What flags flew over those slave ships Mr. Schraub?

Which flag Never flew over a slave ship?

“most inhumane crime”(???)

What flags flew over the Genocide committed against Native Americans?

That the true causes of southern secession and the Civil War have been whitewashed (no pun) is one of the great tragedies of American education. Even if that’s what they say in high school AP history.

I don’t know if that’s still the case – it seems that California would be a bigger single market – but it once was that way.

There’s no question that slavery was an important motivating factor for both Southern Secession and the subsequent Civil War, but in terms of the war itself, slavery was not the primary cause. President Lincoln made it very clear at the onset of the war that the purpose of the war was to preserve the Union and not the end slavery. Abraham Lincoln was personally against slavery, but he wasn’t an abolitionist.

It wasn’t until the Emancipation Proclaimation was issued by Lincoln one and a half years into the war that ending slavery became the ultimate goal. Up until that time, the Confederacy had been trying to enlist the help of the British and the French (who had remained neutral despite their initial sympathies for the Confederacy). The Emancipation Proclaimation ended whatever hopes or supposed moral high ground the Confederacy had.

David writes:

Talk of the conflict being about “states rights� is inaccurate (southern politicians were quite happy to support pro-slavery national legislation–e.g., the Fugitive Slave Act) and irrelevant (at best, the states right in question here was….the right to preserve slavery).

I understand what David’s trying to say, but that does mean that states rights wasn’t central to this debate. The southern states did indeed use states rights as a justification for allowing them to continue slavery. It also used states rights as a justification for opposing protective tariffs that favored northern states at the expense of southern states.

But as David points out, the South was very selective in its use of states rights (much the way today’s politicians are). It invoked states rights to defend policies that it liked (slavery) and oppose policies that it didn’t like (protective tariffs), but it didn’t refused to honor states right when invoked by northern states (i.e. northern states argued that the federal government had no right to force them to return escaped slaves to southern states).

So states right was very important (and I would argue, the most important) factor with regards to what caused the Civil War. The caveat is that those states agitating loudest for states rights (the South), were selective in their defense of states rights.

While the debate over states rights was contentious one at the time and remains so today, one thing is not contentious. Nathan Bedford Forest and the Ku Klux Klan were racists and murderers. The fact that we still have high schools named after such people is sickening.

I frankly think that the approach that was taken in many high schools that you cite was because of the influence of the South in text book selection. I read the same thing in high school and looking back and knowing what I know now about the process of text book writing and selection that the text book companies didn’t want to have books that would be rejected by every southern state. I refer you to something that was somehow never mentioned in one high school American history book I ever saw, the Cornerstone Speech.

1850s: South controls the Federal government, North angry and turns to the Republicans in opposition
1860: North unites and votes Lincoln into office, South loses control over Federal government; Deep South worried that Republicans will create antislavery constituency within the South and permanently thwart any expansion of slavery into the Southwest or even Latin America; 7 Southern states secede (SC, GA, AL, MS, FL, LA and TX)
January-April 1861: Deep South states form new Confederacy that explicitly protects slavery; sends commissioners into other 8 slaveholding states trying to persuade them that slavery is in peril under the Federal government; other states balk at joining the new CSA; Confederates demand Feds evacuate forts, which Feds comply with with the exception of Fort Pickens in FL and Fort Sumter in SC; Lincoln supplies Sumter in April 1861 and SC attacks it on April 12
April 1861: Lincoln calls up 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion; Upper South states (VA, NC, TN and AR) refuse to fight against fellow Southerners, secessionists within those states take over the debate and usher them out of the Union (though western VA, western NC, East TN and western AR refuse to go along and fight a guerrilla war to stay in the Union; they had little slavery there).
May 1861-December 1862: Border slave states (MO, KY, MD and DE) resist call to secede but demand that Lincoln keep war aims to “preserving the Union” and not attacking slavery; Lincoln obliges until slaves rush to Union lines and force the issue; Lincoln eventually turns to abolitionists and issues Emancipation Proclamation

So what’s the upshot? The South seceded to protect slavery. The North fought to preserve the Union. But many ordinary Southerners fought because some “foreign invader” was on their soil. And after 1862, the Union adopted abolition as an official war policy. States rights had virtually nothing to do with it except for the Upper South folks who refused to fight against fellow Southerners after Lincoln’s troop call-up.

OK, off to cook dinner.

I don’t disagree with the slavery issue being the prime motivation for the Confederate split, but treason is not as clear.

Actually, from what I remember from my high school AP American History class, the primary cause of the Civil War wasn’t slavery, but a dispute over states rights. Slavery was definitely an important factor given that the Southern States’ clout in the U.S. Senate was diminishing with every additional free state that was admitted to the Union.

Preserving the Union was cited by Lincoln as being the primary goal when the war began in early 1861. Lincoln was even willing compromise with the Confederacy and allow slavery to remain (albeit only in the South) if the southern states would rejoin the Union. It wasn’t until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclaimation (primarily to earn the sympathy of England and France, who had, until then, sympathized with the South) in 1862 that ending slavery became the goal of the war.

The only way to determine whether or not somebody committed treason is how successful they were. If the colonists had failed in 1775-1781, they’d be called traitors in Britain – and rightly so. If the Texans in 1836 had failed they’d be called traitors in Mexico. If you rebel and lose, you are a traitor. You launched an armed insurrection against the state to which you belong. If you succeed in your rebellion and secure independence then you are a revolutionary and a patriot of a new nation. Sorry, but there’s really no other way to define it. Once the ex-Confederates accepted the fact that their rebellion was over, and lost, they consented to the term “traitor.” They knew it too; in 1865 they were petrified that Andrew Johnson would “make treason odious.” Many prominent Confederates fully expected to be exiled, imprisoned or even executed. But Johnson decided that he treasured white supremacy more than he did punishing treason, thus paving the way for the return of the ex-planter class to power in the South and the ultimate doom of Radical Reconstruction.

Second up, the links you provided are great for people who still romanticize the antebellum South as a place of honor, peace, and tradition only without considering everything else. However, your piece also makes it sound as if the North was the clear side of all that is good, while the South was plain evil. Sherman’s March is always a nice place to start in dispelling that myth.

Now, when I was a baby, Momma named me after the great Civil War hero, General Nathan Bedford Forrest… She said we was related to him in some way. And, what he did was, he started up this club called the Ku Klux Klan. They’d all dress up in their robes and their bedsheets and act like a bunch of ghosts or spooks or something. They’d even put bedsheets on their horses and ride around. And anyway, that’s how I got my name. Forrest Gump. Momma said that the Forrest part was to remind me that sometimes we all do things that, well, just don’t make no sense.

- Spoken by the title character in the 1994 film, Forrest Gump.