Two recent letter-writers deny that “the war between the states was started and fought over the slavery question” (“A Civil War history lesson,” Jan. 9, TribLive; “The Civil War slavery myth,” Feb. 2, TribLive). We are told to “take a history lesson on this subject.”
The South wanted to prosper on the labor and production of slaves/property, those constitutionally designated three-fifths of a person.
Consider Mississippi’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes which induce and justify the Secession: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery … Its labor supplies the product … and these products are peculiar to the climate verging on tropical regions, and … none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun … a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” What moral price such commerce or civilization?
Next, the Texas Declaration of Cause to Secede: “In all the non-slave holding states … the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party … based on an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery proclaiming the debasing equality of all men, irrespective of race or color — a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races….”
We are still fighting the Civil War as long as history distorts the truth about it and America.
Bruce Braden
Carmel, Ind.
The writer is a Mt. Pleasant native.