The things about History you learn at PJs Media Lifestyle.
A century and a half after the Civil War, the debate continues to rage over the true causes of the war.
O rilly.
Oh my gosh I wonder wherever this is going. What a mystery. Whoever could predict. It is not at all horribly, banally obvious.
The menace of slavery is an obvious answer...
You don't say.
... but it wasn’t the sole cause.
Kinda knew you would say.
Many scholars argue that the fight over states’ rights led to the war --
Fuck you, he says, cheerfully, in the Spirit of Open Debate and Scholarly Discourse.
Oh let us move on.
Historian and author Thomas Fleming recently published A Disease In The Public Mind: A New Understanding Of Why We Fought The Civil War, and the book details two compelling reasons for the war: New England’s disdain for the Southern states – along with the ensuing all-or-nothing attitude of militant abolitionists, and Southern whites’ fear of a race war were the nation to emancipate the slaves.
The North should been more nicer to slaveowners, and should have acknowledged how worried they were that if the slaves were freed, they might be kind of pissed off.
It gets better, though! From the actual book:
On October 19, 1831, he told one correspondent that he was pleased the “disturbances at the South still continue. The slaveholders are given over to destruction…”
Here was a signal revelation of the fundamental flaw in William Lloyd Garrison’s character, a flaw that permeated the New England view of the rest of America: an almost total lack of empathy. Fellow Americans had just been exposed to an awful experience – a tragedy that dramatized in horrendous terms the problem of Southern slavery… The only emotion Garrison permitted himself was a thinly disguised gloating – and a call for sympathy for the slaves. No matter how much they deserved this emotion, was this the time to demand it?
"Too soon! Too soon!"
The evidence that the South was on the road to politely getting around at some point or other to ending slavery and then saying "my bad y u mad bro" is rather thin, but here it is, from our PJs interlocutor:
On the other hand, many prominent Southerners wrestled with the issue of slavery.
They almost always lost, even two out of three.
This is all very tedious, even excruciating. But here is where it gets good. Here is the good bit. Are you ready for the good bit? In the good bit, we go back again to direct quotation from this execrable "book":
Without any hope of abolition for themselves or their children, Virginia’s slaves were certain to revolt on a scale far larger than Nat Turner’s berserk band. That would almost inevitably lead to another tragedy that his grandfather had predicted to him and to the public: the disillusion of the federal Union.
Would that the "disillusion of the federal Union" had culminated in the permanent dissing of malignant illusions.
For FUCK's sake.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck did I ever mention that my favorite American ever is WT Sherman?