150th Anniversary of the War of Northern Aggression

In the sense that the South never needed to secede, but chose to do so, and started the shooting when they fired on Fort Sumter, yes.

Lincoln had no intention of summarily and unilaterally ending slavery. The South literally shot themselves in the foot by seceding and opening fire on Fort Sumter.

If the South had not seceded, and no Civil War happened I believe the following would have happened(pure speculation)

Slavery would have been outlawed Federally- but probably as was done in Northern states, it would have been outlawed for a future date, or freed the children of slaves.

Reconstruction would not have occurred, which led to the KKK and the worse excesses of Southern violence against former slaves would have been less severe.

However- the down side- the South would still be thinking of itself as citizens of Virginia or South Carolina etc rather than Citizens of the United States- as would other states- the Civil War created a Federal identity- which was crucial during World War 2. We may never have entered WW2 if there was no Civil War- which would have meant either a Nazi Europe or a Stalinist Europe.

 

To repeat- when the South fired upon Fort Sumter, they were not repelling invaders.

And the South seceded to preserve the right to own slaves.

And if the South had not seceded there would have been no war.

The ultimate reason the Confederate Government fought was to preserve the right to own slaves.

 

And lets not dress this up.

Plenty of those on both sides during the War.

Neither side holds the moral ground there.

 

to repeat....

if the non-slave holders had not joined the army the confederacy would not have existed. the soldiers enlisted not to preserve slavery, but to repel the invader. look it up. I have given you plenty of sources.

If the Feral govt. had not sent an army into the south there would have been no war.

South Carolina fired the first shots. Not the "South". and south Carolina believed that Ft. sumter was S. Carolina property being occupied by a foreign country.

Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina did not secede until the fed. govt. decided to INVADE.

How were those troops going to get to any of the other states without illegally invading Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee or Arkansas?

Hint: there were no paratroopers back then.

 

Grandpa says, "Dat's right...

... dem yankees go over there...

... an' it ain't been the same ever since.

....It's the first time I see eye to eye with you!

....My beloved Granny!"

 

Fortunately or unfortunately for your beautiful and righteous South, France, Britain and other European powers were too weak at that time, otherwise they would certainly intervene to stop the Northern aggression like what they are doing in Libya now. World history would be drastically different.

Tyrant Abraham Lincoln was fortunate not to have ended up like Gaddafi. It's the same type of character but different fate.

 

Of course. And as I said- the officers- and the leaders of the Confederacy fought both for their states, and to preserve their rights to own slaves and maintain their wealth. I would go further and say that the non-slavers may well have fought to preserve slavery, because they aspired to be wealthy slave holders themselves.

And if the South had not declared their intention to secede, and if South Carolina had not fired upon Fort Sumter, the Federal Goverment would not have sent an army into the South. Lincoln was still trying to prevent a war, and preserve the Union when South Carolina opened fire.

"Brig. Gen. Beauregard, in command of the provisional Confederate forces at Charleston, South Carolina, demanded the surrender of the Union garrison of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor."

Let see- Fort Sumter attacked April 12.
April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 militia and a Special session of Congress
April 17, Virginia and the others seceded.

Viriginal solved the problem of how to invade very neatly for Lincoln. If they had stayed in the Union, the troops would have passed through legally. Since they seceded, they were indeed invaded.

Stupid of them to secede to protect the property rights(owning slaves) of a very wealthy, very elite subsection of Southern population.

 

What the heck are you talking about?

Please, get out of the time machine. I mean "state's rights" otherwise known in 1860 as the right to own slaves. Not state governments. We're debating history, not current events.

How many times are you going to dodge the subject by pretending you don't know what I'm talking about?

 

Stop dodging the subject. Stop playing stupid. Either make the argument, or admit you can't.

 

Not gonna happen^

 

already did.

Abe Lincoln quote and WV archives

 

I didn't state that the war didn't end institutionalized slavery in the US, I stated that the war's purpose wasn't to free slaves, it was due to economic policy enacted by Lincoln.

 

What a terrible loss of life the war was............

 

Yes, you're right. That wasn't the purpose in the beginning, but after the Proclomation, the war became partly about slavery.

 

1. Wasn't good enough to win you the debate.

2. Which was right, if that had been my point. It wasn't, which makes it a strawman.

3. The only thing you provided was that there was a Civil War. Yes. There was. Can you provide something from history that says the South did not stand for slavery?

 

At then end of the Civil War the only place slavery was legal was in States which had remained in the Union.

 

Ahhh actually 50 years ago and all the racist Democrats remained Democrats and were reelected as Democrats. Thurmond was the only one of note who switched and that was after the Civil Rights issue was settled, not a factor in his switch.

 

Yes, it seems like over 100 years ago the republicans ended reconstruction for their own crooked election.

 

Of course that is absolutely true. The Emancipation Proclamation of course was not technically within the authority of Lincoln to do but it worked.

The Slavery states which had not seceded with the rest did not lose their slavery rights until later, though I do not remember when.

Still doesn't change the fact that Slavery was a totally a Southern institution by the time of the Civil War or that the motivation for Secession was to protect slavery.

 

There is of course more to this story. After the Civil War, and after Reconstruction, nobody could get elected as a Republican in the South, because Republicans were so despised for ending slavery and for the destruction of the South, and Reconstruction.

In order to be elected you had to be a Democrat- which lead to the so-called "Dixie-crats"- very conservative Democrats from the south whose beliefs mirrored more closely that of the Republicans.

That started to turn around after the Civil Rights changes, when the South then turned on the Democrats basically because of Kennedy and Johnston.

 

The idiots that withdrew from the Union caused the deaths of 625,000 Americans. Sorry, but they were stupid and idiotic.

 

Nonsense. The South seceded because the Northern industrialists and financiers had been waging economic warfare against the South for decades through the imposition of tariffs that disproportionately burdened the Southern economy. If the South had wanted to maintain slavery, they could have just stayed in the Union and refused to ratify any Constitutional Amendment to that effect. Instead, they seceded after they realized the intent of the North was to subjugate them through governmental FIAT and the sapping of their economic lifeblood. The North's goal was to the turn the South into an agricultural vassal state that would finance the expansion of Northern industrialization.

 

The practice of slavery could have been ended peacefully through compensated emancipation, but Lincoln was intent on war.

 

a bunch of traitors tried to destroy the Union, started a war, and lost. Frankly, we would have been better off if we had let them go and good riddance.

 

Why would the OP want to pick at this scab?

Never was a cause so wrong as the Southern cause, which was to keep an entire race of human beings in a state of bondage, in violation of the principles of the Founding Fathers that "all men are created equal."