Pam Mazanec addressed the Colorado state board of education with an argument for “improving” the teaching of history.
As an example, I note our slavery history. Yes, we practiced slavery. But we also ended it voluntarily, at great sacrifice, while the practice continues in many countries still today! Shouldn’t our students be provided that viewpoint? This is part of the argument that America is exceptional.
Isn’t it nice to know that America simply decided not to enslave people anymore? There weren’t any Americans who resisted that idea, because we are exceptional. Unlike countries like the UK, which fought tooth and nail to keep the slave trade going. I guess.
If you find Mazanec’s reasoning a little dubious, don’t you worry. Hordes of people took to twitter yesterday to provide other examples of American exceptionalism and our progressive and entirely voluntary policies.
Neighborhood residents greet first Black students of Little Rock Central High School with open arms #voluntaryhistory
— Monica Roberts (@TransGriot) October 6, 2014
@tanehisicoates Harriet Tubman takes several trips to Canada by foot to promote black fitness. #voluntaryhistory
— voicetrous (@voicetrous) October 6, 2014
Blacks join the ranks of mass incarceration to help their country cope with deindustrialization. "We gotta do our part." #voluntaryhistory
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 6, 2014
Loath to burden the sluggish US economy, women decide to accept just 78 cents for each dollar their male colleagues earn. #voluntaryhistory
— Ess (@ScottyLiterati) October 6, 2014
Japanese Americans move to desert-themed summer camps to free up Bay area real estate #voluntaryhistory
— Will Reid (@WReid56) October 6, 2014
The hashtag “#voluntaryhistory” is full of these wonderful insights, providing plenty of material for conservatives to use in designing the public school history curriculum.
To be fair, Mazanec said, “…at great sacrifice.” That’s obviously referring to the half-million-plus killed in the Civil War. So Mazanec is saying that the “we” who initiated the slaughter that led to the end of slavery are representative of America, and the Americans who died in part to defend the peculiar institution are “they,” and don’t represent America.
The argument breaks down in several places, but the Civil War isn’t being ignored.
ah, one more example of how lies are essential to the conservative mind. Good to see that others are demonstrating how much of a pathetic liar this “Pam” is.
I just don’t get the idea that people have to believe and teach, that any country anywhere is exceptional. Every country has flaws, in the past and present. All institutions have flaws. All societies have flaws. All organizations have flaws. All people have flaws. To think otherwise is arrogant. It leads to decay.
If you refuse to question the status quo of your state you will be left behind by those that do.
I would like to offer an alternate possibility: the “great sacrifice” was when the good, noble Confederate heroes voluntarily gave up ownership of their property (the slaves), and in return those Yankee bullies came down and destroyed everything anyway. Therefore, the war wasn’t about slavery.
You fought a fucking war over slavery! How in the name of fuck is that “voluntary”?
I didn’t interpret Mazanec’s comments as referencing the Civil War. I thought the “at great sacrifice” was referring to the Southern plantation owners who were sacrificing the profits from their cotton plantations by volunteering to end slavery. So to me, Mazanec was somehow trying to make rich, white Southerners the noble and voluntary victims of emancipation, which is mind-boggling.
A Masked Avenger,
I read that sacrifice as being economical. But your interpretation can fit too.
America is exceptional because it voluntarily abolished slavery. No other countries ever voluntarily abolished slavery?
I think it’s the only one I can think of that voluntarily abolished slavery after a horrific civil war. So America’s exceptional in that sense. Exceptional isn’t always a good thing.
Maybe instead they should play the card that America’s slavery past ISN’T exceptional, since there’s all these other countries that allowed slavery.
What next? The KKK is a civic group promoting race relations?
But no matter how long we woodshedded, we couldn’t nail that one Nuno Bettencourt solo.
American exceptionalism gives me the creeps. I’m not a US citizen, so I’m kind of uncomfortable raining on someone else’s parade, but I feel there is a broad feeling that the US could do no wrong, even if it wanted, because it’s the greatest country on earth. Drone strikes are rationalized. Mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of people with criminal priors are rationalized. Spying on your own population is rationalized. Just as long as you can maintain the illusion that the US is the Next Best Thing after the promised land in the Bible.
PS: I hope you don’t think I’m mistaking the tree for the forest. For all its problems, the US still produces some pretty brilliant people. I just fear that we are watching the beginning of nationalism in a form similar to the early 20th century nationalisms.
You’ve got wonder what would have happened to all of the slaves if there had been no Civil War. I’ve read some opinions that say the institution would have withered away by 1920 as a result of mechanization and industrial methods of production. Perhaps. But I’m doubtful. I suspect they would have become slave factory workers, and would have competed with the nascent labor union movement. Would they have been released from bondage and enfranchised by Southern whites? Looking at post-Reconstruction laws I think we know the answer to that. The most likely outcome would have been the equivalent of apartheid South Africa. How the USA could have long survived such a system is questionable. And how conservatives would have painted this situation would be interesting to know.
nomadiq, I think it was Al Franken who said that conservatives love their country like a toddler loves her parents: mummy and daddy are the bestest mummy and daddy in the world, and anyone who points out their faults is a big poopyhead! Whereas liberals love their country like adults love one another: mature enough to see the faults, and talk them through where necessary. To be fair, there are still grown-up conservatives, but they seem increasingly hard to find in America.
Wilberforce must be spinning in his grave! I too have grave misgivings about american exceptionalism. Not just that it is a grossly distorted view of other countries, or that it is a mechanism for excuse making for the most awful lack of concern for international law, or that it is about parochial views of everything, but the worst thing is that it fails to recognise that you are not one of God’s elect if you are not born an englishman!
Yes, abolitionism was “voluntary”, cuz WE did it OURselves; without it being imposed on us by outside forces. (EG: the US forcibly imposing democracy on the Middle East) Those pesky Canadianers didn’t invade us and force us to abandon slavery. We (in the broadest sense) decided to abandon it ourselves. IE metaphorically: like when you are asked a critical decision and you say you are “of two minds” about the decision, and one mind has to struggle with the second mind to reach a final decision. Anthropomorphizing the nation as a whole, is similar. And that is the exceptionalism they talk about: we argue amongst ourselves, with multiple opinions expected to be expressed and let it all just “hang out”, all the time. or some such plooey.
–
and uh, he’s just talking about Colorado, eh? My history is so out of whack: Was Colorado even in the Civil War? I totally lost them from my history knowledge.
Wasn’t the thing about women receiving less then men bogus? I heard the research was made taking an average of all salaries of all women and comparing it to an average of the same for men, so it didn’t actually indicate that women and me on the same job receive different amounts, only that on a large scale there’s a difference on how many women work and at what positions. Am I mistaken?
BUT, if we still had slaves, why would anyone invent mechanization to replace them??? IOW, that opinion is not well thought out (in MY opinion). [dude, we ALL have opinions]
ack, sorry, but hypotheticals where only a single fact of history is changed, with no other effects considered is not too good a hypothetical.
A Masked Avenger@1,
Sorry, but that interpretation doesn’t wash. The Civil War was not fought to end slavery. Lincoln did not run on a platform to end slavery, but merely to limit its expansion into new territories, hoping it would die out of its own accord in a matter of decades. The Rebels were fighting for their “peculiar institution”–as evidenced by their resistance to allowing slaves to fight in return for their freedom up to the bitter end.
Even the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the states in rebellion. Slavery remained legal in the North until the passage of the 14th Amendment, when the South had been all but subjugated. Lincoln was a pragmatist. His first and only priority was saving the Union. It was only when that was saved that he sought to remove the cause of the sundering.
By the way, there was a country that simply abolished slavery at the stroke of a pen at great cost–Brazil, just 2 years after the end of the US Civil War. I always loved the fact that some of the diehard Confederates emigrated to Brazil to continue their Plantation lifestyle after the fall of Richmond.
Brazil has its own racial problems, but by and large their attitudes toward race are a lot less screwed up than those in the US.
@Rivendellyan
Yes you are mistaken.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/upshot/the-pay-gap-is-because-of-gender-not-jobs.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0
@ A Masked Avenger #1
You know how we can tell that the writer IS ignoring the Civil War? By not mentioning it.
Euphemism is a form of dishonesty and obfuscation. (Sorry to shout, but really?!).
Twas Brillig,
Colorado was a Union Territory in the Civil War. It contributed a few Union Troops, but not much else. Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma were Confederate.
@daemonios 11: No, you’re absolutely right. It’s creepy as fuck. I was always slightly embarrassed about that attitude, but after I moved from the US to Ireland, I realized that not every country thinks that. Most countries don’t seem to think they are Objectively The Best. (Some do, but my current theory is it’s only the countries with current or former empires.) The level to which exceptionalism is accepted in American public discourse is frightening, and as you said opens the doors to all kinds of harmful ideas.
All this, despite the fact that by most actually objective measures, the US is far from topping the lists of Best Places to Live. This willful blindness is honestly the main reason I’m eager to leave again.
Oh, and as to Fuckface McHistoricalIgnorance’s statements up there… I’m pretty sure that no country has legal slavery anymore. Not to say that it doesn’t exist; human trafficking is a major problem. Yes, even in the U.S. But at least chattel slavery is illegal everywhere.
@ Robertfoster #12
Here’s Marlon Brando’s “What’s more convenient” speech from the movie Burn! (Trigger warning, nasty misogynist metaphor) that frames the “transition” from slave to “free” worker another way.
It’s not like slavery ended in the US after the Civil War. If I understand correctly, cops would arrest a black man on some (usually bogus) charge then be found guilty and sentenced to hard labor at some well-connected business owner’s place. They’d have to pay for their own room/board out of their meager wages until they could pay off their fine (which rarely happened). FDR put an end to it because he was going to war against the Nazis and having people in the US practice a new form of slavery wouldn’t look right.
Yeah, I’ve had people proudly tell me that America is the only country that fought a war to outlaw slavery. To which I can only point out that America is also the only country that fought a war to keep slavery.
@23 Some Canadians have that view. Seeing someone from another country think the same way about their own snapped me out of the American Exceptionalism mindset.
good thing we didn’t fight a war over it. that would have been devastating!
The Mormons congregated in Utah becasue salt flats make such a hospitable environment for starting a township.
Mexico ceded the Southwest to the USA reduce its bureaucratic complexity of governing.
Capitalists established a minimum wage, weekends, and other labor protections becasue they’re all good people who care about the well-beings of their workers more than anything else.
First Nations groups felt so bad for Europeans fleeing religious persecution that they committed mass suicide to depopulate the landmass and allow uncontested colonization.
Tired of bearing the sole responsibility for the electoral franchise, wealthy White men moved for universal suffrage without much public discussion and no opposition.
Texas politely asked the Supreme Court to throw out outdated sodomy laws that had never really been enforced anyway.
The Canadian military helped with a demolition project so we could build a better, fancier White House.
I thought it was pretty clear that the “great sacrifice” she referred to was the Civil War. Wingnuts have an ignorant and deluded understanding of history, but none of them have yet, as far as I know, tried to erase the Civil War from existence. The usual wingnut interpretation of the Civil War is bifurcated along pro- or anti-Confederate lines as 1) The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, which wasn’t so bad and would have ended anyway, or 2) The Civil War was about slavery, and we’re the good guys for fighting to end it. In either case, the intent is to ensure that “we” didn’t do any wrong. These interpretations of course invite contradiction, which is how we end up with a country “voluntarily” ending slavery by fighting a huge war with itself at “great sacrifice”.
@ futurechemist and comfychair
It’s possible that Mazanec meant “the Southerners sacrificed their wealth to voluntarily free their slaves,” but that interpretation imputes a huge measure of stupidity and/or dishonesty to her. That doesn’t seem justified when it’s at least equally reasonable to take that as a reference to the Civil War, which can certainly be described as a “great sacrifice.”
@ a_ray_in_dilbert_space
Yes, I’m well aware of this argument, and I would agree with you that Lincoln, for his part, had little real concern for the slaves (note the Corwin Amendment, his desire to resettle black people outside the United States, etc.).
However, my interpretation of Mazanec’s comment rests on the fact that Americans pretty much universally believe that “Lincoln freed the slaves,” and that the Civil War was fought over slavery (which it partially was, by the way). Not only Mazanec, but folks like Jon Stewart, and many others, would tell you that we fought the Civil War to end slavery. Google “fought a war to end slavery,” and you’ll get tens of thousands of hits. Therefore it is perfectly coherent to conclude that when Mazanec referred to “great sacrifice,” she was attributing the end of slavery to the Civil War. I conclude this from the widespread nature of that belief, not on the truth or falsehood of that belief.
Like I said in #1, Mazanec is basically saying, “We voluntarily fought a war that killed 618,222 Americans, in order to end slavery.” In saying that, she is identifying “us” and “America” with those who fought the Confederacy, and identifying the Confederacy as “not us” and “not America.” In other words, she’s doing the usual tribal thinking, whereby anything good and admirable we can point to represents the tribe, and anything bad or shameful does not represent the tribe. We do something similar when we say Dawkins doesn’t represent us, but Rebecca Watson does: we identify with what is admirable within our movement, and repudiate what is not.
Also like I said in #1, this argument fails in several ways. I’m being fair to Mazanec by not misrepresenting what she’s saying, but I’m not endorsing it.
This is why nothing is more useless than thinking about history in terms of collective identities. Who the hell is we? The descendents of slaves? Of slaveowners? Of the abolitionists? Of people living on other continents at the time? Good grief, it’s like studying car mechanics in terms of gremlins!
Yeah, slavery isn’t gone, it’s just more subtle now, rather more like serfdom. I have relatives, on my wife’s side, who are essentially slaves (very poor rural from the Philippines, working ‘jobs’ as house servants). It’s sad to see, and we are looking at trying to adopt some of the younger ones to prevent more of it.
“Yes, we practiced slavery. But we also ended it voluntarily,”
Glad to know we did keep it going for many years through hard labor prisons and Jim Crow Laws.
Works for the UK (and particularly England), certainly. Although among the more sophisticated British exceptionalists, there’s a feeling that it’s bad form to make a song and dance about it – no need to rub it in the unfortunate foreigners’ faces!
A Masked Avenger,
Actually, Lincoln cared deeply about the fate of the slaves and ex-slaves. He arrived at the idea of expatriation with an eye toward avoiding precisely the sorts of Jim Crow shenanigans that took place after 1872 when Reconstruction ended. If Lincoln could have ended slavery with the stroke of a pen and kept the Union intact, I believe he would have. After all, what would be gained by ending slavery only to have it survive in the new Confederacy?
Lincoln was complex. He was a pragmatist and a man of his time, but that does not diminish his deep humanity and kindness. Even so, to contend that the Civil War was fought to end slavery is absurd. It was fought to preserve slavery on the Southern side and to preserve Union by the North. Lincoln was merely wise enough to realize that Union could not survive half slave and half free.
@ A Masked Avenger #33
I do agree that you have provided the most favorable reading of the Mazanec quote (which still does not paint Mazanec in a good light). However, I am a bit more cynical. I think that by ‘great sacrifice’ she was purposely not mentioning the war as @ sadunlap #21 states above. More likely, I believe that she was trying to appeal to both camps by keeping it vague: 1) those who think the Civil War was the ‘great sacrifice’ and 2) those who think the loss of slaves was the ‘great sacrifice’.
Why can’t both the war and the loss of capital when the slaves were freed be all rolled into the ‘great sacrifice’?
John Horstman@31″The Canadian military helped with a demolition project so we could build a better, fancier White House.”
Actually it was the British Redcoats who did that. Canada did not exist at the time.
@ a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
What a sweetheart! He wanted to deport them all, and create a whites-only America, for the black people’s own good, because he was such a friend to them. My heart melts. Also, fuck you:
“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality …” –Abraham Lincoln
@ whywhywhy:
That claim requires some sort of evidence. It would be delicious to impute to Mazanec a pity for the “great sacrifice” of the poor, poor slavers who lost their human property, but before you attribute that sentiment to her, I think we need more to go on than, “hurr hurr, those wingnutz think slavery was a good deal, hurr.”
PZ posted, just two days ago, a quote from Dinesh D’Souza that does indeed claim that slavery was a great social program. There are certainly those who believe such repugnant things. But to suggest that all conservatives do, or that a particular conservative does without evidence, is on par with suggesting that all atheists are rapists because Shermer.
I believe that the British actually outlawed slavery before the U.S.A. did. Slaves who reached the northern territories became “freemen” although , of course, still outrageously discriminated against in what later became Canada.
Britain being the main world power of the day, it is hard to see how anyone else forced them to abolish it. Of course if my recollection is right they only abolished it in some places.
Nice subtle flick of the wrist there, so you get a point. The Civil War was not BEGUN to “end slavery”, but restore the Union.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a political maneuver to keep European powers from aiding the South. At the time, the North’s blockade was well underway, but Lincoln likely determined that should any European nations attempt to bust the blockade, they would either successfully slip through (bringing badly-needed supplies to the materiel-poor South) or the North would be forced to fire upon the runners. The latter would be disastrous, as the North didn’t have the forces to fight against another nation.
Once, the EP was issued, however, the genie was out of the bottle: a Northern victory would spell the end of slavery:
* Abolitionists would have fought tooth and nail to prevent the defeated South from reinstating slavery, and
* With slavery back on the table, the fuse would be lit for another Missouri Compromise / Kansas-Nebraska act tug-of-war, with an inevitable secession as the only possible outcome.
tl;dr – the Civil War wasn’t begun to abolish slavery, but it was certainly ended that way.
robertfoster#12
The labor movement knew damn well that was what was going to happen, which is why when the war started entire union locals were dissolved for the duration because everyone had enlisted. Not because they were notably less racist than other whites of the time (some were, most weren’t), but because they knew good and well they couldn’t compete with a wage floor of zero.
Alverant #26
FDR may have pushed for some laws to make it less blatant, but he didn’t end it; the very same practice continues to this day, although these days the labor for which they’re paid nominal wages usually takes place inside the prison walls; making clothes (American Apparel relies heavily on such prison labor, for instance), doing phone and internet-based customer service, etc. , all for pennies an hour.
Come on folks, everybody knows that the Civil War was fought over the ownership of coal mines in West Virginia. So said former troll on Ed Brayton’s blog, Don Williams.
Here we get what I like to call “Snowflake Syndrome”; either we are the most cordial and welcoming people in the world and everything we do is special; or we suck more than all people ever on a fundamental level and we’re doomed to be the world’s mongrels.
about slavery:
It makes sense that practices similar to slavery survived the end of the Civil War; after all, the slaveowners and supporters of slavery still held most of the power after it ended. They calmly regrouped and proceeded to do their damned best to keep them Negroes down with whatever methods available – the law, the institutions and when all else failed, violence.
Because those things are pretty much impossible to reconcile. It was either right or wrong to take the slaves away from their masters, not both. It’s possible that she was being sly and intended a double-meaning for “voluntary” in order to appeal to both neo-Confederate slavery apologists (who are few in number, especially in Colorado) and American exceptionalists who believe America can never be wrong, but that seems unlikely. Without evidence to the contrary, I think it’s safe to assume she was aiming for the latter group.
Keep in mind that winguts almost never have original ideas when they speak in front of school boards or whatnot, it’s always some standard talking points they picked up from Fox or right-wing radio. In this case, she’s aping Rush Limbaugh’s interpretation of the Civil War, which holds that far from slavery being a stain on our history, “we” deserve adulation for having fought a war to end it, and if anything, the blacks owe “us” (meaning white people) a debt of gratitude for sacrificing on their behalf. (It’s this typical inversion of the privileged and the downtrodden that defines modern conservatism, and what makes it so loathsome.)
As others have pointed out, the Limbaugh interpretation only works if you assume that slaveholders going back to Washington and Jefferson, and the people who fought for the Confederacy, weren’t American. Bonus hypocrisy for the fact that the former Confederacy makes up the most conservative part of the country.
Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1843. It had been abolished everywhere in the Empire except for the territories of the East India Company, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and St. Helena in 1833, although I believe in the Caribbean the “freed” slaves were for a few years in a form of bondage scarcely distinguishable from slavery, supposedly paying off the “debt” owed to their former masters. In Britain itself, a legal deciaion of 1772, Somersett’s Case, established that slavery was “unsupported by law” – a slave brought to Britain automatically became legally free. This case led fairly directly to the movement for abolition, first of the slave trade (outlawed in 1808), then of slavery itself.
The British government eventually took action against the arrangements of a subset of it’s colonial subjects after previously tolerating their activities and taxing them on the profits. PS – first European nation to outlaw slavery in its colonies: France’s revolutionary government. Their decision was later reversed by Napoleon.
@ A Masked Avenger 41
After reading your response, I did a crazy thing and found a interview with Mazanec regarding what she meant:
http://www.coloradoindependent.com/149666/ed-board-member-clarifies-comment-about-u-s-voluntarily-ending-slavery
There was a long libertarian letter to the editor of the CI in response to the article.
The libertarian defender portrayed the US “as a whole” dropping slavery voluntarily, even though the states the legalized slavery didn’t drop slavery voluntarily. Huh?
Worse, the defender made it seem like the North decided to end slavery via war, voluntarily taking up the cause. I don’t know where libertarians learn history, but where I was taught the South started the war by shelling Fort Sumpter, a military base of its own national government. That took place before Lincoln was inaugurated [while Buchanan was still President] though after Lincoln’s election.
From here, that looks an awful lot like the South “voluntarily” shelling their federal government and a federal government responding in self defense (there were, after all, a great many federal employees and persons-under-arms south of the Mason-Dixon) under force and threat of force.
Does it, then, ennoble the US that South Carolina bombed US citizens “voluntarily”?
The mind boggles.
We didn’t fight the war to end slavery, but the southern states did absolutely start the war to keep and expand it.
They fucking SAID so at the time, so I’m going to take their word for it.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
Yes, which makes Lincoln anti-slavery with a political agenda designed to eradicate all slavery over time, and makes the Confederate secession a defence of slavery. There were other issues like tariffs and so on, but the single greatest issue was slavery with the North against it and the South for it. People often forget that Kansas had its own little mini-Civil War in 1855 specifically about slavery, as a kind of Civil War in miniature.
Here’s the official Republican election platform of 1860. In summary:
1. Vote Republican for “peace and constitutional triumph.”
2. The phrase “all men are created equal” is essential to the fabric of the USA.
3. It is not the Republicans who are arguing for disunion but their opponents.
4. States’ rights are essential to the balance of power, and the US government should not allow “lawless invasion” of other states (i.e. no more Kansas raids).
5. The Democratic Party forced “the infamous Lecompton constitution on Kansas”, which allows “an unqualified property in persons” and is therefore unconscionable.
6. That the Democrats have plundered the US treasury through “reckless extravagance.”
7. That the Democrat interpretation of the Constitution is “a dangerous political heresy” that will lead to slavery being installed in all states and territories.
8. Slavery is antithetical to the principles of the US Constitution; “…it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.”
9. That the recent reopening of the African slave trade is “a crime against humanity” and should be subjected to “total and final suppression”.
10. The governors of Kansas and Nebraska have committed anti-democratic “deception and fraud” by vetoing anti-slavery laws that had been passed by their legislatures with popular approval.
11. That Kansas should be admitted to the Union as a state.
12. That import duties should be carefully balanced to provide fair pay to workers and fair prices to farmers and manufacturers.
13. That poor settlers on public land should not have the land sold from underneath them.
14. That naturalisation policies should remain unchanged.
15. That the Constitution allows Congress to make infrastructure improvements.
16. That the US government should promote extending the rail network to the Pacific.
17. That people who like our policies should vote for us.
So out of 17 statements, 5 are explicitly anti-slavery and another 4 are implicitly so (that is, the purpose is to weaken the position of the slaveholding states). That’s more than half of their platform.
My apologies to all for post #50. My first time using the Blockquote.
@ A Masked Avenger 41
After reading your response, I did a crazy thing and found a interview with Mazanec from the Colorado Independent regarding what she meant:
After reading the above, I feel that I was overly cynical in my interpretation and stand corrected. I do not think Mazanec is a polished enough politician to be employing dog whistles for the benefit of fringe groups. Her statement that the war was fought in large part to end slavery is also not accurate either as mentioned by others.
After reading the full interview I would not want her for my school board (local or state).
@Nick Gotts
Don’t forget The Act Against Slavery from Upper Canada, passed in 1793, which banned the importation of slaves as well as blocking the breeding of slaves, (any born as a slave would be freed at 25).
In the 18th century the law in England held that any slave who set foot on English soil was immediately free. This led to many slaves in the Americas swimming to Royal Navy ships, which were deemed English soil. A sailor on HMS Bellerophon at the battle of Trafalgar had used this route to freedom, but unusually he was a Swede (Peter Jensen) enslaved by the Barbary pirates.
My part of the UK (the South west of England) was impacted by slavery in an unusual way, in that for about 200 years (16th and 17th centuries) Barbary pirates regularly raided coastal villages (mostly in Cornwall), fishing boats and ships, every year taking maybe 1500 people away into slavery in North Africa. In all it’s been estimated that over a million Europeans were taken as slaves by Africans.
UK banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished most slavery in 1833 and the rest in 1843. between 1808 and 1860 the British West African Squadron intercepted 1600 slave ships, freeing 150,000 Africans.
whywhywhy@54:
For crying out loud, this is blatantly untrue. The major issue in the US Civil War was slavery, with the Northern states wanting to end slavery and the Southern states wanting to continue it. There is no question about it. Just go and read the frigging contemporaneous documents. By insisting that the Civil War had little to do with ending slavery, you are acceding to the “Northern War of Aggression” spin from Southern bigots. As I already posted, more than half of the Republican election platform of 1860 was dedicated to curtailing the slave trade with the long-term view of eradicating it altogether. That’s why the Southern states wanted to secede — because they knew that even if Lincoln would not outlaw slavery immediately, he would put in place policies that would inevitably lead to the end of slavery in a decade or two. They went to war because they weren’t even prepared to allow slavery to be phased out slowly.
Ed Seedhouse @ #40
Revisionist history. I suppose it would have helped if John Horstman had used the #voluntaryhistory tag.
_____
Of course, it’s inaccurate to say that Canada didn’t exist at the time. The two colonies were called Upper Canada and Lower Canada, were referred to as ‘The Canadas’ and, as in America before (I don’t know why this would even need mentioning), the colonists of The Canadas had developed a sense of identity as Canadian, separate from a British identity.
So, Canada did exist at the time, albeit as a prior iteration. I mean, if we’re to be technical, at what point would you like to consider Canada as existing? 1982? It really was that recently that we became independent of the British parliament.
But, yeah, it was the British army ‘who did that’.
I should add, an identity separate from British and French. Oh, it’s funny how much more nuanced and complicated everything is when you get beyond mere bits of fact or ‘common knowledge’.
Usernames@48:
This is only a very small part of the story. Lincoln delayed the proclamation because he didn’t want the European powers to see it as a desperate plea for help. and because his cabinet also wanted to wait until there was some practical chance that they could enforce it. As a result, Lincoln sat on the Proclamation for 3 months, only making the announcement only after the Battle of Antietam had driven Lee out of Maryland. It is true that one of Lincoln’s goals with the Proclamation was to discourage European powers, esp. Britain and France, from formally recognising the Confederacy, but his two more pressing goals were (i) to encourage ex-slaves in occupied territory to join the Union army and to cripple Southern industry (which worked out rather well — the Union gained around 200,000 soldiers who had been slaves and the Confederacy lost thousands of slaves involved in work that helped the army because the Proclamation emboldened many to flee to Union-occupied land), and (ii) outlawing slavery, which had been Lincoln’s goal from the start.
A lot is made of Lincoln’s infamous “I would preserve the Union” letter, but this was political spin designed to reassure the anti-abolitionists in the Union long enough to secure victory. This isn’t hagiography — we know this because Lincoln wrote the letter after he had drafted the Proclamation of Emancipation and read it to his cabinet but before he announced it publicly. That is, Lincoln wrote to appease the anti-abolitionists at the very time that he was sitting on the document that would start the process of abolition.
No other countries ever voluntarily abolished slavery?
In fact, the US was the second to last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. Mexico abolished slavery a few decades earlier. It was a more or less peaceful end to slavery until some immigrants in the northern border territories got upset and rebelled. If you ever want to know how the history of the Civil War from the point of view of the victorious south would have read, just go to the Alamo some time. It’s all about Freedom.
I’ve read quite a lot of contemporaneous documents and I get the impression that the eventual decision to abolish slavery happened some way into the civil war. It was partly opportunistic (the north had the power to carry it at that point), partly punitive (it would control the south post-war) and partly in line with the trend to anti-slavery principles in the north.
There also seem to be lots of reasons things came to a head in the Civil War. One of them was certainly the expansion of slavery into newly formed states to the west which was much deplored in the north. But the north didn’t specifically fight because they wanted to abolish slavery, rather because many decision makers felt the need to retain the southern states in the union at any cost. Think about what was happening at the time: if they had successfully seceded, there would have been all out war anyway, over control of the rest of the continent, so in a sense, it’s true the northern states had no choice. It’s basically the same reason they tolerated slavery in the first place, so if you call it an act of aggression, best face up to it. The southern governments’ decisions to secede were closely related to slavery and the unwillingness of the north to comply to their demands in order to facilitate it.
A Masked Avenger: “Also, fuck you:”
Well, now there’s a cogent argument. Could it perhaps be that your ignorance of history and inability to understand complexity are impeding you from forming logical theses? Might I suggest the following:
https://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4071
I would also note that Lincoln’s support for voluntary expatriation of freed slaves cooled as he learned more. He spent an astounding amount of political capital to ensure black enfranchisement–an action that put him far, far out front of even most of his fellow abolitionists. Moreover, he consulted prominent freed slaves such as Frederick Douglass throughout his presidency.
That he held racist view is not surprising. It would have been hard to find someone who did not in that era. I am sorry if the complexity inherent in being a real human being is offputting to you. Perhaps the insistence on absolute purity if part of the reason why liberals have never held any real power in America.
Pen@62
Yes, that’s one of the current views of the Civil War, and the evidence for it includes the fact that the Republicans took the Northern states to war on the promise of preserving the Union, and that Lincoln that did not issue the formal Proclamation of Emancipation until well into the Civil War. But there are even more powerful reasons to reject this view. Without going into detail, here they are:
1. The 1860 Republicans ran on a strong anti-slavery ticket with a clear agenda to dismantle slavery over the long term.
2. Preventing new states and territories from slaveholding was part of that strategy: eventually the slaveholding states would be vastly outnumbered and they would have no way of voting down federal abolition laws. That’s why the Southern states were so agitated about pushing slavery into new states — they knew that they would be overwhelmed if they could not expand slavery along with the expansion of the US.
3. If Lincoln truly wanted to preserve the Union at all costs, he could have abandoned the anti-slavery agenda while the Southern states were debating whether to secede.
4. When the Confederate states seceded, Stevens’ Cornerstone Speech made it abundantly clear that the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution was slavery. “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [to the Republican platform]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”
A point to remember about the Emancipation Proclamation is that it was limited in its scope due to limits on presidential power. Lincoln could not end slavery everywhere in the US due to the 5th Amendment (no deprivation of property without due process). However, since the work of slaves was supporting an illegal rebellion, ending slavery in those areas was akin to taking a gun away from a man robbing a bank. That kind of confiscation would not be thought to violate constitutional provisions. Early in the war when there was some pressure to return runaway slaves, Ben Butler, in has largest contribution to the war effort, declared runaway slaves to be contraband (property) not to be returned. The CSA was much more unified on the issue – it was fighting for slavery. Those in the North had a variety of feelings about the war, but given the realities of the war and the number of slaves who had runaway or already been freed by the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, it is hard to believe that by the time Lincoln issued it, most northerners accepted the idea that slavery must be ended as one of the purposes of the war.
oops
meant to say that given the reality and the scope of emancipation achieved during the war, it is hard to believe that most northerners did not accept the need to end slavery by the middle of the war.
Confederate States of America – Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina (first to secede)
Full text here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
The important part:
The Civil War was fought over slavery. The south started it because they wanted to keep slavery.
That was their stated reason. The secession document is not the only evidence – articles and speeches and editorials prior to secession made that clear. Statements made by the Confederate President and Vice-President before and during the war made that clear. The confederate vice-President explicitly stated that preservation of slavery was the sole purpose for which the confederacy existed.
Like I said, I take their word for it.
To argue otherwise you have to be ignorant, dishonest, or in denial.
Creationists have a better argument than “the civil war was not about slavery” apologists have.
Jafafa, most if not all, the secession documents for the CSA states make it clear that slavery was the cause for the southern states to start the war. Of course, it’s not politically correct to point that out. And while most southerners didn’t own slaves, more than 80% of southern legislators by 1860 were slaveholders. So yeah, arguing about the North’s motives seems a little silly.