Slavery; the root cause of Secession & War

[Catherine Hopley]

"self-government was never denied to the seceding states."

If a community is denied the right to determine its own nationality - which I would argue is the most fundamental freedom of all - it is difficult to see how it could be depicted as self-governing. Many terms come to mind to describe the condition of the eleven states during Reconstruction, but self-governing is not one of them.

"It has never been established that any state had a "right" to separate itself from what was rapidly becoming a Union unique in the entire world. One in which there was no aristocracy ruling the free will of each citizen."

If the argument goes that the most enlightened society on earth has the right to force people to do as it says precisely because it is enlightened....well, in those circumstances I think we're entitled to subject this enlightenment to critical scrutiny.

So...no aristocracy? Oh, I think you are fooling yourself. The United States has an aristocracy of wealth. In America the rich hold sway as completely as any medieval nobility. In America anyone can aspire to be President - provided he or she is a multi-millionaire. If you are not rich you have no more chance of attaining senior political office than any European serf in centuries past.

There is also a distinct paradox involved in asserting that one's country is the greatest the planet has ever seen, and at the same time having to force several million people to be its citizens at the point of the bayonet.

"It was in the best interest of everyone to keep business as usual. And the northern merchants were quite vocal on that subject."

In the best interests of everyone? Are you sure? How was it in Southern interests to keep paying over the odds for shoddy Northern produce rather than being free to buy from Europe?

This is what Shelby Foote has to say about this:

"Without the rod of a strong protective tariff, eastern manufacturers would lose their southern markets to the cheaper, largely superior products of England, and this was feared by the workers as well as the owners."

Foote goes on to spell out the degree to which economic self-interest coincided with the "eagle scream" of Northern patriotism in 1861:

"The people of the Northwest remained staunchly pro-Union, faced as they were with loss of access to the lower Mississippi, that outlet to the Gulf which they had had for less than 50 years. Then too, following Lincoln's inaugural address, there was a growing belief that separation would solve no problems, but rather would add others of an international character, with the question of domination intensified. In early April the New York Times stated the proposition: 'If the two sections can no longer live together, they can no longer live apart in quiet till it is determined which is master. No two civilizations ever did, or can, come into contact as the North and South threaten to do, without a trial of strength, in which the weaker goes to the wall...We must remain master of the occasion and the dominant power on this continent.' "

[Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, I, p.43.]

Hmmmm....there's not a lot about "government of the people, by the people, for the people" in the above, is there? And the illusion that the young republic was a social paradise is rather undermined by the brutal assertion that the weak should "go to the wall".

No, what we have here is a combination of economic self-interest and political/cultural imperialism. No alternative to the Yankee version of the American Dream was to be tolerated. An entire continent could not be shared with anyone.

I wonder what a European would make of the notion that no two countries can co-exist until one has achieved mastery of the other? It sounds very much like the kind of "philosophy" which barbarians were trumpeting there in the 1930s.

[Johan Steele]

"self-government was never denied to the seceding states."

If a community is denied the right to determine its own nationality - which I would argue is the most fundamental freedom of all - it is difficult to see how it could be depicted as self-governing. Many terms come to mind to describe the condition of the eleven states during Reconstruction, but self-governing is not one of them.  A minority was denied the right to hold sway over the majority.  No one has ever claimed the US perfect, just a damn site better than most of her contemporaries.

"It has never been established that any state had a "right" to separate itself from what was rapidly becoming a Union unique in the entire world. One in which there was no aristocracy ruling the free will of each citizen."

If the argument goes that the most enlightened society on earth has the right to force people to do as it says precisely because it is enlightened....well, in those circumstances I think we're entitled to subject this enlightenment to critical scrutiny.  The US has always been ruled by laws with all equal; more or less.

So...no aristocracy? Oh, I think you are fooling yourself. The United States has an aristocracy of wealth. In America the rich hold sway as completely as any medieval nobility. In America anyone can aspire to be President - provided he or she is a multi-millionaire. If you are not rich you have no more chance of attaining senior political office than any European serf in centuries past.  THe golden rule, he who has the gold makes the rules.  In a cynics view (mine) was true in Rome, England, the US & the CS.

There is also a distinct paradox involved in asserting that one's country is the greatest the planet has ever seen, and at the same time having to force several million people to be its citizens at the point of the bayonet. I love the rhetoric, that's all it is.  Point of a bayonet, so warm and fuzzy.  A minority engaged in a violent and bloody rebellion.  It was put down by a majority.  More and more research shows Secession to have been a minority view in the US.  But the loud dog gets noticed and the loud dog in this case started biting right away.

"It was in the best interest of everyone to keep business as usual. And the northern merchants were quite vocal on that subject."

In the best interests of everyone? Are you sure? How was it in Southern interests to keep paying over the odds for shoddy Northern produce rather than being free to buy from Europe?  Actually it was in everyone's interest to keep paying bills.  Then again succesfull Secession would have probably eliminated many a bill from the wealthy planter class who were buying that nothing but "shoddy" merchandise from the evil north.  Now I can certainly see that as an incentive for Secession.  As has been shown the products impacted by the tarriffs were not the average ax, plow or hammer purchased by the people doing the sweat and toil in the South but by the goods craved by the wealthy.  In other words the point fails to stand up under any kind of scrutiny.

This is what Shelby Foote has to say about this:

"Without the rod of a strong protective tariff, eastern manufacturers would lose their southern markets to the cheaper, largely superior products of England, and this was feared by the workers as well as the owners."

Foote goes on to spell out the degree to which economic self-interest coincided with the "eagle scream" of Northern patriotism in 1861:

"The people of the Northwest remained staunchly pro-Union, faced as they were with loss of access to the lower Mississippi, that outlet to the Gulf which they had had for less than 50 years. Then too, following Lincoln's inaugural address, there was a growing belief that separation would solve no problems, but rather would add others of an international character, with the question of domination intensified. In early April the New York Times stated the proposition: 'If the two sections can no longer live together, they can no longer live apart in quiet till it is determined which is master. No two civilizations ever did, or can, come into contact as the North and South threaten to do, without a trial of strength, in which the weaker goes to the wall...We must remain master of the occasion and the dominant power on this continent.' "

[Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, I, p.43.]

Hmmmm....there's not a lot about "government of the people, by the people, for the people" in the above, is there? And the illusion that the young republic was a social paradise is rather undermined by the brutal assertion that the weak should "go to the wall".  Proven time and again by slaveocracy supporting Presidents and a slaveocracy dominated congress.  THe first time it looked like the slaveocracy might no longer control the fate of the nation off they went to ferment treason.

No, what we have here is a combination of economic self-interest and political/cultural imperialism. No alternative to the Yankee version of the American Dream was to be tolerated. An entire continent could not be shared with anyone. Yes, the enormous US empire of 1865 w/ colonies all over the world backed by the muscle of it's enormous and inexorable army and navy... posh.  Evil US... no more so than any other nation and considerably less than others.  Yes, the evil US where a man could take himself from poverty to the ranks of the richest in the world.  The abiliy of the average joe to own property, to move upward.  More than one US President started as all but a pauper in life.  There is no comparison of the US to an Empire as there is no Emperor or Imperial throne.

I wonder what a European would make of the notion that no two countries can co-exist until one has achieved mastery of the other? It sounds very much like the kind of "philosophy" which barbarians were trumpeting there in the 1930s. It never takes long to bring the Nazism/facism point into the discussion.  It is interesting when one is forced to read what Hitler had to say on the subject one quickly discovers (if the reader can keep the bile at bay long enough to actually read the oile of Drek that is Mein Kampf.) that Hitler appeared actually to be praising the CS and lementing it's loss.  Crap.

Nothing new, and nothing to suggest slavery wasn't at the heart of it.

[Johan Steele]

"so far you have failed to explain why the Southern political leaders (mostly slave owners) lied about the war being to protect slavery."

We're going round and round in circles here. I can accept the argument that slavery was safeguarded (from external enemies) by the creation of the Confederacy. What earthly reason would there be to then go to war to "protect" it?  Because the entire point of Secession was to eliminate the threat posed by a growing number who felt slavery wrong and for the first time in a very loong time it looked like the Presidency would not be controled by one loyal to the slaveocracy.

As for calling for troops, let's remind ourselves that it is the duty of government to provide for the defence of the nation, and that it should make a realistic appraisal of the nature of external threats to its safety. In early 1861 a Confederate government which failed to take precautionary measures against a full-scale invasion by the United States would have been guilty of gross negligence. After all, that was precisely what came to pass.  And yet you crucify Lincoln for calling up 75,000 men AFTER, the CS had fired upon US forts & ships and imprisoned several thousand US soldiers.

The United States in 2008 has an awful lot of nuclear weapons. Does that mean it intends to vaporise the planet? No? Well, that's my point in a nutshell. Doesn't make any sense as a point; as the US is the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons in warfare.  If you believe that isn't what kept Stalin from saying he'd like to have built a holiday villa on the Channel cost you are again showing a lack of knowledge about military history.  Peace through superior firepower has always been far better than peace through weakness.

As for Lincoln's ultimate determination to crush the "rebellion", I can agree that he wouldn't have needed to do so if the Confederacy agreed to dissolve itself. But do you really believe that the decades of increasing tension between the two regions were going to reach a supreme anti-climax in which the South created its own republic and then said "Ooops. Sorry about that. What were we thinking of? May we come back now, please?" The CS was in danger of disintigrating before Ft Sumter w/ many viewing the whole affair as some sort of effete joke.  W/in a year od Ft Sumter the CS had lost huge tracts of territory as well as it's largest city and seaport.  It failed the most basic of tests for a nation, that of arms.  No nation on earth recognized it for a variety of reasons; not least of which was an understanding of why it created itself in the first place.

In the real world that was never going to happen. The war came to pass for one of two reasons:

1. because eleven states engaged in an unjustified act of rebellion, a rebellion which the rest of the U.S. could not allow to succeed without mortal peril to themselves, or

2. because the U.S. government betrayed its own political heritage by denying free-born Americans the right to self-government when they saw fit to try to exercise that right.  How about a neither of the above?
That's what it boils down to. Everything else is just window-dressing.

No ma'am what it boils down to is simple.  Slavery as a root cause of Secession w/ Secession (w/ the first aggressive actions taken by them) being the root cause of the war.

It can further be noted that the large areas of pro US feeling in the CS were generally areas where slavery was at a minimum; and where the slaveocracy had minimal influence.  The political, cultural and economic elite of the CS were slaveholders that pushed Secession and got it.  As I said in an earlier post if the rule of Law had been followed there MAY not have been a civil war.  But that is a "what if" better left to fiction.

[BorderRuffian]

that Hitler appeared actually to be praising the CS and lementing it's loss.

Please post the exact passage.

[Johan Steele]

http%3A//www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/

"The controversy over federation and unification, so cunningly propagandized by the Jews in 1919-1920 and onwards, forced National So******m, which repudiated the quarrel, to take up a definite stand in relation to the essential problem concerned in it. Ought Germany to be a confederacy or a military State? What is the practical significance of these terms? To me it seems that the second question is more important than the first, because it is fundamental to the understanding of the whole problem and also because the answer to it may help to clear up confusion and therewith have a conciliating effect.
What is a Confederacy?
By a Confederacy we mean a union of sovereign states which of their own free will and in virtue of their sovereignty come together and create a collective unit, ceding to that unit as much of their own sovereign rights as will render the existence of the union possible and will guarantee it.
But the theoretical formula is not wholly put into practice by any confederacy that exists today. And least of all by the American Union, where it is impossible to speak of original sovereignty in regard to the majority of the states. Many of them were not included in the federal complex until long after it had been established. The states that make up the American Union are mostly in the nature of territories, more or less, formed for technical administrative purposes, their boundaries having in many cases been fixed in the mapping office. Originally these states did not and could not possess sovereign rights of their own. Because it was the Union that created most of the so-called states. Therefore the sovereign rights, often very comprehensive, which were left, or rather granted, to the various territories correspond not only to the whole character of the Confederation but also to its vast space, which is equivalent to the size of a Continent. Consequently, in speaking of the United States of America one must not consider them as sovereign states but as enjoying rights or, better perhaps, autarchic powers, granted to them and guaranteed by the Constitution. "

"Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. ... The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America." -- Adolf Hitler from Hermann Rauschning's _Conversations With Hitler._

[BorderRuffian]

Mein_Kampf

"The controversy over federation and unification, so cunningly propagandized by the Jews in 1919-1920 and onwards, forced National So******m, which repudiated the quarrel, to take up a definite stand in relation to the essential problem concerned in it. Ought Germany to be a confederacy or a military State? What is the practical significance of these terms? To me it seems that the second question is more important than the first, because it is fundamental to the understanding of the whole problem and also because the answer to it may help to clear up confusion and therewith have a conciliating effect.
What is a Confederacy?
By a Confederacy we mean a union of sovereign states which of their own free will and in virtue of their sovereignty come together and create a collective unit, ceding to that unit as much of their own sovereign rights as will render the existence of the union possible and will guarantee it.

Nothing here about the CSA.  Just his definition of a confederacy (a form of government).

"Ought Germany to be a confederacy or a military State?"

Germany became a military dictatorship under his rule so I guess he didn't like confederacies.

But the theoretical formula is not wholly put into practice by any confederacy that exists today. And least of all by the American Union, where it is impossible to speak of original sovereignty in regard to the majority of the states. Many of them were not included in the federal complex until long after it had been established. The states that make up the American Union are mostly in the nature of territories, more or less, formed for technical administrative purposes, their boundaries having in many cases been fixed in the mapping office. Originally these states did not and could not possess sovereign rights of their own. Because it was the Union that created most of the so-called states. Therefore the sovereign rights, often very comprehensive, which were left, or rather granted, to the various territories correspond not only to the whole character of the Confederation but also to its vast space, which is equivalent to the size of a Continent. Consequently, in speaking of the United States of America one must not consider them as sovereign states but as enjoying rights or, better perhaps, autarchic powers, granted to them and guaranteed by the Constitution.

Here he refers to the United States as a confederation and discusses the sovereign rights of the states- original 13 compared to those established later. 
Nothing about the CSA.

"Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. ... The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America." -- Adolf Hitler from Hermann Rauschning's _Conversations With Hitler._

Who was Rauschning? 
Why do these supposed statements of Hitler appear nowhere else in his writings or speeches?

And I thought you said Hitler's praising the CSA was in Mein Kampf?-

"It is interesting when one is forced to read what Hitler had to say on the subject one quickly discovers (if the reader can keep the bile at bay long enough to actually read the oile of Drek that is Mein Kampf.) that Hitler appeared actually to be praising the CS and lementing it's loss.  Crap."

What you have posted of MK says nothing about the CSA.

[BorderRuffian]

"Conversations with Hitler" (aka "Hitler Speaks")

Seems to be a rather spurious source (scroll down the page):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Rauschning

[Johan Steele]

Implications, my apologies for not being specific does he appear to be praising Lincoln in any way?  What I said: Hitler appeared actually to be praising the CS and lementing it's loss.  I read about all I could stand of Hitler years ago and avoid delving any deeper into that bilge than absolutely needed.  I saw what I expect is the upcoming Hitler praised Union/Lincoln rhetoric and headed it off.

Wikpedia is in no way a reputable source.  I don't know a thing about Rausching and frankly am not all that interested in doing so.  I do at least appreciate the wikpedia link as it is better than the last link I was given that "refuted" his work... I avoid anti-semetic sites like the plague.

[Johan Steele]

Incidently you've never answered my question about at what point are attacks upon your country are no longer acceptable and warrant a reaction.

Seizing forts?
Seizing mints?
Seizing armories?
Seizing ships?
Shelling forts?
Imprisoning it's soldiers?

At what point is enough enough?  In the case of the US it was the last two.

The CS started the war and the US ended it.

[BorderRuffian]

Implications, my apologies for not being specific does he appear to be praising Lincoln in any way?

Who brought up Lincoln?   

What I said: Hitler appeared actually to be praising the CS and lementing it's loss.

In the part of MK that you posted he is not referring to the Confederate States of America.  He is speaking of a confederacy as a form of government.

In olden times many people referred to the United States as a confederation.