A Fox News headline from last year, interesting today in light of Nikki Haley's recent comments on the Civil War.
On [May 21, 2022], Hannah-Jones tweeted out a quote from her controversial 1619 Project...
"Black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself; they held up a mirror into which the nation preferred not to peer. So the inhumanity visited on Black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past and the inequality of the present"....
Critics responded to her tweet with one [critic] noting that the U.S. fought its deadliest war over slavery. Hannah-Jones responded by writing that the North did not, in fact, take part in the Civil War to end slavery.
"1) The North did not fight the Civil War to end slavery. 2) Love how you erase Haiti. 3) Every other country ended slavery without needing to fight a war and we were third to last in our hemisphere to abolish slavery. Next," Hannah-Jones tweeted.
Hannah-Jones continued to double down on her claim the North didn't fight to end slavery.... "How silly. The South fought to preserve slavery, the North fought to preserve the Union. Basic history," Hannah-Jones wrote.
AND YET: When it comes to Nikki Haley, it's not a difficult question fro Nikole Hannah-Jones (who tweets as "Ida Bae Wells"):
It’s not even a hard question. It’s absurd that she felt she had to evade the question to avoid political liability. https://t.co/67kW5yOf0m
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) December 28, 2023
Posts
85 comments:
For many slavery was the cassus belli providing cover for the conflict between economic and political systems that was the deeper schism between the North and South.
Northern industrialists/early globalists saw human capital better put to work in factories than the horribly inefficient agribusiness plantation system in the unchanging South...never mind if the wage system they had in mind was just another form of slavery. The South's political protection of its economic system essentially was already creating two countries in one going back farther than Bleeding Kansas.
Lincoln was right when he talked about a "house divided", it's just that a lot of people early in the war didn't hear slavery in that missive at all when he said it...they were keenly aware of Americas one country, two systems disfunction and had been for decades.
I like to think of it as two competing systems of slavery. Although there was a moral component, I will always think of the Civil War as an economic war, as almost all wars are.
She should consult the last verse of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on."
The reason many fought and wore the Union uniform is captured in that verse. Jones is right that wars are always fought for more than one reason, but you don't get to ignore some and not others.
I thought Haiti killed all the whites, converting itself into a permanent shithole country.
Handmade tales, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation from a 1619 projection to a Democratic past.
The Republicans, the anti-slavers, did stand up to mitigate and abort the progress of slavery, diversity, and shared/shifted responsibility.
To end slavery, the North would have had to sail to Africa and kill all the blacks who sold other blacks into slavery. And kill the Arabs who sold others into slavery.
So she’s right. The North didn’t fight to end slavery. In fact, blacks and Arabs still engage in slavery.
Her explanation is consistent with slavery causing the Civil War. Lincoln did not want to end slavery, but the South saw his wish to tain it as writing on the wall.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act clearly illustrated the division and short-term compromise to try and maintain balance between slave and non-slave states. Whatever the dynamic, the biggest cultural and economic difference between North and South was slavery. The north had industry, the south agriculture surviving on slave labor. That is the truth.
Today it is widely accepted that slavery was the crux of the matter, and it was. However, I understood that Lincoln had to change the focus from "preserving the union" to "freeing the slaves" in order to keep the north engaged.
Haley's biggest mistake was assuming American's today would know details and have more in-depth knowledge of the Civil War. They don't. American's today are ignorant of history and that is why we are seeing our "democracy" eroding so quickly. Haley, more than likely, is ignorant of history herself.
Of course, she’s a progressive like Haley. But at least Jones is not pretending to be a Republican.
If you can make your word thinking sound plausible, then you are an intellectual. One of the best definitions of “rhetoric” is that it sounds like logic, but it’s not. The sophists have seized the positions of public influence because they are useful idiots to the powerful. Neither participant in the transaction forgets this.
That being said, only idiots believe that wars have a single cause.
While it may be true that the overriding policy of the North, particularly at the beginning, was preservation of the Union, the cause of the war was the South’s desire to preserve and extend slavery. I would suggest that it was inevitable, however, that with preservation of the Union would come abolition of slavery.
I dunno, she got most of it right. However, the Upper south did NOT secceed to "defend slavery". When they were forced by Lincoln's call for troops, they had to decide. Fight with the North, or fight with the South.
The Upper south decided to fight with their southern brothers.
Border states were divided. Missouri had a mini-civil war and ended up on the Northern Side. kentucky declared itself neutral (but ended up being mostly Pro-Union). WV left VA, but it was over the union, not slavery.
By the end of the war, Davis, Lee, and others, were proposing to free and arm the slaves to fight for the Confederacy. So, it wasn't just "Hey, we're fighting for our slaves". How could it be, since the North's official policy till Sept 1862 was they were NOT fighting to end slavery. Just fighting for Union.
And then you had guys like McClellan, grant, and sherman who didn't sign up to "free the slaves". they signed up to "Save the Union". Later, they decided the only way to save the union was to free the slaves. But they weren't abolishinists (sic).
Anyway, the whole mess could've been solved by negotiations. And if the North had let the South go, they eventually would've gotten rid of slavery and rejoined the Union in some form or another. As Lincoln stated, no one foresaw in 1861 how long and bloody the war would be. The North thought there was a "Silent majority" of Unionists in the South. The South thought the North was too divided to fight. And that King Cotton would force britian to intervene.
[Shrug] It’s probably fair to say that in the 1860s most Northerners were as racist as nearly all Southerners. The war could not have been sold to the Northern public on the basis of freeing the slaves so it was sold on the basis of preserving the Union. So what? More than a few Northern politicians were well aware that successfully forcing the slave states back into the Union would spell the end of the institution of slavery. Ben Butler, bless his venal heart, forced the issue to a head early in the War by pointing out that runaway slaves, if returned to their owners, could be put to work constructing forts, digging entrenchments, and otherwise doing work that would benefit the Confederate army. Consequently they were declared “contraband of war,” de facto freed, and reimbursed for the work they performed for the Union troops.
I’ve been fascinated by Lincoln’s evolution on this topic. As a younger man and a young, circuit-riding lawyer he saw slaves at work and developed a degree of contempt for the work ethic of Negro slaves. Somewhere along the line he seems to have asked himself how hard he himself would have worked if he had been a slave? How much intelligence would he demonstrate if being smarter than his owner would have earned himself a beating? And the answers came back “Just hard enough to avoid a beating,” and “Not much,” respectively.
This is the type of thing that indicates to me she should be discredited for anything involving US history especially around the civil war.
So basically her entire body of work?
Sounds about her speed.
"The South fought to preserve slavery, the North fought to preserve the Union."
Glib, but if that were true, no fight would have been necessary. As Lincoln repeatedly stated, he would have been happy to preserve both. And many Southerners would have been happy to get rid of slavery, which enriched a few and impoverished many. But they believed, probably correctly, that they would be better off forming their own confederacy, than remaining in a Union increasingly dominated by powerful Northern economic interests. The rich men in Richmond did not wish to be governed by rich men north of Richmond.
Lincoln was a Unionist first and an abolitionist second. From a letter to Horace Greeley in August 1862: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the Confederate States and so he chose the third course.
While you cannot understand the cause of the Civil War without understanding the underlying issue of slavery, I think the North and South went to war for different reasons.
Lincoln had to assemble a coalition of Unionists who were not necessarily prepared to abolish slavery, and abolitionists who were willing to break up the Union and let the slaveholders have the Dixie South. Hannah-Jones was correct that it is partly post hoc rationalization to say the North fought to abolish slavery, as if there was a clear consensus on this point. Lincoln was clear that for the time being he would fight to prevent slavery from spreading any further. For one thing, no one really knew how Reconstruction would work. By the way, how did it work?
Haiti had a successful very violent slave revolt, and has been a nightmare ever since. Other countries in the Americas peacefully ending slavery? I guess if their economies were half-assed, there was less at stake. Tocqueville says Anglos were at one extreme of wanting no intermarriage with blacks, the Spanish were open to this. Of course Anglos had a lot of secret black "girlfriends," and African-Americans may be the whitest blacks on earth; Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas tend to be aware of how white or non-white you are.
I doubt that there was ever an easy solution. It was heroic of the North to follow Lincoln and fight to prevent slavery from being extended any further, with everyone understanding that the abolition of slavery was likely to be on the near horizon.
I don't get the Haiti reference? THey ended slavery through a successful slave revolt in the late 1700's with no US involvement. Feels like a non-sequiter.
While I believe that Ms. Hannah-Jones' historical analysis is faulty, I can agree with her that it is a great shame that negroes were brought to this continent, where they clearly had no desire to be, and their presence is a festering sore. Sadly, not much can be done about that now, but if she believes she would be better off in Africa, I would be willing to help her to get there. As long as she agrees not to come back.
I think Nikki's appreciation of this show of support is roughly this:
"The Americans won't recognize us; because, they think we're Communists. The Communists won't recognize us; because, they think we're American puppets. The one person in the world who would recognize us was arrested yesterday on a morals charge."
-- Fielding Mellish, Bananas
"Basic revisionist history," Hannah-Jones wrote."
FIFH.
The argument is tedious. The original reason for warfare was southern secession and the attacks on federal property. If Lincoln could have put down the rebellion in a few months then slavery would not have ended when or how it did. That said, some on the Union side fought to end slavery from the beginning. It became official policy to end slavery in the rebellious states (i.e, not Joe Biden or AA's Delaware) when Lincoln needed a rallying cause when the war was going poorly in 1862. After a few key victories (or at least not utter defeats) such as Antietam, he announced the Emancipation Proclamation effective 1/1/1863. It took another 2+ years to end it, and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers died fighting in part for the cause of ending slavery.
Individuals have varying motives for why they fight.
Nikole Hannah Jones might be surprised that some Confederate soldiers did not fight to preserve slavery. By far the largest number of Confederate soldiers did not own slaves.
When a Union officer asked a Confederate soldier, "Why are you fighting us since you don't own any slaves?" The soldier replied, "Because you are here."
But it's typical of both the left and the right to paint the "other" as being unified in a single position.
Life is a bit more complicated than that. Not all Republicans are racist--which is what the Los Angeles Times "professional Black columnist" Erika D. Smith claimed today. Not all progressives are morons (well I made that up myself just now).
It fascinates me when people cherry pick Lincoln's speeches and letters to indicate that he was ambivalent about ending slavery. He was not.
Lincoln was a politician who tried to play all sides of the slavery question in order to preserve the Union. He was most definitely anti-slavery, but had to placate Northern Democrats.
The United States came close to war several times in the run up to the Civil War. The reason was that the South wanted to spread slavery into the new territories that had been opened up. Think of "Bleeding Kansas," etc. The North did not want that to happen. Southerners had already proposed secession a few times as well if they didn't get their way on the slavery issue.
When the South tried to secede, Lincoln had to have as much of the electorate on his side as possible. Almost all Northerners and many Southerners wanted to save the Union, and as time went on many more began to support the abolition of slavery as well. Throwing a commitment to abolition into the mix would have made it harder to win the war, and abolition would have been impossible if the South had won.
To put it another way, the existence of slavery caused the Civil War. That doesn't mean everyone was in favor of abolition, but slavery was going to break the Union apart if the issue was not resolved.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born beyond the sea,
With a spirit in his bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on!
Glory, glory Hallelujah!
Glory, glory Hallelujah!
Glory, glory Hallelujah!
While God is marching on!
One of my ancestors left his arm on the field at Chickamauga to make this ungrateful sow free. She can fuck right off.
the central issue was slavery and that issue had been building for years before the civil war. if you look at the events from fall 1860 through lincoln's inauguratiobnn in march 1861, it was a very newsworthy series of events. the oritinal seven states that decided to secede, forming their own constitution and congress. members of the us congress deciding to resign. members of the cabinet deciding to resign. members of the military deciding to resign. southern forces confiscating military installations and munitions. all this was happening under president buchanan's administration before lincoln took the oath of office.
the south was definitely the original aggressor, while unionist forces sought to defend and later battle to defeat the south and preserve the union. lots of things going on, lots of motivation, but the central issue was slavery. democrats wanted to preserve slavery, their way of life and their economy.
hannah-jones glosses over the core fact that slavery was a fact of life in the world almost forever and of the black slaves that were brought to america, 99% were captured in africa and sold by other black africans to slave traders.
The North was not a color bloc, neither was the South, which may... is difficult for diversitists to understand and leverage.
I forgot that's THEIR angle too! And who on the left is gonna argue with Nicole Hannah Jones about slavery stuff?
Oh this is too funny. Grab the popcorn.
It’s morally pretty weird to fight a war to end slavery with a conscripted army.
Tommyesq,
France under Napoleon freed all slaves including in Haiti.
The revolution was between different Haitian factions and to seceded from France.
Mike Duncan in his podcast series "Revolutions" dedicates 30-40 hours to the Haitian revolution as well as before and after background.
John Henry
Haiti is to be congratulated for having the only successful slave revolt on record. Not much else they can be congratulated on. The record seems to indicate that slave owners are more successful in forming a post rebellion government than former slaves. History is so annoying....I recently read that at the time of the Norman Conquest, ten percent of the inhabitants of England were slaves. The Normans so far as I know weren't big proponents of human rights, but, for whatever reason, they didn't own slaves. The institution of slavery was allowed to die out in England after a generation or two. As time went on, the Anglo Saxons came to believe that they were an exceptionally freedom loving people. Well, maybe they were but freedom from slavery was something that came from the Normans and not the Anglo Saxons...If, by way of contrast, England had been conquered by an adventurous group of knights from Benin, the institution of slavery would still be flourishing to this day.
I notice that in a couple hundred comments in multiple threads virtually nobody calls the USA a "country"
I agree. Under our constitution as written and amended, it is no more a "country" than the EU is.
"Before the war people called it these united states. After the war people called it the United States"
I forget who said that.
John Henry
I heartily second Abdul Amir's comment. The Battle Hymn was one of the soldier's favorite marching songs. As had been said many times above, the conflict started as a war to preserve the Union and only became a liberation war later.
Allan Nevin's eight volume history, Ordeal of the Union, has as its final four books The Improvised War, 1861–1862; War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863; The Organized War, 1863–1864;
and The Organized War to Victory, 1864–1865. It is as good an analysis for the development of the Civil War as any.
What a deeply ignorant person is this character.
It is not absurd she felt she had to evade the question to avoid political responsibility. She was smart enough to recognize she was toast the moment the question was asked. She gets full credit from me for that…
The growing economic and political power of the northern industrialists drove much of the insistence for a military victory. They understood that neither a new CSA nor rump USA would have the power to thwart British and French imperial ambitions in North America and the Caribbean.
Racists of the hard left and hard right agree.
I got Haitian slavery wrong.
It was Robespierre who abolished it, including in colonies, in 1794
Napoleon reestablished it in sugar colonies in 1804.
Then abolished it about 10 years later.
John Henry
It seems to me that all this unpleasantness could have been avoided if God had someone like Hannah Jones to advise Him on the issue of slavery. .. If these rights were so self evident, why didn't Moses, Socrates, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed take up this issue in their ethical teachings. It took the United States four hundred years to free the slaves. That's pretty good comparatively. There are written records of slavery in Africa for five thousand years and counting. Under Isis, the institution is apparently making a comeback there.... It should, however, be noted that slavery under the ethical teachings of Islam is a great deal less harsh than slavery under white capitalists. When discussing the rights and wrongs of slavery it's important to put these things in context. Hannah Jones looks like the sort of person who would take a nuanced approach to slavery and look at it in context.
Half a truth is better than none.
Some people believe that shit. They prefer to be called progressives.
Gusty: Haley's biggest mistake was assuming American's today would know details and have more in-depth knowledge of the Civil War. They don't. American's today are ignorant of history and that is why we are seeing our "democracy" eroding so quickly. Haley, more than likely, is ignorant of history herself.
Without addressing the internal contradictions of what is quoted here, I'll stick to the opening phrase Haley's biggest mistake. Haley's biggest mistake IMO was in eliding the whole slavery issue by making a "rights vs change" argument, that many have already dissected. The word "rights" always comes back to the right to keep slaves and the word "change" boils down to slavery was going away should the Union prevail, even if you give first place to "secede" when listing changes the South wanted. But as others said, why secede? To keep slavery in place. She was inarticulately avoiding saying "slavery" even after the prompt from the kid. Then labeling him a DNC "plant" was just the petty comment of someone who realizes she blew an opportunity to prove her smarts. If a nine-year-old DNC operative gets the better of you how will you do with Putin and Xi?
Personally I believe she blows every opportunity to be smart. She was governor of SC and she has no cogent stock answer to the question? Not surprising given she freely acknowledges she promised Trump she'd stay out of this primary and can't give a clear answer why she broke her promise. "Chaos follows him" is as close as she gets and I'm on record nuking that "explanation" repeatedly. What's the female equivalent of an empty suit?
I share our host's contempt for Haley given the expanded info on offer today. Jones I can respect for at least being consistent. I despise the Uniparty.
Maynard said, "It fascinates me when people cherry pick Lincoln's speeches and letters to indicate that he was ambivalent about ending slavery. He was not."
Indeed he co-founded the Republican Party on an anti-slavery platform. He ran explicitly on an anti-slavery platform. That is why ten states governed by Democrats kept him off the ballot in 1860, just like they are doing to the anti-Uniparty Trump today. I pray the story parallels end there or at least do not end in exactly the same way Lincoln's quest did. I put the odds at 50/50 for Trump living long enough to be sworn in. Yes I'm dead serious.
Haiti vs. Dominican Republic. Compare & contrast. From Wikipedia:
"The native TaÃno people had inhabited Hispaniola before the arrival of Europeans, dividing it into five chiefdoms. Christopher Columbus explored and claimed the island for Castile, landing there on his first voyage in 1492. The colony of Santo Domingo became the site of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas and the first seat of Spanish colonial rule in the New World. In 1697, Spain recognized French dominion over the western third of the island, which became the independent state of Haiti in 1804.
The Dominican people declared independence from Spain in November 1821, but were forcefully annexed by Haiti in February 1822. Independence came 22 years later in 1844, after victory in the Dominican War of Independence. Over the next 72 years, the Dominican Republic experienced several civil wars, failed invasions by Haiti, and a brief return to Spanish colonial status, before permanently ousting the Spanish during the Dominican War of Restoration of 1863–1865. The U.S. occupied the Dominican Republic (1916–1924) due to threats of defaulting on foreign debts; a subsequent calm and prosperous six-year period under Horacio Vásquez followed.
From 1930 the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ruled until his assassination in 1961. Juan Bosch was elected president in 1962 but was deposed in a military coup in 1963. A civil war in 1965, the country's last, was ended by U.S. military intervention and was followed by the authoritarian rule of JoaquÃn Balaguer (1966–1978 and 1986–1996). Since 1978, the Dominican Republic has moved toward representative democracy.
The Dominican Republic has the largest economy (according to the U.S. State Department and the World Bank) in the Caribbean and Central American region and is the seventh-largest economy in Latin America. Over the last 25 years, the Dominican Republic has had the fastest-growing economy in the Western Hemisphere – with an average real GDP growth rate of 5.3% between 1992 and 2018.[25] GDP growth in 2014 and 2015 reached 7.3 and 7.0%, respectively, the highest in the Western Hemisphere. Recent growth has been driven by construction, manufacturing, tourism, and mining. The country is the site of the third largest gold mine in the world, the Pueblo Viejo mine."
"If, by way of contrast, England had been conquered by an adventurous group of knights from Benin, the institution of slavery would still be flourishing to this day."
As it happened, it was the descendants of those adventurous knights from Normandy who forced King John to sign Magna Carta. Hardly a Saxon among them, I wager.
And yet at the end of the US Civil War slavery was ended and amended out of the US Constitution. Seems rather obvious that slavery was the root cause if the war and its continued existence or not depended on the outcome.
The South got trapped into the chattel slavery model for one reason - Malaria. The North went the more virtuous “indentured servant” route because they didn’t see 75% plus of European imports die in the first year from the same disease ( too cold to reproduce in the mosquito gut) AND they were around a quarter less expensive to import. Both North and South expanded their populations rapidly with both types of servitude in the early colonial days.
But both regions were driven by the same imperative - all labor was by hand with animal help - steam was a while off. Brutal, hard work in both regions - north and south. But it’s amazing that in the American colonies - the population of black slaves increased by bounds where as in the Caribbean and South America they worked the slaves to death - and kept importing. And as for the “noble Europeans” that abolished slavery - they had excess labor population out the kazoo - they had zero use for any more hands to work. Easy to be virtuous when it doesn’t hit you in the pocket book.
Yes, the issue of slavery was one of the causes of the war - the South was paranoid over the North trying to eliminate their revenue source, since there was no way the North could afford to just buy and free the slaves - too much cost! But being honest - most Northeners didn’t want the freed slaves to resettle in their states - until industrialization opened up enough jobs to need more hands.
It’s a complicated issue - but the key is that economic interests always trump morality in the short term.
I'm sure that Nikki is pleased to see her support at the NY Times. The recent revival of black nationalism, which is what this is, is not going to turn out well. The war on merit will disarm us relative to China.
People in general seem to be unaware that in 1860, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana were all majority-black states. This fact made it quite hard for Southern whites in the 1860's to imagine a peaceful post-slavery dispensation, let alone a democratic resolution. They expected Haiti x 6.
Black majorities in these states hung on until after 1910 when blacks started to migrate out (to the northern states). The right to vote was not granted until the 1960's when southern states were generally more than 2/3 white.
John Henry said:
France under Napoleon freed all slaves including in Haiti.
****************
Baloney. France, before Napoleon rose to power, freed its slaves in 1795. Then he reinstated slavery in 1802, and even went back and forth after that: https://www.dw.com/en/remembering-that-napoleon-reinstated-slavery-in-france/a-57408273
The French constitution promulgated in 1795 declared in its Declaration of the Rights of Man that slavery was abolished.
In 1802, Napoleon re-introduced slavery in sugarcane-growing colonies. In 1815, Napoleon abolished the slave trade.
In 1815, the Congress of Vienna declared its opposition to the slave trade.
In 1818, three years after the fall of Napoleon, Louis XVIII abolished the slave trade once again.
On 18 and 19 July 1845, a set of laws known as the Mackau Law was passed, which paved the way towards the abolition of slavery in France.
"Napoleon's decision in 1802 to reinstate slavery not only betrayed the ideals of the French Revolution, it also condemned an estimated 300,000 people into a life of bondage for several more years, before France definitively abolished slavery in 1848."
Maybe that's why France called for Haiti in 1825 to pay it millions of francs in reparations for the economic losses suffered by slaveowners losing their "property", as a condition for ending its attempts to retake the colony?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt
"The Haiti indemnity controversy involves an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France that included France demanding an indemnity of 150 million francs to be paid by Haiti in claims over property – including Haitian slaves – that was lost through the Haitian Revolution in return for diplomatic recognition, with the debt removing $21 billion from the Haitian economy.[1][2] The first annual payment alone was six times Haiti's annual revenue.[1] The payment was later reduced to 90 million francs in 1838, equivalent to $32,535,940,803 in 2022, with Haiti paying about 112 million francs in total.[3] Over the 122 years between 1825 and 1947, the debt severely hampered Haitian economic development as payments of interest and downpayments totaled a significant share of Haitian GDP, constraining the use of domestic financial funds for infrastructure and public services.[1][4]"
*******
This historical fact also contradicts Crack's recent assertion that the United States was responsible for Haiti's woes from the very start. It was only in the early 1900's that Amerrican banks got involved in collecting those reparations. Bad government, massive corruption, oppressive post-colnial domination, bad weather, bad economic and agricultural policies, and bad earthquakes, all go a long way to explaining how Haiti became a failed state.
If the North didn't fight to free the slaves then why did they free the slaves?
"It took the United States four hundred years to free the slaves....."
sez the defender Nicole Hannah-Jones of the 1819 project, and her view of slavery 'in context'.
It's the Nuance of New Math.
As can be seen by the variety of comments here the reasons for the Civil War are complex and changed over time. They were also different based on geography. If Haley had been prepared, she could have finessed the question by saying that originally the war was caused by the secession of the southern states and the belief of Lincoln, and others, that the Southern states could not secede because they had agreed to the Articles of Confederation and thus permanent membership in the Union of states. This would have been both historically and politically correct. We know that Lincoln's journey from pre-war wish to ship all blacks back to Africa to emancipating the slaves was influenced by such things as meetings with Frederick Douglas, with the desire to keep Great Britain on the sidelines, to maintaining control over his cabinet officers and more. Unfortunately Haley was not prepared and ,apparently, has not been tutored very well to deal with the aftermath.
@ Bob Boyd If you really want a substantive answer to your question without needing to go to a research Library you should read James McPherson's book Battle Cry of Freedom.
If Nikole Hannah-Jones really cares about Haiti (unlikely!) then she could ask the Clinton Foundation collected for Haitian Relief following the 2010 earthquake, and how much was actually spent in Haiti.
If Nikole Hannah-Jones really cares about Haiti (unlikely!) she can start by asking how much money the Clinton Foundstion raised for Haitian relief following the 2010 earthquake, and how much was actually spent in Haiti.
"It’s morally pretty weird to fight a war to end slavery with a conscripted army."
Yeah, I have wondered how the Selective Service Act can be reconciled with the 13th Amendment.
The comments are a college class on the civil war.
My ruling:
The civil war was an economic war. The South just had slaves as an integral cog of their economy.
Economy and slaves may have been the spark, but most of the blood shed occurred, fighting to save Union.
@ minnesota farm guy
Thanks. I'll check it out.
“Next”, said Nicky Haley.
“Next," Hannah-Jones tweeted.
Why do women always talk like this?
The Union States of 1861 were unavailable for comment.
Haiti wasn't really a successful "slave revolt". First, the revolt of 1791-1793 was led and supported by the free blacks, aka the "Mulattos" of whom there were 28,000 compared to 40,000 whites. The French constitution of 91 gave "free men of color with property" voting and citizenship rights.
Second, they were supported by radical Government in France, that had zero desire to put the slave humpty-dumpty back in its place. The French constitution of 93 freed the slaves, and the Constitution of 1795 codified it.
The British invaded in 96 and tried to bring back slavery. They were opposed by some French whites and the mulattos and former slaves 400,000. The British were then wiped out yellow fever and eventually allowed a Free Haiti run by a mulatto dictator. Napoleon tried to reconquer it starting in 1802, and got wiped out by yellow fever. After he gave up, (we supported the mulatto dictactor) Haiti became completely independent.
They celebrated by driving out and/or killing almost all the remaining white population.
Basically, you had almost 14 year race war. Slave v. Free. Mulatto vs. Black. White vs. black and mulatto, poor white vs. Wealthy whites, French vs. British. Spainish v. British. Haitian vs. whoever. You had Poles joining up with the blacks, you had whites helping out all sides. And massive amounts of rape, murder, looting, and genocide from all sides.
Haiti has never been a model for anything.
"Yeah, I have wondered how the Selective Service Act can be reconciled with the 13th Amendment."
"It's good to be the king." - Mel Brooks
If you want the truth, you have to acknowledge that wars of conquest, since the stone age, treated other tribes as a commodity. Slavery was a world wide method of production by the time of the Romans and later Muslims. In the Middle Ages this changed to serfdom. The main idea was that labor had to be restricted, it could not relocate, or nobles would be damaged by migration. Sultans did not want the Circassian Women to move to the next town.
The Middle Ages brought Guilds, Yeomen who made things, the start of manufacturing. The plagues increased labor cost by reduced supply. The great colonial expansion left Europe and India well supplied with labor, the sugar islands, South America, and the southern tidelands were left in the lurch. (Spanish gold seekers were the worst.) They needed labor but also labor that had to remain in place. Thus African slavery. Slavery was a temporary solution that was needed until population growth would make labor cheap again.
If the civil war had been delayed until 1910 the slaves would have moved to Henry Ford's Detroit and the war would not have happened.
The caste system of the Indians accomplished slavery without explicit title. If you can assign people to work roles then you don't need slavery. In a mature Earth you have labor going to the highest payer, like Beidens USA. But since the USA is a Republican Democracy, people get to vote if they want to be the lowest caste compared to the Ivy Grads.
I know, too long,
These are our "ELITE". As if there are/were not MANY reasons for a conflict. So ******* stupid.
Hannah-Jones continued to double down on her claim the North didn't fight to end slavery.... "How silly. The South fought to preserve slavery, the North fought to preserve the Union. Basic history," Hannah-Jones wrote.
She's usually a font of tendentious nonsense, but isn't this basically correct? Delaware and Maryland were both Union slave states. Kentucky was "neutral," but aligned with the Union. And I think Lincoln explicitly prioritised the preserving the union over abolition. The Union cause certainly did include abolitionists, but abolition wasn't fundamental to the Union the way slavery was the "cornerstone" of the Rebellion.
"It’s morally pretty weird to fight a war to end slavery with a conscripted army."
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"It’s morally pretty weird to found a country with a Declaration and write a Constitution abrogating it!
Who else thinks she is an undercover agent for the GOP?
Human slavery still exists in many places around the globe. We Americans ignore it because the only slavery that matters is African American slavery.
iowan2 said...
"The comments are a college class on the civil war.
My ruling:
The civil war was an economic war. The South just had slaves as an integral cog of their economy.
Economy and slaves may have been the spark, but most of the blood shed occurred, fighting to save Union."
Even before the war some plantation owners were coming to the realization that slavery was a hugely inefficient way to do agriculture. Some were still paying off debts that their fathers incurred before the Revolutionary war.
Fortunately the civil war intervened and in its aftermath the previous slave owners figured out a way to enslave both blacks and whites. Sharecropping. A form of voluntary indentured servitude.
An awful lot of beating a dead horse here. I like how Justabill puts it. (12:06)
"While it may be true that the overriding policy of the North, particularly at the beginning, was preservation of the Union, the cause of the war was the South’s desire to preserve and extend slavery. I would suggest that it was inevitable, however, that with preservation of the Union would come abolition of slavery."
What I'd add, however, is that the "union" the North "wanted to preserve," by virtue of Lincoln and the Republicans coming to power, was one that would itself, for the first time, be in essence dedicated to ultimately destroying slavery. The Republicans were determined to prevent slavery's extension into new territories and states. Lincoln correctly saw he could not end slavery in states that had it and still remain constitutional. But Republicans talked a lot about what they referred to as "the scorpion's sting" (see James Oakes book of that title). That is, by bottling slavery up in the South, slavery would in time decay, fade away and die, like a bottled scorpion stinging itself to death. You may not think that would have happened, but Republicans then did -- and so, too, did the South. Which is why merely by Lincoln becoming president, they knew they had to secede. You may not think the North went to war to end slavery, but the South knew darn well that was its intention.
On that point about Lincoln's letter to Horace Greely about saving the union with slavery or without slavery, it is a mistake to take that at face value. Lincoln gave Greely that answer at a time when he ALREADY had the Emancipation Proclamation ready to go and was just waiting for a Union victory so he could issue it without it seeming a desperation move. In other words, when he told Greely what he did, he was already committed to ending slavery.
As for the Emancipation Proclamation only freeing slaves in the Confederacy, Lincoln was acting as Commander in Chief in a war. He only had constitutional authority at that point to do that much. But he also knew well that he'd be setting in motion an inevitable and truly revolutionary unwinding as the Union forces took over and as slaves up and fled to Union lines. It was as much as he could do legally at that point, and he did it.
He does not deserve the crabbed and condescending semi-contempt of a mental midget like Nikole Hannah-Jones.
"It’s morally pretty weird to found a country with a Declaration and write a Constitution abrogating it!
America does not have a progressive Constitution a la RSA, but rather an original compromise to mitigate slavery, diversity, and human rites.
The North fought for a union of interests, including: anti-slavery, anti-diversity, pro-economy, and one-nation policy.
Lincoln explicitly prioritised the preserving the union over abolition
Abortion... abolition presented the same complexity as it did in the run-up to the revolutionary war. Lincoln set the same priority, but, unlike his predecessors, took affirmative action when the opportunity presented itself. To be fair, the Union was not facing the diverse threats of its founding generation.
Narayanan said...
"It’s morally pretty weird to fight a war to end slavery with a conscripted army."
========
"It’s morally pretty weird to found a country with a Declaration and write a Constitution abrogating it!
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"In the Selective Draft Law Cases, 245 U.S. 366 (1918) the Court thought the idea that compulsory military service constituted involuntary servitude was so wrongheaded that it thought a very brief mention sufficient to refute this contention. It wrote (at 245 U. S. 390):
Finally, as we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation, as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people, can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement."
It is clear from the text of that opinion that the justices thought that the existence of a power to draft soldiers was essential to the implementation of the constitutional power (article I section 8):
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;"
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And: Jefferson's flat assertion in the Declaration that "all men are created equal" can be said to be a rhetorical flourish but one having no legal effect. In any case the prevailing sentiment was that African slaves were not really human, but a sub-species. It took people like Frederick Douglass many years later to change that perception.
As ratified, the Constitution didn't refer to slavery at all, aside from the oblique reference to 3/5's of a person--- a term used to calculate state populations for the purpose of Congressional representation, not the instrinsic or moral "worth" of slave peoples. A notorious compromise, one necessary to secure Constitutional ratification by slave states.
IOW it was a political necessity, morality be damned, or deferred. Without a unified country providing mutual aid George III would have attacked individual colonies and killed the Rebellion, colony by colony.
You think slaves would have benefited from that outcome?
Haley and Hannah-Jones have ironically met at the apex of the new bloody crossroads of American indenture: illegal immigration and American worker exploitation, which, in a nod to indenture before, during, and after the Civil War, has created labor conditions for American citizens that are based on 19th Century Northern factory models that drain the spirit and hopes of family life for impoverished laborers who, unlike flagrantly lazy illegals, seek public benefits at much lower rates out of a sense of responsibility and patriotism.
I wonder what Lincoln would say about that.
Darkisland said...
"Under our constitution as written and amended, [the US] is no more a 'country' than the EU is."
The original Articles of Confederation did establish a confederation of the original colonies. But that was superseded by the Constitution in 1788, particularly with the Supremacy Clause. This was referenced in the Federalist Papers (nos 33 & 44, IIRC), and upheld in the Supreme Court as early as Martin v. Hunter's Lessee in 1816 and McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819.
The end of the Civil War drove a final stake through the heart of the idea that the US "are" a confederation. But we have been an "is" since 1788.
Abraham Lincoln in Gettsyburg, PA in 1863 said...
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation..."
Lincoln was correct, even though his math was off by approximately a dozen years.
"Before the war people called it these united states. After the war people called it the United States."
Grammar changes. UK English often might often use the plural whereas US English strongly favors the singular when referring to a collection.
And the Slavocracy would glom onto any argument that would advance their cause. A few short years before the Civil War, they were thrilled with the Dred Scott decision, which overrode state laws in favor of a Federal decision. This case forced many in the North to realize - as Lincoln put it in quoting Matthew 12:25 - "A house divided cannot stand" in regards to slavery, and this decision directly led to the Civil War.
It's not complicated:
The claim is that while the South was fighting to preserve slavery,the North was fighting to preserve the Union.
Okay then, why didn't the North allow the South to hold onto slavery, thus preserving the Union?
It's because the North was fighting against slavery.
QED
"And: Jefferson's flat assertion in the Declaration that "all men are created equal" can be said to be a rhetorical flourish but one having no legal effect."
It was a hope for our future. He was argued out of outlawing slavery in our constitution in order to preserve the colonies as states and to get our constitution ratified.
It is still a creed worth striving for.
Saying the North fought the Civil War to end slavery would be giving the US government credit for doing something good, which is of course impossible.
Several things can be true at the same time:
- The Southern political base (dominated by planters) seceded to preserve political power. I noticed something that was never mentioned explicitly in History class: admission of new states dictated which faction would have a Senate majority. I find it difficult to believe the planters failed to notice.
- Southern rednecks fought to preserve normal access to physical resources. A lot of folks are spoiled; they don't know what lasting devastation full-on invasion brings.
- Some people defaulted to one side or the other of the slavery issue because of its impact on other special interests. That's a phenomenon nobody researches; tariff policy is the only such special interest that ever gets mentioned in history class. I want someone to write the alt history where a major faction opposing both slavery and high tariffs arises, and the War of the Inevitable Consequences of the Three-Fifths Compromise turns out to be a three-sided affair.
- Lots of folks opposed the war on due process grounds.
- The firing on Fort Sumter killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy's car.
Everything you need to know about the causes of the Civil War are in Lincoln 's second inaugurall address
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