I might be pushing my luck starting another thread, but in the other thread another question developed, so I thought I'd ask anyway. It'll be here later if you don't want to answer now.
My question is not "who more closely represented the idea of the CURRENT United States?" My question is "who more closely represented the ORIGINAL United States, the one the founding fathers created?"
If the Confederacy represented it more, then the Union was traitorous to the founding ideas. If the Union represented it more, then the Confederacy was traitorous to the founding ideas. And if you think one of them was more 'traitorous' to the founding ideals than the other, do you think its actions were justified?
This question is WAY too complex for a simple poll-type answer.
For starters, you asked two different questions: who more closely resembled the United States created in 1776? (this was the thread title)... followed by the poll question of Which more closely represented the founding principles of the United States?
The first question has an obvious answer: the Confederacy. In 1776 we declared our secession from Great Britian; at that time we were simply an alliance of sovereign States. We used the Articles of Confederation to formalize our alliance but each State remained sovereign to itself. Thus the Confederacy was more in line with the actual governing system our country began with.
The second question is a lot more complex. Our Founders were not all of one mind on all things... and in case you don't know, some of them chose NOT to participate in the writing of the Constitution that superceeded the Articles and made us more of a nation rather than a federation of States. From day one, the issue of slavery was probably the most contentious and divisive of all.,
Some of the Founders were extremists in their day, and believed in freedom for all men, not just white landowners. Others owned slaves but had reservations and qualms about the institution, and said they would prefer it were abolished. Others were fine with it, accepting the various justifications that were used in that day to pretend slavery had a moral and ethical basis.
We almost didn't get a Constitution, because of the issue of slavery and slave-state representation in Congress. The 3/5ths Compromise got us past that hurdle, but also set the stage for the Civil War when the South lacked the votes to keep the Fedgov from instituting tariffs and trade restrictions that the South found utterly ruinous to its economy.
The prime cause of almost every war is economics, ultimately. Either the aggressor wants to control the economic assets of the defender, or the defender's economic activity was threatening the economy of the aggressor prompting attack. Ideals, ideologies and slogans are almost always an afterthought, to cast "our" side as the angels and the other side as the devils.
The truth is there were few angels and few devils on either side.
The
average Southern slaveowner was not the sadistic devil of popular imagination, who got off on torturing and maiming slaves. He was a businessman to whom his slaves were assets: if they were not kept healthy and able then his profits diminished. The average southern soldier was far too poor to own a single slave.
The average Northerner was not a fiery-eyed crusader for Abolition. Most didn't really care; many actively opposed the idea. There were riots in NYC in which free blacks were lynched in protest against the notion. Abe Lincoln started off saying "If I could keep the Union without freeing a single slave, I would." He changed his mind later... the purity of his motives have been questioned, as to whether it was genuinely a moral enlightenment or a political propaganda ploy.
Many Abolitionists were, by modern standards, racists. They wanted to free the slaves and
send them back to Africa... they didn't want a bunch of freed Negroes running around loose in their neighborhoods, and poorer whites didn't want the competition for labor jobs.
When we judge historical figures by the standards of modern sensibilities and morals, instead of within the context of their OWN societal norms, we lose a lot of perspective.
Pardon my ramble, back to the question...
The Union perhaps best represented the ideals of some Founders, that all men everywhere should be free... even though half the Union didn't really support this notion, and half the rest wanted freed blacks deported to Africa.
The Confederacy best represented the ideals of many Founders that government, especially the central gov't, must be
limited in power and scope, and that the States must serve as a check and balance against Federal power.
So, both fell well short of the highest ideals of the Founders, but in different ways. The evil of slavery was done away with, and that's a good thing, but we continue to deal with an overgrown, overpowering and too-much unchecked Fedgov to this day, as a result of the winning Union's faults.
Blacks remained second-class citizens for another century, and most of the ruling class in both North AND South wanted it that way. Cheap labor.
Slavery would have died out even without the Civil War. Technolgical advances in powered machinery would have rendered it economically unfeasible to keep slaves within a generation. Moral and ethical opposition to slavery were growing and would have pushed the institution out of existence entirely at some point. Perhaps not as quickly, but it would have been done away with war or no war.
Very few wars are entirely made up of angels on the one side and devils on the other; they are chiefly made up of leaders pursuing their own interests and agenda, and common people following whatever ideological cause, territorial banner, or propaganda slogans appeal to them the most. They are typically caused by an
unresolveable conflict of interests which resists diplomacy and compromise and can only be decisively settled by force.
