this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
1740 points (97.5% liked)
Confidently Incorrect
3981 readers
1 users here now
When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
Posting guidelines.
All posts in this community have come from elsewhere, it is not original content, the poster in this community is not OP. The person who posts in this community isn’t necessarily endorsing whatever the post is talking about and they are not looking to argue with you about the content in the post.
You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.
There is currently no rule about how recent a post needs to be because the community is about the comeback part, not the topic.
Rules:
• Be civil and remember the human.
• No trolling, insults or name calling. Swearing in general is fine, but not to insult someone.
• No bigotry of any kind, including homophobia, transphobia, sexism and racism.
• You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.
• Try not to get too political. A lot of these posts will involve politics, but this isn’t the place for political arguments.
• Participate in good faith - don’t be aggressive and don’t argue for arguements sake.
• Mark NSFW posts if they contain nudity.
• Satire is allowed but please start the post title with [satire] so other users can filter it out if they’d like.
Please report comments that break site or community rules to the mods. If you break the rules you’ll receive one warning before being banned from this community.
This community follows the rules of the lemmy.world instance and the lemmy.org code of conduct. I’ve summarised them here:
- Be civil, remember the human.
- No insulting or harassing other members. That includes name calling.
- Respect differences of opinion. Civil discussion/debate is fine, arguing is not. Criticise ideas, not people.
- Keep unrequested/unstructured critique to a minimum.
- Remember we have all chosen to be here voluntarily. Respect the spent time and effort people have spent creating posts in order to share something they find amusing with you.
- Swearing in general is fine, swearing to insult another commenter isn’t.
- No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia or any other type of bigotry.
- No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So, this annoys me to no end, because the first dude is technically right, Lincoln came in to office with no intention to outlaw slavery, although he did want to keep it confined to the states it was already legal in. And what he’s actually wrong about is that Lincoln made it about slavery to get the support of the northerners - he actually made sure that it northerners believed it was about “keeping the union together.” Remember the union still had the slave states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. He wanted to keep these states in the union.
Lincoln (through Seward) stressed the anti-slavery stuff to Europeans, many of whom wanted to intervene on the side of the confederacy because that was where they got their cotton. The industrial north also was a threat to industrial Europe, but the agrarian south was a source of raw materials. But by stressing the anti-slavery stuff in Europe (and then of course the emancipation proclamation which didn’t actually outlaw slavery in the border states) he ensured Europe could not intervene on behalf of the confederacy since it would be so unpopular. So, in the states it was about the union, abroad it was about slavery.
But anyway, he’s right on a technicality that, for Lincoln, it was not really about slavery. But this does not mean the war itself was not about slavery. His conclusion rests on the assumption that in a war, two sides must be diametrically opposed to one another, so if Lincoln and the north were not fighting against slavery, therefore the south could not be fighting for slavery.
But as others have pointed out, the south explicitly says they are fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. They are worried about waning political power also - if Lincoln stopped the spread of slavery across the continent as he desired, the growth of free states would mean congress would not be as evenly split between slave and free states, opening up the possibility of legislating an end to slavery.
So the war was about slavery, and would not have occurred without slavery. Often we point to the Battle of Sumter as the beginning of the civil war, but many historians also point out the popular civil war could instead be said to begin in 1859 in Harper’s Ferry, or with Bleeding Kansas and the Pottawotamie Massacre, or maybe the caning of Charles sumner or the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, or any of the political battles that arose when the US began to expand west and the question arose “what about slavery.” All of these events are directly about slavery and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
And also, just as a last thing “many southern generals didn’t care about slavery.” I have no idea how true that is and it doesn’t matter, because the war was not fought because of southern generals but because of politicians, southern landowners, and an economy resting on the subjugation of Black people, and that’s why they were fighting.
Most Americans naturally want the war to be about slavery—and they object to allegations it's not—because that's the morally righteous position, which is the position they want to believe their side held. So telling them the war was about slavery for the South, but the North really didn't give a shit, is not what they want to hear.
yeah I agree, people have a hard time hearing any criticism of Lincoln. I wouldn't say that he "didn't give a shit" because he was committed to stopping it's spread into the western territories (the position that caused secession). And he did express moral opposition to slavery. But he was a moderate and felt bound by the constitution that he couldn't actually outlaw slavery in the south, hoping that to stop its spread west would cause a gradual end to slavery as slaveowner political power wanes.
So he's a liberal who goes to war mostly to keep the union together, and his first thought is not really about the slaves. But he did do things, like when he issues the emancipation proclamation he ensures there is a legal argument that the slaves freed by it will remain free after the war. So it's not like Lincoln didn't care about the slaves. He was extremely moderate, but he did hold generally anti-slavery views.
Also it's hard to say "the north didn't give a shit" since abolitionism was strong in the north, John Brown was celebrated in the north. There were a lot of people who cared and were extremely opposed to slavery in the north. You have soldiers singing songs celebrating John Brown. Of course this was definitely not true of everyone lol.
So I don't think it's fair to just say the north was completely unconcerned with slavery, but there's a lot of complexity there, especially with Lincoln, and ultimately at the end of the day Lincoln had no plans to outlaw slavery and didn't declare war because of slavery.