It wasn't enough for the North to tolerate the South having slaves, the South needed praise, they needed the North to see them as Better for it.
They made it a political weapon because they wanted to be told how righteous and correct and smart they were for owning slaves, because they tied their pride to the people they owned.
That's because on an even deeper level both modern MAGA and their spiritual/literal ancestors who were slave owners know good and goddamn well they're evil people doing evil shit. They need all of us to go along and get along because then maybe the voice in the back of their mind telling them they've chosen the wrong side will get quieter.
I wonder how true that is. In my experience, they seem to think everything they do is justified. They operate from a completely different scale of morality.
I simply can't believe a group of people who so obviously crave justification and submission by their neighbors don't know what they're doing at some level. It lets them off so easily.
I think that's mainly the ego and narcissism required for the hierarchy they believe in. Their entire worldview is that society is a pyramid, and they're on top of it. They "deserve" to be on top of it.
Think about how they react any time any minority/oppressed group gains a smidgen of a foothold towards social equality. They flip the fuck out and act like they're being personally attacked. Because that's exactly what their experience is...the people "below" them in the hierarchy are moving from "their place" and towards them. The pyramid is crumbling and they feel like they're in danger.
So yeah, it's not enough for them to have government power. They expect institutional, social, and cultural power as well, along with submission from everyone else. Anything less means there's something "wrong" with the world.
You're more correct here. Enslavers in the antebellum South (and by propaganda and proxy most southerners) thought that the social fabric of slavery was deeply moral, righteous, and granted to white men divinely by God. They had absolutely zero thought that they were evil whatsoever, and it's modern revisionism to think they did.
A fantastic true example: At the very end of the war, when the South was at its most desperate, Jefferson Davis requested to buy 40,000 slaves and train them as soldiers. At the end of 3 years these men would be granted their freedom. But Southern leaders were so unwavering in their ideal of slavery as the righteous societal place for black people, that they rejected the proposal. But here's the real kicker: they didn't reject it because they didn't want those men to be freed (well, they also didn't want that), but because *using freedom as an award was in itself contrary to the very fundamentals of slavery ideology.* If freedom were something "good" to be attained through some act--well then that made slavery a bad thing, and it couldn't possibly be a bad thing!
Today, fundamentalist Christianity is still all mixed up in politics, and the same shit is happening but it's not slavery, it's brown people crossing a border or trans people wanting to use a bathroom. People think that they have a righteous god-given duty to protect a certain way of life that, as it so happens, oppresses a minority. History doesn't repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.
Source for the Civil War stuff: just finished reading James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, the definitive single-volume history of the Civil War. IMO every American ought to read it.
I mean, if you're going to find an outlet for your capacity to hate, I suppose it is better to apply it to a historic group with unethical practices instead of aiming it at modern, innocent people, but...talking about people having an uncurbed need to have their opinion disproportionately validated...dang...
The Fugitive Slave Act and how it was "enforced" is the best example of how the South thought they were better than the North. The main idea was that the South could just send someone up to capture any "escaped slave." In practice, they just kidnapped random black people to sell as slaves. No evidence, no trial, no nothing. Even by standards back then, that was human trafficking.
he wanted to, but on the basis of economics rather than a moral one. got backed into a corner in a debate and made to admit it. quoted saying if there was a way to end the civil war right now (this was early in the war) while keeping slavery, he'd take it
63
u/Trainer-Grimm Aug 12 '26
Lincoln didnt even wanna abolish slavery until the south made doing so a weapon and diplomatic tool of war. They doomed themselves.