|
Slavery was not the "main cause". There were several causes that acted mutually to split the country
apart. I've had several history teachers, two of the college professors, tell me the same thing:
Slavery was a minor cause in the civil war, it was used as an excuse to start the war though. |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
I understand that, as far as I can remember about history, slaves need
within this country, method for bringing
them in and the ports were most likely
established up north first, so what- the north all of the sudden developed a
sense of guilt. Yeah right. |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
You're absolutely right. The history of the war is falsified not only at the popular level, but also
the academic level. American historians have an unfortunate tendency to mythologise their own
history, and try to find some noble ideal lurking in the often much more murky facts.
The truth is that Lincoln wanted to expel all blacks from America. He was a member of the American
Colonization society whose purpose was to send the blacks back to Africa or elsewhere on the
American continent. He thought whites and blacks could never live harmoniously together. When
Lincoln expressed this view to prominent black leaders, like Frederick Douglass, they were shocked
by what he had said, and told him they were as American as he was. Lincoln's ethnic cleansing plans
weren't just ideas either. He actually tried to implement them.
Even during the war he paid for a trial colonization scheme in which a few hundred blacks were made
to go and live somewhere else in Latin America (Panama I think, off the top of my head) and work in
a mine there so they could pay back the cost of their passage. In the end, I think they all died of
disease. After the war, Lincoln planned not to turn the slaves into free Americans, but to expel
them from the country altogether. In this respect, he resembled Hitler, who originally only wanted
to expel the Jews from Germany rather than exterminate them.
Part of the problem with the falsification of civil war history stems from the fact that Lincoln
died young. We have a tendency to mythologise people who died young and make more of them than they
really deserved. Witness JFK who escalated the Vietnam war and accomplished very little (other than
preventing a third world war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which, admittedly, is far from
negligible). |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
One of the issues of the Civil War was slavery, that much is true. But I was never taught that it
was BECAUSE of slavery that the Civil War was fought. I was always taught it was because of the
secession of states from the Union. Slavery just happened to be a heated issue at the time. |
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
08 May 2008 04:11
Sign In
For and Against Recent Activity
