Recent content by Country_Bumpkin

Oddly enough, most of the Confederates at the time seem to have disagreed with you on this point, and were quite proud of it. They didn't think they were on the losing side of history, so the defense of slavery is all over their founding documents. This business about how it was really all...

We'll never know, I suppose. I am mostly concerned with combating the pernicious myth that the Civil War wasn't mostly about slavery. But I would note that it took over a century for free blacks in the South to actually achieve most of their civil rights, so I'm not sure how much more gradual...

The problem with this version of the pre-Civil War era is that there were plenty of prominent Southerners calling for an expansion of slavery. It was far from accepted that slavery needed to die a slow death. The idea that all Americans would eventually become industrialized was viewed as...

Whenever I see people arguing that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, or that most people in the South didn't care about slavery, I always tell them to read the secession proclamations of the various Confederate states. They are almost as straightforward as you can be in their stated...