deathonacracker wrote:Not that people from the Dark Continent enslaved (mostly) in the South weren't "ready" for freedom, just that the Radical Republicans of the North were using the Negro as a stick to bludgeon the Old South with, while Whites were disfranchised for having taken part in "Rebellion."
This was the concept that the post-war south was mistreated by the north and carpetbaggers. They were mistreated and misruled with the inclusion of inferior blacks not ready for freedom.
In reality, "Confederate Rebellion" was defending themselves against Northern military and economic Aggression (Federal blockade and invasion). Long afterwards the Republicans "Waved the Bloody Shirt" of the Civil War to continue to politically claim the moral high ground from the Solid South. Not until the 1960s was the South lost to the Democratic Party, and the tax-cutting, hawkish Republicans picked up the Southern Bible Belt by the election of 1980.
The only people in the South who favored Antebellum slavery were plantation owners who controlled the state legislatures. They wanted a low federal tariff to import cheap manufactured goods and to export cash crops, particularly cotton. White people who defended their homes and the heritage from Federal armies did not own slaves--and contrary to modern political-correctness, the war was not "about" Slavery. The defeated Confederacy even supported the 13th Amendment (ending Slavery) until they were removed from power and Negroes were put in charge of the government. (This was admirably depicted by Hollywood in the 1939 classic movie, Gone With the Wind, as well as the 1915 classic silent film by D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation (which Southern-born Progressive Woodrow Wilson considered a masterpiece.)
Slavery was economically doomed by the Industrial Revolution, and slave holders had already been bought out in the British Empire--without crusade or bloodshed--not long before Lincoln. But the Cotton Gin gave slavery a temporary boost in the plantation-based cotton industry, which was capital and labor-intensive. The Radical Republicans used Slavery as their Holy Crusade, and the Radical Republicans piously determined that secession of states that were freely united was now somehow Rebellion and contrary to the laws of God. First Lincoln's bloody campaign was over Preserving the Union and then it was about Slavery.
Northern property owners found cheap immigrant labor employed in factories to be cheaper than slavery, and indentured servants farmed cheaply until they went West to obtain free land of their own (unless they had to compete with enslaved Negroes on the agricultural labor market). Thus Northerners favored ending that peculiar agricultural institution of Slavery, especially in someone else's state that depended upon other cash crops besides cotton (many Northern or border states also being slave states). These sectional economic and political differences--high protective tariff to favor manufacture over agriculture, and free-soil for new Western states to disfavor expansion of "Southern" influence in Congress--found voice in the new Republican Party. Mr. Lincoln was elected President and he refused to negotiate with or even reassure the South so they seceded from the Union.
The Abolitionists were largely Transcendentalists (Bible-thumpers) who believed that God should punish America for its sins, namely Slavery. This is familiar enough in our own day, where Evangelicals and extreme Social Conservatives favor apocalypse in the Middle East and an Israel-First American foreign policy congruent with Biblical prophecy, and they don't negotiate or compromise with their opponents, who they deem as Evil or morally-flawed at best. Even though the unnecessary Iraq War has been a debacle, the Fundamentalists Christians and the Neocons would dearly love to go to war now against Iran. They go looking for what John Quincy Adams called "monsters to Destroy," where any foreign demon is another Hitler. They regard spreading Democracy and Capitalism as a divine mission against "Islamo-Fascism" (or North Korea). Neoconservatives have been described as "Wilsonians on steroids."
The Neocons, Fundies, and Liberal Interventionists (in the Wilsonian or New Deal mold) favor spreading Democracy as long as the liberated peoples vote the way that we want them too--and so long as they don't develop nuclear weapons and invasively integrate their economic fortunes into our corporate banking system apace rather than try to independently use their oil resources to build their own nations which (Fundamentalist or secular) could threaten Israeli power in the region. The Republican base is today run by Evangelical Christians and Neo-Conservatives (ex Liberal Jews who are hawkish about American Imperialism in defense of Israel and favored Zionism over Stalinism during the Cold War). Like the Abolitionists, the Fundamentalist Christians also believe that America should be punished--this time for tolerating homosexuality and abortion. They are not unlike the Islamic Fundamentalist, who believe that America is a Great Satan for her empowering of Zionism and for CIA subversion of their own interests. Some see Terrorism as the only mean of resistance and insurgency against such a ruthless Superpower.
During Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans had no check on their Federal power until 1877. The Ku Klux Klan was the "terrorist wing" of the Democratic Party during this "Time of Troubles." The message of the Birth of a Nation classic film is that out of the incredible bloodshed of the War Between the States, a new nation was forged from a recognition of the Southern heritage and values of the Lost Cause, but that a new national government arose like a Phoenix from the ashes, where states were no longer sovereign but still had inalienable rights after the end of the reign of the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags. Mr. Lincoln is thus redeemed as a nation-builder who had war and circumstances thrust upon him rather than the demagogue who purposefully sacrificed a million lives for self-righteous sophistry. People like Junior Bush aspire to be cut from the same cloth, and they therefore talk to God until God tells them what to do. They are dangerous people. More dangerous than Terrorists with hoods.
