Dixie - In Memoriam
New member
I didn't allude to any specific bill, you will have to post a quote from me so I understand what you are talking about here. The South did not decide to secede from the federal level, it was state action, so why would something in the US legislature have any bearing? There was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Missouri Compromise, and I suppose many slave owners were feeling threatened by the course the country seemed to be taking, our country is comprised of individuals who think independently, so certainly this was the case. However, the "legal" justifications and cause, had to do with fundamental constitutional freedom, as it had been defined in the time.
This war was not about Civil Rights for black people, no matter how much you wish to imagine that was the case. It just simply wasn't, and to try and comprehend or understand what happened with regard to the war, on that basis, is absolutely ridiculous. I take you back to Dred Scott, a slave who was owned by a northerner! He tried to gain emancipation and was refused by the SCOTUS.... not the CSA. General Robert E. Lee did not personally believe the institution of slavery was okay, he was very much an abolitionist. Ft. Mims Regiment for the CSA was one of the most tenacious and resistant in the whole war, was comprised of mostly Choctaw and black soldiers. There are literally hundreds of stories which have been buried under a steaming heap of Nationalism, with regard to the Civil War. The victors write the history books.
It's important to remember, in all the years from the Civil War until Civil Rights, the nation was controlled and run, mostly by racist white people. As with ANY bigotry, it was much easier for them, all of those years, to prop up the myths and legends about The South and make them the scapegoat for all the evils of slavery. The issue of the Civil War was not about enslavement of black people, it was about the power of federal government to violate the constitution and take away personal property. For a century before the Civil War, and even another century before we became a nation, slaves lived in the South because that is where they were used to pick cotton. Northerner's knew about it and were okay with it, because it was allowed and permitted to exist all of that time. In fact, the main beneficiaries to southern cotton, were northern industrialists who used the cotton to make textiles. Cotton was the #1 US export, and thus earned the nickname, King Cotton. It just so happened that cotton grew better in a certain area of our country, and this was where the concentration of slaves existed. It had nothing to do with the character of the people who lived in the South, they had the same diversity of character as Northern people, and the sentiments toward black people was pretty much universally racist by today's standard.
