Southern Avenger

Ok, let’s try to be a little more realistic here. I know Lincoln had his faults, we all do however, I think you are a little more upset about him holding the Union together than the Draft Riot and his support of rules over a city in armed rebellion.
The Draft Riot was as much a issue of treatment of the Catholic Irish and their perception of the war being fought to free black people, they had just left Ireland to avoid famine and war and they ended in another war were they were going to be forced to fight. Several black men were lynched, the city burned and troops needed to stop the riot. How Lincoln involvement in this event was more than indirectly needs to be explained, is it because of the war? Mr. Lincoln did not fight the war alone and I hope you know your history to know how it was started in Charleston Harbor right?
This issue of rape is pretty weak as well. Prostitution is not rape- it was widespread and used by Southern women spies to get information on Union troop movements. The threat to place them in jail or run them out of town is clear (the treatment of undesirable women at the time and even now), to rape them is not so clear and need to be explained as well. The repeated use of slave women for sexual pleasure by slave owners is much closer to rape than anything you suggested that Lincoln suggested. Since we are talking movies, while the Scots in the movie Braveheart showed the outrage of the "right of the first night" the slave faced a lifetime of abuse and mistreatment of his wives and daughters. What is your take on this documented practice by some owners - isn't this more what you’re talking about? Are you going to blame Jefferson Davis for these actual rapes for close to 300 years?

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Dear Southern Avenger,
I don't worship at the alter of Lincoln (Being Honest About Abe), but what I've been able to understand is that British bankers were more than happy to see the United States divided. What better way to destabilize a continental nation than to divide it and place the very concept of freedom in jeopardy. I am sympathetic to secession in principle, but certainly it would have allowed European intrigues to poison the wells between potential brothers. Fugitive Slave laws would have been inoperable, with its potential for engendering anger and future conflict.. I have heard the argument that slavery would have died a natural death if the south had been allowed to depart in peace. I think you have too high a regard for human nature.

Dave

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Fugitive Slave laws were already proving to be more and more unenforceable the closer to secession we came. Regardless of human nature, slavery would've passed from the Southern scene eventually because of it's inherent economic drawbacks. Go back and review the opinions of various Southern leaders throughout the antebellum days: most of the time there is a general underlying current of "we're stuck with this mess" as far as slavery as a system is concerned. In fact, if individual owners had to deal with chasing down runaways completely on their own, I personally think we would have seen an accelerated atrophy of slavery before the War. In other words, socializing the costs of chasing down runaways via making law enforcement have to help the property owner get his property back, made it much cheaper and easier for the slaveowner. The fugitive slave legislation was a subsidy that skewed the actual costs of the chattel slavery system, thereby helping it compete in the market against free labor.

During the boom times of the 1850s there was alot of talk about the slave system being better than the Northern labor system; but there was alot of crying about the costs of slavery during economic slump times, like in the 1840s. To be sure, there are the John C. Calhouns here & there in the record, who posited that slavery was a system of blessings only, but there were more that talked about "diffusing" away the "evil" of slavery by reducing the concentration of blacks in their given area: either by colonization elsewhere (back to Africa) or selling them South (Upper South selling to Deep South), or territorial expansion (think Texas, later possibly Cuba). Besides, how do you think the North got rid of their slaves, anyway? True the cash crop system didn't work there like in the South, but even the Northern states never really seriously discussed abandoning slavery while their respective black populations were "large" relative to the white ones. And when they did set sunset dates for slavery being eliminated, the end date was far enough out there that owners were able to liquidate their investment and retain their capital, in the broad sense. As a general rule, one will find that slave states considered the system of slavery to be a temporary thing within their borders, the lower their individual black-white population ratios were, the more likely they considered they'd be able to move emancipated slaves out of state, and the closer to the Mason-Dixon line they were. Nobody in the antebellum period, North or South, seriously talked about emancipation as long as there was any sizable black population within their borders. Emancipation was always coupled with colonization or other removal until the black population was miniscule compared to the white.

A couple of mistakes I think we make today: confusing "slavery" with "civil rights". In other words, people today seem to assume an anti-slavery position in those days would translate into a pro-civil rights position today. This is decidedly not true. Free Soil was "no slavery"; but even more emphatically it was "whites only". Also, people today tend to assume there was only one "South"; that "the South" was a monolithic block of opinion. This is not true either. Slave states like Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and the western parts of Virginia were much different in their opinions of the slave system and interest in its eventual elimination, than Deep South states with much higher black-white population ratios. I think you can make the case that South Carolina, with it's majority black population, was even different from the Deep South.

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I am for states' rights because I am against slavery. States must be sovereign so that the majority, who always seek to enslave minorities, will be kept at bay.

Justification for war and more control over the citizenry can always be found if one looks hard enough. The slavery issue was just a way for Lincoln to make the Civil War a moral imperative...In our time, terrorism is used to make war a moral imperative. War was good for Samuel P. Chase's foreign investors...

www.365teaparty.com

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