Fossil fuels made the steam engine possible. Steam engines made the transcontinental railroad possible. Steam engines made the end of slavery possible.
Thank you for the history lesson, Professor Don. I can only imagine the effort to research and write such an insightful essay. I gladly trade the daily Highlights for this blog.
I was born in Chile. My father had a picture of Lincoln in his home office. As a little boy, I remember asking him who that man was. I have had huge respect for President Lincoln since then.
We immigrated to the U.S. in 1964. We lived in the land of Lincoln the first two years and on our 8th grade trip we visited many Lincoln landmarks. We also met, as a class, with the Governor, Otto Kerner, a democrat. In 1973 he was jailed for some federal crime. A role model he was not. Lincoln remains a great role model.
His memory and the true story of America the Beautiful must be fought for and preserved! Thank you Don for being on the vanguard of these two worthy causes!
I was born in Atlanta and reared in Georgia & Alabama. To pass the teacher's tests, I memorized a few facts about the Civil War from the sparse paragraphs in my high school history books. Even then I knew a lot of glossing-over was going on.
You, Mr. Don, have proven conclusively right here and now that the hard facts of history don't have to be as boring as they are in those stupid high school history books. This column alone has been worth the price of my subscription to your list. Thank you for bringing a lot of hidden history to light. Long live the memory of Honest Abe!
I grew up in North Carolina in the 1950’s. I recall these facts pretty much being presented as stated here. Only it was often referred to as the war between the states. And North Carolina has/had a some what schizophrenic position on which side they were/are on.
Augustine: The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.
There is a reason why Satan/Lucifer/the Devil is called “the father of lies.”
In NZ we have had the same revisionist approach to historical fact. The liberals here have changed the meaning of Treaty of Waitangi that gave sovereignty to the British Crown into a Partnership. This in turn has led to calls for co-governance.
Fortunately we have brave writers, lawyers and historians in NZ who are doing what Mr.Surber has done here, putting the truth before the people.
It has had a positive effect.
Jacinda Ardern has gone. The Labour Party, our equivalent to the Democrats, is busily back pedaling from their most contentious policies, and best of all, the Wellington consensus that has supported the revisionist lies for the past forty years is being challenged as never before.
It is mighty fine of you to chime in and belly up to Don Surber's bar from east of Down Under. What a lovely country you hail from. Americans seem bereft of an appreciation of our brave and wise ancestors who went so far as New Zealand to spread goodness amidst colonial temptations. I set my sights on Asia forty years ago upon reading the novels of James Clavell who spent real time in Japanese POW camps in Singapore. Glad to hear your good news!
I've been poking that bear for some time now. No longer do they respond because they all do know what an imbecile they stuck in to the White House. So, while I have literally been punched by two separate liberals for speaking out, those critters have gone dormant.
Murphy's law. You try not to taunt it. If you are having a bad day for what ever reason, you dont say. 'God, today cant get any worse...' because then you will have a flat or an accident or it will pour 2in of rain in an hour instead of just the drizzle the weatherman predicted. Schlong is taunting the universe....
I might respectfully beg to differ, here...John Brown, per the resource (and consistent with other accounts) was a staunch abolitionist, and the objective of the "raid" on Harper's Ferry was an attempt to instigate a slave rebellion.
I reserve the right to change my opinion, should my view be proven wrong.
Feb 11, 2023·edited Feb 11, 2023Liked by Don Surber
Donny Boy - "The first is it credits him — not FDR, LBJ and Obama — for the sprawling federal leviathan government we now suffer."
You forgot W, my veteran brother. Not criticizing your great work, but W expanded government exponentially via the national security apparatus that is now the 4th branch of government(unelected) weaponized against more than half of the country.
I have to mostly agree, Don, but slightly disagree on a couple of points. The vast majority of Confederate soldiers, something along the order of 98%, did not own slaves and had no real personal stake in keeping it legal. What motivated them to fight and die? I don't think we can totally discount the role states' rights played. I don't believe we can deny that federalism actually died during and shortly after the war.
Secondly, I don't believe it was necessary to slaughter 620,000 men to get rid of something that was going to inevitably die a richly deserved death anyway in a few years. Once agriculture was mechanized, which was not far off in an historic perspective, slaves were far too expensive to cultivate crops like cotton. Always follow the money. The rich plantation owners undoubtedly heavily influenced their state legislatures, but they were businessmen. Once they could cultivate 100 acres for the cost of keeping one or two slaves, slavery was dead. Competition from growers who mechanized would have killed it as surely as the sun rises in the east.
I agree blaming the growth of the federal gubmint on Lincoln is nonsense. Whereas Woodrow Wilson, a flaming liberal Democrat, signed the income tax into law that enabled the growth of the beast we are burdened with today.
Last, but not least, I don't think we can view the Civil War through a lens that is all black or all white. Most things are most realistically viewed in shades of grey.
I really have to address your opinion Re: we could have waited out slavery until it was no longer economically viable. In other words we should just have looked a slave in the face and said, “Don’t worry in the next 25-50 years this will all go away.” Nice thought. I get that it was horrific that over 600,000 for this cause, but if ever there was cause, in my opinion, ending slavery was A CAUSE!
Also, you didn’t need to be slaveholder to fight for the Confederacy. They were racists who did not “cotton” to the idea these slaves were getting “uppity ideas”about being free, forget equal. It has only been as recently as in our lifetimes that the South has for the vast majority of its citizenry turned from being a racist culture. The entire Civil Rights movement wouldn’t have been necessary had racism ended along with slavery when the Civil War ended. We have come a long way, but it is really our children’s generation, born in the 70’s and 80’s and since, that can claim to be the first truly non-racist generation. That might be a bit of a broad brush, but essentially the case.
OK I have to address yours. Your second paragraph shows a lack of understanding in what this was all about. It wasn't racism. Even among northern abolitionists, and Lincoln himself, they did not see "the Negroes" as equal to whites. This wasn't viewed through the racist lens as we define it today. It was a commonly held opinion of the entire country that they were perceived as less capable than the rest of the population. The abolitionists just felt they did not deserve to be held in bondage. So the whole country was racist.
Now as to changing history, Lincoln's assassination guaranteed that the South's trajectory after the war was going to be different. Johnson actually started on a more magnanimous course than was expected. And the radical Republicans were astonished, that after being gifted Johnson after Lincoln's death, that he wouldn't come down hard on the Southerners. They fixed that, almost impeaching him and created the reconstruction we all know about that birthed the KKK, and our first example of partisan political violence the democrats have uniquely used even today. Slowly democrats worked to expunge the newly freed slaves from the everyday flow of life. National democrats used these efforts to institutionalize this fact throughout society, birthing the likes of Margaret Sanger and Woodrow Wilson. The Bacon Davis Act was used to keep them out of skilled positions - a law still on the books.
We look with amazement at how the current government seems to want to rule over us, as opposed to govern the country. But authoritarian impulses run deep on the left, as well as a crybaby attitude when they lose politically. It's been around for almost 200 years. They are tough bunch of tyrants to beat.
Interracial slavery was not commonplace until a technological leap in transportation technology in the 16th Century made it possible to transport slaves purchased from Africans to the Americas. Also slave ships used sustainable wind energy.
You are making the classic mistake of viewing history through the moral lens of today. Prior to the British abolishing slavery in the 1820's, slavery was very common, ESPECIALLY in Africa and the rest of the Muslim world. Indeed, the vast majority of slaves shipped to North America were captured and sold to Europeans by coastal black slavers who went to the interior where whites did not dare go to capture slaves who they sold to Europeans and Arabs.
Again, it is a mistake to apply modern moral thinking to people two and three hundred years ago. When the African slave trade started it was common among the uneducated whites to believe that blacks were lower on the evolutionary ladder and incapable of fitting into a civilized society. As dead wrong as that belief was, it was still a dominant belief. Before you condemn them, walk a mile in their shoes as the saying goes.
The same applied to Native Americans, who lived a Stone Age existence when Europeans first came to the New World. They certainly did not deserve some of the treatment that came their way, especially the atrocity that was the Trail of Tears, but they have been almost granted sainthood by 21st century activists. I have a smattering of Cherokee blood, and even they and the Seneca, who were viewed as members of the Five Civilized Tribes, were bloody barbarians. The two nations would send young warriors to freaking RUN up and down the Warrior's Path from the southern mountains up into what is now New York state to make war, slaughtering each other, and TAKING YOUNG GIRLS AND BOYS TO BE SLAVES! The Plains tribes were far worse, for their women specialized in torturing captives taken by their warriors.
It was cadets from the Military College of South Carolina (now The Citadel) that fired those shots starting the war. The Income tax was instituted to pay for the war, ultimately resulting
In the 16th Amendment. So we can blame The Citadel for the income tax.
Fort Sumter became a federal outpost in a foreign country when SC seceded. SC was the ONLY state in the union whose population had a majority of black slaves. Right or wrong (and I believe it was wrong, but can understand their reasoning) the white population of SC was deathly afraid of two things. One, having seen the MO massacres and John Brown's bloody attack in previous years, white South Carolinians were terrified that if freed the former slaves would massacre the white population. Two, sudden abolition of slavery would have absolutely destroyed the state's economy. When the federal government tried to resupply Fort Sumter from the sea at Lincoln's order, SC viewed it as an act of war and fired on the resupply convoy, turning it back. Southern forces then attacked Sumter, which surrendered April 14. 1861.
And the reason that was allowed to happen is because allowing for an expansion of slavery out west well beyond what most people would be allowed to happen changed the slavery outlook in the north, and the response northern populations would now expect. Lincoln forever walked a tightrope between pacifying an increasingly radical abolitionist movement, and the realities of fighting a civil war.
Lincoln still suckered the South into firing. As secession was a question, there was no determination made about federal property - which the fort was, and still was when Lincoln re-supplied the fort. That took secession off the table. As I noted in a remark somewhere else in this thread - the South had an amazing officer corps, their political leadership was about as poor as anything we complain about today.
Where is the 21st Century Lincoln to free us Americans living in our progressive slavery? As we hurdle at more rapid speed towards the inevitable second civil war, your beautiful history lesson echos George Santayana’s eloquent words from the Life of Reason in 1905 so well...”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Check your history. South Carolina started the war at Fort Sumter. The North declared war after that. It was the South that wanted to splt the nation. Did you even read what Don wrote? I didn't know some of the details but I know he is going into more depth than I ever got in any American history class I ever had. Good job Mr. Surber. No, GREAT job. Thank you.
Feb 11, 2023·edited Feb 11, 2023Liked by Don Surber
It is pointless to argue against fact, and what you have presented, Mr. Surber, is fact. Facts don't care about anyone's feelings, is also a fact.
I would respectfully offer the following (I'm not sure it is a difference in point of view, or opinion):
In Ken Burns' documentary, "The Civil War," the late Shelby Foote relates that most Southerners resented the North because the Union Army, was there – they viewed the Union Army soldiers as invaders, and occupiers – I don't see that as not valid.
Where I might differ (most respectfully) with your view is in perhaps HOW the end of slavery was brought about. Wasn't mobilizing an entire army and declaring war on what was then half of the nation to preserve the union was more or less completely throwing off this nation's own grounds for independence from England as contained in the declaration of such?
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
Additionally, to my way of thinking, the Nebraska-Kansas affair begs the question: if such a legal and legislative solution existed to prevent the spread of the practice of slavery, could not a similar legal and legislative solution be worked out to address the question in each of the slavery sympathetic states? If such could only be done by keeping them in the union through military force, then the question must be asked, "Was it worth it?" Perhaps it was, but sadly, the left has been remarkably successful in changing that answer to no.
In any event, this is an almost purely academic debate because whatever the downstream effects, it is the here and now in which we live. In the here and now, the left has been equally remarkably successful, with the cooperation of guilt-ridden white liberals to throw off as much of this nation's history as possible that cannot be re-written to suit the narrative of perpetual victimhood.
Feb 11, 2023·edited Feb 11, 2023Liked by Don Surber
Everything you say is, as far as I know, totally correct. The war was about the fundamental view that all people were created equal with unalienable rights and slavery. No one had the right to enslave another person. Yet., Jefferson enslaved his own children. It was inevitable that the vision and the reality would explode. "A House divided cannot stand. " Exactly.
One question. This was NOT a civil war for control of the central government but a war to secede from the United States. Why was secession illegitimate? The Confederate Slave States wanted a divorce because of "irreconcilable differences."
The North was industrial and the Confederate States were agricultural oligarchies. What was invalid about that? I have some speculation but I am not as informed as you, Don Surber, and I have lived in the north until the last few years.
There is a building in center city Philadelphia called The Union League built during the so-called Civil War. The war was to preserve the Union without slavery. Why was preserving the Union necessary to abolish slavery? As you say, initially, Lincoln’s policy was to contain slavery with the view it would eventually disappear as the country industrialized. So the war was about Slavery but NOT about abolition.
In the 100 years after the Watt-Wilkinson collaboration that produced an efficient steam engine slavery became obsolete. Slavery reappeared in Germany during the fossil fuel shortage of the first half of the 1940s. (Audrey Hepburn’s step-brother along with many other Belgians, Dutch, French and other Europeans were enslaved to ameliorate the fossil fuel shortage)
“The North was industrial and the Confederate States were agricultural oligarchies” that is true in 1860 but not in 1776. What changed in the 90 years to make that possible
Very true, Don, but steam powered tractors and cotton gins would have replaced slaves in just a few years. Keeping slaves to do work that could be done by machines was an economic dead loser.
The abrogation of the Missouri Compromise by the Kansas Nebraska Act was what set the course. It was the understanding that the South had no intention of allowing slavery to "die off" but looked to expand it so as to avoid the question they felt was eventually going to come. Most all of the Founders expected slavery to die off. It got new life in the 1800's with the movement of plantations west and some nasty slavery revolts in Haiti. Even so, most of the population expected it to end. The move by the South to aggressively work to not just delay its demise but strengthen it changed the calculus.
And the South recognized it, hence their panic as the new Republican party took this fact and developed a platform around abolition. SO, the South, who used the democratic process to their advantage, took their ball and went home when the reaction to their act became plain and they figured they would lose the democratic process in round two.
It was never about state's rights. It was about pouting over an impending political loss, which in fairness was going to be about slavery. The South had much more to justify their anger over the disputes on tariffs that had been going on for years. Then to cement their foolishness, they allowed Lincoln to absolutely school them into firing on Ft Sumter. They fired the first shot. All arguments about secession were made moot. They had fired on a federal fort.
And later, when it became obvious that the South was probably going to lose, had Davis given on slavery, a negotiated settlement on the war was available. But he remained defiant on the question of state's rights. Never was he willing to accept it was slavery that kept the monied slaveholding faction in the South committed to the war. The South politically was foolishly led, but did very well on the battlefield despite that due to an impressive officer corp and a topography favoring the defender.
Fossil fuels made the steam engine possible. Steam engines made the transcontinental railroad possible. Steam engines made the end of slavery possible.
Rockefeller saved the whales with fossil fuels.
Thank you for the history lesson, Professor Don. I can only imagine the effort to research and write such an insightful essay. I gladly trade the daily Highlights for this blog.
I was born in Chile. My father had a picture of Lincoln in his home office. As a little boy, I remember asking him who that man was. I have had huge respect for President Lincoln since then.
We immigrated to the U.S. in 1964. We lived in the land of Lincoln the first two years and on our 8th grade trip we visited many Lincoln landmarks. We also met, as a class, with the Governor, Otto Kerner, a democrat. In 1973 he was jailed for some federal crime. A role model he was not. Lincoln remains a great role model.
His memory and the true story of America the Beautiful must be fought for and preserved! Thank you Don for being on the vanguard of these two worthy causes!
I was born in Atlanta and reared in Georgia & Alabama. To pass the teacher's tests, I memorized a few facts about the Civil War from the sparse paragraphs in my high school history books. Even then I knew a lot of glossing-over was going on.
You, Mr. Don, have proven conclusively right here and now that the hard facts of history don't have to be as boring as they are in those stupid high school history books. This column alone has been worth the price of my subscription to your list. Thank you for bringing a lot of hidden history to light. Long live the memory of Honest Abe!
Nice comment! I lived in Atlanta 50 years and now I live in Alabama. I echo your sentiments!
I grew up in North Carolina in the 1950’s. I recall these facts pretty much being presented as stated here. Only it was often referred to as the war between the states. And North Carolina has/had a some what schizophrenic position on which side they were/are on.
"suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus"
Aren't we living in a de facto suspension of Habeas Corpus with the Dictatorship clinging to power in the District of Corruption ?
Augustine: The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.
There is a reason why Satan/Lucifer/the Devil is called “the father of lies.”
In NZ we have had the same revisionist approach to historical fact. The liberals here have changed the meaning of Treaty of Waitangi that gave sovereignty to the British Crown into a Partnership. This in turn has led to calls for co-governance.
Fortunately we have brave writers, lawyers and historians in NZ who are doing what Mr.Surber has done here, putting the truth before the people.
It has had a positive effect.
Jacinda Ardern has gone. The Labour Party, our equivalent to the Democrats, is busily back pedaling from their most contentious policies, and best of all, the Wellington consensus that has supported the revisionist lies for the past forty years is being challenged as never before.
The lion is prowling…
It is mighty fine of you to chime in and belly up to Don Surber's bar from east of Down Under. What a lovely country you hail from. Americans seem bereft of an appreciation of our brave and wise ancestors who went so far as New Zealand to spread goodness amidst colonial temptations. I set my sights on Asia forty years ago upon reading the novels of James Clavell who spent real time in Japanese POW camps in Singapore. Glad to hear your good news!
If only it could be thus, here...
It is amazing how the liberals change and distort history to fit their agenda of the moment. What or who is next?
Please be careful, posing such questions, even rhetorically – some unhinged leftist is bound to take it as a challenge...
I've been poking that bear for some time now. No longer do they respond because they all do know what an imbecile they stuck in to the White House. So, while I have literally been punched by two separate liberals for speaking out, those critters have gone dormant.
Your point is? I don't get it.
Murphy's law. You try not to taunt it. If you are having a bad day for what ever reason, you dont say. 'God, today cant get any worse...' because then you will have a flat or an accident or it will pour 2in of rain in an hour instead of just the drizzle the weatherman predicted. Schlong is taunting the universe....
If the Confederate Constitution effectively required states to allow slavery, how can one argue the Civil War was a fight for state's rights?
The South started it, that's one reason. That's also what they told non-elites of that day!
I might respectfully beg to differ, here...John Brown, per the resource (and consistent with other accounts) was a staunch abolitionist, and the objective of the "raid" on Harper's Ferry was an attempt to instigate a slave rebellion.
I reserve the right to change my opinion, should my view be proven wrong.
https://www.ushistory.org/us/32c.asp
Donny Boy - "The first is it credits him — not FDR, LBJ and Obama — for the sprawling federal leviathan government we now suffer."
You forgot W, my veteran brother. Not criticizing your great work, but W expanded government exponentially via the national security apparatus that is now the 4th branch of government(unelected) weaponized against more than half of the country.
Not gonna argue that, but you forgot his dear old daddy the CIA front man.
His daddy disliked Reagan and I now detest the family overall.
I have to mostly agree, Don, but slightly disagree on a couple of points. The vast majority of Confederate soldiers, something along the order of 98%, did not own slaves and had no real personal stake in keeping it legal. What motivated them to fight and die? I don't think we can totally discount the role states' rights played. I don't believe we can deny that federalism actually died during and shortly after the war.
Secondly, I don't believe it was necessary to slaughter 620,000 men to get rid of something that was going to inevitably die a richly deserved death anyway in a few years. Once agriculture was mechanized, which was not far off in an historic perspective, slaves were far too expensive to cultivate crops like cotton. Always follow the money. The rich plantation owners undoubtedly heavily influenced their state legislatures, but they were businessmen. Once they could cultivate 100 acres for the cost of keeping one or two slaves, slavery was dead. Competition from growers who mechanized would have killed it as surely as the sun rises in the east.
I agree blaming the growth of the federal gubmint on Lincoln is nonsense. Whereas Woodrow Wilson, a flaming liberal Democrat, signed the income tax into law that enabled the growth of the beast we are burdened with today.
Last, but not least, I don't think we can view the Civil War through a lens that is all black or all white. Most things are most realistically viewed in shades of grey.
I really have to address your opinion Re: we could have waited out slavery until it was no longer economically viable. In other words we should just have looked a slave in the face and said, “Don’t worry in the next 25-50 years this will all go away.” Nice thought. I get that it was horrific that over 600,000 for this cause, but if ever there was cause, in my opinion, ending slavery was A CAUSE!
Also, you didn’t need to be slaveholder to fight for the Confederacy. They were racists who did not “cotton” to the idea these slaves were getting “uppity ideas”about being free, forget equal. It has only been as recently as in our lifetimes that the South has for the vast majority of its citizenry turned from being a racist culture. The entire Civil Rights movement wouldn’t have been necessary had racism ended along with slavery when the Civil War ended. We have come a long way, but it is really our children’s generation, born in the 70’s and 80’s and since, that can claim to be the first truly non-racist generation. That might be a bit of a broad brush, but essentially the case.
OK I have to address yours. Your second paragraph shows a lack of understanding in what this was all about. It wasn't racism. Even among northern abolitionists, and Lincoln himself, they did not see "the Negroes" as equal to whites. This wasn't viewed through the racist lens as we define it today. It was a commonly held opinion of the entire country that they were perceived as less capable than the rest of the population. The abolitionists just felt they did not deserve to be held in bondage. So the whole country was racist.
Now as to changing history, Lincoln's assassination guaranteed that the South's trajectory after the war was going to be different. Johnson actually started on a more magnanimous course than was expected. And the radical Republicans were astonished, that after being gifted Johnson after Lincoln's death, that he wouldn't come down hard on the Southerners. They fixed that, almost impeaching him and created the reconstruction we all know about that birthed the KKK, and our first example of partisan political violence the democrats have uniquely used even today. Slowly democrats worked to expunge the newly freed slaves from the everyday flow of life. National democrats used these efforts to institutionalize this fact throughout society, birthing the likes of Margaret Sanger and Woodrow Wilson. The Bacon Davis Act was used to keep them out of skilled positions - a law still on the books.
We look with amazement at how the current government seems to want to rule over us, as opposed to govern the country. But authoritarian impulses run deep on the left, as well as a crybaby attitude when they lose politically. It's been around for almost 200 years. They are tough bunch of tyrants to beat.
Interracial slavery was not commonplace until a technological leap in transportation technology in the 16th Century made it possible to transport slaves purchased from Africans to the Americas. Also slave ships used sustainable wind energy.
Well said.
You are making the classic mistake of viewing history through the moral lens of today. Prior to the British abolishing slavery in the 1820's, slavery was very common, ESPECIALLY in Africa and the rest of the Muslim world. Indeed, the vast majority of slaves shipped to North America were captured and sold to Europeans by coastal black slavers who went to the interior where whites did not dare go to capture slaves who they sold to Europeans and Arabs.
Again, it is a mistake to apply modern moral thinking to people two and three hundred years ago. When the African slave trade started it was common among the uneducated whites to believe that blacks were lower on the evolutionary ladder and incapable of fitting into a civilized society. As dead wrong as that belief was, it was still a dominant belief. Before you condemn them, walk a mile in their shoes as the saying goes.
The same applied to Native Americans, who lived a Stone Age existence when Europeans first came to the New World. They certainly did not deserve some of the treatment that came their way, especially the atrocity that was the Trail of Tears, but they have been almost granted sainthood by 21st century activists. I have a smattering of Cherokee blood, and even they and the Seneca, who were viewed as members of the Five Civilized Tribes, were bloody barbarians. The two nations would send young warriors to freaking RUN up and down the Warrior's Path from the southern mountains up into what is now New York state to make war, slaughtering each other, and TAKING YOUNG GIRLS AND BOYS TO BE SLAVES! The Plains tribes were far worse, for their women specialized in torturing captives taken by their warriors.
Trying to moralize history is a fool's errand.
So why did the South shoot first?
It was cadets from the Military College of South Carolina (now The Citadel) that fired those shots starting the war. The Income tax was instituted to pay for the war, ultimately resulting
In the 16th Amendment. So we can blame The Citadel for the income tax.
Fort Sumter became a federal outpost in a foreign country when SC seceded. SC was the ONLY state in the union whose population had a majority of black slaves. Right or wrong (and I believe it was wrong, but can understand their reasoning) the white population of SC was deathly afraid of two things. One, having seen the MO massacres and John Brown's bloody attack in previous years, white South Carolinians were terrified that if freed the former slaves would massacre the white population. Two, sudden abolition of slavery would have absolutely destroyed the state's economy. When the federal government tried to resupply Fort Sumter from the sea at Lincoln's order, SC viewed it as an act of war and fired on the resupply convoy, turning it back. Southern forces then attacked Sumter, which surrendered April 14. 1861.
And the reason that was allowed to happen is because allowing for an expansion of slavery out west well beyond what most people would be allowed to happen changed the slavery outlook in the north, and the response northern populations would now expect. Lincoln forever walked a tightrope between pacifying an increasingly radical abolitionist movement, and the realities of fighting a civil war.
Lincoln still suckered the South into firing. As secession was a question, there was no determination made about federal property - which the fort was, and still was when Lincoln re-supplied the fort. That took secession off the table. As I noted in a remark somewhere else in this thread - the South had an amazing officer corps, their political leadership was about as poor as anything we complain about today.
Where is the 21st Century Lincoln to free us Americans living in our progressive slavery? As we hurdle at more rapid speed towards the inevitable second civil war, your beautiful history lesson echos George Santayana’s eloquent words from the Life of Reason in 1905 so well...”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Answer: Sitting in Florida
Either Tallahassee or Mar-a-Lago
I'll go with Mar-a-Lago. It's looking more and more like Their governor has owners instead of donors. Could be wrong
Robert Smalls should be in Statuary Hall
Check your history. South Carolina started the war at Fort Sumter. The North declared war after that. It was the South that wanted to splt the nation. Did you even read what Don wrote? I didn't know some of the details but I know he is going into more depth than I ever got in any American history class I ever had. Good job Mr. Surber. No, GREAT job. Thank you.
I don’t understand your comment. Yes, I read what Don wrote. Can you be more specific?
It is pointless to argue against fact, and what you have presented, Mr. Surber, is fact. Facts don't care about anyone's feelings, is also a fact.
I would respectfully offer the following (I'm not sure it is a difference in point of view, or opinion):
In Ken Burns' documentary, "The Civil War," the late Shelby Foote relates that most Southerners resented the North because the Union Army, was there – they viewed the Union Army soldiers as invaders, and occupiers – I don't see that as not valid.
Where I might differ (most respectfully) with your view is in perhaps HOW the end of slavery was brought about. Wasn't mobilizing an entire army and declaring war on what was then half of the nation to preserve the union was more or less completely throwing off this nation's own grounds for independence from England as contained in the declaration of such?
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
Additionally, to my way of thinking, the Nebraska-Kansas affair begs the question: if such a legal and legislative solution existed to prevent the spread of the practice of slavery, could not a similar legal and legislative solution be worked out to address the question in each of the slavery sympathetic states? If such could only be done by keeping them in the union through military force, then the question must be asked, "Was it worth it?" Perhaps it was, but sadly, the left has been remarkably successful in changing that answer to no.
In any event, this is an almost purely academic debate because whatever the downstream effects, it is the here and now in which we live. In the here and now, the left has been equally remarkably successful, with the cooperation of guilt-ridden white liberals to throw off as much of this nation's history as possible that cannot be re-written to suit the narrative of perpetual victimhood.
Nonetheless, an excellent offering, today!
Everything you say is, as far as I know, totally correct. The war was about the fundamental view that all people were created equal with unalienable rights and slavery. No one had the right to enslave another person. Yet., Jefferson enslaved his own children. It was inevitable that the vision and the reality would explode. "A House divided cannot stand. " Exactly.
One question. This was NOT a civil war for control of the central government but a war to secede from the United States. Why was secession illegitimate? The Confederate Slave States wanted a divorce because of "irreconcilable differences."
The North was industrial and the Confederate States were agricultural oligarchies. What was invalid about that? I have some speculation but I am not as informed as you, Don Surber, and I have lived in the north until the last few years.
There is a building in center city Philadelphia called The Union League built during the so-called Civil War. The war was to preserve the Union without slavery. Why was preserving the Union necessary to abolish slavery? As you say, initially, Lincoln’s policy was to contain slavery with the view it would eventually disappear as the country industrialized. So the war was about Slavery but NOT about abolition.
In the 100 years after the Watt-Wilkinson collaboration that produced an efficient steam engine slavery became obsolete. Slavery reappeared in Germany during the fossil fuel shortage of the first half of the 1940s. (Audrey Hepburn’s step-brother along with many other Belgians, Dutch, French and other Europeans were enslaved to ameliorate the fossil fuel shortage)
(These observations are easy in hindsight)
“The North was industrial and the Confederate States were agricultural oligarchies” that is true in 1860 but not in 1776. What changed in the 90 years to make that possible
Technology. Franklin opened up electricity. Lot of inventions followed
Oddly enough that Yankee Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin revitalized slavery by expanding cotton growth beyond coastal areas
Very true, Don, but steam powered tractors and cotton gins would have replaced slaves in just a few years. Keeping slaves to do work that could be done by machines was an economic dead loser.
The abrogation of the Missouri Compromise by the Kansas Nebraska Act was what set the course. It was the understanding that the South had no intention of allowing slavery to "die off" but looked to expand it so as to avoid the question they felt was eventually going to come. Most all of the Founders expected slavery to die off. It got new life in the 1800's with the movement of plantations west and some nasty slavery revolts in Haiti. Even so, most of the population expected it to end. The move by the South to aggressively work to not just delay its demise but strengthen it changed the calculus.
And the South recognized it, hence their panic as the new Republican party took this fact and developed a platform around abolition. SO, the South, who used the democratic process to their advantage, took their ball and went home when the reaction to their act became plain and they figured they would lose the democratic process in round two.
It was never about state's rights. It was about pouting over an impending political loss, which in fairness was going to be about slavery. The South had much more to justify their anger over the disputes on tariffs that had been going on for years. Then to cement their foolishness, they allowed Lincoln to absolutely school them into firing on Ft Sumter. They fired the first shot. All arguments about secession were made moot. They had fired on a federal fort.
And later, when it became obvious that the South was probably going to lose, had Davis given on slavery, a negotiated settlement on the war was available. But he remained defiant on the question of state's rights. Never was he willing to accept it was slavery that kept the monied slaveholding faction in the South committed to the war. The South politically was foolishly led, but did very well on the battlefield despite that due to an impressive officer corp and a topography favoring the defender.
Thank you for a much needed refresher course in American history. My all time favorite subject.
Thank you Mr. Kaplan for stealing my line.
This was important to point out.