@ Thunderbolt
I don’t see Lincoln’s personal motives being quite as noble as is commonly portrayed.[/quote]
I don’t think he was a saint, but do tell - what motives did he have that were not as noble as you commonly see in portrayals?[/quote]
It’s more along the lines of what motives he didn’t have. I have a hard time buying that he spent nights awake weeping over the plight of the southern black man. I get the impression that slavery was something he found repugnant, but also that he didn’t hold Negroes in very high esteem.
I think Lincoln had a whole list of reasons, many that were in fact economic in nature, for preventing the secession of the southern states. You have mentioned some yourself in the form of the consequences had it happened. Those are serious concerns and I’m glad we haven’t had to face them, but I have a hard time with the notion that Lincoln would have taken the country to war on the basis of slavery alone which is pretty much what is usually implied. The bleeding heart humanitarian who just could not suffer American slavery to exist one minute longer than he could help.
Yet, for such an emotionalist, we do not get the same level of righteous indignation over the millions who were treated as disposable property and died in chains.
Yes, Dustin, and that is what people who have moved out of their mom’s basement do - they try and assess the future the best they can and make choices based on what they think will happen, and they try to choose the least worst option.
You don’t have a complaint here. The “possible scenarios” I mentioned most certainly could have happened and there is, in fact, little reason to think they wouldn’t. The idea that the individual states would somehow revert to a “peaceful utopia”, minding their own business, is preposterous.
We know - as a fact - that the Slave Power wanted to extend an empire built on slavery into the vast territories of the West. The Union certainly had ambitions of moving West.
We know - as a fact - that insurrections were popping up within the Confederacy itself, as abolitionist counties tried to “secede”. That, of course, would have (and did to a certain extent) plunge the Confederacy into the exact same scenario of using force to hold their nation together, and it would have (a) gotten worse with the addition of slave insurrections, and (b) gotten worse with material support from the old Union. Had a “peaceful” secession taken place, there was nothing but wholesale slaughter around the corner.
Moreover, foreign powers were interested in vast continent of nearly unlimited resources that no longer had a unified power defending its claim to. We know - as a fact - that after Appammatox, General Sheridan was sent to the Mexican border because Napoleon had 40,000 French troops occupying Mexico and sniffing out opportunities north of the border.
My “possible scenarios” aren’t some random hypotheticals on an internet chat board “jumping to conclusions”. Hard men faced with tough decisions ahead of them understood the severe consequences of letting the Union fold, and these were all very real possibilities.
Your naivete continues to amaze, but not as much as your lack of education on the topic. You’ll naturally whine that I am being “condescending”, but it is a matter of truth - you simply have no command of the facts at the time, and you try and create unsupported conclusions that are pure ideology rather than logical.
Whether this is “condescension” or not, it doesn’t mean I am wrong about your shortcomings.
Yes, we do - the Union was saved and the American experiment salvaged from the selfish demands of foolish radicals. The Union had survived destruction from without (tyranny), and had now survived destruction from within (anarchy), and thus, a constitutional republic had survived precisely the dangers its opponents boasted would ruin it.
Additionally, along with the advances made by England and its leadership, the eradication of slavery was set in motion.
Then your basic complaint is really nothing more than that war is awful. but no one disputes it. The issue is whether war, in a given situation, was worth it, not that it was awesome.
There are things worse than war. If you aren’t “grown up” enough to see that in the context of the human condition - and I suspect you are not, given your naive and adoloscent belief in “anarchy” as a viable political philosophy - then that isn’t my problem to fix.
So odd - you swoop into this thread with nothing but attempts to insult me, and yet you never - never, ever - stop whining about my lack of manners or respect shown to you.
What could possibly explain your serial hypocrisy? Be a jerk or be a gentlemen, but don’t try to be both and just end up being a hypocrite. At any rate, it is getting damn old.
It’s more along the lines of what motives he didn’t have. I have a hard time buying that he spent nights awake weeping over the plight of the southern black man. I get the impression that slavery was something he found repugnant, but also that he didn’t hold Negroes in very high esteem.[/quote]
I think you are right on both counts, but I think it is indisputable that he firmly believed that slavery should be ended. In truth, I don’t see anything more being “needed” to validate his motives in terms of the slavery question (again, he believed in a legislative death, and did not launch forth into war to free slaves).
Such as what? I am willing to hear a good argument on this, as destruction of the Union meant many bad things Lincoln wanted to avoid.
However, the idea that Lincoln instigated the war because he had in mind some “super-state” that he desperately needed Southern tax revenue to pay for is the height of stupidity.
I think that is right - and Lincoln was an abolitionist moderate. He was prepared to tolerate the existence of slavery so long as it could be legislatively quarantined for extinction. He wasn’t a bleeding heart humanitarian - he was, like a number of Founding Fathers, a realist about slavery and understood it to be a moral wrong that could not be eradicated overnight.
Maybe a better way to state what I’m saying is that I don’t think slavery was the overriding motivation for Lincoln’s desire to preserve the union. Preserving the union, and all that that would mean was. Abolishing slavery was a bonus that would come almost necessarily along with preserving the union.
I’m not saying I buy the nefarious motivations that some ascribe to him either. It’s just that if you say the name “Abraham Lincoln” to almost anybody in the world who knows who he was the first thing that comes to their mind is, “oh, he’s the guy who freed the slaves” as if he had made it his life’s mission to do so and everything else was incidental to the impetus for the civil war.
I think, though he wouldn’t have liked it, he could have lived with slavery all other things being equal.
I view slavery, as I said, as a crime against humanity. an institutionalized evil rising to levels not far beneath the anti semitism of Nazi Germany. I do also view 600,000 lives as a price worth paying to have that festering cancer formally expunged from our national fabric. We could have never carried the moral authority in the world we did through the late 19th and much of the 20th centuries with the monkey of slavery on our backs. It stood in stark hypocritical contradiction to every syllable of our founding documents. If I view the civil war myself as all about slavery then I support the north and am glad it ended as it did.
In the case of slavery, the very unalienable rights said to be endowed to men by their Creator were being ruthlessly denied to a whole race of other men in the name of economic expediency. I can think of very little I wouldn’t tolerate to see that egregious wrong righted.
Whether or not secession under other circumstances for other reasons could be supported is to me, a different question.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Food for thought: 95% of the southern white population in 1860 owned no slaves.[/quote]
What is your source?
The 1860 census says 31 percent of families in the South owned slaves. Which means that about a third of the families of the South were, in Lincoln’s words, “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” It is likely that most of those families consisted of at least two adults. If so, that would put the percentage of slave-owning adults at around 16 percent.
Secession commissioners from five states of the Deep South toured the South, wrote letters and made speeches to try to convince the remaining states to leave the union. In the nightmarish world of the secessionists, Lincoln and his “Black Republicans” were hell bent on seeing the South: drenched in blood when the slaves rose in revolt; drenched in the horrors of equality, as whites and blacks lived together withouth a master race; and forced into miscegnation, as the races mixed and became one.
Could this have affected the mindset of non-slaveholders and slaveholders alike? It’s no big surprise that a poor, nonslaveholding white would not want the slave to be elevated to equal ground, especially after all the incessent barking about miscegnation and anarchy.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Food for thought: 95% of the southern white population in 1860 owned no slaves.[/quote]
I know you are not a supporter of slavery Push, but we may have found something we disagree about.
The more relevant number is the 3 - 4 million slaves.
Also, how is this 95% figure arrived at. Raw numbers? Adult males? Households?
Saying that 95% of every man, woman and child in the south didn’t own slaves is quite different than determining something like how much of the southern agricultural economy relied upon very inexpensive slave labor for it’s juicy profit margins.
I really think if people view this issue centered firmly on slavery, whether either side in the 1860’s did so or not, it takes on a different much less academic light.
Slavery erased whatever other possibly legitimate claims to self determination the south may have wielded. On that level Lincoln’s motives or whether he loved black people is irrelevant. In preserving the union he also did away with a monstrous institutionalized evil that may have eventually led to worse things than even the civil war.
Don’t those black slaves count? Are we to grieve over the death of 600,000 largely white people, but fancy it tolerable that millions of black people were forced into lives arguably worse than death? Bred like cattle, children wrenched from their mothers arms bought and sold at auction as beasts of burden? Absolutely no rights, even to life, never mind liberty or the pursuit of happiness? There is no way to escape the fact that supporting the south is supporting that even if passively.
That is an emotional argument with constitutional teeth.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Food for thought: 95% of the southern white population in 1860 owned no slaves.[/quote]
What is your source?
The 1860 census says 31 percent of families in the South owned slaves. Which means that about a third of the families of the South were, in Lincoln’s words, “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” It is likely that most of those families consisted of at least two adults. If so, that would put the percentage of slave-owning adults at around 16 percent.
[/quote]
What’s wrong with that? All morality is relative anyway and who are you or me to judge others? Its perfectly okay to firebomb the cities of those who don’t agree with your position, so I’m a Unionist. All morality is relative.
Since morality is relative, its okay to surprise others when they wanted to leave the Union. “You can’t do that, its ILLEGAL!” What was meant, of course, is that we will club you into submission if you just try and leave.
Power is everything. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are just made up words. Right?
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Food for thought: 95% of the southern white population in 1860 owned no slaves.[/quote]
What is your source?
The 1860 census says 31 percent of families in the South owned slaves. Which means that about a third of the families of the South were, in Lincoln’s words, “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” It is likely that most of those families consisted of at least two adults. If so, that would put the percentage of slave-owning adults at around 16 percent.
[/quote]
What’s wrong with that? All morality is relative anyway and who are you or me to judge others? Its perfectly okay to firebomb the cities of those who don’t agree with your position, so I’m a Unionist. All morality is relative.
Since morality is relative, its okay to surprise others when they wanted to leave the Union. “You can’t do that, its ILLEGAL!” What was meant, of course, is that we will club you into submission if you just try and leave.
Power is everything. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are just made up words. Right?
[/quote]
I usually see you as more intelligent and reasoned than most give you credit for here, because, I believe, I take the time to decipher your sometimes intentionally cryptic method of communication.
This, however is an utterly boneheaded analysis. It is exactly in light of the absolute and in my view Divine nature of the substantive equality of ALL men that rendered the abolition of slavery paramount over all other concerns in the civil war era.
This country was a living breathing caricature of her own founding so long as slavery was allowed to persist within her borders.
It was further precisely the relative application of principle depending on which men we were talking about that allowed slavery to exist here in the first place. How can you not see that?
Before you jump on me I have already said that to me, the question of secession for other reasons, under different circumstances is a different question altogether. At bottom I’m much less concerned with the how or why than I am with THAT slavery was abolished. The United States of America could not allow that state of affairs to continue.
EDIT: Oh yeah, do we really want to talk about might making right here when men, women and children were driven under the lash into dehumanizing servile bondage?
I will admit that I stepped out of line when I called your character into question (two posts previous). It’s not my style to do that. I don’t know you so I have no right, or much evidence to make any claims. It wasn’t the purpose of the post, but it certainly came off that way. For that I apologize.
As for the argument with regards to maintaining the Union at the cost of a brutal war, well, I simply disagree. The Southern States were not the first to (threaten to) secede. When the New England states threatened to do so, the country didn’t collapse. We don’t know what would have happened had the South been allowed to leave. You can make all sorts of assumptions, but we will never know for sure.
Either way, you’re not going to convince me it was worth it, which has been my point all along. I made that clear several pages ago to which Push replied to the post and agreed.
Any other arguments you want to bring up will lead to us spinning our wheels. Go for it, if you want.
And to your, yet again, personal attack that I’m somehow supporting slavery, or Slave Power, please quit. No one here that disagrees with you is defending slavery, in any way.
Lastly, you made another irrelevant comment regarding my politics. Once again, it has nothing to do with the topic discussed. It simply comes across as a lame attempt at insulting me. I label you as condescending because you are. Vegita even called you out on it in a recent thread. You denied it as usual.
What does it matter? Well, you mentioned I’m an “emotionalist” and am therefore not fun to debate. Do you think other forum members enjoy debating an individual that upon disagreeing with them resorts to blatant personal attacks?
Whether I’m a forum meanie or gentleman, I could care less. I attempt to post regarding the topic and refrain from all the childish personal attacks .
Completely subjective but entirely within the purview of the “what if” entertainment I mentioned earlier.[/quote]
Well, not entirely subjective because the predictions are based on facts and occurrences taking place at the the time.
On the other hand, the question is which set of scenarios was “more likely” - to which, I ask you: which was more likely, my scenarios or yours, where a seceded Confederacy simply politely bid adieu to the Union and everyone quietly and peacefully went back to business of plowing fields and raising kids?
What set of facts or logic makes you believe that your scenario would be most likely to have occurred? I ask this seriously, because there is world’s difference between envisioning what you would want to happen versus what was most likely to happen.
The same things that were being discussed before the War. How’s that for a simple answer?[/quote]
It’s too simple, that’s what. It’s meaningless. What is to negotiate and talk about? What does Lincoln have that the South wants that would convince it not to secede?
The “things discussed before the war” were the politics of slavery. The Slave Power determined the time for talk was over when they stormed out of the Democratic Convention of 1860.
And I’ll grant you a more substantive answer than you did for mine - wehn do you stop fighting? At either victory or defeat. No one (smartly) wages a war that they don’t have the stomach to see through till the end. You fight until the other side surrenders. That is the easiest question posed yet.
Either way, you’re not going to convince me it was worth it, which has been my point all along. I made that clear several pages ago to which Push replied to the post and agreed.[/quote]
No problem - and then you expressly asked me if I thought the was worth it. If you have no interest in my opinion and I can’t convince you to change your mind at any rate, why solicit my direct opinion on the matter?
Thanks, others have provided a more fruitful and educated discussion, and I will continue to pursue those, because they are interesting.
I don’t think you are defending slavery - I just find it bizarre that libertarians/anarchists who get so emotionally wound up about the toll on property and casualties in the Civil War seem to seem so nonplussed at the horrors of slavery. That doesn’t mean that I think you support slavery - it means I think you have your priorities out of whack, haven’t adequately considered the issues and/or are very confused about what to be upset about, given all the things to have an emotional reaction to.
Vegita didn’t like that I insulted blind, idiotic followers of Ron Paul. Too bad. I called the Ron Paul followers for their historical idiocy and their awful arguments. If you consider that “condescension”, I can’t help you.
Push and I disagree on this topic and have been going back and forth. He disagrees with me, and there have been no personal attacks. Why? Because he is smart and makes good arguments and doesn’t act like a bozo when his arguments are under attack.
Heh. You mean, for example, when SteelyDan asked for my recommendation on a DiLorenzo book and you, without solicitation, instructed SteelyDan to not listen to “Dunder” on account that I do nothing but act as an apologist for the state and have ever since my first post here in PWI?
Sure thing, Dustin. Glad to hear you refrain from “childish, personal attacks.”
Either way, you’re not going to convince me it was worth it, which has been my point all along. I made that clear several pages ago to which Push replied to the post and agreed.[/quote]
I was curious, that’s why I asked. You then explained why by discussing what you thought could happen had the War not occurred. I see your reasoning now.
[quote]
Thanks, others have provided a more fruitful and educated discussion, and I will continue to pursue those, because they are interesting. [/quote]
Good for you.
[quote]
I don’t think you are defending slavery - I just find it bizarre that libertarians/anarchists who get so emotionally wound up about the toll on property and casualties in the Civil War seem to seem so nonplussed at the horrors of slavery. That doesn’t mean that I think you support slavery - it means I think you have your priorities out of whack, haven’t adequately considered the issues and/or are very confused about what to be upset about, given all the things to have an emotional reaction to. [/quote]
Well, I lean towards Tiribulus’s view that Lincoln probably wasn’t loosing sleep at night because blacks were enslaved. I suppose that is why I separate the issue of slavery and the war itself. Perhaps I shouldn’t separate them.
[quote]
Vegita didn’t like that I insulted blind, idiotic followers of Ron Paul. Too bad. I called the Ron Paul followers for their historical idiocy and their awful arguments. If you consider that “condescension”, I can’t help you. [/quote]
Vegita considered it condescending as well. That’s the thing, I’m not the only one. Besides, John S., who is a solid forum member is also a Paul supporter. He’s far from idiotic.
Because you agree with him on virtually everything? He’s your forum “buddy”.
This is the last I will comment about your posting “style”, but you have verbally torn people to shreds over the years posting here, simply because you disagreed with them. And that isn’t even subject to debate.
But, the internet is serious business, so, oh well.
[quote]
Heh. You mean, for example, when SteelyDan asked for my recommendation on a DiLorenzo book and you, without solicitation, instructed SteelyDan to not listen to “Dunder” on account that I do nothing but act as an apologist for the state and have ever since my first post here in PWI?
Sure thing, Dustin. Glad to hear you refrain from “childish, personal attacks.”
On to the actual topic at hand.[/quote]
Modifying your forum handle from Thunder to “blunder” isn’t a personal attack. Calling Paul supporters “idiots”, constitutes as one.
Unless of course your real name is actually Thunderbolt, then I apologize.