By BJ Bjornson
It has been mentioned already in a few places, but if you haven�t had the chance to read Ta-Nehisi Coates� article in the Atlantic on the U.S. Civil War, you�re missing out on an excellent read. A short quote:
In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: it had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and expand, the right to own other people. The mass bloodletting shocked the senses. At the war�s start, Senator James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina, believing that casualties would be minimal, claimed he would drink all the blood shed in the coming disturbance. Five years later, 620,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulys�ses S. Grant called �one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse� invited the damnation of history. Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.
Read the whole thing, it�s well worth it.
Did not find any reference to the contextual complicity of black chieftains who sold their own from even harsher systems.
ReplyDeleteAnother view.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/w-williams1.html
The �contextual complicity�? What the hell does that even mean? If it�s an attempt to excuse the Confederacy�s treason in defense of slavery by noting there was slavery practiced elsewhere, including Africa, it fails pretty spectacularly. The U.S. had outlawed the international slave trade, and therefore the importation of new slaves from Africa, over 50 years before the Civil War started, and I doubt any of those �black chieftains� were providing any assistance at all to the boys in grey. Their shame is their own.
ReplyDeleteAnd your linked article is a perfect example of why TNC�s article should be more widely read; excuse making of the worst kind, pretending the war wasn�t about slavery but �state�s rights�, when the only right in question was the right of white people to hold 4 million blacks as property, and their rights to be free people completely ignored. It�s revisionist history of the worst kind, but like all such things, will take a long time to be stamped out, since the truth is still too painful and embarrassing for some to acknowledge..
Except much of the Yankee War of Northern Aggression thrust was motivated by desire for cheap labor, not egalitarian racial ideology. Not so different than the multinational outsourcers and Chamber of Commerce types now.
ReplyDelete