Nah. Irish and Scots were the chattel race before it became nice and easy to identify people by color. Everything white people have done to Africa and the Americas, the English had already been practicing on us for a thousand years by that point. The only reason Irish people are considered white is because we had black people to compare ourselves to.
The funny thing is that the people who always talk about how the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery and was about states’ rights, are actually right, but for exactly the wrong reasons.
Firstly, it was the South who was opposed to states’ rights. They wanted the federal government to return runaway slaves who made it to free states, while the North wanted states to be allowed to decide that for themselves.
And was the war really about slavery? For the South, it absolutely was- It’s mentioned in virtually every single official statement declaring secession. It was literally named as one of the central tenets of the Confederate government. It was inarguably the single greatest reason for the secession and the single greatest reason for them to fight to stay separate.
Sure, abolishing slavery was a great moral justification (like the evils of communism or rescuing the Kurds), but I think the narrative of the great and noble Union abolitionists valiantly rushing to free their fellow man gives us way too much credit. I’m pretty sure it really boiled down to the same wealthy aristocrats looking after territory, trade, and taxes as every other war in our history.
Then again, I am fed up with our species at this point and just embracing the cynicism.
Again, because even in the cases when Lincoln arguably violated his constitutional authority (as when he suspended habeas corpus) he was operating under the legal theory that his actions fell within the Executive’s broad authority to wage war.
As things were “I have the authority to free all enslaved people in the Confederate states since their labor is being used to support the war effort against the United States” was a bit of a legal stretch. “I have the authority to legally abolish chattel slavery entirely because the practice is morally abhorrent” would have been a principled declaration but one that was much harder to justify from a legal standpoint.
My understanding is that the Confederacy really shot themselves in the foot when it came to aid from the UK. Early in the war (1861), the Confederacy banned the export of cotton in a heavy-handed move to try to coerce France and the UK into joining the war effort on the side of the Confederacy or lose access to all that sweet, sweet cotton. The UK soon found that they could source all of the cotton that they needed from India, while the South ended up with a bunch of cotton rotting in warehouses.
Full-on support of the Confederacy from the UK would have been within the realm of possibility had the South handled diplomacy with more tact at this critical juncture. As things played out, British material support for the Confederacy was quite limited and had little impact, aside from the sale of a few warships to the Confederacy.
i’d appreciate it if you could back that up by pointing to any records showing that irish and scots were sold at auction anywhere in the u.k. or in the states. if you can’t do so i think you should retract that statement. being oppressed is not the same thing as being chattel. that distinction is important.
The Irish were certainly colonized and pressed into less free forms of labor, and both in England and the new world, but not slaves in the same sense, no…
There was a librarian who engaged this awhile back, because white supremacists kept using this as a form of propaganda to dismiss the enslavement of Africans in the new world…
Whenever slavery is brought up in the US, and someone starts shouting about “what about Irish slaves” you got to wonder…
Or they bring up the kidnapping of Europeans by the Barbary Pirates, too.
“Chattel” has a pretty specific definition that is not at all close to how you’re using it. It means “property other than land.”
The Irish and the Scots were treated in a lot of horrible ways by the Brits. But “chattel” was not one of them.
It’s worth pointing out that everyone opposed states’ rights, and everyone supported states’ rights when it suited their purpose. The examples of this are endless, from ignoring the Fugitive Slave Acts to censoring the postal system.
The only time one ever hears this “narrative” is when pro-Confederate apologists rush to point out that whites in the Union states were every bit as racist as the Confederate counterparts. Other than that, it’s not really part of any serious discussion about the Civil War.
Fun fact, the Irish were caricatured as monkeys and apes before African Americans were, and it took a long time for the Irish to be considered “white.” Eastern and Southern European immigrants helped with that, as the Irish could point to newly-arrived Italians and say “See, that’s ‘not white.’”
[A fairly standard 19th-century caricature of the Irish.]
Indeed, Lincoln made it very clear in the following paragraph what the North was going to war for, and he had to sell this idea to keep slaveholding states that did not secede in the Union as well.
“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 slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
certainly the most adamant of the abolitionists were very negative about lincoln until he started moving in the direction of freeing the slaves and even then they were suspicious of lincoln until he started pushing the 13th amendment. interestingly, one of lincoln’s harshest critics at the beginning of the war, william lloyd garrison, came to support lincoln quite a bit before most of the other abolitionists did. garrison took the position that once lincoln began moving towards abolition he would find it less and less possible to backtrack. garrison seemed to think that the dynamics of lincoln’s approach verified his belief that trying to join his abolitionist movement to a political party would be futile and that only when a political party moved to join him would there be a political opportunity for abolitionism.
i think garrison was a much more sophisticated political strategist than people at the time gave him credit for. more than he frequently gets credit for being today, really.
As a person of Irish descent I wish people would stop making this embarrassing claim. As others have explained, not all forms and oppression were created equal and false equivalency is false.
I’d only add to what you (and others) have written that Lincoln (and most others outside the slave states) believed that slavery was dying a slow death anyway, so realistically there was no need to cause a major crisis by trying to end it. Demographically, all the signs pointed to a slow inexorable decline. The white population of the slave states was in decline, immigrants avoided slave states, the overwhelming majority of everything useful, aside from cotton, was produced in the “free” states, and despite skirmishes in Kansas and Nebraska, slavery wasn’t going to expand westward–it was seen by non-slaveholding whites as backwards and a threat to the emerging economic order. For non-slaveholding whites in the south its main benefit was to keep Blacks down, and because most had some kind of family or economic connection to it even if they didn’t own slaves. Even the cotton trade was shifting, as cheap imports brought by fast steamships from India and Egypt seemed like a possible future replacement for southern cotton.
The absolute backwardness of the slave states’ economy was obvious to everyone. A few examples from the 1860 census are instructive.
Ohio in 1860:
Produced 15 million bushels of wheat, more than Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina combined.
Produced 73 million bushels of corn, more than all three of those states combined.
Produced 10 million pounds of wool, more than every slave state combined.
New York in 1860:
Had 14 million acres of improved farmland, more than Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina combined.
Had 500k horses, more than all three of those states combined.
Had 316 iron factories, around 70 more than every slave state, combined.
The list is practically endless. By any economic metric aside from the value of human chattel and the output of whatever monoculture crop that slave state produced, any one or two free states combined produced more than all the slaves states combined. Even by “total dollars invested in agriculture and manufacturing” the smallest free states vastly outstripped the largest slave states, and the largest “free” states had more invested than the all the slave states combined. Add to that a decline in the white population, which meant fewer representatives in the House, where financial legislation originates, and the writing was on the wall.
So for Lincoln, it’s an easy statement. Slavery seemed to be slowly dying off. It might take a few generations, but in truth as long as it didn’t poison the “free” states, most whites did not care if some backward areas of the country held Blacks in bondage. Abolitionists in 1860 were a fringe, wild-haired minority, only used by southern whites to scare each other into action.
[whew, that went on longer, and became more generalized, than I intended. apologies]
Before the war, the South depicted Lincoln as someone who was just itching to free the slaves. After the war, they depicted him as someone who went to war to do just that. The reality, as always, is much more complicated. It was a war fought because of the divides brought by slavery, but it was not a war fought for the express purpose of ending slavery, although it did end up producing that result. It was almost the midpoint of the war when Lincoln got around to the Emancipation Proclamation, and even that only applied to slaves in the states that had seceded.
For poor whites in particular, slavery was quite to their economic detriment, as the availability of slave labor (which could even be rented out) put gainful employment out of the reach of many who did not possess the skills for skilled labor. And yet, those young white men who could not find jobs because of slavery nevertheless fought to preserve slavery just so that they could continue to enjoy keeping the Blacks down.
Simply put, the South fought the war for the express purpose of preserving slavery and the North fought the war for the express purpose of preserving the Union.
With only a small quibble–that’s what the governments fought for. Individual soldiers also fought for all kinds of personal reasons, sometimes those aligned with the government’s objectives, and sometimes they did not.
Blame Nathaniel Bacon. And, also, this sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on it . . . poor whites willing to support something not in their economic interests because of scare tactics? Where have I heard that before?
Sure but that’s true of every war. Not every conscript who fought for the Nazis was the Devil incarnate but that doesn’t change what the Nazis stood for.
Quite ironically, the South probably could have continued to practice slavery for at least another few decades if they hadn’t panicked at Lincoln’s election and seceded from the Union. There was growing abolitionist sentiment in the North, but Congress was nowhere near the point of actually doing anything about it. The South fought because they believed their slavery system was in peril, when it was merely simply beginning to fall out of favor.
the problem the southern slaveholders faced was similar to the problem the petroleum industry faces in that while their business model was in no immediate danger of being eliminated it required so much government support to maintain profitability that removal of even the slightest proportion of those supports seemed an inexorable calamity.
What was done to the Irish was terrible, absolutely, but it wasn’t slavery in nearly the same way, just as the company town work model is also not slavery, even if it locks workers into an abusive circle. What really gets me about these weak “what about” talking points is I’m not even really sure where those that bring them up are going. “These things happened too, so slavery isn’t so bad?” Is that what they’re trying to say?
I mean, yeah, losing your legs in a car crash was bad, but I broke my toe, so …?
