history rec: a phrase I never thought I could possibly utter.

[cimorene]

Yesterday twistedchick linked to Karl Marx's contemporary writings on the American Civil War. Reading an outside perspective - especially, cough, having learned history as a child in Alabama - is a real eye-opener.

Besides being constantly told about "The War Between the States" and "The War of Northern Aggression", we in the South at least are generally told that the Civil War wasn't "really" "about" slavery. Of course, an astute observer grasps that this isn't exactly true. An astute teacher admits that slavery was part of a way of life, attempting to intimate that Northern bigotry against Southern culture of the time (which was totally unfair, because the culture just so happened to include slavery!) was truly at fault. But this reading shows that nothing could be more false than this ridiculous claim.

It's long, but it's gripping reading even though I know how it ends.

The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders' party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an autonomous group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of the Union. Nothing could be more false: "The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it." With this battle-cry the secessionists fell upon Kentucky. By their "entire territory" they understand in the first place all the so-called border states-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. Besides, they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the north-west corner of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, call the South, embraces more than three-quarters of the territory hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.

There's so much here that makes so much sense and that I wasn't taught in school!

• Even though it's always called "the war of Northern aggression", in fact the South was the literal aggressor in terms of opening fire and of angling for the armed conflict for a long time first.



• Many of the states now considered to belong to "the South" were so-called border states not given to slavery as a way of life and didn't secede, but were held by the North at the start of war. Basically, the center of evil Confederacy was confined to what we now call the Deep South. Tennessee and Missouri were overwhelmingly Unionist but the rich and powerful intrigued to help the Confederate army invade and conquer. In Kentucky, the governor and ruling class failed repeatedly to get the people to agree to secede in referendum. It declared itself neutral, a declaration the Confederacy formally recognized until it had finished conquering Tennessee, at which point it announced its intention to take Kentucky next. The legislature declared for the Union, captured the governor, and called the people to arms. The secessionists marched on the capitol.



• The reason Texas is so big: slavery! It should have been admitted to the Union as 5 states by size, but the powerful slaveholders were an even smaller than usual minority, there being a lot of German whites as well, and even joining as just two states would have made one a free state.

I highly recommend reading this for any and all Americans or history buffs.

It is especially striking in light of the recent appalling events in Virginia, with their reprehensible slime-ball governor declaring a Confederate history month.

Virginia now forms the great cantonment where the main army of secession and the main army of the Union confront each other. In the north-west highlands of Virginia the number of slaves is 15,000, whilst the twenty times as large free population consists mostly of free farmers. The eastern lowlands of Virginia, on the other hand, count well-nigh half a million slaves. Raising Negroes and the sale of the Negroes to the Southern states form the principal source of income of these lowlands. As soon as the ringleaders of the lowlands had carried through the secession ordinance by intrigues in the state legislature at Richmond and had in all haste opened the gates of Virginia to the Southern army, north-west Virginia seceded from the secession, formed a new state, and under the banner of the Union now defends its territory arms in hand against the Southern invaders.

Comments

[twistedchick]

I remember hearing more about the North's problems in the struggle, such as the law that allowed wealthy men to 'hire' poor immigrants to fight for them, and the riots in New York City that (I think) resulted at least in part from this. It was less dates and battles and how many died where than it was bits about individuals at various times that sometimes did and didn't fit together.