Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire OMG Another Civil War Thread!

I was born in 1950, and grew up hearing the stories my grandmother told about her childhood. She had a neighbor who was a veteran of the War Between the States. He told her stories about such things as being in a battle and getting so thirsty that he drank out of a creek filled with the blood of dead and dying soldiers. We lived near the birthplace of Jefferson Davis, and my grandfather helped build the 351 tall monument that honors him.

Although Kentucky was a border state, and didn't secede, I live in a part of the state that was pro-Confederate in it's sentiments, partly because of the large farms that were here, and the slaves that went with them. When you have been raised since childhood being told the stories that I was, it is very easy to be swayed by what you hear. As I got older and learned more about the war, and it's local connections, it was easy to become more and more pro-South in my feelings. My late brother was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and tried to get me to join up. I just didn't have the time to spend doing it, and wish now I had done so.

Anyway, I don't hold any animosity or hatred towards any from the North, but I do get pretty heated up when they tell the lies that they do as to what they perceive to be the causes of the war. Other than that, I'll go to my grave believing the South had every right to secede from the Union, and that Lincoln pushed the South into war.

Thats no doubt true....but to say it had nothing to do with slavery??

Slavery needed to end,..no doubt about it. It went on far too long in America. But one big issue that nobody knew how to address was 4 million slaves that had nothing being turned out to fend for themselves.

Slavery needed to end,..no doubt about it. It went on far too long in America. But one big issue that nobody knew how to address was 4 million slaves that had nothing being turned out to fend for themselves.

Is foolish.....

Most of the world’s cotton came from the south. It takes land, labor, and capital. Regardless of where the ships came from I’d say the south had a higher demand for cheap labor.

Slavery is an abomination in any society and existed at one point in all of them. The south’s transition out of it would have eventually happened, and they knew it. Just a matter of technology and time, both cut short during the war. Cotton gin for starters.

Anyway, that’s kinda my perspective.

40 acres and a mule.

Shelby Foot who spent 20 years writing the "Civil War Series" said the only way to settle the issue of slavery was with armed conflict.

For what it's worth the cotton gin was a driver for the increased need for labor in south because it increased production so much. The civil war would never have happened if the emancipation proclamation would have been enacted at the beginning of the war since there was not even enough support for it in the northern states at the time. Blacks, Irish, and Chinese were not treated very well in the 1800's anyplace in the US. That was also the area when England starved millions of Irish to death so they could sell their food at a better profit. So really the whole planet was pretty harsh by today's standards

https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/exodusters.htm
...Slavery was nothing more than a bad memory; the Fourteenth Amendment to the ... unique to their condition also prevented many freed blacks from moving ahead. ... Movement to parts further west, such as Kansas, began almost immediately ...

...Thousands of African-Americans made their way to Kansas and other Western states after Reconstruction. The Homestead Act and other liberal land laws offered blacks (in theory) the opportunity to escape the racism and oppression of the post-war South and become owners of their own tracts of private farmland. For people who had spent their lives working the lands of white masters with no freedom or pay, the opportunities offered by these land laws must have seemed the answer to prayer. Many individuals and families were indeed willing to leave the only place they had known to move to a place few of them had ever seen. The large-scale black migration from the South to Kansas came to be known as the "Great Exodus," and those participating in it were called "exodusters."
...

See Oregon, it is next.

If you read that entire tome my hat is off to you, sir.

I couldn't hang but for about half of the first book. Great for insomnia.