Quoted
Dean
Quoted:
"Slavery was undoubtedly the immediate fomenting cause of the woeful American conflict. It was the great political factor around which the passions of the sections had long been gathered --the tallest pine in the the political forest around whose top the fiercest lightnings were to blaze and whose trunk was destined to be shivered in the earthquake shocks of war. But slavery was far from being the sole cause of the prolonged conflict. Neither its destruction on the one hand, nor its defense on the other, was the energizing force that held the contending armies to four years of bloody work. I apprehend that if all living union soldiers were summoned to the witness-stand, everyone of them would testify that it was the preservation of the American Union and not the destruction of Southern slavery that induced him to volunteer at the call of his Country. As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps 80% of her armies were neither slave holders, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed than the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its begining to near its close the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the union." --General John Brown Gordon
Quoted:
Historian Hans L. Trefousse wrote: "It is true that Lincoln never, prior to 1862, advocated federal action to end slavery in the states where it existed. Constitutional obligations were important to him, and he hoped that putting an end to the expansion of the institution would in the end cause its demise in the South." "It would do no good to go ahead, any faster than the country," President Lincoln told the Rev. Charles Edwards Lester, himself an emancipation advocate. Mr. Lincoln made his comments after he reversed General John C. Fremont's order of emancipation in Missouri in the summer of 1861: "I think [Massachusetts Senator Charles] Sumner and the rest of you would upset our applecart altogether if you had your way. We'll fetch 'em; just give us a little time. We didn't go into the war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back, and to act differ at this moment, would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause but smack of bad faith; for I never should have had votes enough to send me here if the people had supposed I should try to use my power to upset slavery. Why, the first thing you'd see, would be a mutiny in the army. No, we must wait until every other means has been exhausted. This thunderbolt will keep." (From Mr. Lincoln and Freedom)
Quoted:
"There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil." --Robert E. Lee, five years before the Civil War began
Those of you who quote history and its actors out of context do a grave disservice not just to history, but to the people who are its inheritors--and quite often, to yourselves.
I have as much contempt for people who slam and smear southerners and their heritage (including cringing self-hating southerners), and for those who assume that honoring that heritage amounts to racism, as I do for racist idiots who expropriate the symbols of a long-gone era to justify their own bitter, hateful ideologies.
That's about all I have left to say on the matter.
Related Posts (on one page):
Apu is taking his citizenship test and the question is, "What was the cause of the Civil War?"
Apu starts to go off on economic and other causes and the testor says, "Just say slavery".
I would like to think that if the Civil War had never happened or if it had ended differently we still would have ended slavery long ago.
That's the quote I was looking for! Thanks.
You fail to appreciate the role slavery played in Southern life. The reality was that prior to the Civil War there were in fact TWO American Dreams, one Southern, and one Northern. The war was about whether or not it would stay that way.
Lincoln's primary objective was to save the Union. He saw, wisely, that only by saving the Union could slavery be later eradicated. I suspect he really wanted slavery to be gone, but knew that he could only take it one step at a time.
Yours,
Wince
Then again, there are others who disagree and see my view as naive. Obviously I can't prove they're wrong.
If we take the model of the European peasant, tied by law to his Lord's land as a model, we can see that it did die out all over Europe. Considering the existence of such concepts as the droit de seigneur, European peasants weren't much different than slaves. Sometimes the change was bloody, like the French Revolution, and sometimes it wasn't. The last hold out was Russia, sometime around WWI, IIRC.
Yours,
Tom Hawkson, aka Wince
Consider: what about Lincoln and the Republicans was so objectionable to the South?
It is true, yes, that the South considered it unconscionable that the North would dare lecture it on morality. Which precise moral issue did the North mostly lecture the South on?
And yes, some people fought out of loyalty to their homeland. But why did the leaders of those lands decide to invoke those loyalties (or, more accurately, invoke a crisis of conflicting loyalties)?
I am sympathetic to the beating Southern culture and life takes because of their unfortunate past. But the answer is not to pretend their past was not unfortunate; the answer is to let go of that unfortunate past, and let the South (and the rest of us) move on.
(And General Gordon's "undeniable" fact is quite deniable, unless one redefines "near its close" as "less than half-way through". The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862, and took effect on January 1, 1863. Are we surprised that Confederate generals were eager participants in revisionist history, given their defense of a cause with such a rotten thread in it?)
World War I was when the October Revolution happened, and the czar was deposed. Not long after, the Bolsheviks took over, and the Soviet Union was formed.
My point is that revisionism does exist in Civil War history, and the place of slavery in the conflict is one place where it is rampant--on both sides.
From the 1790's (when slaveholding Kentucky and Tennessee were added to the Union to balance free Rhode Island and Vermont) until 1850 free states and slave states were added to the Union in an alternating pattern, preserving balance on this issue in the Senate. Then in 1850 California, geographically a southern state, entered the Union as a free state, followed by Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, and Nevada, all free states (presumably without the Civil War West Virginia would never have split off from Virginia).
If the West entered the Union entirely as free states, as Lincoln planned, slavery would eventually die by the mechanics of our Constitution. The writing was on the wall by 1861 (which is why the South seceded).
Mike
The most important and undeniable fact, to me, is the simple fact that the vast majority of those who fought for the confederacy never owned slaves or had any intention of owning slaves. Some were abolitionists--and indeed, Robert E. Lee tried talking Jefferson Davis into emancipating the slaves as the war dragged on. Meanwhile, slave owners fought for the Union, and Maryland, a slave state stayed loyal.
Continuously denying people of southern heritage their dignity and their pride in the honor of their ancestors is destructive and foolish--and utterly unnecessary.