Neo-Confederate Madness

As discussed yesterday I'm going to go through some of these posts at Free Republic, but before I do, I'd like to point out that many posters at Free Republic posted rebuttals to these posts. I don't want to suggest that these view points are the beliefs of all people at Free Republic.

OK let's look at a few posts here and there.

Slavery was not the primary reason that the vast majority of people fought for the Confederacy. Very few people even owned slaves, perhaps 5% or less. . . . The issue is much as it is today with liberals; they continually try to spin every issue to make it something that it is not. BTW, if slavery was the issue, why did Lincoln wait two years to sign the Emancipation Proclamation (which did not free a single slave)?

This argument is pretty easily dealt with. It's true that most southerners didn't own slaves. It might well be that most Confederate Soldiers were motivated by a love for their homeland and not by a desire to preserve slavery. However if you take a poll of those southerners who sat in the capitals and the legislatures and who made the decisions to pull this nation into the civil war, they were slave holders. And they fought the civil war because they thought that Lincoln would free the slaves (despite his assurances that he wouldn't.

As for Lincoln, he made it clear why he fought the civil war, to preserve the Union. That's what he said and that's, presumably, what he meant. So let's list this out.

Union Soldiers fought because of love of the Union (well more complicated than this, but for the purposes of this discussion).

Confederate Soldiers fought because of love of their state / the Confederacy (see above).

Union Leaders (i.e. President Lincoln) fought to preserve the Union.

Confederate Leaders fought to preserve Slavery.

So which of those things is not like the other?

Another post from Free Republic.

Linkum was the first Clinton, as he was on all sides of every issue. When it became expedient to be an abolitionist, he became one.

However the cause of the war was simply over two issues, one tax revenue, as Linkum said in response to why doesn't he just allow the South to go its own way, he said, "from where then will we get our revenue"? There had been about a 30 year period of wealth redistribution from the South to the North. The other issue was pure cultural, where we still find the war raging, the socialist anti god elitists of the New England States could not tolerate the God fearing South. Marx and Engels works being published circa 1848 became the rage of the elites. It was simply a collision of cultures here. Slavery was just an issue to bash the South with, as New Englanders were more racist that the South, per DeToqueville's writings.

I don't know why this author calls Lincoln "Linkum," but one has to assume it's not a mark of respect.

I don't have a source on that where will get the revenue quote, but it seems almost certainly taken out of context, if not made out of whole cloth. But it is nice to see that, in this authors mind at least, the goals of the Confederacy and the goals of the Republican Party are more or less one and the same--Lower Taxes and preserving the God Fearing South (against the Marxist New Englanders (which, by the way, ignores the deeply religious underpinnings of the abolitionist movement)).

Here's a brief one.

shame how so many folks under middle aged think slavery is the worst thing ever foisted on mankind...for some it's turned out to be a blessing.

This is repeated several times--the justification for slavery is that after having been abducted from their homes, enslaved and forced to work for free for centuries, freed through a bloody war foisted on America by the southern slave holders, forced to endure decades more of second class citizenship, and still facing widespread bigotry, the blacks may be better off than, say, citizens of Rwanda. So that makes it all ok.

This is another long post and I haven't even gotten to such nice myths as "The south would have given up it's slaves eventually," and "The North had slaves too and picked on the Indians (unlike the south, apparently) so they are hypocrites" and "Lincoln was a tyrant." It's all an effort to get us to ignore the elephant in the room, namely, Slavery.