--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Actually, no. During the Civil War, everyone, North and South, >called it
>the Civil War. The term War Between the States arose >after the Civil War
>at the behest of a group of Southern historians ->the Lost Cause school,
>essentially, who went on and on endlessly >about the nobility of the
>Southern cause and how the war had to be >fought and so on.
When was that? I thought that Southerners thought of things in these terms
for a very long time. If it�s from 1900, 100 years is still close.
>They did a great deal of harm to American historiography, in my >opinion,
>as they deliberately set out to obscure the racial >component of the Civil
>War and legitimize the Southern position -
In what sense legitimate? My high school history teacher taught that, while
the South was on very shaky moral grounds, the Declaration of Independence
would tend to support the idea that the Union was entered into voluntarily
by independent states and that there were legitimate grounds for breaking
such a union.
Were there other documents that supported the idea that it was impossible to
leave the Union? I don't remember that being explicitly written into the
Constitution.
I had the understanding that the United States was considered a collective
before the Civil War, and a single entity after it.
>Almost all historians now refer to it as the American
>Civil War, except those who are (in my opinion) ideologically >committed to
>what is, in my opinion again, a fairly tendentious view >of American
>history.
Well, I stand corrected then. The interpretation that I�ve been taught is
that it was very fortunate for the South that they lost, that their moral
position was undefendable. But, forcing the states to stay united at
gunpoint went against the founding documents of American history. This view
was held by my Tennessee in-laws, who were definitely not apologists for the
Confederacy. Indeed, this is the family that received death threats in the
�50s because Teri�s grandfather worked with blacks.
Dan'm Traeki Ring of Crystallized Knowledge.
Known for calculating, but not known for shutting up
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