Not at all. It remains controversial because some people are desperate to assert that racism does not exist, and it never existed. Maybe the alternative is too much to bear.
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âPrager Universityâ puts out a lot of neo-con/Libertarian-ish garbage, but this video is spot on. It does seem weirdly at odds with their normal messaging.
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No.
It deeply infected the southern part of the Roosevelt coalition, for example. Historically, it dates from Jefferson Davisâ memoirs, at a time when there was general agreement that this had been a dumb thing to fight for, so he emphasized the importance of other causes. But you can look at all the ordinances of secession. They arenât secret. You wonât see a word about tarriffs.
The southern strategy was to use cotton as an economic lever on the British textile industry to bring them into the war on the southern side, which would have stood a good chance of success. Then they would reopen the slave trade with Africa that had been shut down around 1820, and also expand into the Caribbean and Central American, establishing plantations as they went.
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My father was born in Texas, and moved to several other states as he was growing up, including Colorado and Kansas. He said he had to relearn the history of the War Between The States every time he moved. These days, Texasâs officially approved school books try to water down slavery as the issue that led to Texasâs and the Southâs secession.
The Southâs reasons for seceding were clearly all about slavery, and stated pretty clearly in their declarations of independence from the Union - all of them said it was about preserving their statesâ rights to have slavery, and many said it was also about the Northâs unwillingness to allow slavery to expand into all the new territories in the west, and about the Northâs unwillingness to enforce fugitive slave laws (because âstatesâ rightsâ certainly shouldnât include the right not to return peopleâs property to them when that property wanted to secede from its owners.)
But the Northâs reasons for reconquering the South really were much more complex. The slave-owning border states that stayed in the union, including Maryland, werenât required to give up slavery until later on. The Emancipation Proclamation didnât happen until 1863, when Lincoln was having political trouble maintaining support for the war. The âManifest Destinyâ that the US would take over as much of North America as it could grab was seriously threatened by the Confederacy, not only because it reduced the Unionâs power to conquer the Indians, Mexicans, and other colonial powers like the Brits, but because the South might very well conquer territory of its own. Nationalism and racism arenât pretty things, and those of us who grew up in the North donât like to admit that our position wasnât 100% pure any more than the Southerners like to admit that theirs was 100% about slavery.
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Not just race. My first exposure to them was their âWhy is Modern Art So Bad?â video, which is complete, mendacious, unmitigated horseshit.
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Some people want to pretend racism doesnât exist, because otherwise theyâd have to admit how much they still benefit from it, but it used to be that racism not only existed, but was critically important and necessary. If youâre living on a farm that your granddaddy bought with borrowed money and paid for with the labor of his slaves, and your daddy and his brothers split up, and now youâve got, and suddenly black people are just as good as whites and have the same rights that you do, then not only are your whole family and you a bunch of sinners*, but youâre also a bunch of thieves, and the descendents of your granddaddyâs slaves can take you to court asking for the forty acres and a mule** that rightfully belong to them, not to you.
(* or, if youâre secular, a bunch of total assholes)
(** Iâd always assumed the âforty acres and a muleâ was just an empty promise by politicians, but in fact it was a policy that General Sherman implemented in one part of South Carolina confiscated from Confederates and given to former slaves.)
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In other news, Water Is Wet, George Takei Is Gay, Too Much Of Anything Is Bad For You, and About Half Of All Kids Are Below Average.
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I assumed that the myth is an artifact of the 20th century. Everyone at the time knew what was what, itâs only later that the myth came into being for various political reasons.
Am I wrong?
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This is the central story, the great revisionist campaign that took place for decades after the war. âThe great lost causeâ HAD to be for something other than owning people, right?
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Historical ju-jitsu!
You forgot the Dred Scott part in the middle of those where the Federal government agreed with the South regarding Federal slave laws, stated that people of African ancestry couldnât be citizens, ended the prohibition of slavery in federal territories, and prohibited Congress from regulating slavery anywhere. Somehow despite the Feds. increasing the Southern States ârightâ to own human beings, they still were remarkably touchy about the topic.
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Dudeâs from WEST POINT⌠hardly a bastion of communismâŚ
Iâm not familiar with Prager University, but if even THEY are on board with slavery as the reason with the Civil War should tell you somethingâŚ
Always good advice, actually. Itâs certainly pro-American and pro-military
Itâs the pro-military angle, I think.
Revisionism tends to just mean changing the historical narrative in light of new ways of thinking about history (or in some cases, new evidence, like the opening of the Russian archives at the end of the Cold War). The first major revisionists of this period were the ones saying that the civil war was indeed about slavery, not other factors. Revisionist history is one of those terms that gets thrown around when people want to discredit how the other guy is engaging with a topic (Iâve seen both holocaust deniers and postcolonial historians called revisionists and I canât think of two groups farther apart than that), but in reality⌠all modern history is revisionist. We donât write the same kind of histories of the west, for example that Fredrick Jackson Turner wrote.
If this was a pop quiz in my class, youâd get that question correct. Itâs pretty much a jim crow invention.
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Although I agree with you, this point about the Emancipation Proclamation not freeing slaves in the North is a bit of a deception that the âheritage, not hateâ crowd likes to use as a defense, and it ignores the reality of Constitutional law: the President canât just make laws as he sees fit. The Emancipation Proclamation was different because it falls under âwar powersâ granted to the President, so when Lincoln freed the slaves only in those states in rebellion he was really making a tactical move to aid the Union army (arguably it was a political move too, but from a legal standpoint it was defensible.) Freeing the slaves in the Northern states would take an act of Congress, and an amendment to the Constitution (something that, ironically, would have been impossible if those states in rebellion were still in the Union.)
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The South began to use the rhetoric of States Rights after secession in large part for diplomatic reasons. The goobers werenât hard to motivate to fight (their homes and lives were at stake once Southern leaders had fired the first shot of the war at Fort Sumter), but it was very hard to establish diplomatic relations with European countries when their justification for the rebellion was slavery during a time when abolition was being adopted more and more widely in Europe.
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When the South began the war with the attack on Fort Sumter, a US military base, the North wasnât really able to just walk away and let bygones be bygones. Once the hot war started they were in to win, and politically that was the only available option - peace could only have meant defeat. The North certainly wasnât 100% pure, Grantâs tactics were brutal, but their motives were largely that rebels had started a war and the only way to finish it was to put them down.
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âPrager Universityâ, is really just a front for conservative radio host Dennis Prager posing as an online âuniversity.â Dennis Prager is Jewish, so naturally he wouldnât defend the Confederacy.
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Does he have some real gems on the middle east or does he just put out films on US history?
I have never spent time at his âuniversityâ, I have heard his radio show a couple times, and know of the website coincidentally.
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Some did make those claims, but they were pretty much BS fear mongering - the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 overruled the States and refusing to return slaves was no longer legal (even if there were still groups and individuals who worked to protect fugitives). Dred Scott and the KansasâNebraska Act ended the Missouri Compromise, and slavery was legal in all Federal territories in the West at the point that the first shots were fired. There was a lot of very intense, very false rhetoric coming from the South to rationalize their attack.
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Sounds like avoiding his work a wise use of your time⌠
However, this video is good, in that it does challenge a widely held conservative notion and presumably, that is his target audience⌠It seems like from whta others were saying up thread, his other stuff, not so much.
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