Thread: Is the American civil war really over??

Originally Posted by Shek

This is a complete red herring. Point out where someone has claimed that slavery didn't exist at one point in the Northern states or didn't exist in the border states as the Civil War was raging. You won't find it.

However, the fact that slavery existed was not sufficient to start a Civil War. The GOP and Northern Democrats participated in the peace conferences post-secession/pre-Sumter where the compromises would have resulted in the 13th Amendment explicitly allowing slavery to remain where it existed, removing any potential doubt about the status of slavery in the United States.

However, because the South wanted to remove the restrictions on the expansion of slavery that had existed since even before the Constitution, they didn't accept the compromise solutions. Jefferson Davis then ordered that Fort Sumter be fired on, despite the objection of Toombs in his cabinet that it would mark the start of a bloody civil war.

George Washington's ownership of slaves didn't force the South to secede, and it didn't force Davis/Beauregard to fire on Fort Sumter and start the Civil War. Yet, that's the argument you're making. There simply isn't a causal connection there.

It existed everywhere was my point.

Originally Posted by Julie

It existed everywhere was my point.

Okay. No one's ever claimed anything different.

Originally Posted by 7thsfsniper

I can't speak for everyone, but my reason was to demonstrate that it wasn't a racial thing. If all slave owners where white, then the racial argument could stand. However, the people selling them the slaves in Africa and an actual percentage of owners in the states where black. Blacks owning black slaves.....hardly racially based I think.

I haven't read down thread yet, but I think Astralis has begun in on this. My question is this - how many white slaves were there in post revolutionary America & how many black slaveowners owned white slaves?

The racism is in who gets enslaved & in what numbers, not in who owns them.

(I have read down thread now). Also be aware that indentured servitude, nasty though it was, was not chattel slavery of the type practiced on Africans. Being a slave for 7 years was appalling. Being a slave for life with the knowledge that your children (and most likely grandchildren) will suffer the same fate is not even on the same planet.

Originally Posted by Julie

I find it fascinating the small number of slaveholders in comparison to the entire population at the time. But at $400.00 as the going rate, that would be understandable. 650,000 lives were lost because 1% of the population owned slaves, and of that 1%, some of them were black slaveowners.

And? Still not seeing the point of bringing up black slaveowners again.

Shek has dealt with the deceptive percentages entailed in your figures. More than one third of all people in the Confederacy were slaves and somewhere bewteen one in four & one in three households owned them. Throwing around figures like '1% of the population owned slaves' is not only innacurate, it is deceptive of the scale of the institution.

650,000 people died because southerners were prepared to break up the union & attack Federal property rather than accept limits on the spread of slavery. Square that with your 1% as you see fit.

Blame should be spread around to everyone involved in that process, including the slave trade in Africa. Had they not been sold, they would not have been bought. Lincoln even said in one of his addresses, that they were much better off than being sent back to Africa. That I would agree.

First, you are arguing points not at issue.

Second, you have provided a compelling argument for manufacturers or sellers of firearms to take responsibility for the deaths they cause, but I don't see what your point has to do with slavery in antebellum America.

Northern states (and some from the south) would have ended the slave trade at independence had several southern states not threatened the integrity of the new nation over the new issue. Northern states moved to end slavery on their territory in the decades after independence. The south actually entrenched slavery. Manumission became more difficult and abominations like the fugitive slave act were passed. That the south was not only unprepared to act to end slavery, but prepared to split the nation when it refused to extend it cannot be laid at the feet of anyone but those in the south who made those choices & those who supported them.

After the war, slaveowners came in all colors, not just white. I'm not shifting the responsibility, just placing back where it obviously was.

OR 'after the war slaveowners were overwhelmingly white. They dominated the south politically & economically & bore a disproportionate responsibility for the secession crisis & its aftermath.' Seems obvious to me.

There is another point here. You (and others) continually bring up the belief that slavery would have 'died out'. This has been addressed before, but it deserves more attention. This may or may not have been true. We simply cannot know. We do know what lengths slaveowners were prepared to go to to entrench and extend the institution, but his is merely suggestive of what might have happened (though not helpful to your contention). The possible 'death' of slavery is, however, wholly irrelevant here. Like the issue of black slaveowning, it is a red herring. Had the North started a war in order to free slaves then there would at least be some reason to indulge this bit of alternate history. That was not what happened, however. Indeed, there is no evidence that it was going to happen. The farthest the North dared go was to limit the extension of slavery, and even this was too much for most of the slaveowning states.

As I & others have pointed out, slavery could have been ended without a single death had the Sth chosen to do so. Those deaths are on the heads of those who chose secession & war rather than allow slavery to be limited to the states where it existed.