Thread: "South celebrates Civil War, largely without slaves"

Dex, not that I disagree with you, but saying someone is wrong is not as effectual as demonstrating with facts that they are wrong.

Originally Posted by Consultant

people from the south are running around shouting "The south's gonna rise again!" and stuff...problem is they are hard to understand through their 3rd grade educations and KKK hoods.

Texas is....

And I'll point out, that even if the feds are telling Cali "MJ is illegal", do you see Cali actually obeying?

Its like Denver, cops just ignore it, despite the state law trumping the local law.

Originally Posted by dex71

Because they are.....in this case.
The Southern States believed it was their right to decide the slavery question, just as Cali believes that deciding that MJ should be legal. In both cases, the Feds put their foot down. The difference is that before the Civil War, the Feds had no right to put any foot down. The North winning provided the Feds with the power to completely over-rule the will of the people in an individual State.

The whole "States Rights" battle was mainly a smoke screen to get around the issue of slavery, however.

I believe the Civil War was far more about capitalism than the moral issue of slavery. Abolition was a convenient moral vehicle to reach a desired economic goal for the special interest groups of the time.

Lincoln was certainly not an abolitionist. He found slavery personally abhorrent, but ending it was not his first priority. He was in many ways what we would consider in modern terms a typical cautious liberal -- a compromiser on serious moral issues, only moving on them when pushed by social movements. As a Congressman, he was opposed to the Mexican War (which was designed to add slave territory) but still voted to finance it. He would not speak publicly against the Fugitive Slave Act, wrote to a friend "I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down...but I bite my lips and keep quiet." He was a lawyer, with a legalistic approach to slavery: the Constitution did not give the federal government the power to interfere with slavery in the states. The District of Columbia was not a state, and he did offer a resolution, while in Congress, to abolish slavery there, but accompanied this with a fugitive slave provision that escaped slaves coming into D.C. must be returned. Wendell Phillips, the militant Boston abolitionist, called Lincoln "that slavehound from Illinois". During the Civil War he would not do anything about slavery for fear of alienating the states fighting on the side of the North which still had slavery, said plainly that his main aim in the war was not to end slavery but to get the South back into the Union, and would do this even if it meant retaining slavery. The Whig Party which became the Republican Party which elected Lincoln represented economic interests which wanted a large country with a huge market for goods, with high tariffs to protect manufactures (which Southern states opposed). The South stood in the way of capitalist expansion. If you look at the legislation passed by Congress during the War, with the South no longer an obstacle, you see the economic interests: Railroad subsidies, high tariffs, contract labor law to bring in immigrant workers for cheap labor and to use as strikebreakers, a national bank putting the government in a partnership with banking interests. The Emancipation Proclamation was a weak document for freeing slaves, but did have great moral force. Chronology On The History Of Slavery And Racism 1830 To The End

Nice information Deputy.

The civil war was financial no doubt about it.

Getting rid of Slavery was a means to end.

The end being firing up our economy. For the first 100 years. We were one broke ass country especially after the war with Great britian. Both them.

I like what Andrew jackson did.

In 1835, Jackson managed to reduce the federal debt to only $33,733.05, the lowest it had been since the first fiscal year of 1791.[26] President Jackson is the only president in United States history to have paid off the national debt.[citation needed] However, this accomplishment was short lived. A severe depression from 1837 to 1844 caused a tenfold increase in national debt within its first year.

He basically took all the gold from a private bank even though it has an official sounding name like the Bank of the United States it was privately ran.

He did so b/c the bank was refusing to lend money at reasonable rates was starting to kill the economy.

Off topic I find it amusing that back then the Republicans was the liberal party and the Dem's conservative.

Originally Posted by deputyfestus

Off topic I find it amusing that back then the Republicans was the liberal party and the Dem's conservative.

It's just politicians being politicians.