To my knowledge “economic forces” have never ended slavery in any place where the practice was still legal.
This idea “they didn’t have to outlaw slavery because it was going away anyway” is bananas.
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Strongly agree. I think that, even if chattel slavery had become economically disastrous, it would have continued until the damage done by the inherent poor economic choices brought about a collapse in connection with other forces. To assume otherwise is to think that humans are rational actors, the central conceit and error of economics. Momentum and sheer stubbornness would have kept it going well past the point where it was hurting the confederate economy, up until some external factor (like the war) forced the regime to change.
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We’re talking about different people.
Yes. The people marching in Charlottesville should die in a fire. I’m not willing to say that they represent everyone in the south.
I’d like to believe is that the Charlottesville marchers are a minority. Maybe someone can straighten me out. I am curious why there wasn’t more of a reaction from churches & civic leaders trying to distance themselves from the marchers.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Sigh.
Read the whole sentence. I was talking about a proposition that people invoke. It’s a poorly informed proposition, but I was questioning if it was cynical or not.
Have you actually had this conversation with anyone?
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more.
I’ll concede that. At some point one should expect them to think like adults, regardless of their upbringing.
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For all the decades that I’ve observed them, apologists for the Confederacy never really do, wherever they come from and whatever the level of their intelligence or formal education. The more sneaky and clever ones hide their childishness under a thin veneer of superficial politeness and smooth rhetoric but they’re still arguing in bad faith in service to a racist agenda. The only “cultural difference” that explains this is their propensity for bad-faith arguments that’s a by-product of their conservatism.
This is why it’s not worth dealing with them directly except to mock their ignorance and delusions and point out that their arguments, arising as they do from the same basic category error, are ultimately as unconvincing as are those put forward by this racist bumpkin.
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Listen, my fellow pasty Americans… the war was about slavery and racism. It’s there in the documents. Read them. They are explicit about what they wanted. Poorer southerners also benefited from the psychic wage of racism, by at least not being slaves, and then not being second class citizens. The problem is not black people not understanding the complexity of the white mind or some other bullshit. IT’S WHITE PEOPLE UNABLE TO ACCEPT THAT HISTORY. Period.
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And now for good news concerning this era of history.
A Harriet Tubman film is closer to getting produced
You may remember Tubman as the BAMF who rescued slaves for the Underground Railroad and became an effective spy for the Union.
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I’m reading right now, Gerald Horne’s, Counter-Revolution of 1776.
https://nyupress.org/books/9781479893409/
I hate to break it to Mr. Hallinan, but not only was the Civil War about slavery, so was arguably the Revolution. I recommend this book highly.
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I"m not at all convinced that even if he had gotten buy in from the Europeans, he would have been successful selling that back home in the South. I could easily imagine states seceding from the CSA in response to such an agreement.
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The high price of slaves argues strongly against this proposition. The price after all represents the current time value of the difference between the cost of paying for free labor and the cost of feeding, housing, clothing, and torturing the work out of for the rest of the slaves life.
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The Iron Brigade. I’m a big fan of theirs.
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I’m certainly not arguing that paid labor is always (or even usually) cheaper than slave labor. My point was that there are certainly situations in which unpaid’s labors aggregate costs can exceed those of paid workers.
I’m no economist, but I bet if you’d offer Walmart the opportunity to replace all their hourly workers they’re paying $10/hr without benefits with a slave labor force they’re required to feed, house, and manage, their accountants would say no thanks and it wouldn’t be on moral grounds.
We might have to agree to disagree about that premise, my friend. I take your point, though, even if I’m not sure that it contradicts what I wrote.
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I think this is the crux of why you’re getting so much pushback here. You seem to think that people like the Charlottesville “Lil’ Nazi Bergade” are an exception and that the majority of sympathizers or enablers (either active or passive) truly believe that the South was attacked, there were equally compelling reasons for secession beyond slavery and that the cultural attachment to antebellum southern culture is only about “heritage”, whatever that means. I have lived in the South and grew up in Missouri, a state many consider southern. The root of this is bigotry. Not some nuanced examination of the multifarious motivations for armed conflict (I mean, really, have you ever had a well-informed discussion with a confederate apologist? I haven’t.).
This cancer of American life is not the result of duplicitous education, duplicitous education is the result of the cancer. People choose to believe it. Actively and willfully. When I think of all of the “good people” I know who post BS like “all lives matter” and claim not to be racists, all I have to do is reach into my memory to remember who they really are. And how near they came to having me join them. In this instance it really is that simple. “Southern heritage” is bigotry.
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I’d add the caveat that specifically this is a form of “white” southern heritage (meaning a particular reading of southern history, a kind of American exceptionalism all unto itself) that erases the experiences of southern people who aren’t white, protestant, Christian, Anglo-Saxons, generally male, exclusively straight, or identify as such (even if they were born into that kind of family).
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“… well-informed”? Nope. Can’t say I have. I’ve had the conversation, but not a well-informed one.
Welp, I asked for someone to straighten me out, and I guess you did.
I always thought the ‘civil war wasn’t about slavery’ mindset was about southerners who were uncomfortable about labelled as racists letting themselves off the hook with respect to having a racist history. A way to be southern and distance yourself from racism. You’re saying I’m wrong?
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Dude, there are plenty of southerners who embrace being from the south, but aren’t racist shitheads. The entire black population, for one.
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The racist history is inextricable from white Southern heritage, just as anti-Semitic history is inextricable from German heritage. For 3-4 generations since WWII ended an overwhelming number of Germans have (at least until very recently) recognised what they call their “special responsibility” in this regard; the same can’t be said about the vast majority of white Southerners over the past 6-7 generations since the Civil War ended.
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