Edited for clarity, above.
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I think I meant to reply to @mangochin on that, but somehow managed to reply to you? But I think I misread that, too?
But yes, there is a larger story there, of how the building of the highway system was one of the many mechanisms that were employed to reinforce segregation and disrupt black communities that had given rise to urban leadership of the civil rights movement. In ATL, the Auburn avenue corridor included Ebeneezer and Wheat Street churches, which were the epicenter of the movement here, so disrupting that community would have weakened the movement somewhat…
Short answer is (and @Mangochin) I agree.
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Not All Red Wizards of Thay!
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Not just that, because it gets a little grimmer. The Confederacy had sufficient slaves that it was a slave “producing” state (eg, childbirth). They didn’t want importers to compete with their home industry, thus the need for trade barriers.
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Yup.
By the rough standards of a military scorched-Earth campaign, Sherman’s March was exceptionally gentle. Yes, there were some atrocities (as you will find any time a military moves through a country), but they were not systematic. This was not Armenia.
The fact that Sherman’s March is treated as this great horror is itself emblematic of the influence of white supremacy and pro-Confederate revisionism.
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Savannah managed to escape with nary a scratch by surrendering while the surrender was good.
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Seriously? 92 replies in, and nobody has welcomed all of our new members? Who all have joined within the last day to post why the Confederacy was awesome, and how the Civil War totally was not about slavery…
Okay, I’ll do it:
Jesus Christ, what assholes!
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It looks like Petroleum b Nasby. Is still alive and well.
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TIL about David Ross Locke. Thanks! From the new commenters above it seems that, once again, real life has outpaced satire.
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Both of you missed an important point. It was a way to appeal to Great Britain and France who had already abolished slavery several decades previously.
Great Britain used a crusade against the slave trade as a pretext to project power around the world and further imperial interests. You could not import slaves from Africa to the Americans without the Royal Navy getting in the way.
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Also, I think it’s important to note that, although the British Empire had official abolished slavery, they were also employing the problematic indentured labor system that was very similar to slavery in South East Asia (moving people all over the empire, including into the West Indies).
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Late stage Racism?
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Even a cursory examination of history, including documents, communications, and records kept by the confederate states which make it very clear that the war was specifically about slavery and the assertion that whites were superior to blacks. The fact that not all northerners were abolitionists is irrelevant, and your mentioning that they were still incredibly racist still is also irrelevant.
One made an issue out of keeping slavery legal. You can complain about the slaughtering of civilians all you want–for one, welcome to every war ever, nobody is the good guy in a war, if you’re extremely lucky, you might get least worst guy. Secondly, how about we contrast that with hundreds of years of slavery, and the staggering amount of torture, rape, and murder that occurred at the hands of slave owners. Literally hundreds of years of that. It doesn’t make it right, but I feel like you’re throwing it out there as though it’s some kind of counter to the North, something to cast them in a bad light. That’s fine, but you just also have to recognize that the south treated black people like livestock for hundreds of years. You can’t throw that stone without accepting the fact that the confederacy literally existed to secure the “right” of some people to treat other people like property.
That is what the war was about, that is what the confederacy was about, and we have only just barely begun to do something to help mend the enormous deficit of opportunities for black people that white people themselves created by systematically oppressing black people. You make a problem, you fix it. You don’t just get to say, “oh, we’re sorry!” and then walk away, a lot of people got what they got because they stole it from others, and it doesn’t matter if you now had nothing to do with it, it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure equality.
Not that I feel like you much care about that.
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