1737
The American civil war wasn’t about slavery.
(lemmy.ca)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
1737 points (97.5% liked)
Confidently Incorrect
3984 readers
1 users here now
When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
Posting guidelines.
All posts in this community have come from elsewhere, it is not original content, the poster in this community is not OP. The person who posts in this community isn’t necessarily endorsing whatever the post is talking about and they are not looking to argue with you about the content in the post.
You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.
There is currently no rule about how recent a post needs to be because the community is about the comeback part, not the topic.
Rules:
• Be civil and remember the human.
• No trolling, insults or name calling. Swearing in general is fine, but not to insult someone.
• No bigotry of any kind, including homophobia, transphobia, sexism and racism.
• You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.
• Try not to get too political. A lot of these posts will involve politics, but this isn’t the place for political arguments.
• Participate in good faith - don’t be aggressive and don’t argue for arguements sake.
• Mark NSFW posts if they contain nudity.
• Satire is allowed but please start the post title with [satire] so other users can filter it out if they’d like.
Please report comments that break site or community rules to the mods. If you break the rules you’ll receive one warning before being banned from this community.
This community follows the rules of the lemmy.world instance and the lemmy.org code of conduct. I’ve summarised them here:
- Be civil, remember the human.
- No insulting or harassing other members. That includes name calling.
- Respect differences of opinion. Civil discussion/debate is fine, arguing is not. Criticise ideas, not people.
- Keep unrequested/unstructured critique to a minimum.
- Remember we have all chosen to be here voluntarily. Respect the spent time and effort people have spent creating posts in order to share something they find amusing with you.
- Swearing in general is fine, swearing to insult another commenter isn’t.
- No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia or any other type of bigotry.
- No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
So, this annoys me to no end, because the first dude is technically right, Lincoln came in to office with no intention to outlaw slavery, although he did want to keep it confined to the states it was already legal in. And what he’s actually wrong about is that Lincoln made it about slavery to get the support of the northerners - he actually made sure that it northerners believed it was about “keeping the union together.” Remember the union still had the slave states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. He wanted to keep these states in the union.
Lincoln (through Seward) stressed the anti-slavery stuff to Europeans, many of whom wanted to intervene on the side of the confederacy because that was where they got their cotton. The industrial north also was a threat to industrial Europe, but the agrarian south was a source of raw materials. But by stressing the anti-slavery stuff in Europe (and then of course the emancipation proclamation which didn’t actually outlaw slavery in the border states) he ensured Europe could not intervene on behalf of the confederacy since it would be so unpopular. So, in the states it was about the union, abroad it was about slavery.
But anyway, he’s right on a technicality that, for Lincoln, it was not really about slavery. But this does not mean the war itself was not about slavery. His conclusion rests on the assumption that in a war, two sides must be diametrically opposed to one another, so if Lincoln and the north were not fighting against slavery, therefore the south could not be fighting for slavery.
But as others have pointed out, the south explicitly says they are fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. They are worried about waning political power also - if Lincoln stopped the spread of slavery across the continent as he desired, the growth of free states would mean congress would not be as evenly split between slave and free states, opening up the possibility of legislating an end to slavery.
So the war was about slavery, and would not have occurred without slavery. Often we point to the Battle of Sumter as the beginning of the civil war, but many historians also point out the popular civil war could instead be said to begin in 1859 in Harper’s Ferry, or with Bleeding Kansas and the Pottawotamie Massacre, or maybe the caning of Charles sumner or the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, or any of the political battles that arose when the US began to expand west and the question arose “what about slavery.” All of these events are directly about slavery and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
And also, just as a last thing “many southern generals didn’t care about slavery.” I have no idea how true that is and it doesn’t matter, because the war was not fought because of southern generals but because of politicians, southern landowners, and an economy resting on the subjugation of Black people, and that’s why they were fighting.
Thank you!
I try to always emphasize the existential threat to the South that abolishing slavery was. As another user pointed out in Mississippi's declaration of secession, their "position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery". If you abolish slavery, the South dies (in the economic sense, and in the cultural sense for white people) immediately. If you simply restrict slavery to this one corner of the country, the South dies slowly as its political power is curbed.
Remember the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Similarly, people who would otherwise be on the fence about slavery were firmly in the pro-slavery camp because of the political and economic power inextricably tied to it.
That's not to say that the South was full of reluctant slave owners or anything. It was still one of the most racist times and places in human history. The South brutalized their slaves and they enjoyed doing it, or at best were indifferent to the brutality.
The South liked slavery. But it was the economic and political threat that meant fighting was their only course of action if they wanted to survive as a socio-economic bloc at all. If it weren't for the economic impact, they probably would have done like the North: got rid of their slaves (though not their racism...the North was extremely racist at the time too, a fact which history glosses over).
And we can see proof of this in the history of the South after they lost: abject poverty for generations. That was what they feared.
It's way more complicated than pro-slavery vs anti-slavery. On both sides. Yes, that was a central theme but there's an important distinction between "fighting to keep slaves" and "fighting to keep the economy built on slaves". The former is pure evil, the latter is the same kind of evil we all promote when we buy iphones or leggings assembled by child laborers in China.
I grew up in the South and went to college in the South, so I learned all of this. But I've since discovered that in the rest of the country, none of this context is taught. It's literally "these guys were all unrepentantly evil and we, the good people, defeated them". Like a fairy tale.
On the southern side it’s really not any more complicated than being pro-slavery. Not only secession, but throughout the 19th century southern states were pushing for the continuance and expansion of slavery, and actually resisted industrial development in the south because of the threat it posed, then as you point out fought to preserve slavery. And I’d love to know the difference between fighting to keep slaves and fighting to keep an economy built on slaves, and how a southern plantation owner who owns slaves and has great sway in government (or is in government) is in any way comparable to me with no political power buying an iPhone (or other smartphone) because of the difficulty surviving in the modern world without one.
And I’m sorry, I did not realize that southerners were all given in depth lessons about bleeding Kansas and the lead up to the civil war. You must be hiding them somewhere because all I ever get from southerners is the rote memorization of basic historical facts that seem to (but don’t) contradict popular narratives of the civil war with absolutely zero historical analysis, just like the picture. I’d much rather a layperson have the northern “fairy tale” understanding of the civil war that actually gets its reasons for occurring correct, than some both sides attitude towards it. I honestly cannot believe I typed out that whole thing above and what I get in response is some sort of “nuanced” confederate apologia.
I doubt that, but I'll play along.
First though, we should make a distinction. Most people are ignorant. If we are to leave people ignorant of history, yes the Northern fairy tale is better than the Southern one. At least then they're not ignorant and racist. But here I'm arguing against fairy tales AT ALL.
Nuance can be weaponized, yes. That's a poor argument for always striving against nuance and contextualizing things. I haven't seen any pro confederate racism in this thread at all. I think we are not in danger of that happening here, now, in this conversation specifically.
I think we can afford nuance in this space. We don't need to silence it for fear of it being weaponized by bigots. There's very few if any bigots here, and the pro-nuance camp here doesn't deserve to be accused of bigotry. Maaaaybe pedantry, at worst.
Back to my first point:
The difference is one of degree. The North faced a similar dilemma of pro-slavery racism vs abolitionism a hundred years prior, but without the economic or political implications. That was a pure "racism good" vs "racism bad" debate, and "racism bad" won. Not a complete victory, but enough to undo slavery and some of the worst dehumanizing aspects of racism.
If you could, today, abolish slavery and child labor without giving up your iphones and milk chocolate and cheap clothes, that's an easy battle to undertake, morally. But you can't extricate the economic implications. Removing yourself from consumerism is HARD. We have fought wars to protect our oil even though we know it's bad for the planet. No, we didn't all agree with it, but enough people put their immediate quality of life above concerns for the climate and for the well being of locals. These people, you and I included, are not all unrepentantly evil.
It's a tradeoff. It's a spectrum. It's not all yes or no, black or white, good or evil.
"I will fight a war to preserve my right to be evil" is not a thing that anyone has ever thought or done. "I will fight a war to maintain my standard of living" is a thing that happens all the time, even when that standard of living is based on evil.
In many cases, the evil that the standard of life is based on is SO EVIL, it must be stopped. That's why the North was right. I'm not making some sort of both sides bullshit argument here. The Confederacy was wrong, and should not have existed. The tradeoff between harm done and standard of living for those on top was too much, by far. It was a morally good thing that slavery was destroyed, despite the harm that came to Southern whites because of it.
But the reason for understanding all this is so we don't fall into the trap of dehumanizing the Confederacy. They're not cartoon villains. They had rational reasons for why they were willing to fight to preserve slavery.
"People who disagree with me are evil, full stop" is a dangerous place for one's mind to go, and I'll always try to combat it. With the understanding, like I mentioned above, that nuance can be weaponized, and when that happens (not before), we can take the gloves off, ignore nuance, and berate the bigots into submission. Then once the bigots are gone, we can go back to discussing nuanced and contextualized hostory.
Granted, this early history of abolitionism in the north is not as much in my wheelhouse, but I have to doubt the charge that northern slavers so willingly gave up their slaves based on idealistic appeals of “racism is bad.” The real reason slavery did not gain as much of a foothold in the north is one of environment - the south is blessed with low, flat and extremely fertile plains, longer growing seasons and a warmer climate, which lends itself to agriculture and the large plantations so common in the south. The north is rocky, colder, and growing seasons are shorter. That’s not to say the north did not have large slaveowners, but the plantation economy of the south could never have existed in the north. What the north does have is harbors. While slavery might not have looked the same in the north, there were plenty of people involved in the slave trade in the north because of the importance of shipping to the northern economy. I don’t imagine the slaveowners and slave traders so willingly gave up the slave economy in the north, but slavery just never had the foothold in the north that it did in the south, and when the industrial economy gets going the north is just better suited for it, especially with its shipping capabilities, and many slave traders I imagine could be flexible since it wasn’t so much “slaves” they were tied to as “trade.”
The rest of this, I don’t know, I don’t understand the nuance you believe there should be with regards to the south. I’m not dehumanizing confederates, they were in fact all too human, which I believe is even scarier, that human beings are able to rationalize the subjugation of another human being, or rationalize themselves into supporting it. I understand exactly what you’re saying they wanted to maintain their lifestyles, privileges, and class position, but I take the opposite position which is they are bad people for doing so. And yeah maybe they were raised that way, propagandized that way, never had a chance to form differing opinions - I don’t care. At one point they were upholding slavery and maintaining it, and I’m not going to be gentle with them while Black people were being worked to death, killed, beaten, and kept in bondage through their actions.
My concern when it comes to nuance IS the dehumanizing. Removing context inevitably causes "othering" of the perpetrators. We begin to think they're some other species, nothing like you and I or our friends. So then when it happens again it sneaks up on us.
Nuance allows us to LEARN from the tragedies of the past.
I am telling you that I am not dehumanizing confederates, and the fact that they are human makes it even worse. What is the nuance you think I need to avoid dehumanizing confederates?
I'm not specifically talking about your responses when I'm talking about dehumanizing. Just the general conversation in this thread.
Edit: in fact of all the responses here, yours is probably the most level headed and rational.
The fact that the confederates were not cartoon characters but people makes their collective crime against humanity worse, not more sympathetic as you seem to believe.
I in fact do not believe that. And in fact I never said or implied that.