Look y'all, it's an "ending slavery wasn't worth the white lives lost during the Civil War that industrialism already made unnecessary" take blithely pushed out to the general public!
Constantine — Look y'all, it's an "ending sl...
Tankies gonna tankie
Okay, but when you're effectively calling Marx stupid doesn't it seem like you might not even be tankieing right?
I define "tankie" as people who've discarded Marx for Stalin & Mao.
Aha, that makes sense, at least in this context.
I just like saying tankie because it's a funny word
"Voting for Lincoln got us the war" is a fucking take. Jesus.
You mean, as opposed to DECADES of shit and legislative maneuvering and things like the Fugitive Slave Laws etc etc etc? The war was coming no matter what.
oh hey, I have been reskeeted! just gonna block that guy because obviously I don't want to hear from someone who thinks the end of slavery was immoral.
"Voting for Lincoln got us the war" is fucking incredibly misleading history to say the fucking least
Yeah I cannot believe folks are still playing with an obvious piece of shit
Good point. It happened slowly at first and then suddenly.
if guy thinks the moral course was for people to vote for the pro-slave party or either of the"desperately do not engage with slavery" parties - well you know I don't think I want to hear from guy.
I mean, it’s quite literally the thing Confederates said, so it makes it easy to slot him in to the American Crank Catalogue
Its like yeah dude the future confederates were quietly stealing Union supplies from arsenals for fun
Also, it didn’t have the patina of Marxism about it, but Confederates were quite open about how they saw themselves as opponents to capitalists and the corporate system of employment. Sure doesn’t make them progressive, etc.
(these were mostly lies, but then they usually are)
Not exactly, I think there's evidence the planter class was hostile to industrial capitalism. They had more of a feudal mindset and in fact still do.
This is correct, if you replace "capitalists" with "yankee factory owners" & correctly assume the Confederates were perfectly fine with capitalism that saw human beings as the equivalent of machines, except they had the superior feature of self reproducing.
Historical materielism
This is one of those, "you are technically correct" takes. I don't see the US ending slavery without a Civil War, so he's just arguing that he would extend slavery to avoid the war.
It's the kind of misleading where you have to really want to be misled to fall for it (much less to espouse it).
It comes from this same shit-for-brains place as "Voting for Biden got us a Roe repeal."
Basically the usual “every bad thing conservatives do is somehow actually liberals” but applied to the 19th century.
Congrats?
You should print this out, frame it & hang it on the wall.
This is a "Sorry, the firing squad called in sick. Would you mind holding this gun & pointing it at your face" level of discourse.
you know, people read a lot of meaning into my original post - but it's trivially true that slavery ended because Lincoln was President. If one of the other parties had won in 1860 or even 1864, slavery would not have ended. (McClellan thought of the EP as liberal social engineering)
Hell, isn't it the case that Lincoln wasn't actually seriously an abolitionist until the secession of the southern states forced his hand? Like, the war was specifically triggered *because* Lincoln was elected and the south got into a froth about him and abolition.
Abolitionism was a fringe political position in 1860; being anti-slavery (like Lincoln and the GOP) was much more popular. Even Lincoln's mild criticisms were enough to upset the applecart for white Southerners used to having the whip hand.
Would you mind briefly explaining the difference between being anti-slavery and an abolitionist? In my head they're the same thing.
Anti-slavery: People who felt that slavery was immoral, wicked, bad for America - not necessarily pro-slave at all.
Abolitionists: People who wanted to see slavery forcibly ended. Generally pro-slave though not universally so.
Thank you!
some anti-slavery men were sympathetic to abolitionists but thought it would take a civil war and would be unconstitutional; and they were probably correct on both counts!
an anti-slavery man could say "I don't want a bunch of plantations here in Indiana, slavery ruins the dignity of labor and wrecks things for small farmers" and still think abolitionists were delusional fanatics who would let Black men marry his daughters.
note that Marx, no fool, was a vigorous supporter of Lincoln and the North's war against the South.
(as was Bakunin, who had a very pleasant dinner with Longfellow during his escape from his Siberian exile)
marx was a bigger fan of lincoln and grant and sherman than lincoln and grant and sherman ever were.
You know how people say Jesus would be horrified by Christians today? I feel like Marx would be horrified by Marxists today.
Hrmm. Would Marx tell common people, who are able to vote for elected leaders, to forgo voting while the revolution goes into yet another year of the planning phase.
the Union cause was that of almost every European radical movement, who looked at Lincoln's war against the enslaving anti-democratic landowners and said "oh yeah that's our thing too."
I occasionally wonder about the European outliers, who apparently just looked at a map of North America and said, "Oh, a war of independence. That's actually our thing." Like it was Russia and Poland.
And the pro Confederates who (1) rip Marx and (2) argue that slavery was going to end inevitably, should consider where they got the essentials of argument (2).
Lincoln didn't start the civil war. He finished it.
There is a difference
the slave South could have kept slavery much longer if they'd just sucked it up and written off the west.
i think they were not really capable of doing that
No, they really weren’t, they had to be maximally confrontational at all times.
and why not! it had worked so many times before.
Brazil didn't end slavery until 1888 & I've seen arguments that it only ended then because the US had already ended slavery.
I've shifted from thinking the us would have ended slavery by 1880 at the latest, to thinking it could have lasted into the 20th century.
I think we most likely end it _by now_ - if nothing else during the Cold War, but it's going to linger here and there a long time.
i assume it ends one one way or another after the American front of the Great War is resolved
not actually obvious to me they'd be on opposite sides!
I'm gonna say most likely they end up on opposite sides of the big european alliance structure but i have no idea which would be which
The main reason slavery was something the south was willing to go to war over is that it was necessary for the cotton plantation economy. The consensus in the earlier discussion was that the boll weevil & the Great Depression would have been the end of it, if nothing else.
Hard call. The economics of it were bad; not for The Planter Class, but for everyone else. And the soil-sucking nature of cotton and tobacco were why it kept moving west. They needed new land; not just new space.
But the use of slave labor to perform skilled trades was growing.
That made the condition of the poor whites worse; because it reduced the middle class even more. A huge amount of of effort was put into keeping that unrest from manifesting.
But the problem wasn't going away. Migration wouldn't help, and there was even talk of enslaving poor whites to fix things.
That, of course, would have been a very different death knell (because there was no way non-slave states would tolerate that; not with the kidnapping of free Blacks from the North already happening) but it shows how tenacious they were.
And driving wages down outside the south...?
The Capitalists wouldve loved that. No need to import Chinese; just hire slaves to build the railroads; because the Fugitive Slave Act meant they couldn't be freed by presence; and where could they run to where the Railroad was the only contact to the larger world?
So yeah, I can see it lasting
It's still going on in the prisons.
Large numbers of freedmen worked on the railroads & they still needed to bring even larger numbers of immigrants in to do the job. The vast expanse of the West would have made holding slaves to railroad camps harder, not easier.
The boom-bust cycles of railroads were not favorable for slave labor. You can fire a laborer & send him on his way. Slaves need to be housed & fed, regardless of how much work there is.
The railroads wouldn't own the slaves; they would lease them; as was done in the South.
And without resources, getting across the plains, or over the mountains, was unlikely.
Look at how hard the Oregon Trail was for those with wagons, and supplies.
Capturing runaway slaves in the West would be far more challenging than it was in the settled South.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_S....
A vast expanse without much in the way of resources for a fugitive; and slave patrols would be reasonably cheap.
The relative cost of killing a "runaway" now and again pour encourager les aûtres would be well within believable practice by the rail barons; so that would be on the table.
Any widespread attempt at enslaving non-Africans would have set off social upheaval like the US has never seen. Even free Black labor caused riots in cities. Your trying to fit a narrative into your hostility to the word capitalism.
No. I said it would be the death knell, and that it was an example of how much the South knew their system wasn't sustainable AND DIDN'T care; because they liked slavery that much.
I've done a lot of reading on how the South managed slavery (there are some wonderfully readable dissertations)
The south understood if all new states were admitted as free states, they'd be outvoted. They chose war, rather than fighting a losing battle in the electorate.
Sounds familiar.
Their ideological descendants behave the same way in our time, and lose what might be winnable political battles for them because of it (for now, thankfully).
if you make the assumptions that it would take a constitutional amendment to end slavery and that most slave states would be against it, the numbers look v. ominous until far into the 20th century.
No that’s actually not some of the “great men of history” stuff he’s heard about and clearly did not understand
Assume a completely frictionless surface, also known as "poaster brain"
it's funny that his argument isn't even "slavery would've gone away because it couldn't compete with industrial capitalism", like here he's just saying "the North was better at fighting wars than the South." Yeah, okay? And voting for Lincoln got us the war, which the North won?
When did Davis block me…. Noticed they were gone but…
About a week ago.
There's sites to scrape this info from the atproto logs.
"Slavery was good actually" right here on bluesky
jfc
*block*
*sheds a single tear*
It's perfect, we finally made the perfect bad take
So would this guy be in favor of a violent revolution or not
my blocking decisions always seem to be validated very quickly. nice.
this is the take that will kill me
That’s the plan, probably
I think we’ve reached Max Hot Takes
www.tiktok.com/@hugejerk/vi...
maximum Chet energy.
I suggest holding onto this meme as a defensive measure.
I am not even sure I get what Chet is trying to say. Sure, electing Lincoln led to the end of slavery, but also the slavers were willing to kill lots of people to keep their right to enslave, and the anti-slavery forces won because they were structurally better at war, and therefore ????
It's like arguing that the Red Army had already won by the time they reached Berlin, so they should have just stopped fighting then
Or maybe that because the US and USSR had more industrial capacity, their victory absolves the Nazi regime of its crimes somehow?
I had this exact question, and I think it’s something like
“…therefore, Lincoln started the war *needlessly*. Rapid industrialization would have co-opted the South (or the economics of slavery?) in short order anyway.”
I’m not necessarily doing justice to the argument—because it’s fucking stupid.
I've heard that one from right-wingers and poorly educated libertarians before. It's nonsense on stilts, of course.
I don't think that's what he was saying. I think he said slavery had become untenable so the conflict was (somewhat) inevitable and we don't need to give all the credit to one historical figure in order to create a hero where there is only a cynical politician.
That's why I said you need to read more. Let's say you're right about what his intended message is (you're not), it ignores several basic consensus facts.
The ONLY person that said anything resembling ending slavery wasn't worth white lives lost is you. And you can mute me but those were your words that you may have felt were the conclusion of his statement but they aren't anywhere in his statement. That's you rage baiting.
I have no idea what I waded into
Evidently Chet was misunderstood and everyone who has liked and reposted this is a victim of my magical rage-baiting hypno-powers.
😵💫 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚔 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚎 𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚒 𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍
You said that he said something that he didn't say. Period.
I am not sure how to read Chet's statement other than to say that evil should not be challenged until it can be challenged without cost, or how not to take the obvious step from there to the white - and non-white - lives lost in the civil war being wasted. Not that Chet's sentiment is unique.
It is the eternal refrain of the white moderate. We heard it from Biden recently, when he said protest must be protected, unless it leads to disorder. It is handing a veto to those willing to do violence - like the Confederacy - over dissent in the name of justice.
It is a cowardly position, and one that forever delays justice in the name of order. And whatever *exactly* Chet intended, it is morally bankrupt.
Everything else you said is invalid unless you can show how Chet insisted or inferred a relative value between the end of slavery and the lives lost. Assuming that pointing out lives were lost is somehow a value statement that lives should not have been lost is a huge leap.
He never said that the civil war shouldn't have happened. Only that the credit for slavery ending doesn't rest on a great man but on the many lives lost. He made no statement as to the value of the lives lost or the value of the end of slavery, much less a relative value relationship between the two
This doesn't seem to be quite that argument. I think it is more that Lincoln doesn't deserve any credit because the war killed a lot of people (he kind of implies Lincoln started the war but lets the passive voice do a lot of work) and the North's victory was inevitable.
So voting is dumb because everything is ultimately inevitable anyway and the actions of individuals don't matter? It feels more like that.
Pretty impressive way to entirely ignore the dynamics of the first two years of the war of that's the case.
Yeah, it's still a very dumb and ahistorical argument, but I think a somewhat different one.
That makes “sense” — thank you
I beg of him, please read a single book.
Can’t believe I got to see a pseudo-left take that Lincoln’s election didn’t matter and a pseudo-left take that Lincoln’s election mattered (derogatory) all in the same 24 hours
"As he died to make men holy, so we die to make men free" raising a lot of questions already answered by the marching song
What a Chethead.
Yo what the fuck
i'm sorry, but i've already had my portion of psychic damage today
Funnily enough most of that thread Chet has a ton of likes because he is encouraging people not to vote and talking about how terrible liberals are. 🤔
asdfghjkl;
also what kind of 1st grade understanding of history is that?
the civil war didn't just happen. it was building up for YEARS, and every president just kept kicking that can down the road until tensions and division got so high the only road to abolishing slavery was war
That guy’s sense of history is microns thin.
As if Bleeding Kansas wasn't a trailer for it, even.
Confusing "great man theory" for established cause and effect written extensively into the historical record would be remarkably dumb, but I'm pretty sure he's just being dishonest.
Of course it’s a Chet.
Brain as smooth as a cue ball. No folds in sight.
This is some microwaved instant potato brained nonsense.
I knew that guy was a useless douchebag but I didn't know he was against the 13th amendment.
the ghost of James Buchanan smiles, slips this person a $100 bill in a Reverse Marley
💸
Shet Chandberg
further proof that guys named chet are absolutely not to be taken seriously
"pluralistic industrial society obliterates agrarian slave society that goes to war to enshrine agrarian slavery" is a good thing
This is an oldie, but it's absolutely the right time to break it out of storage:
Oh good, already blocked.
Well, that guy earned a block.
That's not what Chet said though. What he said was Lincoln(alone) didn't end slavery, a violent war in which lives were lost resulted in the end of slavery. But I don't see where he says the war wasn't worth it.
You're living up to your bio, my guy.
And you're rage baiting unnecessarily imho
I'm muting you now.
As if slavery and industrialism were mutually incompatible (looks at modern meatpacking plants, garment manufacturing, etc.).
Christ. That’s all we need. I hope somebody has already made that guy feel really stupid or bad or both.
I saw that storyline on twitter, back in the day.
arguably fugitive slave act got us the war, and the civil rights act was passed by LBJ before he was elected president after having assumed office since JFK was assassinated. so voting for president didn’t really do any of that
I mean you can argue it, but it would be dumb as fuck.
And "industrialism would end slavery" isn't even good nonsense. It's an unsupported claim they try to smuggle in, like the idea that the Union didn't explicitly go to war to free slaves means the CSA didn't go to war to keep slavery.
I mean, it's really not, but okay
Oh, fun, this is the fight I have with peace-or-nothing pacifists
Similar Posts
Worth mentioning that Fogel was responding to
the myth because it was a favorite of Lost Causers back in the day. If slavery was dying out anyway, then that was more evidence that Lincoln was a tyrant who started an unnecessary war.
Love how they also make it sound like voting for Lincoln automatically led to war. Like, no, the South declaring war got us war. If they're gonna trace back the causes why stop at Lincoln? Just as valid to say that the introduction of slavery to the South "got us war"
...the take-away (especially from students) is to diminish or overlook how Lincoln changed how he viewed slavery and the purpose of the war, and ultimately made the cause of the war to end slavery.
I try to make my admiration for Lincoln clear to my students, BECAUSE of his shortcomings.
Oh, yes, I didn't mean to imply slavery wasn't the cause of the war. I think his argument was that most Union leaders weren't trying, at the outset of the war, to end slavery, but were pushed in that direction when they saw emancipation was the way to end the war. I was trying to point towards that
The Civil War was 100% about slavery, and not even that abolition of slavery was imminent, but that the newborn Republican Party, whose platform was to end slavery eventually at some point down the road, succeeded in getting Lincoln elected.
I will say that I don't think voting for Lincoln is what got slavery abolished. Someone was going to abolish slavery, Lincoln was just the one who did it. Which isn't without value in any way but it's reductive to attribute it purely to voting.
— an insane theory that suggests Lincoln was to blame for the war. "Let me be clear for those who don’t’ seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. There is no negotiation about that," Biden said. He warned that the "truth is under assault in America." /6
Answers to Civil War pop quiz:
1. The Civil War was about slavery.
2. The Civil War was about slavery.
3. The Civil War was about slavery.
4. The Civil War was about slavery.
5. The Civil War was about slavery.
6. The Civil War was about slavery.
This guy probably also thinks that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday suggested the Civil War could have been avoided through “negotiation” arguing that the fight to end slavery in the US was ultimately unnecessary & that Abraham Lincoln should have done more to avoid bloodshed
We can’t have anyone who’d keep slavery be Pres.
Trump says Civil War ‘could have been negotiated’ | CNN Politics
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday suggested the Civil War could have been avoided through “negotiation,” arguing that the fight to end slavery in the US was ultimately unnecessary and that...
www.cnn.com
Coming from someone who says race isn't an issue in the US and won't say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, I think I'll take a big pass on Nikki's analytical skills.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley told NPR that President Biden presents a bigger threat to the country if reelected than his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
Nikki Haley says Biden is 'more dangerous' than Trump but neither is fit for the job
In an interview with NPR, Nikki Haley says in a rematch between President Biden and former President Donald Trump, Biden is a bigger threat. But she's hoping she presents voters with another option.
www.npr.org
They'll abandon "the Civil War wasn't about slavery" in favor of "the Civil War was absolutely about slavery and slavery should have won".
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the Civil War was fought over slavery. That is all. Have a good Friday.
The whole slavery and US Civil War discussion is frustrating for anyone with a sense of history.
Yes the civil war was about executive power and the rights of individual states...
To own slaves. Slavery is inseparable from the US Civil War.
The North wasn't going to wage a war for the express purpose of ending slavery. But once the war was started that was the logical conclusion. The only way it might not have meant ending slavery wasn't a given is a Norther Walkover.
But it would still have spelled slavery's end.
Although they do acknowledge that the Civil War was because of slavery, and that's bad. (Because we're from the North where they don't teach us that the lost cause was real)
No, Lincoln was not pro-slavery. That is why he was a member of the anti-slavery (note that anti-slavery was not the same as abolitionist) party, the Republican Party.
States seceded when Lincoln, the first president of an anti-slavery party, was elected.
Every state that seceded said it was to continue slavery.
The terms of the Confederacy's surrender were ending slavery.
New states to join the US after the war could not be slave states.
Gotta admit it does feel dirty voting for someone who had to be shamed into saying that the Civil War was because of slavery.
This some of that “great man of history” stuff I’ve heard about?
Voting for Lincoln got us the war. A lot of young folks died to end slavery, and ultimately, it was simply that northern industrial capitalism was better at everything needed to fight a war than was an agrarian slave society.
voting for Lincoln got slavery abolished. voting for Johnson got the Voting Rights Act passed. these aren't the only things that made these things happen but they were essential to making them happen.
I just read the chapter on slavery and the Civil War in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and while the Union doesn't come off smelling of roses (the quotes from Lincoln are something), it's extremely clear that from the Confederacy's viewpoint it was about slavery.
“voting for lincoln got us the war”
true, in the sense that slavers prob don’t attack the north if the guy who wanted to expand slavery wins the election. not sure thats the best argument against Lincoln
also v ironic to lambast great man theory while claiming one man led to the war
Trump says Civil War ‘could have been negotiated’. He argued
that the fight to end slavery in the US was ultimately unnecessary
www.cnn.com/2024/01/06/p...
continues to be hilarious that the position of the modern GOP is "we're the party of Lincoln!" but also "the civil war wasn't about slavery and the South had some good points!"