Featured Slavery and Civil war.

On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger issued “General Order Number 3” in Galveston, Texas.

 

Here's a little food for that thought, and after this, I'll shut up about it in this thread:

God promised national greatness for Israel, which wasn't even close to being achieved in old Israel. Right now, modern Israel is the Jews only.

And God told david, in 2 Samuel 7:10-
Moreover I will appoint a place for My people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own and move no more; nor shall the sons of wickedness oppress them anymore, as previously,
At that time, Israel was living securely under its greatest king, with no thought of moving. Later, the USA & British Empire held more than 80% of ALL the world's resources!

 

If you are up to it, I would appreciate a separate thread where we can explore this belief.

If you do start a new thread on this topic, please include the scriptures where you find the promise of "national greatness."

I strongly disagree, based on Paul's teaching about the spiritual descendants of Abraham vs. only the blood descendants of Abraham.

Yet World War II stripped the treasure of three hundred years of colonization from Britain and transferred it to the United States. The US lived off of that huge windfall until the 1970s, when the money ran out.

How do you know 2 Samuel 7:10 is to be fulfilled before the fullness of the Kingdom?

 

I started a thread, "Are the British Empire & USA in prophecy?" in the "other Christian denominations" sub-forum.

 

A link for convenience: Are the British Empire & the USA in prophecy?

 

Historical fact. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, every time a state or territory was added the question came up free or slave? The southern states, which were run mostly by wealthy planter class Democrats, wanted the new states to allow slavery because they could see clearly that the industrial economy in the north would outnumber southern congressional numbers and eventually outlaw slavery. Free enterprise may be imperfect but it requires a free and intellectual labor pool to thrive.

Consider the modern state of West Virginia. On the eve of the Civil War, it was part of the state of Virginia. Virginia at the time extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ohio River, PA/MD/Ohio to the North, NC/KY/TN to the south, it was a huge state. The reason West Virginia was formed on June 20, 1863 (anyone see any irony in that date?) was because those living in the western counties of Virginia were tired of paying taxes to Richmond and receiving nothing back in return. There were slaves in those counties, only a few but it existed. And WV organized regiments for both the Union and the Confederacy.

The sheer volume of Civil War casualties and resulting misery cannot be attributed to poor and middleclass commoners fighting to maintain or eliminate slavery. The millions that carried the actual burden of the war again did not do it to eliminate or preserve the institution of slavery. My favorite Hollywood movie on the Civil War quotes General Longstreet in a conversation with General Lee where he states "we should have freed the slaves then fired on Fort Sumter". A great case could be made that if that had happened, the American Civil War would have turned out much differently.

ON EDIT: My college professor teaching West Virginia history made the observation that had the south won the civil war, the confederacy would have within 25 years fought another civil war with itself over the issue of....slavery. His prediction was that war would have resulted in a third country centered around Texas. The fact of the matter is many of us know little about the economic/political environment much less the many historical facts of a mere 150 years ago in the USA.

 

While slavery was a large factor in causing the war, it was far from the only one.The South was against many of the tariffs imposed on their imports. many wanted the full right to make moonshine tax-free. Above all, they wanted the right of the individual states to make such laws & taxes as they chose, without interference from a distant federal govt. And long as growing as much cotton as possible was profitable, they wanted cheap labor to produce it. The cheaper the labor, the more profits they made.

The North often viewed the South as a gang of wealthy playboys & drunks, wanting federal benefits without having to pay for them. They were happy to let most of the blacks remain in the South, where they couldn't threaten their jobs by offering to do the same work cheaply.

The attack on Sumter was like a slap in the face to many Northerners, who viewed it as treason, or equal to an attack of a foreign power against the USA. Also, they were greedy for some of the South's farmland & other resources & viewed most Southerners as ignorant louts.

But as the war went on, Lincoln worked to make slavery the main reason to carry it out to victory.

I believe the South would've been better off not starting the war, as, even had they freed themselves & made a separate nation, they couldn't've withstood an attack by a foreign power Even Mexico might've been able to beat them & take Texas, etc. back. I believe the only thing that would've moved the North to help the South against a foreign invasion would've been if it'd been from Germany or some other European nation besides Britain or France.

And when Europe began to find other sources of cotton, the South's market would've collapsed.

 

The largest by far cash crop of the confederacy was cotton, a crop that is not for human consumption. The means of cultivating and harvesting this crop was labor intensive. Cotton fed the northern garment factories but couldn't feed anyone. The entire economy of some deep southern states depended on cotton.

From the time that the South Carolina Militia fired on the Federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor (SC) in April of 1861 until the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) MD, September 17, 1862, the war had been going in the favor of the south, with Union fiasco's being common. A major consideration for having Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia invade the north was to first give Virginia a chance to harvest her fall crops without Union army interference and more importantly a big southern victory north of the Mason-Dixon Line would have very likely resulted in France and England (one or both) establishing diplomatic relations with the south.

Since Antietam was a Union victory, the first after a string of embarrassing and costly defeats, Lincoln finally had the ability to issue the emancipation proclamation, a document that he had been sitting on for months. That political act was calculated to deter France or England from supporting the Confederacy making the war a moral crusade on the international stage. While Lincoln and many in the north were uncomfortable with the institution of slavery, being uncomfortable isn't a good enough reason to endure the many hardships that the soldier had to endure, in particular for the men in blue who had a comfortable existence and little exposure to slavery.

After Antietam, the Union Army of the Potomac (in the east) continued to lose battles until Gettysburg (PA) July 1-3, 1863. Had Lee and his army prevailed at Gettysburg, the Confederacy still had a reasonable chance to get outside support. The south knew that once the north was able to put it's industrial omph and much larger population into the war effort it would lose the war. After First Bull Run it was never a matter of winning on an even keel rather it was hoped in the south that they could outlast the north.

 

The war was started by politicians, as most wars are. North & South traded heavily before the war, to the benefit of both.

Slavery began to weigh heavily with the formation of new states, with large arguments of whether they'd be slave or free. I think such incidents as "bleeding Kansas" called much attention to slavery.

Lincoln's assassination made it much-harder for many former slaves after the war. Many were simply evicted my their former "massa" & had no home nor income.Only a lucky few who had certain job skills were hired by someone, or became paid servants of their former owners. And the thing the North feared happened-many blacks came North & offered to work for less than the native whites, leading to many conflicts.

 

Also, another political aspect of the time that has a parallel to our day but not directly associated with the issue of slavery has to do with the attitudes of voters in states located north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

By the time of the presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party was less than 10 years old while the Democrat Party was as old as the republic. Lincoln, the Republican, was basically a political unknown, the Democrats ran two veteran politicians (including the previous vice president) and another Party (Constitution Party) ran one so it was a 4 man race.

In response to Lincoln's victory, the democrat dominant southern states had a hissy fit on a par with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The 1860 "solution" was for the democrats to leave the union, the 2016 "solution" was non-stop fabricated legal actions. In both cases, the democrats had nearly 100% mass media cooperation and a surprising amount of church support who might claim that the war was as immoral as slavery.

What all this meant was anyone that had the slightest dislike of Lincoln for whatever reason did whatever they could to destroy him politically. As the numbers of war casualties and the cost grew, the northern democrats loudly did everything they could to discredit him. In the election of 1864, northern democrats ran former General George McClellan who Lincoln had given much responsibility to at the onset of the war. McClellan ran on a platform of ending the war by settlement which would have essentially left slavery intact in southern states.

 

At the time of the Civil War there were slaves in New Jersey and other states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the states in rebellion.

When I was in college I had a work study job in an outdoor museum that had a few log structures that were originally built by slave labor in WV.

 

When Gen. Grant married Julia Dent, she had some slaves given to her by her dad as a dowry. I believe they were household slaves, almost treated as family.

 

Slavery existed in Canada as well, with Indians of some nations enslaving members of other nations before any Europeans arrived. Then, they, too, practiced it, holding both blax & Indians as slaves. However, Canada ended it in 1793 with one of the earliest national slavery bans in the world.