Originally posted by JGrubbs:
There were many of our founding fathers and many Southern Generals who were opposed to slavery, but understood that it was part of society at that time. You are looking at it with a modern understanding, being a history teacher you should know that you have to put yourself in the mindset of the time period to understand the issue. Many make the mistake of assuming that everyone who owned slaves were evil people, yet there were many great Christian men who owned slaves, and at the same time educated and evangelized those slaves, knowing that if they didn't own them, then someone who was evil would and would mistreat, beat and even kill those slaves. God allowed slavery to happen at different times around the world throughout history for whatever reasons He had.
Had I lived in the 1860's I would have been opposed to the institution of slavery, but I would have also been opposed to the abuse of the US Constitution and the tyrany of Lincolns invasion of the Southern states to "preserve the Union".
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue for the last 50 years or so, and not just as a history teacher. I watched the Civil Rights movement on TV as a child, and read the speeches. I have witnessed racial prejudice up close and personally.
I have thought this through, and I have read a lot of primary source materials over the years.
For us to buy off on the notion that slavery was acceptable to the South because of them being people of their times is not very convincing to me. The United States itself was a cutting edge institution; there were no other true republics in 1789. The Declaration and the Constitution were radical documents to anyone else in the world. And, there was, even among some of the slaveholding southern leaders, a realization that the institution was fundamentally at odds with what we were as a nation from the beginning. Jefferson's own comments show that he was full of dread for the future because of the "Institution." Franklin dedicated the last years of his life pushing for abolition. Our mother country, due to the actions of conservative evangelicals such as John Newton (Amazing Grace) and William Wilberforce, eliminated slavery in 1833 on purely moral grounds. Whereas our republic was cutting edge, we were behind most of the western world in this.
The real tragedy, of course, was the arrogance and overreaction of the leadership of the South, and its unfounded fears. Lincoln, the 39% president without a majority in either house of Congress, and with a majority slaveholding SCOTUS, had not one bit of power to change anything. Had the SC hotheads kept their cool, Lincoln would have been a one-term president, but their actions gave him the stick to beat them with.
I have a unique perspective on this; because of the long generations in my family (my great grandfather was born in 1817, my grandfather in 1856, and my father in 1902), because I know what my great grandfather did during the Civil War, and why he did it. He was a southerner, but also a religious opponent of slavery. He put his body where his mouth was, and at the age of 44, he left his family (14 kids) in the care of his older children, and joined the Union Volunteer cavalry.
When the southern delegates signed the Constitution, and when their states ratified it, the right to secession was gone forever. The supremacy clause and other sections in the Constitution make it plain that the states are inferior in power and therefore cannot secede. Perhaps the real tragedy is that when the SC hotheads first pushed the federals, during the Jackson administration, Henry Clay cobbled together a solution, averting Old Hickory's plan to invade SC and end the debate then and there. Late in life, Jackson said that one of his great regrets in life was that he had not hanged John Calhoun.
Then, of course, there is the whole issue of Reconstruction, which I have nicknamed "The Cold Civil War." It lasted three times as long as the war, and probably did more to hurt the South and African Americans than the war did. Race relations in the US have not gotten over the 99 year delay in fully enforcing the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. The economy and culture of some parts of the South has yet to recover from the effects of the plantation system, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow.
There are no simple answers to this history. The US has not gotten over this yet, which is why so many study this.
