Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War
The first is a paper read before read before the Lexington chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909. The woman starts off by praising the importance of the South in the history of the United States, especially before the Civil War. She concentrates on the 'social enjoyment' in the South before the Civil War and how great it was.
'Armies of negroes tilled the soil and were happy in their circumscribed sphere, humanly cared for by the whites.'
(Um, yeah. They were happy. Sure. If you say so, lady. Sure they were happy. And the men in the nice white coats will be coming to take you away.)
She then describes the plantation houses, and how wonderful they were (and totally forgets that not all the whites in the South were that rich and had plantation houses of their own. There were a lot of poor whites that were as separated from the rich as poor people are in today's world.) Her view of the women who ran the plantations ran along the lines of efficiency in running things, but no interest in anything intellectual other than religion.
She says the men who went to war did so to defend state's rights. She says that the Union army carried out vandalism when they attacked the Southern mansions and it was 'wanton destruction' that they practiced.
The next article is on slavery. This section is about as disgusting as I expected, with her trying basically to say that the North was just as bad, if not worse, as the South in regards to slavery. In reference to anything changing in the South, she said 'The planter would not willingly give up his property honestly acquired...' His property? Hello. The slaves were human beings, not someones property. As far as 'honestly acquired' goes, that means he bought them at a slave auction where entire families could be separated forever. She also brings up the tidbit that slavery is in the Bible and is not condemned.
>She refers to John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the same sentence as 'fanatics.' She says that, as a result of all that was going on, '...the helpless negro was dragged from his havens of peace and comfort.' In relation to part of their culture, the woman refers to the '...relic of ancient African barbarism.'
It just gets worse. In referring to the number of slaves that were Christians, the woman writer says: '...So the owners of these Christianized people were doing missionary work in saving them from the cannibalism of heathen Africa.'
And worse.
'The world can nowhere show human beings as care-free in bondage as were the negroes of the ante-bellum days.'
The next article is on secession. She claims that, historically, there were numerous threats of secession, even by Northern states, long before the Civil War. Then she talks about the inauguration of Jefferson Davis. Finally she talks about the after effects of the war, at least acknowledging that the North entered the war with a lot of advantages over the South (more people, more factories, more guns, etc.) She basically paints an idealistic view of the South and an extremely nasty, vicious view of the North in relation to the war.
This is, without doubt, the most one-sided book I have ever read on the Civil War.
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