Why it is a BIG Lie To Demonize Confederate Memorials
Posted By : manager
Posted : December 1, 2020
By: Phil Leigh
(November 27, 2020) Confederate statues are destroyed, removed, and vandalized while streets, schools, and possibly military bases named for Confederate leaders are changed because of a lie. As historian James McPherson puts it, “The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.” His conclusion is not only wrong, it is a lie. But it is not an obvious lie, because the argument has become so accepted that it fails to recognize that slavery was a really euphemistic way of referring to blacks. The antebellum Republican Party did not want to merely exclude slavery from the Federal territories, it wanted to exclude blacks. The true object of the increasingly powerful Northern interests was to keep blacks—not just slavery—quarantined in the South.
The issue first became obvious in 1846 with the advent of the Wilmot Proviso. Twelve weeks after the Mexican War started, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot attached a rider to a $2 million funding bill requiring that slavery be prohibited in any territories acquired as a result of the war. Although commonly misinterpreted as a moral attack on slavery, it was really motivated by white supremacy. Specifically, Wilmot wanted to reserve the new territories for white families.
“I make no war upon the South,” he said when introducing the rider, “nor upon slavery in the South. I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.” Although the Proviso passed the House it failed in the Senate.
During debates over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that would permit the territories to determine slave-or-free status based upon a Popular Vote in the applicable territories, Abraham Lincoln declared, “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [Federal] Territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.”
Four years later during an 1858 debate with Stephen A. Douglas for election to the Senate from Illinois, Lincoln added:
I am not now, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social or political equality of the white and black races. I am not now nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarriages with white people. There is a physical difference between the white and the black races which will forever forbid the two races living together on social or political equality…
Four years later as President in 1862 Lincoln’s attitude was little changed when he spoke to a group of black leaders visiting the White House where he urged them to promote mass black emigration to other countries, including some where he might arrange to have lands set aside to receive them:
See our present condition—the country engaged in war!—our white men cutting one another’s throats, none knowing how far it will extend; and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other.
During the ten years prior to the Civil War no new slave states were admitted to the Union whereas four (California, Oregon, Minnesota, and Kansas) free ones gained statehood. Not one of the four free states permitted blacks to vote and Oregon even prohibited free blacks from moving into the state. Other free states, such as Lincoln’s Illinois, only permitted blacks to move into them if they were financially prosperous. At the start of the Civil War less than one percent of the population in all free states were blacks whereas blacks composed forty percent of the population of the 11-state Confederacy.
Even after the Emancipation Proclamation that prompted laws permitting blacks to enlist in the Union armies to help win, the biggest race riot of the era happened in New York in July 1863 where the number of killed totaled about 120. Even as slaves were set-free by Union military successes after the EP they were largely confined to squalid Concentration Camps in the South because Northerners would not permit blacks to migrate to states North of the Ohio River and Mason Dixon line.
After Lincoln sent Major General Lorenzo Thomas into the lower Mississippi River valley during the war to recruit black troops and see what could be done to improve the conditions for black non-combatants, he wrote back:
It will not do to send [black refugees] . . . into the free states, for the prejudices of the people of those states are against such a measure and some . . . have enacted laws against the reception of free negroes. [Ex-slaves] are coming in upon us in such number that some provision must be made for them. You cannot send them North. You all know the prejudices of the Northern people against receiving large numbers of the colored race.
Even Massachusetts, the cradle of abolitionism, refused to accept black refugees. Famous abolitionist, Horace Greeley, advocated that occupied Southern lands be given to freedmen in order to avoid black migration into the North. After the war ended Massachusetts Congressman George Boutwell proposed that South Carolina and Florida be reserved exclusively for blacks in order to keep them far South of the Mason-Dixon line.
If the typical politician and media editorialist today knew that Northerners entered the Civil War in order to ensure that blacks would be quarantined indefinitely in the South so that the rest of the country could be populated by whites, they might have less interest in toppling Confederate statutes and removing the names of Confederate heroes from streets, schools, buildings and even military bases. In truth, except for a few New Englanders, the Northerner’s objective to restrict the spread of slavery was merely a noble-sounding cover for a desire to establish white supremacy everywhere in America outside the South. That is, in fact, precisely what happened. All of the seventeen states that joined the Union after the start of the Civil War to the present, had tiny black populations upon achieving statehood.
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