Quote:
Originally Posted by LynnieS
Spoiler for To save space:
I'm not 100% sure if this is right - at least not by everyone. The South, at the time of the American Civil War, wasn't purely an area of plantations and their owners kept in power through slavery. If that was the case, the Underground Railroad, for one, would have been broken up not too long after it got started, IMHO.
For those already in power, yes, it would have been one factor, but there are also the loss of (1) privilege, (2) power and (3) tradition, esp. for those who were perhaps ordinary sharecroppers. By taking away the "tradition" in the South, you can make some serious hay over the ideas of "destroying our way of life" and "removing a (if not the) path to prosperity", and both will get people upset.
Just as not everyone in the South is pro-slavery, I doubt that everyone in the North is against it. President Abraham Lincoln, in his Emancipation Proclamation, did not free all of the slaves in the country - just those in rebellion; he also did not make slavery illegal. I also doubt that those Northerners who went to the South during Reconstruction did it out of kindness. 
In the end, though, the winner always writes the rules and histories.  Neither side was particularly pure or honorable. General William Sherman's Savannah Campaign was fairly brutal in its effects on both the military and civilian areas - although it wasn't at the scale of, say, the "traditional" punishment of sacking and burning of a city for refusing to surrender when told.
Interracial relationships were up not too long ago, I thought? For the "birthers", I also wonder if some of them are also hoping that if they could prove that Barack Obama is not a native son, it would be possible to... unwind time and get rid of his changes. Of course, the number of changes Barack Obama has made so far isn't that much, IMHO; I still see his presidency, not as one of change, but rather one of "out with the old, in with the same".
And before people jump [up and] down on me  , I see that being a fault of everyone - Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives and etc. |
The whole thing about the nation was in fact Slavery wasn't just a North South thing just like the Revolutionary war wasn't just a England vs them thing. There were sympathizers on both sides, but in South, even if you were a proponent of free blacks, you could easily lose your land, whereas in the North being pro slavery didn't instantly castigate you from society. Also there were many attempts to fight the Underground railroad, namely the fugitive slave act, which allowed southern bounty hunters to grab runaways and bring them back to the south to be brought back to slavery.
Now Sherman was a general, at the time of the war his actions would cost the US government millions of dollars but at the time, after bunker hill and the battle of appomatax the notion of playing civil with the southerners would have cost Grant the war. The decisive and brutal tactics that Sherman used helped demoralize the south enough to force the surrender of the confederates. And yes the war wasn't fought solely on noble purposes of the freedom of slaves as Lincoln was a proponent of emigration of Africans back to Africa.
And for the most part on Obama, yes he's more of the same, with the renewing of the patriot act, and the slow withdrawal of American troops in Iraq, and the escalation in Afghanistan, but at least on some things he's moving. Still I just want the corporatists out of washington, and for the people to become the main customer of the government not the corporations some of which are enslaving part of this great nation. (pst i know it's rhetoric, but working poor do exisit)