South Carolina, tear down that flag!

[ponderingturtle]

The slave population had reached a point to where importation was not a requirement which of course, meant the ships registered out of New England had to find other cargo to haul.

That is not necessarily true though. It was stopped by the British who decided that they would not tolerate the slave trade in Africa.

If it was allowed there certainly would have been a market and by not having it so supply limited the costs could be managed.

 

[RandFan]

ETA: We were talking about this at lunch and a colleague said that this is what such stories always reminded him of...

Awesome.

My favorite scene for CW uniforms "God is not on our side because he hates idiots also".

 

[luchog]

Depends on how long you amortize the expenditure over. And of course that was after the importation of slaves had been outlawed thus reducing the supply of new slaves.

And ignores the fact that the US had a huge breeding population of slaves by the time of the Civil War; which guaranteed a steady supply of nearly free labour regardless of the reduction of importation. The purchase of imported slaves was a single-time investment that got many times that return in labour.

 

[dudalb]

Awesome.

My favorite scene for CW uniforms "God is not on our side because he hates idiots also".

What is great about that scene is it's very accurate about how Dust sticks to Wool Uniforms like crazy. Hard as hell to get it off short of a trip to the dry cleaniners. Trust me on this, I know. Just ask ANY Civil War Reenactor.

Love "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly". Not very accurate in placesRailroads in the Southwest in 1862? And the actual battles in New Mexico during Sibley's invasion were not anything like what is shown in the movie) but a great movie.

But my favorite El Tuco line is:

"If you are going to shoot, don't talk,shoot".

 

[lobosrul]

What is great about that scene is it's very accurate about how Dust sticks to Wool Uniforms like crazy. Hard as hell to get it off short of a trip to the dry cleaniners. Trust me on this, I know. Just ask ANY Civil War Reenactor.

Love "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly". Not very accurate in placesRailroads in the Southwest in 1862? And the actual battles in New Mexico during Sibley's invasion were not anything like what is shown in the movie) but a great movie.

But my favorite El Tuco line is:

"If you are going to shoot, don't talk,shoot".

Mine:

"If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?"

 

[ponderingturtle]

And ignores the fact that the US had a huge breeding population of slaves by the time of the Civil War; which guaranteed a steady supply of nearly free labour regardless of the reduction of importation. The purchase of imported slaves was a single-time investment that got many times that return in labour.

Depends on supply and demand. Of course there has been lots of ways to have low cost labor. Look at how the south won reconstruction.

 

[lobosrul]

You took the long way however, did make my point in that it (war) was in fact, economic in basis. The idea that slaves were a low-cost commodity is an oft used fatal flaw. In ~1860 the average slave cost ~$2,400 to purchase.* Indexed to today's dollar (3% CPI) would approximate to ~$86,400, and at ~2X the cost of human labor today, hardly a bargain.

You really don't consider $86,400 a bargain for getting an employee that you can force to work as many hours as you like, at whatever task you set, under any conditions, can never quit, and whose only cost to you after purchase is food, some shoddy clothes and a barracks to live in?

BTW, why did the south even have an army if (as you say) it was only the elite involved in the process?

Why indeed? A well oiled propaganda machine would be my first guess. I still can't figure out why so many poor white southerners are so pro confederacy. The run of the mill white man didn't benefit from slavery in the south, if anything it depressed wages, yet he went out and died in support of a rich landed plutocracy.

Oh, and many of them were drafted, unless you owned 20 or more slaves then you were above such things

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/faq/

 

[Upchurch]

IMO, you missed the mark as (coming from someone that grew up in the "occupied land") the American Civil War was an economic clash (first and foremost) that used slavery as a focal point, after the fact since President Lincoln's first motive was to "preserve the Union".
{snip}

This is utterly fascinating.

 

[dudalb]

Mine:

"If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?"

Clint Eastwood was to make another great Civil War themed film in "The Outlaw Josey Wales".

That film, sadly, is a pretty accurate portayal in the early scenes, of what the irregular/guerilla Civil War in Missouri turned into: A blood feud between opposing gangs that often had little or no connection with the basic issues of the Civil War. Not much to choose between William Quantrell and Jim Lane and the BOrder Ruffians and the Redlegs.

Ang Lee's 'Ride With the Devil" is also a good film on this topic with how the "Inside War" in Missouri degenerated into a pure blood feud.

BTW Eastwood shot the Missouri scenes for Josey Wales around Oroville, California,and the river substituing for the Missouri is the Sacramento river.

 

[luchog]

You really don't consider $86,400 a bargain for getting an employee that you can force to work as many hours as you like, at whatever task you set, under any conditions, can never quit, and whose only cost to you after purchase is food, some shoddy clothes and a barracks to live in?

Seriously. Considering the average full-time unskilled labourer where I live can earn that much in roughly four years at minimum wage just as salary (not including the value of the various benefits which slaves certainly did not get); and you could easily get four to five times that work from the average field hand slave. And you didn't necessarily even need to provide much in the way of food for them, just a bit of ground for a subsistence farm, a few bags of beans now and again, and a couple breeding animals so they could raise their own. Sounds like a heck of a deal to me.

In a modern context, the whole deal is more like the worst sort of Third-World sweatshop labour than anything we would expect an actual free labourer to endure, except even worse than that.

The run of the mill white man didn't benefit from slavery in the south, if anything it depressed wages, yet he went out and died in support of a rich landed plutocracy.

True that. The majority of them were subsistence farmers, fishermen. The only way to really prosper if you weren't one of the elite landowner class was to have learned a high-demand skilled trade.

 

[grunion]

And you got their babies for free, to keep or sell off.

 

[Belz...]

You took the long way however, did make my point in that it (war) was in fact, economic in basis.

And the economy was based on slavery, which was luchog's point. This isn't a chicken and egg scenario, here.

 

[RandFan]

What is great about that scene is it's very accurate about how Dust sticks to Wool Uniforms like crazy. Hard as hell to get it off short of a trip to the dry cleaniners. Trust me on this, I know. Just ask ANY Civil War Reenactor.

Love "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly". Not very accurate in placesRailroads in the Southwest in 1862? And the actual battles in New Mexico during Sibley's invasion were not anything like what is shown in the movie) but a great movie.

But my favorite El Tuco line is:

"If you are going to shoot, don't talk,shoot".

Mine:

"If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?"

"You never had a rope around your neck. Well, I'm going to tell you something. When that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the Devil bite your ass." --Tuco

 

[grunion]

Hey at least they were the first nation to write the supremacy of the white race in to their constitution that has to count for something right?

And they won reconstruction and stripped blacks of the rights that the foolish northerners had tried to give them so that must count too.

How about taking pride in how well they are resisting the gays now?

Unsure whether the White Supremacists of South Africa or Rhodesia beat the rebs in the institutionalization of racism but unfortunately the Confederacy was not historically unique in this regard.

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

 

[Foolmewunz]

Rest assured, the epidemic display of yankee colonial arrogance in this thread isn't lost on the droves of lurkers.

Despite their supporters heroic spinmeister efforts, the fact remains the north provoked war (for the reasons previously outlined) by "invading" via Fort Moultrie.

My gggrandmother's "transfer" papers were impaled upon the end of a USA bayonet during her forcible removal from Alabama to Oklahoma ~1840 because of one reason, her race. Trying to label me with the racist, slavery defender card is a dawg that won't hunt.

THIS thread is about the use of the redneck and KKK symbol on State property, not about the causes of the Civil War.

I believe the argument is that you, like other historical revisionists (led by those intellectual midgets holed up at Auburn), by giving credence to the ridiculous variations of "It wasn't about slavery", are (perhaps) unintentionally, supporting the bigots and racists and Confederacy apologists. The fact that you or I know a social out-lier who sports a rebel flag just to thumb his/her nose at the world does not change the history associated with that particular emblem, a history none of its defenders knew about when it was first popularized.

If you'd like to discuss the causes of the war, please see this thread. Chuck Guiteau gave it a noble effort, and cites the exact same incorrect revisionist conclusions you cite. (Sort of a Confederate-Marxist version of history.)

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=288666

 

[This is The End]

IMO, you missed the mark as (coming from someone that grew up in the "occupied land") the American Civil War was an economic clash (first and foremost) that used slavery as a focal point, after the fact since President Lincoln's first motive was to "preserve the Union".

That is revisionist history at its finest. Of course the loser is not going to want to admit the truth. Therefore they try and shine it up with the old "It was really about X, not slavery.".

There is a plethora of indisputable evidence from the time period that clearly shows that it was entirely about slavery.

 

[Meadmaker]

I still don't understand the sympathy or your complaints. Should symbols of hatred be sold by the government or not?

The nature of symbols is that they mean whatever the person interpreting them thinks they mean. Certainly that flag has been associated with a lot of hatred, but it could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. In other words, for many, it will always be associated with hatred, but for others it means something else entirely.

For an awful lot of people, it "means" nothing in particular. It's an historical reference to a famous time in American history. Nothing more. At a battlefield gift shop it's a reference to the event that occurred on that battlefield. If someone wants to put it on a coffee cup, I don't have a problem with that.

I do have a problem with people seeking out negative symbols and trying to purge them from the land lest they inspire impure thoughts. It's just a coffee cup.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, "Let the band play Dixie". In somewhat the same spirit, I say let their descendants put that flag on a belt buckle. It just isn't a big deal.

(And come to think of it, I wonder if we'll have to go through the CDs at the gift shop and get rid of "Dixie" or "The Bonnie Blue Flag". And what about "Marching Through Georgia"?)

 

[Ladewig]

You really don't consider $86,400 a bargain for getting an employee that you can force to work as many hours as you like, at whatever task you set, under any conditions, can never quit, and whose only cost to you after purchase is food, some shoddy clothes and a barracks to live in?

Plus, you can rape them whenever you like.

Plus, they can never sue you in federal court because of the Dred Scott ruling. (I haven't looked it up, but I am guessing they didn't have much standing in Southern state courts either.)

Plus, if they run away, all domestic LEOs have to help return them.


I fear that even today, there are Americans that would jump at the chance to own $84,000 slaves under 1860 laws.

.

 

[Dorian Gray]

This link (and similar) is all over the interwebs, and I'm kind of sick of it. What do you guys make of it? Full of some crap, isn't it?

"History books, the media, the school systems, etc abound in falsehoods and inaccuracies of Confederate and Southern history. This fact sheet will help to clarify and dispell some of these rampant inaccuracies."

http://www.rulen.com/myths/

 

[Mumbles]

This link (and similar) is all over the interwebs, and I'm kind of sick of it. What do you guys make of it? Full of some crap, isn't it?

"History books, the media, the school systems, etc abound in falsehoods and inaccuracies of Confederate and Southern history. This fact sheet will help to clarify and dispell some of these rampant inaccuracies."

http://www.rulen.com/myths/

Yeah, that page is full of garbage. It's not worth reading, when there are so many actual historians who have put in work to tell us what the confederacy was about.

Moreover, it doesn't matter in the current discussion much.