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There wasn't a ruling before the war. If there was the result would have been the same. Secession was illegal. You, like the south, lose bud.The supreme court disagrees, there is no legal basis for a state to secede. The articles of confederation explicitly state the Union is perpetual. The traitor/slaver states lost their illegal war for slavery.Wrong. There was nothing in the Constitution that prevented secession. As a matter of fact the USA was born of secession from England.
And when the Civil War was over, some Union States still had slavery.
The Supreme Court only ruled against secession after the war was over.
We all lost when Imperial Subjugation (the Union cause) won the war against States Rights (the Confederate cause).
It may have been a loss, but do you think that a United States is better than a divided states? I know that there are deep scars; deeper than most realise, but the US is a Wonderful Nation. I would hate to see it divided...though maybe California could be ceded to Mexico...any loss there?
Greg
You blind? The quote just before yours from Scamp, that you tagged informative.Nope. The union is strong despite history revisionist traitors that wish this country was torn apart like yourself.There wasn't a ruling before the war. If there was the result would have been the same. Secession was illegal. You, like the south, lose bud.The Supreme Court only ruled against secession after the war was over.
We all lost when Imperial Subjugation (the Union cause) won the war against States Rights (the Confederate cause).
Where on earth has anyone HERE said that? That is just nonsense.
Greg
"We all lost when Imperial Subjugation (the Union cause) won the war against States Rights (the Confederate cause)."
BS
Since secession was not prohibited by the Constitution, it is up to the States or the people. Look up the 10th Amendment.
But like any contract one side cannot unilaterally pull out of it if the other side objects.
It is what it is. I don't think all republicans are like this or southerners. I'm just pointing out those that are.You should be shunning alt-right aholes just like antifa should be shunned by dems.^Blames the Jews. The republican alt-right is all over this forum folks.I keep reading about "unfair tariffs" on the South wrt the North. Now I don't hold that the South was right to secede etc etc, but they did view the various impositions on their mostly rural industries as unfair. This is an extraxt that is along the lines of my own thinking on the matter.
Protective Tariffs: The Primary Cause of the Civil War
Now granted it is not something I consider conclusive proof; the authors obviously have their own agenda. But I do see it as on the "right" track, or at least one that is more real than "Let's free the Slaves" and kill a million Americans to do it. To me at least it was a total clusterf***.
But it did, in the end, keep the Union together and abolished Slavery. That result at least I find very good indeed. But the war itself? I just don't think it was necessary.
BTW: The Jews funding both sides? It was the lendees who put the money to whatever use they so desired. From what I can gather the Banks just did what banks do; lend money. I see no merit in bringing the Jews into it at all.
Greg
And this is a perfect example of lefties trying to lump Anti-semites with Republicans and normal conservatives/libertarians.
I usually don't deal with them, I just don't care if they post their blather on sites like this. better for them to be in the open then slinking in the shadows.
Since secession was not prohibited by the Constitution, it is up to the States or the people. Look up the 10th Amendment.
But like any contract one side cannot unilaterally pull out of it if the other side objects.
Yes they can. The Southern states legally voted to secede. It was Lincolns war that was illegal.
There wasn't a ruling before the war. If there was the result would have been the same. Secession was illegal. You, like the south, lose bud.The supreme court disagrees, there is no legal basis for a state to secede. The articles of confederation explicitly state the Union is perpetual. The traitor/slaver states lost their illegal war for slavery.
The Supreme Court only ruled against secession after the war was over.
We all lost when Imperial Subjugation (the Union cause) won the war against States Rights (the Confederate cause).
It may have been a loss, but do you think that a United States is better than a divided states? I know that there are deep scars; deeper than most realise, but the US is a Wonderful Nation. I would hate to see it divided...though maybe California could be ceded to Mexico...any loss there?
Greg
it would work better if people went back to federalism and not overwhelming federal control over things it has no reason to meddle with.
The 14th amendment was needed to prevent States from creating 2nd class citizens, but it has been taken too far by the Courts recently, much like the Commerce clause has been abused.
Since secession was not prohibited by the Constitution, it is up to the States or the people. Look up the 10th Amendment.
But like any contract one side cannot unilaterally pull out of it if the other side objects.
Yes they can. The Southern states legally voted to secede. It was Lincolns war that was illegal.
No, they can't. Unless it's clear in the contract. I contract to buy 1000 trucks of frozen concentrated orange juice, and if there is no out clause, I am stuck with it, or I suffer the consequences of breaking the contract.
The Civil War was the consequence of the Southern States trying to break a contract when the remaining parties didn't want to.
What an ignoramus -
Ignoramus gave me a smile because I was once called that by a black woman in Walmart's parking lot because I used two parking spaces. I said this is my new truck and don't want anybody to ding or dent it. She called me "ignoramus" and I only smiled back.
She was wrong for calling you an ignoramous. Taking up 2 parking spots to "protect" your new truck is not ignorant. No, it's the act of a arrogant asshole. I know people who key those cars when they are parked anywhere near the front of the store, and I understand why they do it.
The same ones see any beautiful car as a target. I find them better to hold to the old idea; NONE OF THEIR BLOODY BUSINESS!! If it is such a problem phone the local parking inspectors.
Greg
And another thing...Lincoln's army waged war upon civilians of the South.
We call that Terrorism now days. Lincoln should have been hanged for this. Instead he was shot.
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
Lincoln went to war when the southerners attacked Ft Sumter which was U.S. property. The war was their baby. "Lincoln led the north into war"? WTF kind of bullshit are you selling?No, the Civil War was about slavery--that and states' rights--but, slavery was the issue at stake in the Missouri Compromise. Slavery was the issue in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Slavery was the subject of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Slavery was what polarized the election of 1860. As for economic reasons, slavery was doomed anyway. A slave is a very inefficient source of labor and the whole system was gradually dying out on its own. Pennsylvania and everything north had all already abolished slavery. Maryland had already taken the first steps to end slavery. Abolition was on the table in Virginia. Had Lincoln been Andrew Jackson, we probably wouldn't have had that bloody war.There’s been a lot of ignorant commentary lately about Donald Trump’s speculation that Andrew Jackson wouldn’t have let the Civil War happen. Doesn’t Trump know that Jackson died 16 years before Fort Sumter?!?
But Trump was right to point to Jackson’s successful handling of South Carolina’s secessionist movement in the 1830s, which was led by Jackson’s initial vice president, the formidable pro-slavery intellectual John C. Calhoun.
The ostensible subject was South Carolina being anti-tariff, but as Calhoun admitted privately in 1830, the ultimate cause was that South Carolina’s “peculiar domestick institution” had made South Carolina different enough that economic policy that was in the national interest would generally not be in South Carolina’s interest.
The crisis began around 1830 with a famous debate in the U.S. Senate between the southerner Hayne and the New Englander Webster:
The debate presented the fullest articulation of the differences over nullification, and 40,000 copies of Webster’s response, which concluded with “liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable”, were distributed nationwide.Jackson’s uncompromising stand in favor of Union, and willingness to use federal might on the side of nationalism, combined with his lack of enthusiasm for tariffs, gave him the opportunity to turn what had looked like a national crisis into routine political horse-trading, with tariffs being reduced enough to allow South Carolinians to climb down from the perch they had gotten out on.
Many people expected the states’ rights Jackson to side with Hayne. However once the debate shifted to secession and nullification, Jackson sided with Webster. On April 13, 1830 at the traditional Democratic Party celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Jackson chose to make his position clear. In a battle of toasts, Hayne proposed, “The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States.” Jackson’s response, when his turn came, was, “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” To those attending, the effect was dramatic. Calhoun would respond with his own toast, in a play on Webster’s closing remarks in the earlier debate, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.” Finally Martin Van Buren would offer, “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concession. Through their agency the Union was established. The patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.”
Van Buren wrote in his autobiography of Jackson’s toast, “The veil was rent – the incantations of the night were exposed to the light of day.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton, in his memoirs, stated that the toast “electrified the country.”[67] Jackson would have the final words a few days later when a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message he wanted relayed to his friends back in the state. Jackson’s reply was:
“ Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.
Jackson’s proteges, such as Sam Houston who had fought under Jackson during the War of 1812, and gone on to be governor of Tennessee, President of the Republic of Texas, and finally governor of Texas, tended to be exactly the type of pro-Union Southerners that Lincoln needed more of. In 1861, Houston was deposed as governor of Texas by secessionists because he refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy.
Similarly, Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Jackson-like Tennessee Democrat pro-Union man, as his running mate in 1864.
My personal feeling is that a military confrontation between the Union and South Carolina, font of the ideology that a slave owning oligarchy was the highest form of society, was inevitable at some point in the 19th Century. The big question was how many other states would ally with the South Carolina firebreathers?
Jackson had adeptly kept Calhoun’s South Carolina malcontents isolated by focusing on the key issue of Union.
When it came to the crisis after the 1860 election, South Carolina seceded first, followed quickly by six deep Southern slave states that largely depended upon King Cotton.
But then nothing happened for months, with the other 8 slave states uncertain what to do. Unfortunately, Lincoln didn’t seem to perceive the significance of the national crisis, devoting much of his energy during his first six weeks in the White House to interviewing Republican volunteers seeking local postmaster jobs.
Lincoln’s unreadiness for the big time drove William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, crazy. Seward put forward a plan to re-unite the Union by taking exception to how France and Spain were violating the Monroe Doctrine in response to internal American disarray by colonizing Mexico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. But Lincoln saw Seward’s clever idea as a personal diss and shut down all consideration of it.
Eventually, the Union managed to hang on to four slave states, including crucial Kentucky. But after Fort Sumter, it lost four states to the Confederacy, including Jackson’s old state of Tennessee, where much of the Civil War was fought, and, catastrophically, Virginia, which became the main battlefront. Virginia is further north than any other secessionist state, so it should have stayed in the Union with Kentucky and Missouri. But Lincoln’s belated initiatives to hold Virginia, such as offering Robert E. Lee command of the Union Army, didn’t come until after Virginia had finally voted for secession.
What should have been a quick war thus turned into a 4 year long ordeal that killed 750,000 Americans, largely fought in Jackson’s state of Tennessee and heavily Scots-Irish Virginia.
Moreover, the class ideology of Jacksonism tended to be averse to slavery. Calhounism favored a slave-owning oligarchy that had little need for a flourishing class of white yeomen, except to fight for the oligarchs. The Western-oriented populist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian mindset was largely about small farmers and remained an important force outside of cotton country.
Cotton plantations worked by slaves were so profitable in the deep South that the six Cotton Belt states followed South Carolina, but further north, the Jefferson/Jackson social matrix was stronger. For example, the furthest north Confederate state, Virginia, suffered secession by its hillbilly northwest into the Union state of West Virginia (another reason why belated secession by Virginia seems like such an avoidable tragedy).
A climate map of the United States shows that the rain-watered cotton belt runs out in East Texas, while independent farmers can flourish further west the further north you go. Inevitably, a pro-Western policy like Jackson’s is going to be unenthusiastic about slavery.
Seems to me that, as is usual, the war was more about $ than slavery. Had the South been "allowed" to keep slaves I think the war would have happened anyway. The end of slavery was a good thing, but the war was fought over other issues. imo of course.
Greg
So Lincoln led the North into the war to free the slaves? I just can't see it. He wanted to crush the Confederacy; that slavery became part of it is an "of course" but without the States rights issues then I doubt that Lincoln would have gone to war just to free slaves. If it was a matter of freeing Slaves then there were many alternatives that could have and should have been explored before a total war. (Seems to me like a chicken/egg argument; there are powerful arguments on both sides imo).
Greg
Lincoln went to war when the southerners attacked Ft Sumter which was U.S. property. The war was their baby. "Lincoln led the north into war"? WTF kind of bullshit are you selling?No, the Civil War was about slavery--that and states' rights--but, slavery was the issue at stake in the Missouri Compromise. Slavery was the issue in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Slavery was the subject of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Slavery was what polarized the election of 1860. As for economic reasons, slavery was doomed anyway. A slave is a very inefficient source of labor and the whole system was gradually dying out on its own. Pennsylvania and everything north had all already abolished slavery. Maryland had already taken the first steps to end slavery. Abolition was on the table in Virginia. Had Lincoln been Andrew Jackson, we probably wouldn't have had that bloody war.There’s been a lot of ignorant commentary lately about Donald Trump’s speculation that Andrew Jackson wouldn’t have let the Civil War happen. Doesn’t Trump know that Jackson died 16 years before Fort Sumter?!?
But Trump was right to point to Jackson’s successful handling of South Carolina’s secessionist movement in the 1830s, which was led by Jackson’s initial vice president, the formidable pro-slavery intellectual John C. Calhoun.
The ostensible subject was South Carolina being anti-tariff, but as Calhoun admitted privately in 1830, the ultimate cause was that South Carolina’s “peculiar domestick institution” had made South Carolina different enough that economic policy that was in the national interest would generally not be in South Carolina’s interest.
The crisis began around 1830 with a famous debate in the U.S. Senate between the southerner Hayne and the New Englander Webster:
The debate presented the fullest articulation of the differences over nullification, and 40,000 copies of Webster’s response, which concluded with “liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable”, were distributed nationwide.Jackson’s uncompromising stand in favor of Union, and willingness to use federal might on the side of nationalism, combined with his lack of enthusiasm for tariffs, gave him the opportunity to turn what had looked like a national crisis into routine political horse-trading, with tariffs being reduced enough to allow South Carolinians to climb down from the perch they had gotten out on.
Many people expected the states’ rights Jackson to side with Hayne. However once the debate shifted to secession and nullification, Jackson sided with Webster. On April 13, 1830 at the traditional Democratic Party celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Jackson chose to make his position clear. In a battle of toasts, Hayne proposed, “The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States.” Jackson’s response, when his turn came, was, “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” To those attending, the effect was dramatic. Calhoun would respond with his own toast, in a play on Webster’s closing remarks in the earlier debate, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.” Finally Martin Van Buren would offer, “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concession. Through their agency the Union was established. The patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.”
Van Buren wrote in his autobiography of Jackson’s toast, “The veil was rent – the incantations of the night were exposed to the light of day.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton, in his memoirs, stated that the toast “electrified the country.”[67] Jackson would have the final words a few days later when a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message he wanted relayed to his friends back in the state. Jackson’s reply was:
“ Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.
Jackson’s proteges, such as Sam Houston who had fought under Jackson during the War of 1812, and gone on to be governor of Tennessee, President of the Republic of Texas, and finally governor of Texas, tended to be exactly the type of pro-Union Southerners that Lincoln needed more of. In 1861, Houston was deposed as governor of Texas by secessionists because he refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy.
Similarly, Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Jackson-like Tennessee Democrat pro-Union man, as his running mate in 1864.
My personal feeling is that a military confrontation between the Union and South Carolina, font of the ideology that a slave owning oligarchy was the highest form of society, was inevitable at some point in the 19th Century. The big question was how many other states would ally with the South Carolina firebreathers?
Jackson had adeptly kept Calhoun’s South Carolina malcontents isolated by focusing on the key issue of Union.
When it came to the crisis after the 1860 election, South Carolina seceded first, followed quickly by six deep Southern slave states that largely depended upon King Cotton.
But then nothing happened for months, with the other 8 slave states uncertain what to do. Unfortunately, Lincoln didn’t seem to perceive the significance of the national crisis, devoting much of his energy during his first six weeks in the White House to interviewing Republican volunteers seeking local postmaster jobs.
Lincoln’s unreadiness for the big time drove William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, crazy. Seward put forward a plan to re-unite the Union by taking exception to how France and Spain were violating the Monroe Doctrine in response to internal American disarray by colonizing Mexico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. But Lincoln saw Seward’s clever idea as a personal diss and shut down all consideration of it.
Eventually, the Union managed to hang on to four slave states, including crucial Kentucky. But after Fort Sumter, it lost four states to the Confederacy, including Jackson’s old state of Tennessee, where much of the Civil War was fought, and, catastrophically, Virginia, which became the main battlefront. Virginia is further north than any other secessionist state, so it should have stayed in the Union with Kentucky and Missouri. But Lincoln’s belated initiatives to hold Virginia, such as offering Robert E. Lee command of the Union Army, didn’t come until after Virginia had finally voted for secession.
What should have been a quick war thus turned into a 4 year long ordeal that killed 750,000 Americans, largely fought in Jackson’s state of Tennessee and heavily Scots-Irish Virginia.
Moreover, the class ideology of Jacksonism tended to be averse to slavery. Calhounism favored a slave-owning oligarchy that had little need for a flourishing class of white yeomen, except to fight for the oligarchs. The Western-oriented populist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian mindset was largely about small farmers and remained an important force outside of cotton country.
Cotton plantations worked by slaves were so profitable in the deep South that the six Cotton Belt states followed South Carolina, but further north, the Jefferson/Jackson social matrix was stronger. For example, the furthest north Confederate state, Virginia, suffered secession by its hillbilly northwest into the Union state of West Virginia (another reason why belated secession by Virginia seems like such an avoidable tragedy).
A climate map of the United States shows that the rain-watered cotton belt runs out in East Texas, while independent farmers can flourish further west the further north you go. Inevitably, a pro-Western policy like Jackson’s is going to be unenthusiastic about slavery.
Seems to me that, as is usual, the war was more about $ than slavery. Had the South been "allowed" to keep slaves I think the war would have happened anyway. The end of slavery was a good thing, but the war was fought over other issues. imo of course.
Greg
So Lincoln led the North into the war to free the slaves? I just can't see it. He wanted to crush the Confederacy; that slavery became part of it is an "of course" but without the States rights issues then I doubt that Lincoln would have gone to war just to free slaves. If it was a matter of freeing Slaves then there were many alternatives that could have and should have been explored before a total war. (Seems to me like a chicken/egg argument; there are powerful arguments on both sides imo).
Greg
They tried to steal property from the U.S. govt. Bad idea.Lincoln went to war when the southerners attacked Ft Sumter which was U.S. property. The war was their baby. "Lincoln led the north into war"? WTF kind of bullshit are you selling?No, the Civil War was about slavery--that and states' rights--but, slavery was the issue at stake in the Missouri Compromise. Slavery was the issue in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Slavery was the subject of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Slavery was what polarized the election of 1860. As for economic reasons, slavery was doomed anyway. A slave is a very inefficient source of labor and the whole system was gradually dying out on its own. Pennsylvania and everything north had all already abolished slavery. Maryland had already taken the first steps to end slavery. Abolition was on the table in Virginia. Had Lincoln been Andrew Jackson, we probably wouldn't have had that bloody war.There’s been a lot of ignorant commentary lately about Donald Trump’s speculation that Andrew Jackson wouldn’t have let the Civil War happen. Doesn’t Trump know that Jackson died 16 years before Fort Sumter?!?
But Trump was right to point to Jackson’s successful handling of South Carolina’s secessionist movement in the 1830s, which was led by Jackson’s initial vice president, the formidable pro-slavery intellectual John C. Calhoun.
The ostensible subject was South Carolina being anti-tariff, but as Calhoun admitted privately in 1830, the ultimate cause was that South Carolina’s “peculiar domestick institution” had made South Carolina different enough that economic policy that was in the national interest would generally not be in South Carolina’s interest.
The crisis began around 1830 with a famous debate in the U.S. Senate between the southerner Hayne and the New Englander Webster:
The debate presented the fullest articulation of the differences over nullification, and 40,000 copies of Webster’s response, which concluded with “liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable”, were distributed nationwide.Jackson’s uncompromising stand in favor of Union, and willingness to use federal might on the side of nationalism, combined with his lack of enthusiasm for tariffs, gave him the opportunity to turn what had looked like a national crisis into routine political horse-trading, with tariffs being reduced enough to allow South Carolinians to climb down from the perch they had gotten out on.
Many people expected the states’ rights Jackson to side with Hayne. However once the debate shifted to secession and nullification, Jackson sided with Webster. On April 13, 1830 at the traditional Democratic Party celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Jackson chose to make his position clear. In a battle of toasts, Hayne proposed, “The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States.” Jackson’s response, when his turn came, was, “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” To those attending, the effect was dramatic. Calhoun would respond with his own toast, in a play on Webster’s closing remarks in the earlier debate, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.” Finally Martin Van Buren would offer, “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concession. Through their agency the Union was established. The patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.”
Van Buren wrote in his autobiography of Jackson’s toast, “The veil was rent – the incantations of the night were exposed to the light of day.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton, in his memoirs, stated that the toast “electrified the country.”[67] Jackson would have the final words a few days later when a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message he wanted relayed to his friends back in the state. Jackson’s reply was:
“ Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.
Jackson’s proteges, such as Sam Houston who had fought under Jackson during the War of 1812, and gone on to be governor of Tennessee, President of the Republic of Texas, and finally governor of Texas, tended to be exactly the type of pro-Union Southerners that Lincoln needed more of. In 1861, Houston was deposed as governor of Texas by secessionists because he refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy.
Similarly, Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Jackson-like Tennessee Democrat pro-Union man, as his running mate in 1864.
My personal feeling is that a military confrontation between the Union and South Carolina, font of the ideology that a slave owning oligarchy was the highest form of society, was inevitable at some point in the 19th Century. The big question was how many other states would ally with the South Carolina firebreathers?
Jackson had adeptly kept Calhoun’s South Carolina malcontents isolated by focusing on the key issue of Union.
When it came to the crisis after the 1860 election, South Carolina seceded first, followed quickly by six deep Southern slave states that largely depended upon King Cotton.
But then nothing happened for months, with the other 8 slave states uncertain what to do. Unfortunately, Lincoln didn’t seem to perceive the significance of the national crisis, devoting much of his energy during his first six weeks in the White House to interviewing Republican volunteers seeking local postmaster jobs.
Lincoln’s unreadiness for the big time drove William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, crazy. Seward put forward a plan to re-unite the Union by taking exception to how France and Spain were violating the Monroe Doctrine in response to internal American disarray by colonizing Mexico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. But Lincoln saw Seward’s clever idea as a personal diss and shut down all consideration of it.
Eventually, the Union managed to hang on to four slave states, including crucial Kentucky. But after Fort Sumter, it lost four states to the Confederacy, including Jackson’s old state of Tennessee, where much of the Civil War was fought, and, catastrophically, Virginia, which became the main battlefront. Virginia is further north than any other secessionist state, so it should have stayed in the Union with Kentucky and Missouri. But Lincoln’s belated initiatives to hold Virginia, such as offering Robert E. Lee command of the Union Army, didn’t come until after Virginia had finally voted for secession.
What should have been a quick war thus turned into a 4 year long ordeal that killed 750,000 Americans, largely fought in Jackson’s state of Tennessee and heavily Scots-Irish Virginia.
Moreover, the class ideology of Jacksonism tended to be averse to slavery. Calhounism favored a slave-owning oligarchy that had little need for a flourishing class of white yeomen, except to fight for the oligarchs. The Western-oriented populist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian mindset was largely about small farmers and remained an important force outside of cotton country.
Cotton plantations worked by slaves were so profitable in the deep South that the six Cotton Belt states followed South Carolina, but further north, the Jefferson/Jackson social matrix was stronger. For example, the furthest north Confederate state, Virginia, suffered secession by its hillbilly northwest into the Union state of West Virginia (another reason why belated secession by Virginia seems like such an avoidable tragedy).
A climate map of the United States shows that the rain-watered cotton belt runs out in East Texas, while independent farmers can flourish further west the further north you go. Inevitably, a pro-Western policy like Jackson’s is going to be unenthusiastic about slavery.
Seems to me that, as is usual, the war was more about $ than slavery. Had the South been "allowed" to keep slaves I think the war would have happened anyway. The end of slavery was a good thing, but the war was fought over other issues. imo of course.
Greg
So Lincoln led the North into the war to free the slaves? I just can't see it. He wanted to crush the Confederacy; that slavery became part of it is an "of course" but without the States rights issues then I doubt that Lincoln would have gone to war just to free slaves. If it was a matter of freeing Slaves then there were many alternatives that could have and should have been explored before a total war. (Seems to me like a chicken/egg argument; there are powerful arguments on both sides imo).
Greg
Fort Sumter became South Carolina's property when they seceded.
During the war, Lincoln by himself illegally made West Virginia a new state. ....
Lincoln went to war when the southerners attacked Ft Sumter which was U.S. property. The war was their baby. "Lincoln led the north into war"? WTF kind of bullshit are you selling?No, the Civil War was about slavery--that and states' rights--but, slavery was the issue at stake in the Missouri Compromise. Slavery was the issue in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Slavery was the subject of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Slavery was what polarized the election of 1860. As for economic reasons, slavery was doomed anyway. A slave is a very inefficient source of labor and the whole system was gradually dying out on its own. Pennsylvania and everything north had all already abolished slavery. Maryland had already taken the first steps to end slavery. Abolition was on the table in Virginia. Had Lincoln been Andrew Jackson, we probably wouldn't have had that bloody war.There’s been a lot of ignorant commentary lately about Donald Trump’s speculation that Andrew Jackson wouldn’t have let the Civil War happen. Doesn’t Trump know that Jackson died 16 years before Fort Sumter?!?
But Trump was right to point to Jackson’s successful handling of South Carolina’s secessionist movement in the 1830s, which was led by Jackson’s initial vice president, the formidable pro-slavery intellectual John C. Calhoun.
The ostensible subject was South Carolina being anti-tariff, but as Calhoun admitted privately in 1830, the ultimate cause was that South Carolina’s “peculiar domestick institution” had made South Carolina different enough that economic policy that was in the national interest would generally not be in South Carolina’s interest.
The crisis began around 1830 with a famous debate in the U.S. Senate between the southerner Hayne and the New Englander Webster:
The debate presented the fullest articulation of the differences over nullification, and 40,000 copies of Webster’s response, which concluded with “liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable”, were distributed nationwide.Jackson’s uncompromising stand in favor of Union, and willingness to use federal might on the side of nationalism, combined with his lack of enthusiasm for tariffs, gave him the opportunity to turn what had looked like a national crisis into routine political horse-trading, with tariffs being reduced enough to allow South Carolinians to climb down from the perch they had gotten out on.
Many people expected the states’ rights Jackson to side with Hayne. However once the debate shifted to secession and nullification, Jackson sided with Webster. On April 13, 1830 at the traditional Democratic Party celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Jackson chose to make his position clear. In a battle of toasts, Hayne proposed, “The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States.” Jackson’s response, when his turn came, was, “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” To those attending, the effect was dramatic. Calhoun would respond with his own toast, in a play on Webster’s closing remarks in the earlier debate, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear.” Finally Martin Van Buren would offer, “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concession. Through their agency the Union was established. The patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.”
Van Buren wrote in his autobiography of Jackson’s toast, “The veil was rent – the incantations of the night were exposed to the light of day.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton, in his memoirs, stated that the toast “electrified the country.”[67] Jackson would have the final words a few days later when a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message he wanted relayed to his friends back in the state. Jackson’s reply was:
“ Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.
Jackson’s proteges, such as Sam Houston who had fought under Jackson during the War of 1812, and gone on to be governor of Tennessee, President of the Republic of Texas, and finally governor of Texas, tended to be exactly the type of pro-Union Southerners that Lincoln needed more of. In 1861, Houston was deposed as governor of Texas by secessionists because he refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy.
Similarly, Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Jackson-like Tennessee Democrat pro-Union man, as his running mate in 1864.
My personal feeling is that a military confrontation between the Union and South Carolina, font of the ideology that a slave owning oligarchy was the highest form of society, was inevitable at some point in the 19th Century. The big question was how many other states would ally with the South Carolina firebreathers?
Jackson had adeptly kept Calhoun’s South Carolina malcontents isolated by focusing on the key issue of Union.
When it came to the crisis after the 1860 election, South Carolina seceded first, followed quickly by six deep Southern slave states that largely depended upon King Cotton.
But then nothing happened for months, with the other 8 slave states uncertain what to do. Unfortunately, Lincoln didn’t seem to perceive the significance of the national crisis, devoting much of his energy during his first six weeks in the White House to interviewing Republican volunteers seeking local postmaster jobs.
Lincoln’s unreadiness for the big time drove William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, crazy. Seward put forward a plan to re-unite the Union by taking exception to how France and Spain were violating the Monroe Doctrine in response to internal American disarray by colonizing Mexico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. But Lincoln saw Seward’s clever idea as a personal diss and shut down all consideration of it.
Eventually, the Union managed to hang on to four slave states, including crucial Kentucky. But after Fort Sumter, it lost four states to the Confederacy, including Jackson’s old state of Tennessee, where much of the Civil War was fought, and, catastrophically, Virginia, which became the main battlefront. Virginia is further north than any other secessionist state, so it should have stayed in the Union with Kentucky and Missouri. But Lincoln’s belated initiatives to hold Virginia, such as offering Robert E. Lee command of the Union Army, didn’t come until after Virginia had finally voted for secession.
What should have been a quick war thus turned into a 4 year long ordeal that killed 750,000 Americans, largely fought in Jackson’s state of Tennessee and heavily Scots-Irish Virginia.
Moreover, the class ideology of Jacksonism tended to be averse to slavery. Calhounism favored a slave-owning oligarchy that had little need for a flourishing class of white yeomen, except to fight for the oligarchs. The Western-oriented populist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian mindset was largely about small farmers and remained an important force outside of cotton country.
Cotton plantations worked by slaves were so profitable in the deep South that the six Cotton Belt states followed South Carolina, but further north, the Jefferson/Jackson social matrix was stronger. For example, the furthest north Confederate state, Virginia, suffered secession by its hillbilly northwest into the Union state of West Virginia (another reason why belated secession by Virginia seems like such an avoidable tragedy).
A climate map of the United States shows that the rain-watered cotton belt runs out in East Texas, while independent farmers can flourish further west the further north you go. Inevitably, a pro-Western policy like Jackson’s is going to be unenthusiastic about slavery.
Seems to me that, as is usual, the war was more about $ than slavery. Had the South been "allowed" to keep slaves I think the war would have happened anyway. The end of slavery was a good thing, but the war was fought over other issues. imo of course.
Greg
So Lincoln led the North into the war to free the slaves? I just can't see it. He wanted to crush the Confederacy; that slavery became part of it is an "of course" but without the States rights issues then I doubt that Lincoln would have gone to war just to free slaves. If it was a matter of freeing Slaves then there were many alternatives that could have and should have been explored before a total war. (Seems to me like a chicken/egg argument; there are powerful arguments on both sides imo).
Greg
Fort Sumter became South Carolina's property when they seceded.
During the war, Lincoln by himself illegally made West Virginia a new state. ....
Wrong
During the war, Lincoln by himself illegally made West Virginia a new state. ....
Wrong
You do know that it is spelled out in the Constitution how a new state is made right? Lincoln violated the constitution when he made WV a state. Plain and simple.
During the war, Lincoln by himself illegally made West Virginia a new state. ....
Wrong
You do know that it is spelled out in the Constitution how a new state is made right? ...
