The Top 40

I myself wouldn't mind handing power and credibility to the Confederate revanchists. The South was a noble cause.

The South was a noble cause.
Yes it was and is. The War of Northern Aggression was about State's Rights, not slavery.

Read the history of that war from places like NYC, Bridgeport and Boston to see the effects of racism in the North.

Slavery is/was a terrible condition; it is however, an unsustainable business practice. The Industrial Revolution would have finished it off permanently.

Chris Rock has it right. The problem is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Peccable, Every one of the Secession declarations mentioned their reason as being about preservation of slavery, in and of itself.

As a Southerner, I don't mind defending what's right about The South, but don't get sucked into defending what was horribly wrong and suffocating about The South. The Civil War, at least for the States that left, was about preserving slavery. that's evil. Every nation on earth practiced that evil at some time, but it's still evil.

I consider the South to be a noble people, yoked to the defense of human chattel slavery. Mention of the Cause leaves me wishing the South had picked its' own damned cotton. Many fewer problems, crime, and public expenditure for us to deal with in our own time if they had.

I believe in states’ rights and small government, and I fully recognize that the war that took place in this country during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln had an extremely complicated set of motives on both sides—but I am writing here about slavery per se.

Slavery is as old as the hills, and has been part of every group of humans at some time in the past. I don’t believe the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have finished off slavery in the USA—after all, there is still slavery in the world even now, today, even with the newest methods of industry and technology, even in places where the finest technology has been purchased and is being used.

Slavery is as old as the hills, and has been part of every group of humans at some time in the past. I don’t believe the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have finished off slavery in the USA—after all, there is still slavery in the world even now, today, even with the newest methods of industry and technology, even in places where the finest technology has been purchased and is being used.

Moreover, despite the availability of the most state-of-the-art industry and technology, throughout the world there are also people hired to do crop harvesting by hand and to be servants—and in some areas of the world, sometimes slaves are used for this. There are also sadists who would own slaves if it were legal to do so.

In the USA, slavery was widespread throughout the South, and as new states were added to the Union the issue of slavery played a tragic, bloody part in the debate. Whatever else was going on in our country—and there were a lot of major cultural battles, just as there are today—I believe that slavery was too deeply entrenched to end without serious bloodshed.

To make slavery illegal here, especially where it was deeply entrenched, there had to be a definite moment in time where all forms of slavery became illegal throughout the country, and the law had to have major threats of force behind it. Moreover, there had to be a specific, simultaneous release of the slaves people already owned, and further purchases had to be made illegal. The end of slavery couldn’t be sporadic or by attrition over time.

Sorry about the duplicate paragraph in my comment above. I wrote it in WORD so I could catch the spelling, and when I copied and pasted it it accidentally moved the same paragraph twice. (*sigh*)

I think it was Tom Sowell that pointed out the vast wealth that was represented by slaves in The South. The slaves were more valuable that all industry and railroads of the North and South combined.

One reason the political structure of The South was so determined to preserve slavery was the fearsome prospect of suddenly having all of that "wealth" suddenly disappear. It would be like being told next month all vehicles that use petroleum-based fuels must be incapacitated or abandoned.

But I still consider The South's defeat in the war to be the best thing that happened to The South. It should have happened sooner and been as destructive at the start as later during Sherman's march through the Carolinas and Georgia. When people stubbornly hold onto a fantasy, such as preservation of slavery or spread of sharia, the best thing you can do for them is to put real war right in their lap. Not, the kinder gentler war of recent decades but as close to Roman-style salting of the earth type war. Anything less just encourages the hard cases to hold out and hold on. The sooner the war brings a "wrath of God" effect to the heart of the enemy the sooner the enemy changes his mind and the sooner the dying ends. Nicer wars are deadlier wars that never end and achieve very little. It worked in The South, Germany, and Japan.