Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Saying the Civil War wasn't really about slavery is like arguing that Roe vs. Wade really was about privacy rights.
More on that this evening, I hope, but I had to snark first and explicate later.
About Me
- Elizabeth
- I'm a 30-something recent recipient of a Ph.D. in Classics, which means I'm fascinating at cocktail parties but not terribly useful for much else. I live in the Midwest. I am married to one of the most wonderful men in the world, and the mother to one of the cutest little girls. I am a Christian. I am more of a liberal than not, but grow increasingly exhausted of two sides screaming at each other with no one actually listening. I'm an inveterate internet and pop culture junkie, and I'm growing out of feeling a need to apologize for it.
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Elizabeth's shared items
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1 comments:
I agree. It's possible that I'm just acting out a bias I developed at a very young age when I first learned a simplistic version of the Civil War. But, I've heard many silly arguments defending the Confederacy's fight as not being about slavery, but never one that was the least bit persuasive.
"Most confederate soldiers didn't even own slaves." is the one I hear most. But how many of their fathers or employers owned slaves? How many of them were craftsmen, or anything other than farmers, and had little use for slaves themselves but operated in an economy supported by slave labor? How many of them, just like soldiers in any other age, were poor soldiers acting out the will of the wealthy and powerful?
I know a lot of American soldiers who joined the military for pay, training, college, or a way out of a bad home life. I know very few who joined because they thought Kuwait needed defending (that's what was going on while I was in the service) or that dictators shouldn't control oil, or that the Taliban shouldn't control rural Afghanistan.
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