(August 17, 2017 at 9:32 am)Brian37 Wrote:(August 17, 2017 at 9:14 am)Rev. Rye Wrote: And yet the people who built them are no longer around, and thanks to this, the meaning of said statues is free to be changed.
No, the South fought to keep slavery, that is not subject to change.
The Sought didn't actually fight to keep slavery since slavery was completely legal in America under the Constitution. It could have kept its slaves even after the shooting started if they had simply stopped fighting and returned to the Union.
What the Southerners wanted to do was to expand slavery into the Western Territories and to take control of Cuba. To counter the expansion of slavery into the West the Unionists came up with the Homestead Acts, which limited the size of land ownership in the territories. They wanted the land to be settled by free white men from the North instead of by a few slave owners who controlled big parcels of land.
The Civil War was about economics although the Southerners did say that their nation was based on slavery. They wanted to import more slaves. The North wanted to limit slaves and would have been perfectly OK with deporting all black people in America. The Southerners could have kept their cake and ate it too but once the shooting started their fate was sealed. They simply didn't have the infrastructure or manpower to win the war and they had no foreign allies.
The South could have used slaves as soldiers, which the military was calling for, but the politicians said that they would rather be defeated than to owe their freedom to blacks. Plus they needed people to work the farms and they didn't want hundreds of thousands of armed black people getting used to the idea of killing white people. They didn't think that the slaves would give up their guns and go back to picking cotton once the war was over.
The US Army had the same thinking during WWII when it wouldn't let black American soldiers kill white Nazis who were trying to conquer the world. So they sent most of them off to fight the other colored people, the Japanese.
