Scholarly history of Civil War vs. popular "history" of Civil War

[Guynemer]

Excellent post, Sprayber.

QFMFT. I don't agree with much of what he says, but that was goddamned poetry. +100 internets to you, sir.

[MrFun]

The Confederacy was a terrible experiment in our history. It has done more harm to the concept of states rights than anything else that I can think of. I was born and raised in the South and I love this region dearly but the constant insistence on claiming that the South fought for a noble cause gets on my nerves. Having to see idiots driving up and down the road with Confederate flags on their trucks claiming "Heritage not Racism" makes me sick to my stomach. Now I can understand the desire for people to want to believe that their ancestors fought for a noble cause but to ignore what the driving cause of the war was is to be dishonest. It is true that the North had and has forms of racism in its own right but the fact that the South institutionalized its racism in the form of slavery at first and then in laws limiting the rights of blacks cannot be denied if you are honest about the facts. The only way to ever get past that is to acknolwdege that the South was wrong and move on. One more thing that irritates me is the constant yacking about the war of Northern Aggression term that a lot of people down here talk about. I don't recall the South having a problem with an aggressive federal army when it was attacking Mexico and extending the borders south or all the talk about adding Cuba to the US. I actually believe that states should have more control over decisions that effect their people BUT if it means that an institution such as slavery would have been allowed to drag on for decades more or a large part of the people living in that state would be effectively shut out of the decision making process, then id rather there be a strong federal government to make sure everyone has an equal opportunity in life. I for one am happy about reading about Sherman's march through Georgia and South Carolina. It took the war to those people who were so enthusiastic about plunging the nation into a bloody war that cost so much in human life.

That's one Southerners opinion...

I'm going to build an altar in your honor.

[Arrian]

Whatever. It still started in Topeka.

You're hopeless. Did you not read what the man wrote? Or are you simply incapable of processing it?

It wasn't an attack, just so you know...

-Arrian

[SlowwHand]

Yes, I read it and processed it. He quoted my post and then essentially agreed with it.

[DaShi]

It's widely known here that Sloww can't read. Enjoy it for the laughs like I do.

[Dr Strangelove]

On the previous page I attempted to post a graphic concerning school segreagation posted on Wikipedia, but I couldn't get the picture on the post.

Go to Wikipedia, look up "Brown v. Board of Education" and you'll see that by 1950 the states mandating segregation were essentially those of the old Confederacy plus the border states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma). Woodrow Wilson brought segregation to D.C.

Four states allowed optional segregation - Kansas, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. These were states which had a large influx of Southerners after the Civil War.

Eleven states had no legislation on their books regarding segregation - Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Montana, The Dakotas and Nebraska - mostly states which had so little black population that the issue probably never came up.

The rest of the country, 16 states, most of the North and Midwest plus Oregon, Colorado and Idaho, had laws forbidding segregation.

[MrFun]

It's widely known here that Sloww can't read. Enjoy it for the laughs like I do.

I mailed Slowwy Hooked on Phonics program for him for Christmas, but he probably won't appreciate it.

[Whoha]

The main driving point was the desire to curb the economic and political power of the southern states.
If the economic and political power of the southern states had been allowed to grow unchecked, the northern elite would've lost their power, the USA would've remained a primarily agrarian country and would've lagged behind the UK and Germany in the industrial race.

The only problem with that is that without slavery and coresponding cheap labor available in the North, the North did industrialize, had a greater population, and utterly dwarfed the South, a reversal of the situation almost a century prior where the South came out of the revolutionary war in a fantastic position.

The North had already been steadily limiting the political power of the south via the much maligned 3/5ths compromise, the ban on limiting additional slaves in 1808, the Missouri compromise and others so the writing was on the wall for them in every imaginable way.