Did you know that the federal government had nothing to do with freeing the slaves? That is, according to Heritage Foundation head Jim DeMint:
Yup, that’s how it went down. The slave owners were like, “so…if you can just pick one more bale of cotton, we’re good, m’kay?”
On today’s show #TeamBlackness also discussed context and race, and how we’re in the era of the proud black racist.
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David in NY
My great-grandfather, a Captain in the Grand Army of the Republic present at the battle of Wilmington, NC, a victory correctly noted in the movie Lincoln as a crucial turning point in enactment of the 13th Amendment, would have been surprised at this idea.
satby
There’s no nice way to put this so I’ll just say it: I hate the Rs with every fiber of my being. I just wish zombie Lincoln would come back and eat DeMint’s brains.
Belafon
And if blacks had been willing to walk up to the schools, Wallace would have let them in. He was just standing in front of the door so he could shake their hands first.
ranchandsyrup
who knew the declaration of independence grants and confers rights?
Gene108
DeMint is correct. After 280,000 Northerners died to preserve the Union, the conscience of the American people spoke ” fuck the South, if freeing slaves will fuck ’em hard, let’s free the slaves. Asshole Southerners have caused so much suffering for us.”
c u n d gulag
JIm Demented is nucking-futs!!!!!
There is no other way to put it!
libarbarian
How long until it’s “The South seceded in order to end slavery”?
Mnemosyne
I guess that if you’re desperate to convince people that the “War of Northern Aggression” had nothing to do with slavery, you have to take slavery out of the picture entirely.
Unfortunately for DeMint, actual history tells us a different story.
(Yes, I’m repeating a link, but I still think it’s really cool. Union soldiers going sightseeing to find the places they read about in abolitionist literature!)
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
If they wanna turn around and give them reparations now for slavery, I sure as fuck ain’t paying for it.
Schlemizel
@libarbarian:
They sort of sell that brand of bullshit already. Even one of the blowharders on FAUX news claimed that slavery was coming to an end & the North just made the inevitable more painful. That level of ignorance is really unforgivable.
libarbarian
@Gene108:
Thank you for only including Northern casualties in your count. I don’t like it when people add the two together into some lumped “American” casualties as though the moral value of a dead traitor was even remotely close to the value of a dead Union soldier.
Mike in NC
@satby:
Needless to say, zombie Lincoln would starve. Same is true for the moron that they appointed to fill DeMented’s Senate seat.
Mike E
Well, all true, but it won’t stop me from registering ‘R’ so I can vote in the May primary. Gotta make some shit happen!
Paul in KY
@satby: Zombie Lincln would find it a poor meal, I fear.
Would be great to see it happen, though!
Ben Cisco
I’m old enough to have heard this lie (the South was totally over slavery till those damned Yankees tried to tell them what to do), and all its various colloraries:
– Slaves as farm equipment were about to be obsolete anyway (had a co-worker actually say this to my face – good times!)
– Massa LOVED his slaves, fed ’em and everything (well, he may have loved the female ones, for varying values of “love.”)
– and so on, and so on, and so forth…
It doesn’t raise my blood pressure up now (mainly b/c I’m on meds), because I know he’s not lying to ME – he’s lying to his peeps.
Just another death rattle.
Only a matter of time until the chest lowers one final time.
Paul in KY
@libarbarian: At the rate we’re going, I’d say 1 Friedman unit.
Ben Cisco
@Paul in KY:
The very definition of empty calories…
Schlemizel
@satby:
SO! You want Zombie Lincoln to starve to death. Now Betty’s shit eating dogs would grow fat on that carcass but Zombie, not so much
Paul in KY
@libarbarian: Hear, hear!
Many of the traitors though (at the cannon fodder ranks), were just deluded, ignorant doofuses trying to get some meals & clothes.
Paul in KY
@Mike in NC: Crap! Beat me to it :-)
Quaker in a Basement
Gene108 and Libarbarian have peeked behind the curtain where DeMint is hiding. Yes, the “conscience of the American people” spoke, but only if you exclude all those “Americans” who tried to go start their own country. For just about all other purposes, DeMint is happy to count Confederates among the American populace.
Paul in KY
@Ben Cisco: Zombie Lincoln would get more protein out of twinkies.
srv
Look, the south did the best they could with those ungrateful people, and after realizing it was unappreciated, they tried to be as graceful as possible about it. Southern honor and all that.
The War of Northern Agression had nothing to do with slavery, why anyone reading the Southern States’ Articles of Secession could see that as true.
Ben Cisco
@Paul in KY: And more intellect, too.
Schlemizel
@Paul in KY:
At one level I really feel sorry for the poor dumb sons-a-bitches that got caught up in fighting for people who knew they were better than the PDSOBs so they could keep their human chattel. I bet for a lot of them, on the micro level, the war was not about slavery, it was about chivalry, honor and repulsing what they wrongly believed to be an invasion of their homelands. They were after all poor and dumb.
This leads me to feelings of guilt because I am having very strong reactions to all the South amnesia I have put up with in the last 25 years (I used to belong to a Civil War listserv back in the prehistoric Internet). As an example I was watching documentary on the role of Minnesota regiments last night & they mentioned an engagement that ended with some 18,000 COnfederate casualties and my first thought was “too bad it was so few”. I know thats wrong of me, more I wish it were 18,000 modern day apologists but I can’t stop that thought from popping up.
Belafon
@Paul in KY: Many of the cannon fodder folks were hoping that they could become wealthy enough to own slaves themselves. Sounds an awful lot like the reason people keep voting Republican: When I get wealthy, I don’t want no one taking away my
slavesmoney.Amir Khalid
I’m really confused now. Then who does Jim DeMint say issued the Emancipation Proclamation, if not the President of the US? Who were the blue uniforms in the war of 1861-65, Northern freebooters?
srv
@Schlemizel: Many of the poors were at the vanguard – this was a populist economic, social and religious issue as many of them subsisted on careers within the orbit of the plantations and Jesus told them so.
Many wealthy southerners were bright enough to realize Lincoln wasn’t coming for their slaves anymore than Obama is coming for their guns, and thought a war would be folly. In those cases, it was likely more a sense of maintaining their position (honor) in society than a fervant belief that the state/slavery was threatened.
boatboy_srq
Shorter DeMint: Everything nasty that’s happened in US society (ni-CLANGs getting the vote, poors getting help, wimmins getting votes and jobs and stuff) since 1865 is the continuation of Northern Aggression in the form of Big Gubmint.
WereBear
I guess none dare call it treason.
scav
He’s sorta making the case that so long as the general principle is more or less implied in some document, enforcing a specific right or law is inconsequential and irrelevant and just look at all the trouble it stirs up sigh. Long live Platitudinous Statements of Intention and Ideals, Fuck real attempts at their lived reality — It’s all about what written on the tin, ignore the canned offel on the plate.
Ian
@libarbarian:
Conscription is a hell of a thing, whether its Irish fresh of the boats or of poor frontier settlers. Personally I don’t like to demonize the little people with no real say in the matter. I like to set my sights on the fucks in charge.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv:
This is utter fantasy, easily corrected by the viewing of period documents.
It’s official now. You’re a serious fucktard. I cordially invite you to find a fire to go die in.
Kylroy
@srv: Lincoln wasn’t coming after *their* slaves, but he was shuttering the possibility of expanding slavery that made so many poorer southerners convinced that they’d be rich plantation owners someday.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear: Lincoln made a mistake in his formulation of the general tenor of Reconstruction. “With malice toward none, with charity for all…”. No. All Confederates at the highest levels of the rebel government should have been hanged for treason, as should have the senior officers in the rebel army.
The rest of us now have to deal with the repercussions of this mistake in the personages of scum like Jim DeMint.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid: Southern revisionism on why there was a “War of Northern Aggression” was underway within hours of Lee’s surrender to Grant.
DeMented is just carrying on yet another “tradition” of the South.
Chyron HR
Lincoln was a Republican hero… who prosecuted the heinous War of Northern Aggression! The southern slaveowners would have voluntarily freed their slaves… from the free room and board they were providing out of the goodness of their hearts!
Any self-respecting robot would explode if it tried to believe this stuff, so why are Republicans still going?
Amir Khalid
@Villago Delenda Est:
Just curious: what happens when one says “the War of Southern Treason” in front of a pro-Confederacy Southerner?
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid: I’ve never done that, seeing as they get all out of sorts if you call it The Civil War.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chyron HR: “Norman, coordinate!”
kc
Heritage pays Jim DeMint $1 million a year to say shit like that.
SatanicPanic
@Ian: I agree. To me this leads to- Iraq War was bad, therefore all soldiers who fought in it were bad people. In that case maybe more so because we have an all-volunteer army. I’m not saying none of the Confederate soldiers were, I’m just saying I don’t want to say all of them were either. I don’t know for sure.
satby
@Amir Khalid: at Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog they call it the War of Treason in Defense of Slavery. Which is what I call it now too.
JoyfulA
@Belafon: It wasn’t just the aristocrats who owned slaves. DH’s line of ancestors on a poor-to-middling NC tobacco farm had a few slaves (which horrified DH).
scav
Love how Jim Demint is also carefully ommitting how many of those “People of Faith” were clinging to and waving the Bible about as a defence and legitimatization of slavery.
Bill Arnold
@Amir Khalid:
Don’t know, but it was officially called the “War of the Rebellion” for a while – had a collection of nice books with that title when I was growing up, given to my great grandfather as a US House of Representatives member.
Useful discussion at wikipedia – Naming the American Civil War
Mnemosyne
@JoyfulA:
Yep — most people couldn’t afford to have a huge plantation, but even having just one or two slaves was a status symbol, and they didn’t want to give that up.
Higgs Boson's Mate
My own country, the one for which I shed my own blood and that of others, has become unrecognizable to me. This isn’t the first ahistorical shot from the cons and it’s far from being the last but, goddamn it, we now seem to be at a point where reality itself is negotiable. In the past. I always shared the view of one of the many people who are more smart than I am that the ship of state would always right itself. I don’t believe that any more.
rikyrah
silly Elon,
we all just imagined that Civil War thing…
a figment of our imagination
srv
@Villago Delenda Est: Clearly, your “review” of period documents has missed most of the era before the war, including all those slaveholding post-Whigs, Constitutional Union Party, Alexander Stephens, etc who opposed seccession and yet still served…
You liberals just have problems with facts.
Villago Delenda Est
@scav: The defense of slavery is the basis of fundamentalism in this country.
It is an abomination.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv: You wouldn’t know the factual basis of the secession of the southern states if someone hit you over the head with a clue stick.
Which sounds like a very good idea in and of itself.
srv
@Villago Delenda Est: For the sake of anybody who could possibly ever care about you, you have a lot of growing up to do.
I hope you start soon.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv: Keep quacking away, Confederate apologist. You’re on the wrong side of history.
Gee
One Sincere Question: Why is it called the War of Northern Aggression? Wasn’t the first shot fired by the South at Fort Sumter?
Paul in KY
@Schlemizel: When you watched Ken Burn’s series & saw some old photos, etc. it was apparent to me that there was great poverty in the South for anyone black or white who had no land and/or worked/slaved for someone else.
For many of those traitors, when they were issued their boots (if they did get some) it was the first pair of shoes they had ever owned.
Paul in KY
@Belafon: I’m sure many of them did have those fantasies.
Paul in KY
@Villago Delenda Est: I would have been fine with that, but I do think he would have run into serious opposition within his own government had he done that.
There were many divided families at the elite level & the ‘attitude’ of many seemed to look at the war as a giant sporting contest of some kind & expected all to shake hands at end, etc. etc.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: Will have to try that sometime :-)
Paul in KY
@Gee: It’s only the Southern dead-enders who call it that. There’s no real logic to it, IMO. Just a cute branding for racist asswipes.