Political Ruminations

The Truth About the Confederacy

The real reason the South seceded, and it wasn’t states rights as so many on the Right like to claim, it was, as we all know,  a matter of the 1% wishing to protect their assets. Mark Ames:

A little over a year ago, while researching the Confederacy’s economy, I stumbled across this unnerving graph charting the value of America’s “stock of slaves” in the last decades before the Civil War.

This graph tells the real story behind the South’s secession: the value of the South’s “slave stock”—the property of the ruling class — soared as secession approached, reaching an almost 90-degree angle in those final years before Harper’s Ferry. The South’s ruling class seceded to protect their riches, period:

From afar, if you didn’t know that human “slave stock” was the asset being charted, you could easily mistake this graph, and its parabolic trajectory, for one of the many destructive asset bubbles this country has suffered right up through our own time.

Up close, this graph drips greed, mass murder and shame — it strips away the historical revisionism that falsely ascribed the South’s “cause” to an almost selfless, tragically romantic attachment to “tradition” and “culture”; it gives lie to the myth that slave owners kept their slaves to the detriment of their own bottom line.

Like the worst wars and the worst of history’s villains, the Confederacy’s one percenters seceded and fought in order to continue profiting from their most valuable investment properties — their human slave stock.

You should go read the rest of Mark Ames’ piece.

Civil War History Buffs

Bob Cesca is doing a series on Civil War History. If you have an interest, it’s well worth your time to read.

Bob’s latest post in this series, is “Secession and Non-Slaveowners”

Morning Quote: Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy

I have argued with conservatives on Huffpo and elsewhere, innumerable times, about the reason for the Civil War. They like to claim that it was really about “states rights”.

Let there be no mistake. The Civil War was about slavery, the enslavement of human beings.

Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, from the speech he delivered 150 years ago (known as “The Cornerstone” because in this speech he laid out the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy, and the primary cause of the impending civil war):

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Let there be no mistake, indeed.

The New York Times derides Stephens and the coming civil war, April 2, 1861

It would be difficult, without the deliberate declaration which Vice-President STEPHENS has given to the world, to believe that a national revolution could ever be conducted on the theory which he assigns as underlying secession. Some noble human motive-- some yearning toward light and liberty -- has hitherto consecrated every revolution: some indeed have been steeped in splendors; while this age has been cheered and blessed with the spectacle of a spontaneous upheaval of popular life, on another Continent, which is a pure gain to progress, and claims the tears and laurels of mankind. It has been reserved for the Slave Power of America to bring into the theory of society a doctrine utterly wicked, retrograde, diabolical. As stated with applause, the other day, by Mr. STEPHENS, in the town of Atlanta, it is perhaps the most purely atrocious thing in history. It may well give us pause that in this Nineteenth of the Christian centuries, and in America of all countries in the world, a theory of the social contract such as this could be seriously promulged:

Via Bob Cesca