quote:

ORIGINAL: Phin

I have told you, and given a direct reference to the document that slavery was used as a way to try to end the war, not as a reason to start it.

The north was the first to attack, and they even forced maryland to stay in the union so that DC would not be surrounded by confederate states.

It was a coincidence that all of the states that sucseded where slave states. there were slave states that DID NOT SUCSEDE

quote:

ORIGINAL: Archer

Lets not forget that the economic reason the north had for wanting slavery stopped was far less than egalitarian in nature.

Southern states wanted to be free to trade their raw materials to europe (who had ended their slavery issues already but saw little problem with buying the raw materials that had been produced that way. Northern states wanted the raw materials so they could produce their goods to sell to europe post processing, and since the Southern states had less political power, the Northern states made sure the law made it unprofitable for the south to sell to europe directly, by placing export tarrifs on materials that were produced in the Southern states. They were not worried nearly as much with the idea of slavery as they were with the idea of making sure the South didn't send their raw materials overseas until the north had had it's chance to profit from them.

Where there folks who had actual moral objections to slavery certainly but lets not make the general population out to be more egalitarian than it was in either North or South.

Want the other  "State's Rights" issue it was in the area of freedom to trade raw materials produced in a state to a foreign market that was more profitable than the Domestic northern states markets.

The question as many records of the time by Southern Senators was, " Do we as the State of SC NC GA etc have the right to trade our goods to whatever market is the most profitable or do the Northern states have the right to by force of law tell the Southern states that they must sell their produce for less to a northern market or pay an export tarrif that makes the foreign trade even more unprofitable than trading them to the Northern states?"

quote:

ORIGINAL: MissRayne

ok now I got a headache from trying to process all of this....

quote:

ORIGINAL: Emperor1956

FR:  The amount of ignorance in this thread is astounding.  Not by all who posted, but by the OP and those who follow as apologists and glamorists  for R.E.Lee.  This note is long, but the issues raised in the glamorizing of Lee and by extension, the Confederacy are serious, and deserve serious rebuttal.

Lee was no saint.  He surely was not the ideal Southern aristocrat or gentleman.  Lee did NOT free his slaves at the start of the Civil War; indeed as I outline below, he put his newly acquired slaves to work to pay off family debts until 1863, well into the war.  He was a brilliant military mind.  There is no evidence of him having been especially chivalrous, gentlemanly (except that he was born to privilege) or -- laughably "Domly".  What the OP and others have done is adopted a view of the Confederacy as noble, romantic and "gentlemanly" -- This is in fact so common a view that it is referred to by Civil War scholars as the "Lost Cause" theory.  The Lost Cause theory is insidious; it is mostly false, supported by no historical fact, and often proponents of the Lost Cause then justify modern acts of racism (flying the Confederate Flag, denying the adoption of MLK day as a state holiday, etc.) by invoking the great old "Lost Cause".  Of course, the biggest proponent in popular culture of the "lost cause" theory is Gone with the Wind.  And the OP's statements and most of the others in this thread are just as much fiction as that great novel.  

Lee's experience with slavery serves as example of what he was (a smart, loyal, dutiful man shaped by his upbringing and his times) and what he wasn't (a saint or a paragon).  Facts:  Lee was a wealthy suburban professional soldier, and as such had a small holding of household (i.e. higher grade and well-educated) slaves.  Prior to 1857, he owned probably no more than six slaves at any time.  He had an income from plantation lands, but did not actively oversee operations.  After his second marriage, he moved into one of the stately homes on his father-in-law's small plantation in Arlington, Virginia (the property that later became and still is Arlington National Cemetary). 

However upon the death of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, in October 1857, Lee (as executor of the will) came into control of 196 slaves on the Arlington plantation.  Lee could have freed all of these slaves immediately (the Parke Custis will provided for the slaves to be emancipated "in such a manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper", providing a maximum of five years for the legal and logistical details of manumission), Lee found himself in need of funds to pay his father-in-law's debts and repair the properties he had inherited.  Therefore, Lee decided to make money during the five years allowed him control of the slaves by working them on the Arlington plantation and hiring them out to neighboring plantations. 

Lee, with no experience as a large-scale slave owner and no desire to become one, tried to hire an overseer to handle the plantation in his absence, writing to his cousin, "I wish to get an energetic honest farmer, who while he will be considerate & kind to the negroes, will be firm & make them do their duty." But Lee failed to hire anyone, and he had to take a two-year leave of absence from the army in order to run the plantation himself.  He found the experience frustrating and difficult; some of the slaves were unhappy and demanded their freedom, largely because Parke Custis had promised many of them that they were to be made free as soon as Custis died. 

In May 1858, Lee was required to discipline several of the disgruntled slaves who had run away.  This incident and Lee's treatment of slaves who ran away in a subsequent incident led to his demonization by the Abolitionist movement.  Remember that the country was heading towards Civil War, and Lee was already noted as a significant Southern politician. 

The first "runaway slave" incident was as follows:  As Lee wrote to his son Rooney, "I have had some trouble with some of the people. Reuben, Parks & Edward, in the beginning of the previous week, rebelled against my authority--refused to obey my orders, & said they were as free as I was, etc., etc.--I succeeded in capturing them & lodging them in jail. They resisted till overpowered & called upon the other people to rescue them."   Less than two months after the slaves were sent to jail, Lee decided to remove these six slaves from Arlington and sent them -- under lock and key as slaves were then transported -- to William Overton, a notorious Richmond, Virginia slave trader.  Lee instructed Overton to keep the slaves in jail until he could find "good & responsible" slaveholders to work them until the end of the five year period. 

In 1859, three other Arlington slaves—Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin of theirs—fled for the North, but were captured a few miles from the Pennsylvania  border and forced to return to Arlington. On June 24, 1859, the New York Daily Tribune, which had adopted a strident Abolitionist rhetoric, published two anonymous letters which claimed to have heard that Lee had the Norrises whipped and went so far as to claim that Lee himself had whipped the woman when a local police officer refused to. Lee wrote to his son Custis that "The N. Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather's slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy."

Did Lee encourage the whipping of these slaves, and even take a hand in it?  Biographers of Lee have differed over the credibility of the Tribune letters.  A leading "pro-South" and "Lost Cause" proponent, Douglas S. Freeman, in his masterful four-volume 1934 biography of Lee, described the letters to the Tribune as "Lee's first experience with the extravagance of irresponsible antislavery agitators" and asserted that "There is no evidence, direct or indirect, that Lee ever had them or any other Negroes flogged. The usage at Arlington and elsewhere in Virginia among people of Lee's station forbade such a thing."   The apologists would love this view.  Of course, it probably sugar coats the real story.

Michael Fellman, in The Making of Robert E. Lee (2000) (which I have used as the source material for most of this note), found the claims that Lee had personally whipped Mary Norris "extremely unlikely," but he also found it very likely that Lee had the slaves whipped:  Fellman says "corporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism 'firmness') was an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage."

One of the slaves, Wesley Norris, discussed the incident after the war, in an 1866 interview.  Norris stated that after he ad the other two had been captured, and forced to return to Arlington, Lee told them that "he would teach us a lesson we would not soon forget." According to Norris, Lee then had the three of them tied to posts and whipped by the county constable, with fifty lashes for the men and twenty for Mary Norris (he made no claim that Lee had personally whipped Mary Norris). Norris claimed that Lee then had the overseer rub their lacerated backs with brine, a detail that will gratify many of you still reading with me.

Wesley Norris gained his freedom in January 1863 by slipping through the Confederate lines near Richmond to Union-controlled territory.  Lee freed all the other Custis slaves after the end of the five year period by filing the freedom document on the last business day of 1862, well into the War, as I said above.

E.

quote:

ORIGINAL: thompsonx

quote:

ORIGINAL: Emperor1956

FR:  The amount of ignorance in this thread is astounding.  Not by all who posted, but by the OP and those who follow as apologists and glamorists  for R.E.Lee.  This note is long, but the issues raised in the glamorizing of Lee and by extension, the Confederacy are serious, and deserve serious rebuttal. (...)

Finally,someone who did not think the reading list was just a little spare toilet paper.

quote:

ORIGINAL: seeksfemslave

It seems to me that there exist notions that people hold that are so wedded to what they want to believe that nothing at all has ony affect on those beliefs.
Your candor is to be applauded.  Now if you could only do something to extricate yourself from your self imposed dilemma.

The US civil war was not about slavery per se.
It was about political and economic control and the maintenance of the union.
Dont shout at me...these are facts !
I would never shout at you seeks you are a gentleman and have always conducted yourself as such.
As to your facts I am unsure which facts you are putting into evidence.  Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't it the South that started the war?  They certainly did not start the war to preserve the Union nor did they did not start the war to exercise political and economic control over the north. 

The Brits came close to intervening on the Confederate side.
Do you remember just what it was that prevented you Britts from entering the war on the side of the Confederacy?  Our history books claim it was the emancipation proclamation.  Do your history books tell a different story?

Maybe we should have done. Get our own back on you damn Yankees lol
Coulda,woulda,shoulda.....but you didn't

quote:

The amount of ignorance in this thread is astounding. Not by all who posted, but by the OP and those who follow as apologists and glamorists for R.E.Lee. This note is long, but the issues raised in the glamorizing of Lee and by extension, the Confederacy are serious, and deserve serious rebuttal.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Archer
At the heart of it my point is that the north was by and large basing a significant part of their objection to slavery not on moral grunds but economic grounds. Had the south been trading their cotton, indigo, tobacco, etc to the north first for goods manufactured in the north rather than to England and Europe, allowing the north to get their "piece of the pie" then the Morrill Tariffs and their predicessors might not have been passed, and the whole war avoided, leaving slavery in place for several more decades.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Moloch

The proclamation was shrewed political move, Lincoln himself said he would not free the slaves if it preserved the union.

quote:

ORIGINAL: subexploring

quote:

ORIGINAL: Moloch

The proclamation was shrewed political move, Lincoln himself said he would not free the slaves if it preserved the union.

I left about a dozen posts above demostrating in Lincoln's own words that he had always been anti-slavery. He was willing to allow existing slaves in the deep South to remain enslaved, but he was completely committed to stopping any expansion of slavery. Because it was in his own words evil and morally wrong. Southerners felt that stopping the expansion of slavery would eventually weaken and destroy it.

Confederate sympathizers will go to some length in order to avoid dealing with the fundamental moral question behind the Civil War. 

quote:

ORIGINAL: Moloch

quote:

ORIGINAL: subexploring

quote:

ORIGINAL: Moloch

The proclamation was shrewed political move, Lincoln himself said he would not free the slaves if it preserved the union.

I left about a dozen posts above demostrating in Lincoln's own words that he had always been anti-slavery. He was willing to allow existing slaves in the deep South to remain enslaved, but he was completely committed to stopping any expansion of slavery. Because it was in his own words evil and morally wrong. Southerners felt that stopping the expansion of slavery would eventually weaken and destroy it.

Confederate sympathizers will go to some length in order to avoid dealing with the fundamental moral question behind the Civil War. 

Horse shit.

Heres what Lincoln said:
“My paramount
object in the struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or 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; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving
others alone, I would also do that.”

Lincoln was a despot and a politician. 

But Lincoln said....
SHUT YOUR YAP

Bush says god told him to inavde north korea you are gonna trust that too.


Where did you learn your History ? A comic book?