I think you’ve identified a key factor here. (It also poses some serious questions about the wisdom and likely outcome of what the US is doing in Iraq, but that’s another thread. Those who don’t learn from history …) So could things have been done differently and a different outcome achieved with respect to reconstruction? Another key factor that hasn’t been discussed is the fact that the war was much longer and much bloodier than anyone expected. Generals with dated sensibilities, tactics and strategies lead armies with far superior weapons in terms of accuracy and reloading rates and the result was that men lined up facing each other and ended up slaughtering each other in very large numbers. A number of battles racked up 5 figure casualty counts in a day or sometimes only a few hours. In such a war the South was destined to end up depopulated of its men, and destroyed, although no one anticipated this outcome at the beginning of the war. Grant did give very favourable conditions of peace to the Confederate soldiers at the end, perhaps with an eye to creating a positive atmosphere for rebuilding, but the carnage was so great that I suspect nothing could have counterbalanced it. Sherman laid waste to Georgia on his trek to Savannah but I’m guessing that there are only local resentments about that. So reconstruction was identified as a noble cause and great pains were taken initially to ensure near complete equality for black in the south including the ability to run for elected office. At one point the majority of the elected members in the South Carolina legislature were black, and in Mississippi 50-60 black members were elected. But the backdrop to this was a crushed and decimated white population that had just lost a generation of men, and the world as they knew it, both economically and socially, and there arose the mentality, “my people, right or wrong”. Is this an accurate representation? Before the war it was only a minority of southerners who owned slaves and the vast majority were owned by a relatively small number of plantation owners, so you wouldn’t think that the rest of the population would be so invested in notion of slavery, but perhaps the shocking level of carnage and crushing defeat of the civil war traumatized and hardened the people into a form of solidarity and a “my country/people right or wrong!” type attitude, and white supremacy became the flag they rallied around? (Just to put things into perspective, the US just tragically lost its 2000th soldier in Iraq. In 1 Civil War battle over 3 days at Gettysburg over 6,500 soldiers were killed and another 30,000 were wounded! No one knew before hand that the war was going to go like this, but once it started there seemed to be no way out but to finish it, at a horrific cost.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_war#Major_land_battles)
The way the share cropping worked out most of the black working the on the cotton plantations effectively were not free, but perhaps this wasn’t widely known in the north? (Blacks were kept in debt for the supplies they bought from the plantation manager, the former owner, and so couldn’t leave because they could never pay off their debt). Reconstruction as a policy went wrong in that it was abandoned and Jim Crow laws were allowed to rise up in its place. Let me interject that I’m not approaching this as a criticism of the US or US history. It’s simply a very fascinating (and tragic) time in human history. It marks in many ways a transition point. It was a time of a great social change and a widespread change in awareness about what human rights meant (particularly if looked at over the time span of 1.5 to 2 centuries) and it’s interesting to to look at and to try to understand what happened. What went right and what went wrong? Could it have gone differently or was the length of time it took the length of time it would have needed to take in any event? (Canada never had many slaves but we never had many cotton plantations either. The cotton balls tend to get lost in the snow drifts. I could make an impressive list of the horrific things we did to our first nations people, though, but that’s another thread.) I’m largely with you but I also think that great leadership can accelerate the social forces, and people like MLK and Gandhi come to mind as such leaders. Here though I’m probably more interested in the social forces at work. I find it interesting because I didn’t know about reconstruction in anything more than superficial detail before, and because it seems relevant again today. How are we managing social change in the ME and in Iraq in particular? How is our generation going to manage the social change, both theirs and ours, when China and India become strong enough that their cultures begin to collide with ours? Will it be a “my country right or wrong!” response, or will we try to understand them and to have them understand us and together come to find a higher level of awareness that includes us all and yet respects “human rights”. (I may be rambling a bit here and there’s more behind this than I’ve had a chance to talk about. A UNESCO committee recently agreed to rules that would allow countries around the world to override free trade laws when it comes to protecting their culture. This is primarily designed to curb the spread of American culture through movies, television and magazines etc. and it’s generally a good thing, at least in the from my Canadian perspective, but it raises questions again about the need to understand and appreciate each other and each other’s cultures (and this raises all kinds of human rights issues too and how to address them), and how to do it in a healthy way. I’m WAY off on a tangent now so I’ll stop here.)
It's a valid question; valid at the time of the Constitution's founding; valid enough to cause a debate over whether or not there was a need for the Bill of Rights.... Personally, once you start its hard to stop.....Wireless access? A civil right? Why not, what is the logic against it at this point, we keep granting more and more rights. Its a valid legal question to me. EDIT: By the way this is the first readable thread in the D&D in a long time.
The war was over slavery, not the black's right to vote or have a major say in society. Add that to the propoganda that filled the newspapers after the war, it wasn't too easy for blacks to gain any ground. I studied NC history about this topic -- they used to have 3 newspapers, White extremist, white moderate, and the black's newspaper. They would always have political cartoons in both white newspaper depicting the blacks as evil, as going to rape their daughters, etc. Obviously, when you bring family into it, it strikes home pretty hard. In Wilmington the blacks actually had a council and had political power. One day, the white extremist decided they had enough, rounded up a herd, and literally forced them out. They marched into the meeting hall with a letter demanding they sign over their resignation, or they would kill them and their families. I guess I see it kind of like - the North won the war, but that didn't mean the South necesarilly automatically felt different. The Reconstruction Era was about putting the nation back on track, re-uniting it. The Jim Crow Laws were allowed so to speak because our president was afraid of what it would mean if he tried to stop it. The last thing this country needed was another civil war.
Something I never knew. From the Wikipedia article on that memorable American President Rutheford B. Hayes (In my mind the order of the presidents of the US goes from Linclon, to a whole bunch of fat guys who were corrupt or stupid, to Theodore Roosevelt) [rquoter] Election of 1876 Four states' electoral college votes were contested. In order to win, the candidates had to muster 185 votes: Tilden was short just one, with 184 votes, Hayes had 165, with 20 votes representing four states which were contested. To make matters worse, three of these states (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina) were in the South, which was still under military occupation, the fourth being Oregon. After months of deliberation and bargaining, Southern Democrats were assured that if Hayes were elected, he would pull federal troops out of the South and end Reconstruction. An agreement was made between them and the Republicans -- if Hayes' cabinet consisted of at least one Southerner and he withdrew all Union troups from the South, then he would become president. This is sometimes considered to be a second Corrupt Bargain. [/rquoter] and [rquoter] 1876 The election of 1876 is sometimes considered to be a second Corrupt Bargain. Four Southern states had contested vote counts, and for either candidate to win the election, he would need more electoral votes. In Congress, an agreement was made: Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, would be elected under the following conditions: Hayes's cabinet would include one Southerner. The Union troops would withdraw from the South. A policy of noninterference from Hayes. Reconstruction would be declared finished. With the Union troops gone, there was no security that the South would uphold the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, so African-Americans were not guaranteed to be free. Hence, it was called a Corrupt Bargain. Many historians call this "The Great Compromise of 1876". [/rquoter]
Civil wars are also just nastier to begin with. Ottomaton's comparison's are interesting, but I think you have to add the heavy weight of it being a civil war. Example from my side is the French Revolution of 1789. It pretty much failed (and thus should be understood as the French Revolutions) immediately. It wasn't until 1872 that the Third Republic became stable and democracy could actually survive. So, almost 100 years and similar to the slavery/segregation issue in the US. I know NOTHING about the deeper specifics of American history, though, so my opinion means very little.
If you could expand on this please. I had always been under the assumption that states' rights was the prevailing cause.
4. The oppression of share-cropping wasn't too much different or more unfair than the factory work conditions in the North. If they wanted to start looking into unfair labor practices in the South, why not also start looking in their own backyard too? Both eventually did happen. But, I'm arguing that there may have not been as much outrage given that the Yankees were quite used to seeing oppression of minorities and the poor in their own cities. 5. The new freedom for blacks put a new set of stresses on Southern whites, especially the ones that never owned slaves in the first place. For one, they were now free to roam about and didn't have owners who were accountable for their actions. You could not seek compensation from a plantation owner if a black wronged you. They could take jobs from poor whites, and poor whites were forced into sharecropping set-ups due to the market forces of the new economic structure. So, there were plenty of reasons for folks who formerly needed no dealings with blacks to form an animosity since they were suddenly thrust together by the aftermath of the defeat.
Reconstruction was an occupation much like Iraq. Not only was it an occupation, they forced black leaders on southerners who still felt blacks were barely human. I think Texas had a black govenor. Now imagine going from owning a person to having them be your govenor. The North WAS very unforgiving in its practices in the South and I'm sure they put blacks in place to insult them because of the blood spilled. Its much like the vengence attitude that German's felt after WWI and the circumstances they were forced to accept by the Allies that put Hitler in power.
Your assumption that the war was fought over slavery is incorrect. The south wanted to leave the Union. Some of the legislators that had voted to join the union were still around and felt they could vote to leave the union just as they had voted to join. States rights. #1 reason to leave. Felt that the power of the federal governmant had grown to large. There wasn't the since of national unity that there is today. It was your State that was in a since your country. Slavery was definitly a flash point but even Lincoln said, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; " As far as the hatred goes, it was prevelent in both the north and the south. The south more so because their economy depended upon it. It was taught in the Churches and schools that slavery was ok because: Genesis 9:25-27: "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers. He also said, 'Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japeth live in the tents of Shem and may Canaan be his slave'. "
why do some of you guys have such a problem with slavery being the issue in the war? Yes the South wanted to leave the union, because the north wanted to abolish slavery. its the issue. yes states rights was an issue, because the South wanted to keep their right to legalized slavery.
because history doesn't support that very simple black and white version of events. nothing is ever that simple.
but the issues you cite revolve around slavery. so are you telling us had there been no slavery, there would have been a Civil War? Race was THE issue in this country from inception to the Civil Rights edit: even the Licoln quote only proves that Lincoln may have not been as sympathetic to blacks as alot believe, but it doesn't say anything of what the war is about.
an analogy I would use is the abortion issue. Right Wingers want a "constitutional conservative". is abortion the key issue?, yes. But does that mean that if there was no abortion issue there would be no conflicts? no. It's a "flash point", an issue that brings many differences to light.
what other differences? there are two differences agriculture vs. manufacturing slavery vs. no slavery and both differences go hand in hand.
I don't understand why there is any confusion on the subject. Everybody knows it was Halliburton's fault.
I share a similar view as losttexan - that the overriding cause was states' rights but that slavery was merely the triggering point. I like the example losttexan gave of the abortion issue. Right wingers and the left don't go to war with their words because we all care that much about abortion. It's the underlying principle of whether or not the government can impose it's will on a woman's rights that has the greater implications. Similarly, I think for the South, slavery was the motive behind war - this was paramount to their way of life and they didn't feel the North had any right to impose upon their state rights. For the North, the outrage wasn't over slavery, but the fact that the South shouldn't be allowed to break with the Union over an issue. I could be wrong, but that's just what I had always been taught. I'm interested in hearing Ottoman's explanation of it.
I don't think the moral question regarding slavery was as big an issue to the North as has been presented to us in the history books. It's pretty common knowledge that the North was just as if not more racist than the South.
