Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The South secedes, why die to stop it?

I have pondered this. I know sectional differences had simmered for a long time...it puzzles me why so many would oppose a separate country and die to prevent it.... giving your life to keep the nation united

I also believe that few Northern whites opposed slavery on moral grounds... the phrase in the Battle Hymn of the Republic "let us die to make men free" is enigmatic.

Why, how dare you question the motives or the sense of those fine young Yankees who went to war to free the oppressed black race.

Dam good chance that if it had split, it wouldn't have looked good after
a few decades. One of our strengths is diversity.

That was fun!

Seriously. We had manufacturing, ag, mining. Steel was coming on,
infrastructure to put it all together. And it all worked as one machine,
without too much BS competing among jurisdictions.

Couple that with the Europeans circling like buzzards to grab a
foothold and move back in.

Heck, they were supplying both sides in our war and looking to
slip into the fray at the first easy chance.

This is all mental masturbation, some think of today's political
makeup and feel the south would be better off. Possibly.

Or, the migrations north for work,
then South by manufacturing, wouldn't have happened.
The Depression and run up to WWII are what modernized
the rural South. What would that look like if the country was split?

Would the south would be like some "used to be great" ag centered
countries that are now 3rd world s-holes. Probably not. It's not
like there was no industry in Dixie.
But who knows.

Some like to play regional rivalry BS.
It's all history to me. An incident 150 years over is interesting.
But long over.

Right now, we are in a fight of at least as much importance.
Some here talk stupid crap of relinquishing territory to our
enemies.

Never!

It is my understanding that the war was because the south wanted states rights (including slavery I guess).

The south’s cotton industry was a HUGE source of revenue and Lincoln did not want to lose that economy.

Thats why when you read the letters home from the soldiers you see a marked difference. A Southerners letter home commonly talked about how proud they were to serve their Country and if need be die for it. Northerners letters often contained no such enthusiasm for the cause

Lots more to it than that. No government ever wants to cede territory, like any entity, the Gov seeks to expand and strengthen itself. Losing the huge ag and tax base of 1/2 the states would have erased the Union. I submit that if the south had triumphed, the North would have fragmented into the separate states, and by extension, there would have been no westward expansion. Cali, NM, Az, Ut, would revert back to Mexico, Brits would sell Mt and WA to Russia, who would have retained AK. In effect, The United States would have crumbled, easily picked off by the waiting Brits and Frogs. Balkanization would have been proceeded by "Columbiazation". When a nation starts to shed territory, it's current government has a rather short time left. Slavery, State sovereignty, all that had big roles, but it really was about preservation of the Union.


On the positive, I'll bet that if the South had won conditions wouldn't have existed for the National Socialist German Workers' Party to rise, and Marx may not have made it out of France alive.

What would the North have done without Texas and Oklahoma oil? Or for that matter the southern timber cut over and sold for seven cents on the acre after the war?

Frankly, I suspect that the South would have more of a Latin flavor to it than it does today. I suspect their would have been expansion into Cuba and Central America. Or at least very cordial relations. The Gulf of Mexico would be a Confederate Lake.

I suspect things would have worked out better for both countries, particularly if there had been no war. The federal leviathan was born then and though the South saw it coming and that was the real reason for the war, the war itself hastened its coming and brought on the conditions to birth it.

It was all about the Mississippi River and New Orleans. Follow the money.

As always “Follow the money.”

It started with the Eerie Canal, forcing Southern trade ships to England to come north and pay taxes first .... around 1817 I think it was but I'll look it up in the books later after lunch.

It didn't just happen overnight. Fawking yankees started that [bleep] for decades before the South finally got enough of it.

And it wasn't so much about slavery .... that was one of several convenient reasons that could be used to challenge certain Constitutionality aspects of the split .... all men are created equal vs states rights. States Rights was the real biggie but the South was being taxed to fricking death ... cotton, indigo, rice, while the north was opening-up to massive importation of irish slave labor to fill the rich robber Barron's factories with cheap labor and foot soldiers desperate for citizenship.

How’s it working out for us now?

Why would southern ships have to go thru the Erie Canal to get to England?

Slavery was dying world wide. Another twenty years it would have been gone all by itself. Keep in mind the cotton gin was invented in 1793. Lincoln didnt care about slaves. He cared about the export tariff money on southern cotton. He needed to stop the south from leaving the union. He started a war to do it. In the south it is called "The War of Northern Aggression" for a reason. The south didnt fight a war to keep slaves. They fought because they were attacked. They simply fought back.

If California, Oregon, and Washington wanted to secede, you might think that would be great. But the reality is that they'd be antagonistic toward the (lower) 45 other states. They would refuse use of their ports, and resources, and pay no money toward the repaying of debts that provided them enormous swaths of infrastructure and security. And since they're all dumber than dogschit, they are now leaving the remaining 45 states vulnerable to foreign invasion. Rather than having a pack full of retards on our western boundary, we would end up with China on our western boundary.

It would be cute for maybe a year, but sooner or later people are going to have enough and they're going to restore the order they once knew.

Would you move into California, Oregon, and Washington state to kill the people that caused all the problems? I would argue that most Americans today would love a reason to do so.

Don't be a victim of revisionist history. Slavery was not the issue. It was much, much, much deeper than that.

Maybe we can finally dredge the Trinity River and bring ships into Dallas.

Here's another thought that most southern folk rarely grasp:

If you got your asses gaped by Sherman and his men, how the fugk do you think you would have done when a foreign entity came to your shores and you had no aid from the north?

We'd all have to???? Come on now... Think deep. What would the northern and southern states have to do? To keep everyone from living under tyranny?

Except that queers and transgenders don’t know how to steer a ship, run a dock, drive a forklift or do anything but suck on each other. You tell those guys that Hawaii is paying $5,000.00/month to drug addicts and homos, and they would all leave for greener pastures.

Problem solved, we really don’t need Hawaii.

Oh yeah.

Good idea.

I have to take exception to the first sentence. All one needs to do is look at the US' ascent post Civil War all the way to the mid 50s to put pay to the idea of "being better of". Lincoln should have done EVERYTHING to preserve the country and without that disastrous war. disastrous in so many ways to include just as you say, the rise of Federal Power. Slavery was a dying trade and would have eventually gone the way of the dinosaur as technology AND Western culture and values evolved. The disdain for Blacks would have never risen to the levels after the war, when the North shoved them down the throats of the Southern states. It's arguing a negative, but an agrarian, single crop economy would have relegated the South to just an enlarged version of pre-Castro Cuba, a Second World country with a paper-thin economic footing and if as you say the "latin flavor" would have seeped it...I don't think so..