The Civil War

Here's an executive summary of my argument in a Facebook discussion on the Civil War:

South ignores its most prominent son, Thomas Jefferson (later on Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens would repudiate him explicitly) and concludes that all men are not created equal.  Proceeds to brutalize, rape, and occasionally murder its way through its Black population for 400 years.

North loans Southerners a substantial chunk of the money they need to build this slave society, jacks up the tariff so that that money gets spent at home, agrees Blacks are 3/5ths of a person, collects checks.  Everyone is happy except Blacks, and who cares about that?

North realizes South is winning most presidential elections and dominating Congress.  Tariff in danger.  North decides that, profitable or not, maybe not all new states need to have slaves in them.

South begins to feel, correctly, that its abominable way of life is threatened, especially after terror raids from isolated bands of extremists in Kansas and West Virginia and the election of a Republican.

South secedes.  Articles of Secession and Southern politicians are explicit as to why: Black people are inferior property and South will not allow a situation to develop where it would be powerless to prevent them from being taken.  Lincoln has no intention of taking them, of course, not being a particularly good person himself, but South is taking the long view and making sure there are still Black women to rape in it.

South points out, correctly, that secession is legal even if done for horrible reasons and the North should really leave its forts.  North points out, correctly, that Northern tax money paid for most of those forts and anyway, it doesn't have to.  Deep South hotheads start shooting.  Upper South, heretofore not very interested because it has fewer Black women to rape, decides it had better go ahead and leave too.

Robert E. Lee, who didn't like slavery but wasn't one to let that keep him from owning some, kicks ass and takes names for a while.  Then he and his fellow Southerners are ground down under numbers, industrial capacity, a choking blockade, and ultimately good generalship.  Then General Sherman, effectively freed of the unpleasant constraints of fighting another military, rapes (not personally, that we know of), burns, and loots his way across the South.  Aided by the Confiscation Acts, Union soldiers take Southern slaves and make them Union Army slaves, meanwhile raping quite a few of the women and probably some of the men.  In New Orleans, General Butler, concerned that Southern women will provoke his soldiers to insult by violence and thereby provoke a rebellion, orders that any woman insulting a soldier may be treated as a prostitute, i.e., raped.  Do you begin to sense a theme here?

Meanwhile the Southern army, having won at Fort Pillow, massacres every Black soldier it can get its hands on.  It also threatens to illegally murder any white officer caught commanding Black troops.

At Andersonville, the Confederate Army starves prisoners of war to death.  At Camp Douglas near Chicago the Union Army, with not even scarcity as an excuse, does the same to Confederate POWs.

Having deservedly won the war the Union neither gives Blacks the genuine civil liberties they are entitled to and have earned all over again, nor protects the White population from them, nor protects them from the White population.  A few are elected to state legislatures, but that doesn't mean they can use the same railroad waiting rooms as white folks, nor will be able to for a hundred years.  Having got what it set out for in the war, continental control, and having incidentally and almost accidentally freed the slaves, the North ignores the plight of the Southern Black population for 100 years  (and doesn't desegregate itself in most cases for at least half that).  In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was perfectly legal.  Justice Harlan, a Southern former slaveowner, was the only dissent.

During Reconstruction, the Klan fires up in the South.  By the 1920s, it is a politically powerful force - in the North.

For anyone bored enough to read this far:  see any heroes?  Really think that one society, either side, was wonderful, apart from maybe a few bad apples, and the other was wicked and wanted to impose its will over helpless people who were only insisting on their rights?  Still proud of the Grand Army of the Republic or the Lost Cause?  'Cause all I see is 400 years of assholes who liked to rape Black girls.