What is with history revisionists Republicans and the American Civil War?

The southern states seceded because of slavery. Period. There is no other reason. You can read the Declarations of Secession from those states, and they CLEARLY said that it was the issue of slavery that drove them to this. Mississippi even goes so far as to say that African Slaves are the only ones adapted to work in their fields.

Revisionist republicans crow on about "states rights". Sure, but the "right" that they were referring to is SLAVERY. That is a basic true fact. So what is the hubbub about removing confederate monuments? I bet most of the cities and towns with these monuments had more confederate monuments than US monuments. Am I right?

Take them all down and put them in museums where they belong.

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BohemianBabe · M

It's a bit more complicated. The southern states really just wanted to succeed and one of the reasons often cited was that the federal government was getting too big.
Lincoln famously said if he could save the union without freeing a single slave, he would. But the South didn't care about this concession because it was never just about slavery.

Now with all that being said, Republicans are hugely hypocritical here. They say that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, but then say Democrats are the REAL racists because they backed the Confederacy.
And yeah, the confederate monument thing is so stupid. They claim the statues are just about history, but we all know they were built to celebrate the Confederacy. Nobody would want a statue of Osama Bin Laden in New York to mark the history of 9/11. You don't see statues of Heinrich Himmler in Poland.
We have museums and schools to learn about history. We don't need confederate statues in public which are clearly meant to celebrate something that the people in those communities disagree with.

trollslayer · 46-50, M

@BohemianBabe I think that quote from Lincoln says that we did not go to war to end slavery, we went to war to preserve the Union. The south had already seceded by that point and the war had begun. This was no "concession" to them - their motivations were already there, and slavery was the undercurrent for all of them. Their entire economy, social structure, and way of life involved slavery. It was nearly impossible to separate slavery out of any issue the southern states had.

I see similar issues today regarding fossil fuels and that is why this is such a divisive issue. Many segments of our economy are entirely dependent on fossil fuels. They are engrained in our culture and way of life.

BohemianBabe · M

@trollslayer If slavery was the undercurrent, wouldn't they have been able to make peace and rejoin the union if the North was willing to let them keep their slaves?
I agree that slavery was one of the reasons for the war, but if it was the only reason, then the war would have ended quickly.

So this is another thing. Slavery was actually super unpopular among the white working-class in the South because they were losing jobs to slaves. It's similar to how a lot of working-class people today are against immigration. In addition to that, industrialization was making slavery the more expensive alternative. Slaves had to be kept alive and healthy, so even without payment, owning a slave is expensive.

Slavery was on its way out around the time of the Civil War. Not for any moral reason, simply because it was unpopular and becoming replaced by machines.

Justme22 · M

@BohemianBabe I have heard the argument that slavery was going to die anyway but that would've been only true in the South east US. The South west could have let slavery continue and even boom with mining alone. Those machines need metal and it had to come from somewhere.

BohemianBabe · M

@Justme22 Eventually it would have died off everywhere, but there probably would have been some areas where it went on for who knows how long. So maybe it was a net positive that the Civil War happened, since it did lead to a national ban.

Justme22 · M

@BohemianBabe Eventually means that a generation or more would have still been slaves. It did lead to a national band and a constitutional amendment as well.