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The Civil War

Who was right: North or South?

  • North

    Votes: 34 77.3%

  • South

    Votes: 6 13.6%

  • Neither

    Votes: 4 9.1%
  • Total voters
    44
apdst said:
Alotta people--North and South--wanted to work something out, but there were too many fire brands on both sides.
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Hmmm... this I can kinda agree with. You had the extreme abolitionists on one side, and the extreme secessionists on the other running the show. Though I think the Civil War may have been inevitable, it might have been stopped if some strong moderate had been able to step forward. Problem was, if you weren't strongly for one side, you were demonized by that side. Hmmm... anyone see the parallels to the idiot extremists from both sides, today?
 
Henrin said:
This is piss poor argument. First, democratically elected officials has nothing to do with a government, but a form of government.
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When you say "The South" wanted this or "The South" wanted that, you're referring to an entity that did not represent the people living there. So when you say that "their solution was peaceful and it solved all their problems," that's only true in the narrow sense that it solved the problems of the illegitimate GOVERNMENTS in those states. It didn't solve the problems of the majority of the people.

Henrin said:
Second, no matter the government you aren't going to get 100% approval of anything. Third, human rights as you know them weren't international issues like they are today.
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They were an issue in THIS country, as they should have been. And you don't have the right to take away someone else's rights just because you can muster a majority vote anyway.
 
apdst said:
Seccession was put to a statewide referendum. So yes, seccession was the will of the people.
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Really. And how many slaves got to vote in those referenda? How many women voted in them?
 
Wake said:
To be blunt it's easy for us to make such decisions because we live in this day and age. I'm sure our opinions would be different if we were from that time period.
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Yeah, this is very on target.
 
CaptainCourtesy said:
The South leaving in "peace" is revisionist crap. The south attacked and seized US federal property, an act of war.
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They didn't attack anything. You have your history all backwards.

Also, secession was illegal, anyway. Texas v. White confirned this as did Federalist 7.
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From 1976. Yeah, that isn't even an argument and Federalist 7 says nothing of that sort. It argues why the federal government is needed and the relationship of states to each.
 
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CaptainCourtesy said:
Hmmm... this I can kinda agree with. You had the extreme abolitionists on one side, and the extreme secessionists on the other running the show. Though I think the Civil War may have been inevitable, it might have been stopped if some strong moderate had been able to step forward. Problem was, if you weren't strongly for one side, you were demonized by that side. Hmmm... anyone see the parallels to the idiot extremists from both sides, today?
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Extreme abolitionists? As in, people who REALLY wanted to abolish slavery? Yes, what an unreasonable viewpoint!
 
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CaptainCourtesy said:
The South leaving in "peace" is revisionist crap. The south attacked and seized US federal property, an act of war. Also, secession was illegal, anyway. Texas v. White confirned this as did Federalist 7.

Oh... and I wold certainly be on the side of the North.
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Thank you CC for injecting those facts into the discussion.


As to the OP, I too would be on the side of the north.
 
Kandahar said:
Really. And how many slaves got to vote in those referenda? How many women voted in them?
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The freed men who had the right to vote in the South--a right that freed men in the North didn't enjoy, by the way. How many freed men were there living in the Confederate states?
 
Harry Guerrilla said:
Had the states rights issue not of been slavery, the South would have a lot more sympathizers.

It still doesn't make states right wrong though.
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I agree with this. I could support secession under certain circumstances, but the "right" to abuse the people living in the states is not a states' rights issue as far as I'm concerned. Human rights are more important than states' rights, as the states are merely an abstract concept and do not exist in the real sense that people do.
 
Kandahar said:
I agree with this. I could support secession under certain circumstances, but the "right" to abuse the people living in the states is not a states' rights issue as far as I'm concerned. Human rights are more important than states' rights, as the states are merely an abstract concept and do not exist in the real sense that people do.
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Well back then, there was really no such thing as the modern understanding of human rights.
So it's a moot point in the historical sense.
 
CaptainCourtesy said:
Hmmm... this I can kinda agree with. You had the extreme abolitionists on one side, and the extreme secessionists on the other running the show. Though I think the Civil War may have been inevitable, it might have been stopped if some strong moderate had been able to step forward. Problem was, if you weren't strongly for one side, you were demonized by that side. Hmmm... anyone see the parallels to the idiot extremists from both sides, today?
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It wasn't just the militant abolitionists--the ones that idolized John Brown. It was the Northern textle owners, who were pissed off because the South was selling most of it's cotton to England, then England turning around and selling it back to the Northern mills, at nearly twice the price they could have bought it directly from the South. It was the midwest farmers, who couldn't compete with southern farmers, because of labor costs.
 
CaptainCourtesy said:
The South leaving in "peace" is revisionist crap. The south attacked and seized US federal property, an act of war. Also, secession was illegal, anyway. Texas v. White confirned this as did Federalist 7.

Oh... and I wold certainly be on the side of the North.
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The viewpoint in the South, was that those military installations were on sovereign soil, illegally and the Confederate government had every right to sieze them.

You can't judge history from a modern perspective.
 
apdst said:
The freed men who had the right to vote in the South--a right that freed men in the North didn't enjoy, by the way. How many freed men were there living in the Confederate states?
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I don't know how many there were, nor is it relevant. The point is that the majority of the people were NOT allowed to vote. The southern states were in no way democratic and in no way represented the views of the people who actually lived in those states.
 
Henrin said:
They didn't attack anything. You have your history all backwards.
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They did attack something. YOU have your history backwards.

From 1976. Yeah, that isn't even an argument and Federalist 7 says nothing of that sort. It argues why the federal government is needed and the relationship of states to each.
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It confirmed that secession was not legal. Irrelevant as to when the case came to the SCOTUS.

And I meant Federalist 6. Hit the wrong key... though Hamilton's discussion on the topic DOES continue in Federalist 7.
 
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Harry Guerrilla said:
Well back then, there was really no such thing as the modern understanding of human rights.
So it's a moot point in the historical sense.
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There was enough understanding of the concept to inspire an abolitionist movement. Maybe they didn't call it human rights back then, but the idea definitely existed.
 
apdst said:
The viewpoint in the South, was that those military installations were on sovereign soil, illegally and the Confederate government had every right to sieze them.

You can't judge history from a modern perspective.
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The Confederate's position is irrelevant as the land was Federally owned. I can't just say, "well, I'm a country now, so the land that I am standing on is mine." They seized federal property, an act of war.
 
Kandahar said:
I don't know how many there were, nor is it relevant. The point is that the majority of the people were NOT allowed to vote. The southern states were in no way democratic and in no way represented the views of the people who actually lived in those states.
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The voting rights in the South were the same as in the North, with the exception that freed men could vote in the South.
 
The southern states "might" have had the right to secede from the Union, but not the way they did.
 
Kandahar said:
Extreme abolitionists? As in, people who REALLY wanted to abolish slavery? Yes, what an unreasonable viewpoint!
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Stop being over emotional. These were the people who WANTED war and WANTED to fight and punish the south. Some of them were nothing more than terrorists. John Brown comes to mind.
 
CaptainCourtesy said:
The Confederate's position is irrelevant as the land was Federally owned. I can't just say, "well, I'm a country now, so the land that I am standing on is mine." They seized federal property, an act of war.
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Seizing the Federal arsenals isn't what kicked off the war. The Federal Army had abandoned all those installations.

The attack on Fort Sumpter started the war. The Northern saber rattling that went on prior to the bombardment was just for show. The North would have never invaded, premptively. Then, again, Lincoln knew that he wouldn't have to invade. He knew there were enough hotheads in the South that wanted to fire the first shot.

Gotta look at things in the proper perspective, dude.
 
apdst said:
The voting rights in the South were the same as in the North, with the exception that freed men could vote in the South.
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The north wasn't much better in terms of representative government. The US didn't become a de jure democracy until 1920, and a de facto democracy until the mid-1960s. Prior to that, the US was at best an oligarchy and at worst a totalitarian dictatorship, depending on where you lived and who you were.

My point isn't that the north was so much better than the south in terms of democracy, it's that all the talk about "states' rights" in the context of slavery is bull****, because A) basic rights are not subject to a vote, and B) the state had no democratic legitimacy to enslave its residents or secede from the country anyway.
 
Kandahar said:
There was enough understanding of the concept to inspire an abolitionist movement. Maybe they didn't call it human rights back then, but the idea definitely existed.
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To some degree yes, but not as widely accepted and understood as most think.

A lot of the abolitionists were more interested in spreading their religion to the "heathen" slaves, than freeing them.
 
Kandahar said:
Extreme abolitionists? As in, people who REALLY wanted to abolish slavery? Yes, what an unreasonable viewpoint!
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It's not unreasonable when you consider that they all called for war and very few of them enlisted once it started.
 
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