5 Myths re Southern Secession

[decaro]

from MSN:

"One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we’re still fighting it — or at least fighting over its history. I’ve polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States’ rights? Tariffs and taxes?

"As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war’s various battles — from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — let’s first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began...."

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/f ... ar-AAc0LfR

[Bookman]

Excellent article, one that everyone should read.

[sullafelix]

Some of it is not correct at all.

The years 1860 and 1859 as I remember were bumper crop years for Southern cotton.

The only problem was, the European powers that needed it had started to grow there own in their colonies.

This has always been stated why England and France did not step in. They didn't need southern cotton anymore.

With them not needing cotton the southern economy would have collapsed.

[E]

ORIGINAL: sulla05
The years 1860 and 1859 as I remember were bumper crop years for Southern cotton.

How old ARE you?!?

[Agathosdaimon]

so the article's points all pretty much point to the same thing - it was about the south wanting to continue slavery through and through

[Alchenar]

The thing about the States rights and culture and economic/tariff arguments is that press them hard enough and they all collapse back to 'slavery'. Anyone with a passing familiarity of the Confederate Constitution knows that the only thing it really changes is denying states the right to ban slavery. Anyone familiar with pre-war US politics knows that that South was perfectly willing to use the Federal government to support slavery (ie. the Fugitive Slave Act) and only when they lost their grip on the Presidency was it that states's rights suddenly became fashionable.

Why was the South economically distinct from the North and not industrialising? Because when all the capital in your economy is being ploughed into human goods there's no money to build factories. Why wasn't the South benefiting from the immigration the North was? Because when all the manual labour is being done by slaves there are no jobs for immigrants to build a life on.

It's a sad epitaph to the ACW that for a hundred years afterwards the South were able to frantically spin history to present themselves as the misunderstood good guys.

[Curtis Lemay]

Boy, the left is in a full-court press on this. What an even-handed article.

You can bet this guy's opinions will receive very little vetting since to do so invites charges of racism. But I'll take a crack at it anyway.

Let's start with point 1: That the Southern states variously declared the economic benefits of slavery to be the reason they seceded. Sure, those were the reasons of the aristocratic plantation owners. However, that cannot be ascribed to the common people. Only a fraction of them owned slaves. Furthermore, had the slaves been white, the system could not have withstood even local assemblies. There had to be more to it than economics.

Point 2: It was not about Tariffs and Taxes, because those were at a low point in 1860. By that line of reasoning, it couldn’t be about slavery either, because that was legal in 1860. It was fear of what the future held that bothered the South. Obviously, those weren’t the primary reasons, but they were a factor.

Point 3: Common Southerners supported slavery because they aspired to own slaves and they adhered to White Supremacy. I truly wonder just how that first part was ascertained – mind reading? (The guy then adds a gratuitous shot at George Bush’s tax cuts that clearly IDs him as on the far left). White Supremacy – sure, but the South didn’t have the patent on it. It was the belief de jure – North and South. But is such a belief necessary to conclude that abandoning national identity as the foundation of the state is a bad idea? Look where we are now: we can’t even defend our borders from foreign interlopers (and would doing so be an act of “White Supremacy”?). And let’s be clear: the vast majority of freed slaves would have resided in the South. It was a cost-free, abstract issue to the North. Now, atoning for the genocide against Native Americans, on the other hand, would have gored the North’s ox.

Points 4 & 5 are irrelevant to why the South seceded and will be skipped.

I’d have forgiven those three canards if only he could have at least offered some balance to his “myths”. Allow me to offer a couple:

The South seceded because after things like Bloody Kansas, John Brown, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thaddeus Stevens, and the election of 1860, they perceived the North, not as a their countrymen, but as their enemies. Considering the nature of the war that resulted, they appear, in retrospect, to have been correct.

Once again, we find people from a different age being impaled on today’s ethics. Let me just remind everyone that the North was conducting genocide against the Sioux in the Dakotas simultaneously with their war against the South. (Just to give a hint of the sort of ethics that was in sway at the time). And their ethics weren’t different because they were benighted. It was because they lived in different circumstances. Today’s ethics can only be adhered to during times of extreme luxurious plenty. Hard times demand harder ethics.

[Alchenar]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

The South seceded because after things like Bloody Kansas, John Brown, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thaddeus Stevens, and the election of 1860, they perceived the North, not as a their countrymen, but as their enemies. Considering the nature of the war that resulted, they appear, in retrospect, to have been correct.

The South believed those things because they saw the effective veto they had over US federal policy slipping away and they knew that that was a threat to, you guessed it, slavery.

I'm going to quote extensively from a friend of mine:

The second reason I wanted to bring up this issue, is because this type of polarization is far from unprecedented, and is intrinsically linked with the impossibility of governing the United States. One of the major reasons for the bitterness of ideological combat right now is because it is innately tied with identity. That identity is not the one people think it is. Contrary to apparent common sense, the most politically homogeneous group in American history is not African Americans but white southerns, who ever since the 1820s began to see themselves as a distinct national group. This was not in and of itself a problem, but the founding myth of America for southern whites became one of dualism, where America was not founded by Americans, but by partnership between the South and everyone else, whereby the South should have an effective veto over policy. This political belief drove US politics, and is why until 1851, the South insisted on parity in the Senate, and any effort of the national government to use its numerical majority to force its will on the favored Southern position, even if the effort in question had substantial support within the South, an unconstitutional violation of Southern "rights" and justification for secession.

The "Southern Question" in American politics was even in the pre-Civil War era never wholly about slavery, which is one reason it failed to obligingly vanish once that institution disappeared. Rather it was about the twin threats to Southern "rights" or sovereignty, namely the fear of a national majority overruling them, and the more immediate fear of becoming a minority in their own land. The fact that "Southern" meant white, and a very specific, Protestant(and in fairness given the century Sephardi Jewish) white, meant that they constantly under demographic threat and Southern politics took on the tone of Afrikaner politics in South Africa. In fact that is the proper comparison for understanding the US lost cause, namely it functions in the Southern mind much as the Boer War did in the Afrikaner one, as a national holocaust in which the Volk's enemies did everything in their power to destroy it and failed. In the case of the South, after a rearguard action, the North rejected the Union by electing a party pledged to governing without Southern support or cooperation, namely the Republicans, justifying their departure(I wrote about moderate Southern reasons for secession here) They then faced a war of conquest, followed by a military effort(Reconstruction) to make themselves a minority in their own land. Following their success, the dominant effort has been to prevent that by repressing the political opposition at home, which ends up in racially tinged gerrymandering and voting laws because that is who demographically the opposition is, as well as in taking the offensive at the national level. "Racist" policies in the eyes of Southern conservatives are hence justified not by the fact that their targets are Hispanic, Black or Asian, but because they are Democrats, and Southern Republicans today are almost ecstatic when African Americans join the party, and tend to go gaga over them as candidates, see Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

The problem is that this Southern defensiveness, in addition to equating electoral defeat at the state and local level with political/cultural genocide, involves effectively being able to have a veto at the national level. What the South saw as preserving a veto, the North in the 1850s saw as Southern efforts to block the settlement of the West by killing the Homestead Act and the construction of a Trans-Continental railroad, as that would lead to more Western and hence non-Southern seats in Congress. The decision to elect the Republicans in 1860 was not about slavery on the North's behalf. Rather it was a decision to get on with governing without the South, because it had proved impossible to do anything economically or internationally due to the Southern veto. The link with slavery is that it was the reason the South wielded its veto on everything else, in order to prove that it could if necessary use it on slavery. The South left because its veto was going to be gutted.

[KISSMEUFOOL!]

The Souths gonna do it again!
www.dixienet.org

[Capt. Harlock]

Common Southerners supported slavery because they aspired to own slaves and they adhered to White Supremacy. I truly wonder just how that first part was ascertained – mind reading?

True, there is no way of proving or disproving it. But from what I've read of the speeches and newspaper editorials of the day, most Southerners subscribed to Jefferson's ideal of the "gentleman farmer". It was held to be a superior mode of civilization over the industrializing North. (e.g., one editorial read, "Free Society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives . . . All the northern, and especially the New England states, are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen.")

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: Alchenar

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

The South seceded because after things like Bloody Kansas, John Brown, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thaddeus Stevens, and the election of 1860, they perceived the North, not as a their countrymen, but as their enemies. Considering the nature of the war that resulted, they appear, in retrospect, to have been correct.

The South believed those things because they saw the effective veto they had over US federal policy slipping away and they knew that that was a threat to, you guessed it, slavery.

That's about like saying the US invaded Afghanistan after 911 because we could see sharia law coming - not because of all the dead.

Again, the South seceded because they were being subjected to slaughter and the North was indoctrinating its citizenry for a crusade against them. Who would stay in such an alliance?

I'm going to quote extensively from a friend of mine:

The second reason I wanted to bring up this issue, is because this type of polarization is far from unprecedented, and is intrinsically linked with the impossibility of governing the United States. One of the major reasons for the bitterness of ideological combat right now is because it is innately tied with identity. That identity is not the one people think it is. Contrary to apparent common sense, the most politically homogeneous group in American history is not African Americans but white southerns, who ever since the 1820s began to see themselves as a distinct national group. This was not in and of itself a problem, but the founding myth of America for southern whites became one of dualism, where America was not founded by Americans, but by partnership between the South and everyone else, whereby the South should have an effective veto over policy. This political belief drove US politics, and is why until 1851, the South insisted on parity in the Senate, and any effort of the national government to use its numerical majority to force its will on the favored Southern position, even if the effort in question had substantial support within the South, an unconstitutional violation of Southern "rights" and justification for secession.

The "Southern Question" in American politics was even in the pre-Civil War era never wholly about slavery, which is one reason it failed to obligingly vanish once that institution disappeared. Rather it was about the twin threats to Southern "rights" or sovereignty, namely the fear of a national majority overruling them, and the more immediate fear of becoming a minority in their own land. The fact that "Southern" meant white, and a very specific, Protestant(and in fairness given the century Sephardi Jewish) white, meant that they constantly under demographic threat and Southern politics took on the tone of Afrikaner politics in South Africa. In fact that is the proper comparison for understanding the US lost cause, namely it functions in the Southern mind much as the Boer War did in the Afrikaner one, as a national holocaust in which the Volk's enemies did everything in their power to destroy it and failed. In the case of the South, after a rearguard action, the North rejected the Union by electing a party pledged to governing without Southern support or cooperation, namely the Republicans, justifying their departure(I wrote about moderate Southern reasons for secession here) They then faced a war of conquest, followed by a military effort(Reconstruction) to make themselves a minority in their own land. Following their success, the dominant effort has been to prevent that by repressing the political opposition at home, which ends up in racially tinged gerrymandering and voting laws because that is who demographically the opposition is, as well as in taking the offensive at the national level. "Racist" policies in the eyes of Southern conservatives are hence justified not by the fact that their targets are Hispanic, Black or Asian, but because they are Democrats, and Southern Republicans today are almost ecstatic when African Americans join the party, and tend to go gaga over them as candidates, see Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

The problem is that this Southern defensiveness, in addition to equating electoral defeat at the state and local level with political/cultural genocide, involves effectively being able to have a veto at the national level. What the South saw as preserving a veto, the North in the 1850s saw as Southern efforts to block the settlement of the West by killing the Homestead Act and the construction of a Trans-Continental railroad, as that would lead to more Western and hence non-Southern seats in Congress. The decision to elect the Republicans in 1860 was not about slavery on the North's behalf. Rather it was a decision to get on with governing without the South, because it had proved impossible to do anything economically or internationally due to the Southern veto. The link with slavery is that it was the reason the South wielded its veto on everything else, in order to prove that it could if necessary use it on slavery. The South left because its veto was going to be gutted.

And the leftist indoctrination continues...

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: Capt. Harlock

Common Southerners supported slavery because they aspired to own slaves and they adhered to White Supremacy. I truly wonder just how that first part was ascertained – mind reading?

True, there is no way of proving or disproving it. But from what I've read of the speeches and newspaper editorials of the day, most Southerners subscribed to Jefferson's ideal of the "gentleman farmer". It was held to be a superior mode of civilization over the industrializing North. (e.g., one editorial read, "Free Society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives . . . All the northern, and especially the New England states, are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen.")

I would expect a published article to dispel "myths" with facts, not a few anecdotes.

[Aurelian]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

Again, the South seceded because they were being subjected to slaughter and the North was indoctrinating its citizenry for a crusade against them. Who would stay in such an alliance?


And the leftist indoctrination continues...

Myth #6 and #7

[Alchenar]

I love the reference to 'leftist indoctrination' when it was Southern states that banned publication of any article that advocated the abolition of slavery.

That's the true nature of the Southern States - the people who chose to protect slavery over free speech. To my mind there's no greater act that proves that a slave state is inherently one in which no one is free, regardless of their colour.

[rgb07460]

MSN[:-] is a reliable source for historical fact? Wow I thought I was on a historical war game site!

[danlongman]

Just start that ball rolling and look what happens! Joe McCarthy comes jumping out
from under the bed... hand in hand with Jefferson Davis and all the other radical leftists!
Don't forget that Karl Marx was in New York about that time doubtless cooking up some
deviltry or another to make sure a socialist spin went on the whole affair.
They are everywhere and all across time too!

[Anthropoid]

ORIGINAL: KISSMEUFOOL!

The Souths gonna do it again!
www.dixienet.org

I am as southern as anyone and that is just silliness. It isn't even funny; its just hubris.

The Confederate States of America was a despicable regime in which a category of people were denied basic human rights. Thankfully it was crushed and forced back into the Union, where all of its former states are now firmly embedded.

[GaryChildress]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

ORIGINAL: KISSMEUFOOL!

The Souths gonna do it again!
www.dixienet.org

I am as southern as anyone and that is just silliness. It isn't even funny; its just hubris.

The Confederate States of America was a despicable regime in which a category of people were denied basic human rights. Thankfully it was crushed and forced back into the Union, where all of its former states are now firmly embedded.

+1. Well said. I'm from Virginia and have no desire to resurrect the Confederacy either.

[Capt. Harlock]

Again, the South seceded because they were being subjected to slaughter

Exactly when and how before the Civil War were the Southerners being subjected to slaughter? In both "Bleeding Kansas" and John Brown's raid, they gave as good as they got.

[VPaulus]

Locked. Sorry no politics.