James W. Loewe Quotes
The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public monuments and our history books.
When he referred to "the noose" he was connoting one of the major ways the Southern Segregationists and racists maintained white supremacy and Jim Crowe after the Civil War: Lynching. They terrorized blacks and whites who had different views by kidnapping their victims, torturing them, hanging them, and often mutilating their bodies after the murder. They never were convicted because the Southern law enforcement officers were often part of the lynch mob, the judges were usually themselves racist segregationists, and if jurors voted to convict in the few cases that went to trial, they themselves were risking lynching. From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. Of these people that were lynched, 3,446 were black.
James W. Loewe, Historian & Sociologist, "Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong.", The Washington Post, July 5, 2015
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
While this assessment was true up until the 1980s. By the 21st century there were almost no serious historians who thought that the motivation of the Confederate States for the Civil War was anything but slavery and the economic impact that abolition might bring. However, one of your advantages having this collection of historical quotations is that you can see for yourself why the Southern states say they were seceding. This following are four of the official secession resolution documents. Read these and you will see that all the claims that there were other major reasons for secession are just attempts to make the Confederacy a little less brutal and greedy. See {621371}, {619793}, {621372}, {621375}
As just one example of Southern States' reasons, see {583044}. Many of the Northern States had passed laws declaring everyone in the state was free and making it illegal to return or assist in the returning of escaped slaves. The Southerners got the Federal Fugitive Slave Act passed which required all Americans to assist in recapturing escaped slaves. It was the Northern States who claimed states' rights were being trampled. The South was vehemently opposed to States' Rights when it came to allowing individual states to decide who was free and who was not. The Southerners had only one fundamental reason for secession—the maintenance of the Negro slavery system on which much of their economy depended as did their sociology, culture, and way of life.
Some Southerners, in order to obtain support in England for the Confederate cause claimed in their propaganda that slavery was not the issue but their issue with the Union was just one of local and regional autonomy. The British and most Europeans at that time were strongly against slavery so this “spin” might have gotten some support. Stowe and others put the lie to this, and the Confederacy never did get any significant material support from any country in Europe. The secession resolutions of the Southern States all state that Slavery was the cause (and often the ONLY cause stated) of secession. Also Southern General Mosby, called the spin for what it was. See {584991}.
The Confederates were very clear that slavery was the cause of the war. Revisionists later tried to add other motives to the Southern cause, but Grant and all the contemporaries on both sides knew slavery was the crux of the matter. So the Confederate cause was the right to brutalize, torture, and even kill an unwilling labor force that was unpaid. No war in history had ever been fought for such a lowly cause and the Confederate leadership skills were amazing in keeping up morale without a decent cause to fight for.
Newsletter of the United Sons of Confederate Veterans
