Let’s Compromise
Tomorrow marks the 150th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the beginning of the Civil War.
In the Miami Herald this past Sunday Leonard Pitts, Jr. addressed the issue of historical revisionism so common in the American South, The Civil War: ‘A conspiracy of amnesia’.
For me it is simple – people were literate and wrote contemporary accounts of what happened. There were newspapers and the acta of the secessionist conventions, so there is absolutely no doubt that the issue for the South was slavery. The issue for Abraham Lincoln was union. That is what the written records from that period show, and there were too many of them, in too many places, for anyone to have changed them all.
Later in the war, when it was obvious the South couldn’t win, there were attempts to change the subject, but at the beginning of the war the reason was not in doubt.
I don’t get into Civil War history to any great extent, because I have no interest in wasting time with delusional people, but there is a relevance to our current situation – compromises.
In a sense, slavery in the United States, under the Constitution is a long list of compromises, beginning with the “Three-Fifths Compromise” in the document itself. I understand the need for compromise in framing something like the Constitution, but there has to be a limit. The failure to take a stand on the extension of slavery after the Constitution came into effect eventually led to the Civil War. By repeatedly compromising on slavery issues, the South was emboldened to constantly threaten secession, which is what happened after Crittenden Compromise as rejected as the last straw for the Free States.
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The local rag in Panama City recently published a quarter-page article explaining that the slavery issue had little to do with the South’s decision to go to war. I have to confess that I didn’t bother to actually read it. On reflection, it really makes perfect sense that the phrase “Missouri Compromise” appeared nowhere in the text. My bad.
There are records of the meetings where secession was voted on. The plantation owners were almost the only people who could pass the property qualification in the South to vote. The newspapers were full of it. All you have to do is look at the governmental records of the period, and a sample of surviving personal diaries.
It is mighty damn disingenuous of the people who pushed the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law to claim it was about “states’ rights”. You had to extradite murderers who fled to other states, but Blacks could be seized anywhere and taken South without so much as a hearing before a local magistrate.
It is long past time to move on, and stop trying to re-write history.
In 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens bluntly declared that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution.” He said the United States had been founded on the false belief that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, in contrast, had been “founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural moral condition.”
That is the root cause of the American Civil War. It’s like oil and Iraq — without slavery, there would have been no war. Just as if Iraq had been oil-less, there would have been no invasion of Iraq. Reality just *is*, and it irritates the **** out of me that people want to re-write it to be what they *want* it to be and then live as if they were actually in that fictional alternate universe…
– Badtux the “What color are the unicorns in their universe?” Penguin
Slaves accounted for more than 90% of the “wealth” of the Confederate states. At a stated value of $1000 apiece, they were obviously of supreme importance to the people with the power, and slavery was being outlawed throughout the world.
Attempting to claim that slavery was the most important issue is ignorant on its face. The Confederacy instituted a draft almost immediately after being formed because poor white boys weren’t rushing to die for plantation owners.
It’s the obvious lies that really get to me.