So why are you bearing false witness against me? I gave an exact quote and even included the punctuation. It is not required to post the entire speech, not an entire book, nor an entire article. In fact, that's illegal. What I quoted was exactly what was said. The point was his inclusion of slandering the "prophet" of Islam, which is Sharia law not American law.
This quote is removed from context. Obama lists "those who offend slander the prophet of islam" in the same context as anyone else who starts fights for the fun of it. Seriously,
read the speech. He's not advocating a legal principle here, he's recommending that we don't be
jerks. A rather ironic fact, given the reaction to the speech.
The Confederacy had slavery for 4 years. The United States had slavery for over 80 years.
Slavery didn't end when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, or the North won the Civil War. It was finally ended in 1870, a full 5 years after the war.
So what?
A careful look at history shows it is a lie to say that there was a huge groundswell of anti-slavery sentiment, and Lincoln was their champion (as revisionist history would have you believe.)
So what?
Nobody is claiming this. Nobody with a halfway decent grasp of history is buying into this idea. You guys are battling a straw man. The issue at hand here is not "did the north keep slaves" or "Was the north abolitionist". The issue at hand here is "what did the confederacy stand for". And the answer to that is pretty simple:
racism. This is not some fringe opinion. Read the articles of secession of each of the states and you'll see as a common theme running through each of them that they want to uphold slavery as an institution.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp
Or how about the infamous "Cornerstone Speech", where the vice president of the confederacy made it
perfectly clear what was going on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#The_.27Cornerstone.27
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our
peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
Indeed, there's virtually nothing else that reasonably applies here. It was not, as many people have proclaimed, about "states rights". Indeed, one of the grievances you find all over the place in the declarations of secession is that the northern states aren't following the 6th amendment. And in the constitution of the confederacy, we find this gem:
“In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”
Yep, the confederacy cared about states rights so much that they made it illegal for individual states to ban the owning of slaves. Whoopsie!
It was also not about tariffs.
@outsidethecamp brought up the threat of secession in the 1830s by South Carolina over tariffs, but not only did nobody else seem to care enough to stop the US army from shutting the whole thing down in short order, but the tariffs of the early 1860s were based on a
law passed in 1857. A law passed first and foremost by the
southern states. This is a complete fabrication - there was no economic cause for this secession beyond the economy of slavery. Indeed, the 1830s kerfluffle was about
nullification - SC argued that the law was unconstitutional and therefore should not apply to them. Slightly different story, that.
In other words:
More people should be defending the Confederate Flag over the US Flag, since it stands for opposition to totalitarian rule.
This is just totally wrong.
It was co-opted by racists (carpetbaggers, scalawags)
Although this has a grain of truth to it. The first time it was brought out, it was as a symbol for a group of traitors who seceded virtually exclusively for the sake of protecting the institution of slavery (which they held to be a moral good). The next time it really gained prominence, it was brought out again during the civil rights movement. Guess which side was waving it. I'll give you a hint:
it wasn't anyone who would want to share a beer with MLK Jr.
“As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps eighty per cent. of her armies were neither slave-holders, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed than the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its beginning to near its close the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union.” Major General John B. Gordon, from his book, Causes of the Civil War.
You do realize that John B. Gordon was part of the confederacy, right? His opinion on the matter is kind of unreliable, and likely to be just a
wee bit biased. And then he writes a book on the causes of the civil war. However, compared with the historical evidence that wasn't dictated long after the fact by someone trying to protect his own legacy, this just doesn't hold up. If the south had no interest in slavery, what was up with that amendment to the southern constitution that made it clear that all the states would have slavery? What was with the Cornerstone Address? Why does slavery, more than
anything else, keep coming up as a reason stated by those in the south?
Oh, and by the way, you wanna know how I
know that Gordon is lying about that last bit? The Crittenden compromise. An attempt in 1860 to save the union by giving the southerners most of the terms they wanted... That was voted down by the north. In other words, the South wasn't getting their way before the war, and they sure as heck weren't getting it after a surrender during the war.
This is the kind of sloppy, revisionist history that whitewashes the crimes of the confederacy.
This is what you read in revisionist history books by the victors:
The Civil War was fought over a wide range of issues (e.g. the difference in southern and northern social cultures and political beliefs, taxes, tariffs, internal improvements, as well as states rights versus federal rights); however, the future of slavery WAS the burning issue and catalyst for it.
It is largely a lie.
You're right, unless I read the next sentence of your post. Tariffs and taxes had next to nothing to do with it. "States rights" had nothing to do with it. It was almost entirely about slavery. Yes, this history book is revisionist. It's revised in favor of the losers.
Slavery was already dying out.
You know what would be really nice? If you offered sources for the huge number of tall claims you make. Because, oddly enough, when I went to look this up, you know what I found?
https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/was-slavery-on-the-way-out/
In the years between 1850 and 1860, in the thirteen slaveholding states (excluding Missouri and Delaware), the total cash value of farms rose from $1,035,544,075 to $2,288,179,125; the average cash value of farms rose from $2,035.75 to $3,438.71; the number of slaveholders grew from 326,054 to 358,728; and the average number of slaves per slaveholders rose from 9.54 to 10.69. [Thomas P. Govan, “Was Plantation Slavery Profitable?”
Journal of Southern History, Vol VIII, No. 4, Nov., 1942, p. 518] Does that sound unprofitable? Does it sound as if slavery was dying out?
In perhaps
the classic study of the economics of slavery, Alfred Conrad and John Meyer concluded, “Slavery was profitable to the whole South, the continuing demand for labor in the Cotton Belt insuring returns to the breeding operation on the less productive land in the seaboard and border states. The breeding returns were necessary, however, to make the plantation operations on the poorer lands as profitable as alternative contemporary economic activities in the United States. . . . Continued expansion of slave territory was both possible and, to some extent, necessary. The maintenance of profits in the Old South depended upon the expansion, extensive or intensive, of slave agriculture into the Southwest. [Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,”
The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. LXVI, No. 2, April, 1958, p. 121]
Huh. That's different. And if that's not enough, feel free to click the link and keep reading, although it's likely to bore you before the end - the page spends so long belaboring the point with source after source after source that it can get really tiresome to read all of the ways in which this is dead wrong.
What are your sources? On what grounds do you make any of these claims? None of what you're saying is backed up by anything beyond your own say-so, and the sources I keep posting consistently show that your say-so is not a reliable source of information. For example:
There were more abolitionist organizations in the South than there ever were in the North.
From what I can tell, this
seems to be accurate... If you consider 1790 (AKA before the huge cotton boom in the south) relevant to the current conversation! Even then, I cannot verify that source to any meaningful degree. But then again, you don't offer your sources, so I have
no idea where you're getting this from, and frankly, I'm getting tired of doing your work for you - particularly when so much of what you say is just really,
really wrong.
Not to take the United Statesians side here...
