US Civil War 150th anniversary this year. Currently reading "A People's History of the Civil War"...

[matmar]

by David Williams.

3/4's of southern whites held no slaves and tended to believe, as one of Georgia's plain folk put it, "that this fuss was all for the benefit of the wealthy"

There was an undoubted majority of the people who desired to remain in the Union....The election machinery was all in the hands of the secessionists, who manipulated the election to suit their end". --John Francis Tenney, Florida Voter

Still, secessionists pressed their advantage for all they could in the face of popular opposition. Alfred P. Aldrich, a South Carolina legislator and staunch secessionist, acknowledged that most southern plain folk opposed disunion. "But", he asked, "whoever waited for the common people when a great move was to be made --We must make the move and force them to follow."

[Cognitive_Resonance]

1. "Rich man's war, poor man's fight" nt

[Uncle Joe]

2. That was the Karl Rove strategy of the day, they didn't care about "enlightened principle" or

what the people thought would be the wisest most judicious course to take either.

Those "leaders" believed in creating their own reality with the result being the Civil War and over 600,000 Americans killed on both sides within a four year time span.


http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karl_Rove

"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Suskind, Ron (2004-10-17). Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush. The New York Times Magazine."

Of course we're still studying the Civil War and they're still creating new "realities."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101447197

"February 8, 2012, New York and Madrid – Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) submitted a declaration to a Spanish court detailing the torture of Mohammed al Qahtani, who has been detained without charge or trial at Guantánamo since 2002. The submission follows Spanish Investigating Judge Pablo Ruz Gutierrez’s recent order to proceed with the probe into the U.S. torture program.

Mr. al Qahtani was the victim of the “First Special Interrogation Plan,” a regime of aggressive interrogation techniques amounting to torture personally authorized by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. al Qahtani is the only prisoner held at Guantánamo Bay the U.S. has officially admitted to torturing. Mr. al Qahtani’s treatment, much of which is described in detail in the declaration through his own words, includes 48 days of sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions, and prolonged sensory overstimulation. In addition, the document details the effects of the interrogation, which included Mr. al Qahtani’s severe emotional distress, inability to control his bladder, and visual and auditory hallucinations. Time Magazine obtained and published a detailed log of his interrogations in 2005.

Katherine Gallagher, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitution Rights, said, “This declaration details the severe psychological and physical trauma suffered by Mr. al Qahtani as a result of the brutal treatment he was subjected to at Guantánamo through techniques that are in direct violation of the Geneva Convention and the Convention Against Torture. That the high-level U.S. officials alleged to be responsible for this criminal conduct, including Donald Rumsfeld and Geoffrey Miller, continue to enjoy impunity domestically is a stain on the U.S. system of justice. We hope that this declaration will provide valuable evidence for use in holding these officials accountable in Spain, a venue that is willing to investigate torture.”

Thanks for the thread, matmar.

[demosincebirth]

3. What did the slaves in the south gain aside from their freedon after reconstruction? Every southern

state past Jim Crow laws and segregation. I think the assassination of Lincoln did great harm to their cause and basically kept the blacks, in the south no better off than before the civil war. Except, that they couldn't be bought and sold. Thank God for the democrats and the civil rights laws signed by President Johnson. God bless him.

[Uncle Joe]

4. Where did Jim Crow come from? I've posted this before but I will post it again.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=243229

History is complicated but the short answer is from both, the North and South.

Keep in mind the South didn't have serious national poltical power for half a century during and after the Civil War, the only Democrat elected President before the Civil War started 1861 and Woodrow Wilson's election in 1912 was Grover Cleveland of New York.

So Northern Republicans dominated the White House and the Congress for the last half of the 19th century.

Those are the Presidents and Congresses which determined the makeup of the Supreme Court which in turn made Jim Crow the law of the land while turning the 14th Amendment; intended to protect the oppressed minorities into a vehicle to elevate corporations over the people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

"The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. The separation led to treatment, financial support and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson

"Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal".

The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. Associate Justice David Josiah Brewer was absent at the ruling because of his daughter's sudden death the day before. "Separate but equal" remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education."

(snip)

"Justice John Marshall Harlan, who decried the excesses of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote a scathing dissent in which he predicted the court's decision would become as infamous as that of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). As heralded as this dissent may be, in which Harlan called for a "color-blind" constitution, it should be noted that he did not view all races as equal. In his dissent, Harlan highlighted the plight of blacks by pointing out that the Chinese, a race he viewed as inferior, could still ride with whites. "There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race," he wrote."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Marshall_Harlan

"John Marshall Harlan (June 1, 1833 – October 14, 1911) was a Kentucky lawyer and politician who served as an associate justice on the Supreme Court. He is most notable as the lone dissenter in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which, respectively, struck down as unconstitutional federal anti-discrimination legislation and upheld Southern segregation statutes. In Pace v. Alabama (1883) he supported opinion that anti-miscegenation laws are constitutional."

[Major Hogwash]

5. Good post.

It's interesting to see how people still view the Civil War and the Jim Crow laws that resulted from that war to this day.
When millions of men started moving out West after the Civil War was over, the color differences between them out on the lone prairies didn't matter all that much because life was so harsh.
Many Black men went on to become cowboys as a way to escape the turmoil of the urbanized cities in the Northeast and the ruined cities in the South.