroy and plunder their economy was simply, the enemy.
Slavery was doomed but there was no reason for it to cause a horrible Civil War before it collapsed. All the slave owners had to do was free their slaves and pay them every bit as much as the mill and mine owners paid their child laborers and voila, an end to slavery.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/nikki-haley-acknowledges-civil-war-about-slavery-after-facing-backlash/ar-AA1m9GcN
It didn't take too long before this piece of political human garbage decided to abandon the truth in favor of political points.
She is almost as bad as Biden.
Nikki worked with Trump for two years, obviously she didn't learn as much as needed. The reason we fought the civil war: Democrats!
Both true and infuriating to the left.
Good point!
Fun fact: The various declarations of secession talked so much about slavery that they utterly exhausted the South's stockpile of the word "slavery" to the point where their history schoolbooks have to strictly ration it to this day.
And, David, if Slavery was so bad, why didn't many Northern States ditch the peculiar trade until after the war and being forced by Congress?
States like Ohio and Illinois were non-slave states and were the ones raising a ruckus about expansion of slavery into new territories. But, curiously, not New York, New Jersey and several other states. Hmmm.
Slavery as it was pre-Civil War was doomed. That would be chattel slavery. Slavery as represented by serfs and peasants (persons tied to the land or to a job) was increasing, especially in the North amongst 'factory towns' and 'factory farms' (go read up on the founding of The Grange to see how wage and land slavery was controlling farmers after the Civil War.)
Secession was about slavery. The war was about Lincoln's invasion. Secession =/ war. Both were independent choices. Something that should be remembered as secession and civil war loom again.
There were certainly causes other than slavery that led to the Civil War, but slavery was *by far* the most important. Here's a historian's view:
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160242
Yet, curiously, slavery was so evil that Congress had to outlaw it in the Northern States after the war. Hmmm...
Maybe the Slavery Cause was due to the Northern States putting pressure on the South to get rid of slavery while maintaining slavery for their own use.
Could it be (putting tinfoil hat on) that we've been lied to, about the causes of the Successions and the War, by our education system and our 'elites' and 'the Swamp'?
Slavery WAS a factor in the War Of Northern Aggression but not the on!y one. Economics, money and expanding the power of the Federal government were bigger factors.
My read of the Constitution indicates that the President has no role in proposing amendments. That is totally a Congressional prerogative. States may convene an Article V convention but that was not used in this case. Presidents can play a political role. Buchannan actually signed the Corwin amendment though it was not necessary. Lincoln, following a precedent set by George Washington, performed a ministerial role in transmitting it to the states and expressed his approval but did not sign it.
Slavery is the ex post facto excuse for the astounding amounts of bloodshed of the war. History is written by the victors, and they wanted something that seemed noble and moral. That the Federal government wanted tariff and excise taxes and the northern states wanted to force the southern states to buy manufactured goods from them instead of England, but that didn't seem very noble.
The different economies of the north and south were the cause. Slavery was a vital component of the southern economy, so it is easily conflated.
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