One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago On This Day

[icenine]

Well Dave

when we were kids in school Lincoln was lumped with Washington and sort of presented as a equal to the Founders because he ended slavery. Simplistic yes but a good foundation for kids and future citizens to understand that freedom from slavery, equal rights regardless of color, and democracy were indeed good things. Nothing wrong with that at all.

You can get into revisionist territory when one becomes a graduate student and takes seminars on Civil War and the South and discuss the economics behind slavery and the military situation on the battlefield that influenced Lincoln.
I am by no means an expert on the Civil War. However I was taught by guys at Kent State who had all been influenced by the history department at the University of Wisconsin....in short the intellectual birthplace of American Civil War historiography.
No one ever took the sort of arguments about self-determination of the South seriously. In fact, none of us would even think of bringing up such an argument. We studied slavery and what made the South different, but the paradigm is that slavery was an evil institution and that Lincoln defeated it because the nation had to in order to survive.

Was Lincoln John Brown?
no
Was there racism in the North?
yes

at the end of the day however the North realized that slavery had to be ended.

The North had to militarily defeat the South on the battlefield and forge a complete surrender on the part of the Confederacy.

All the South had to do was wait it out and see if the North would get tired of fighting. We are lucky we had Lincoln.
A lesser President might have caved. The world is lucky too.

Imagine Hitler tearing across Europe 80 years later and the Western Democracies in Europe having an American ally only half as strong or completely isolated. Imagine Hitler having an alliance or a neutrality pact with a Confederate nation whose birth was indeed predicated on the institution of preserving servitude based on race.

Imagine apartheid being in place in half of our continent in 2013.

I don't like the revisionist world at all as you can tell.


If you make a statement that the South had the right of self determination because they wanted to expand slavery into new territories seized from Mexico you need to really think about what you are saying.