For the Record: What Was That Civil War About, Anyway?

 

Blacks in the Civil War. Until very recently, the list of Civil War casualties stopped about about 620,000 dead. but this was missing something like 130,000 Black combatants killed by Confederate and in some cases Union troops, and mostly by the same enemies that killed most of the white troops: pneumonia, yellow fever, and smallpox.

Some Lost Cause buffoon defending the original (1865) Ku Klux Klan in the course of yet another version of the beloved claim that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery: 

"the southern people" meaning the white citizens, of course; the formerly enslaved being not people, or not southern, or both?

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 20, 2023

You say the rebels fought not to preserve slavery but to preserve their homeland. But the homeland they wanted to preserve was one inhabited by white citizens and Black people without civil rights--preserving slavery or something like it was an essential part of the program.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 20, 2023

That's ridiculous. Slavery was illegal in 15 of the 18 Union states. pic.twitter.com/CivZGtqTRy

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 20, 2023

Really 3 https://t.co/rTfxpBSpCt; there were no more than 1800 slaves in Delaware in 1861; West Virginia had more, over 18,000, but it had always been an economically insignificant phenomenon, which is why the new state split from Virginia, refusing to join the Confederacy.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2023

... which obviously carry more historical weight than a nonrandom selection of diary entries. There's no question but that Southern power elites perceived Lincoln's incoming administration as opposed to slavery (it was certainly opposed to expanding slavery to the territories)

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2023

... and that is why they seceded. They said so! And if Lincoln himself wasn't yet an abolitionist, there were abolitionist Radical Repubicans in his cabinet. By the time the war began his government was emancipating thousands and ignoring Dred Scott https://t.co/vuuLwpGYyN

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2023

I thought you meant to debate history. These bad-faith sub-Calhounist excuses for rebellion aren't evidence for any kind of reality except the con game pulled by plantation aristocrats on their marks, the misled farm boys who did all the dying.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2023

You still haven't answered or even apparently looked at my question: why do you refer to "the Southern people" when you clearly mean only white people, while Black people had been living there for two and a half centuries and formed a majority in some states?

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2023