In Defense of the Confederate States of America (CSA)

I ask him/her not to display or use profanity, sexually-explicit material, violent threats, or trolling. Please note that this debate does NOT mean that I in any way support the institution of slavery in the United States or in any other nation. With that being said, I will begin. I. The Confederate Contention A. State rights were more important to the South than slaves. By the latter part of 1864 the CSA was moving toward ending slavery. . http://www.southernheritage411.com... . http://listverse.com... . http://www.libertyclassroom.com... So why is this important? Con may argue that they only did this under Union pressure. HOWEVER. this proved that the sovereignty of the South was at least slightly more important to them than the institution of slavery. Contention B. Only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves In the first half of the 19th century, one-third of all southern white families owned slaves. . http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu... Contention C. The South Needed Slaves The Reconstruction Era: . http://ramsey.spps.org... The Civil War left the South in pieces for many reasons, ranging from the large destruction of property to the collapse of Confederate money which so many people had invested in. HOWEVER, I think the main reason the South was hurt so badly was because they had to free 3 million slaves overnight. Nearly their entire economy depended on these slaves, who made up over a third of the South's population. The South knew this, and thus they were unwilling to end abolition. II. The Union Contention A. The Union did not have much of a moral high ground While the South was a mostly agricultural place, the North was heavily industrial. Back then, and still today, that meant a lot of factories. Now back then, there were no minimum wage laws, no air conditioning, no child labor laws, etc. The North was full of sweatshops where people, even children, worked for 14 hours a day for very low wages. If they quit their jobs, they'd be out on the streets, homeless. They were Free In Name Only (FINOs). . http://historymatters.gmu.edu... . http://voices.yahoo.com... III. Psychology of the South This last part may sound more emotional than logical, but please read it anyway. It is so easy for us to sit on our moral high horse and say that the South was an evil empire. When we do this we walk away feeling good about ourselves. After all, we never were slave owners, and we tell ourselves that we'd be abolitionists if we lived back then. But let me tell you this: if you lived back then, it's quite possible that you may have supported the institution of slavery or you might've even been a slave owner yourself. We have no way of knowing these things. We see slavery in black and white terms. Yes, slavery is black, but what we forget is that slave owners are grey. They were people, just like us. They were capable of only that which human beings throughout history have been capable of. We condemn them, seeing them as inherently immoral people. Well, it turns out that the North did the exact same thing. The North saw the South as a region of immoral brutes who enslaved blacks. They sat on their own moral high horse and saw themselves as superior to their Southern counterparts. In the past couple of days I have researched this subject and I have been able to see through the eyes of the slave owners of that era more clearly than I ever have before. I can see what they were thinking, what they thought of the arrogant North that saw itself as white and the South as black (in figurative terms of morality, of course; I'm not referring to race in this usage). So, the North was basically saying "we art righteous and holy while thou slave owners art vile sinners who shalt end up in hell unless thou giveth up thy slaves. " The South saw the North for what it was: arrogant and overly pious. Every time they heard a Northerner talk to them about the evils of slavery, they probably thought to themselves, "Who are you to judge me? You don't know me, you don't understand me, and like heck I'll never give up my slaves just because you want me to. " They saw Southern culture as simply a counterpart to Northern culture. The way they saw it, if they ever gave up slaves, they'd be acknowledging their own immorality and the Northern superiority. So, this completely turned them off to the words of the abolitionists. It was a matter of pride and refusal to acknowlege their guilt to the smug and overly righteous North. So though slavery was indeed immoral, the North embraced an attitude which only pushed the South further away from freeing slaves. It was also about paranoia. In the decades prior to the Confederate's rise and the Civil War, there had been a series of compromises each time a new state was added. These compromises made sure that there was about an equal number of slave and free states in the Union. HOWEVER, with events like the admission of Arizona and New Mexico as free states, the South knew that eventually the free states would far outnumber the slave states. When this happened, those arrogant Northerners could forcibly end slavery. They also feared that Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery, would abolish slavery upon taking office. So as you can see, paranoia was high in the South. They thought that their way of life, which they had been taught from the cradle to the grave was not wrong, was about to end. They figured that the only way to save the institution of slavery from the North was to form their own nation, a nation where the United States (which was spewing out more and more free states) could not force their will upon the South. I await my opponent's rebuttal.