FUN FACTS ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR.

Most historians agree that Jefferson Davis would have made a fair-to-middling registrar of deeds, as long as someone else dealt with the public for him.

Throughout their existence, the Confederate States of America successfully avoided the evils of political parties. And look what happened.

Contrary to popular belief, the Confederate battle flag is not a symbol of racism; it is simply a symbol of Southern tradition—specifically, the Southern tradition of keeping Africans in their place.

About 10% of the male population of fighting age died in the Civil War, but that was all right because there were too many young men loitering in front of cigar shops anyway.

It took a man of Jefferson Davis’ talents to lose the Civil War for the South; it took a man of Rutherford B. Hayes’ talents to lose it for the North.

If you examine American history with care, you will find that the phrase “states’ rights” invariably refers to the rights of states to oppress some group of individual residents. Try it sometime!

Comments

  1. markm says:

    Boy, you’ve really stepped in it – in my experience if a blogger says something implying that the South seceded because of slavery and there will soon be a mass of postings by historically ignorant southerners and special pleaders. So to get ahead of that crowd:

    To my Kansas ancestors, the Civil War didn’t start at Fort Sumter in 1861, it started in Kansas in 1854, and it was definitely about slavery. With slavery for the territory up to a vote, slavery supporters were not only working to pack the polls with non-residents from across the river, but they were also trying to suppress anti-slavery opinion by murdering people in the streets. Admittedly, abolitionist sociopaths like John Brown ratcheted it several notches by responding to random murders in the street with _organized_ murders of proslavery men in their homes, but everything I’ve seen about this says that the slavers started the violence. And why not? By advocating slavery and holding slaves if they could afford them, they were already stealing the lives of men and women, one day at a time.

    Rebel apologists will claim that the root cause was economic policy, especially tariffs to protect northern manufacturers and drive down the relative value of cotton. The tariffs were unfair, but unfair tariffs had been in place at least since the 1820’s. There was a semi-rebellion over that thirty years before the Civil War (look up nullification”), which was suppressed by Andrew Jackson – a southerner, a slaveowner, and a cotton planter – because he recognized that preserving the union was more important than the economic interests of his part of the country.

    Just one thing changed in 1860 – a President was elected who was determined to see that the stain of slavery spread no further. That was why the South rebelled – and they had already proven their willingness to kill to expand slavery to new states in Kansas. They had also shown that they were willing to give up their freedom of speech to suppress criticism of slavery, in laws passed in many of the southern states. They’d committed assault and battery – if not attempted murder – in the halls of Congress to try to suppress debate of slavery.

    If the South hadn’t started the war in Fort Sumter, it would have just started a little later, when the CSA attempted to seize Kansas or Oklahoma, or perhaps when the CSA invaded Mexico or other Latin American countries to steal their land and re-impose slavery, and the Union intervened.

    • Hezekiah Garrett says:

      Funny you should mention Oklahoma…

      Your Kansas ancestors were genocidal maniacs, whether free or slave.

    • Oatworm says:

      Just one thing changed in 1860 – a President was elected who was determined to see that the stain of slavery spread no further.

      Fun fact: Abraham Lincoln was never given a chance to show anyone what he thought about slavery – the Southern states started to secede long before he was sworn in. South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, almost three months before Abraham Lincoln took office. The bigger issue at the time was that the Northern states chose to exercise a bit of “state’s rights” of their own and started treating the Fugitive Slave Act with the same level of respect that modern-day Colorado and Washington treat marijuana’s Schedule I classification. This was already happening before 1860, but after the election, most of the Northern states elected Republican legislatures and governors who openly ran on a platform of effectively nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act; the Southern states (probably rightly) assumed that Lincoln, being a Republican and all, would exercise some “prosecutorial discretion” and refuse to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in those recalcitrant Northern states. So, to protect their “property”, they tried to take their ball and go home.

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