[Peace-discuss] 5 Myths re Why the South Seceded (James Loewen)

[C. G. Estabrook]

Societies are defined by how the ruling class gets enough to eat.  The American 
civil war was a conflict between two ways of doing that.

Two dominant political groups, one primarily resident North of the Mason-Dixon 
Line and the other south of it, competed because they profited from two 
different and incompatible ways of exploiting labor - by renting it or owning it 
(i.e., by chattel-slavery or wage-contract).  Extracting surplus value from the 
direct producer could be done ether way, but probably not by a mixture of both.

That's what Lincoln meant when he said in 1858, "I believe this government 
cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free ... it will cease to be 
divided. It will become all one thing or all the other ... Either the opponents 
of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public 
mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; 
or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all 
the States, old as well as new --- North as well as South."

("Free" labor has a technical meaning - it refers to the labor of those who have 
no right to live without working for their masters, i.e., those to whom the 
society had no responsibility.)

The Southern ruling class understood that the new Republican party, with its 
central plank of "no extension of slavery" was the vehicle of the northern 
ruling class and wage-slavery, as opposed to their form of slavery. When its 
candidate was elected president, the the rulers of the Southern states knew an 
attack was imminent and declared their independence - as these governments had 
done three generations earlier, in 1776.

Gen. Winfield Scott, the leading US military figure - his generation's George 
Washington - wrote on the day before Lincoln's inauguration (March 3, 1861) and 
suggested the new president could conquer the Southern states at the end of a 
long, expensive, and desolating war, and to no good purpose; or he could say to 
the seceded States, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace!"

Lincoln chose the former, and Scott was retired.

That Lincoln understood what was at stake in his state-building is clear from 
his first State of the Union address: 
<http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/lincoln/stateoftheunion1861.html>.


On 4/10/11 6:02 AM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> The best explanation of the "War of Northern Aggression" that I ever heard 
> came from Fred Madsen,
> who took a bullet in South Vietnam during reconnaissance in the early 60's.
>
> Fred said that the war was fought over who would control the Land occupied by 
> the southern states.
>
> I find Fred's explanation to be unassailable.
>
>
>
>
> On 4/10/2011 10:49 AM, Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
>>
>>     I  ran into this today on Google or Yahoo news and made it into a word
>>     doc b/c I tho't it was interesting and enlightening enuff on its own,
>>     plus it had parallels with today's issues, i e poor white farmers [who
>>     were not slave-owners] supporting the Confederacy because that was the
>>     class they aspired to and identified with... (Sociologist James Loewen
>>     wrote /Lies My Teacher Told Me/ and /Sundown Towns/).
>>      --Jenifer
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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