Aaron Latham Quotes
The Republican Party started with Lincoln as the party of civil rights. And the Democrats started with Jefferson as the party that did not believe in big government. If Lincoln and Jefferson came back now, they wouldn't know which party to vote for. Jefferson might start another revolution; Lincoln might secede.
Aaron Latham, Author, The Washington Post, October 23, 1988
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
While Douglas and Lincoln were political opponents with little love lost between them, both were patriots. And Douglas was committed to seeing that Lincoln was inaugurated and the Union preserved, if Lincoln won the election. When Lincoln did so, Douglas traveled throughout the South trying to persuade Southerners to stay in the Union. See {584870}.
After the Presidential years of James Buchanan who protected the South from slavery reform and abolition as the North was gaining political power and the abolitionists were having a greater and greater effect on public opinion in the North. While Southerners did not believe Lincoln would emancipate the slaves, they realized that the majority of the growing nation was opposed to slavery, and more and more Northern states were passimg laws making any slave who sets foot in the State a free person. Slaves coud not only have more reason to run away, but slave owners would not be able to get their “property” back. Lincoln would not help the South as Buchanan did, and the Southerners realized that over time, slavery would no longer be feasible or profitable. Cobb, very experienced at Washington politics, realized the changes that would come and thought that they would be “certain and speedy.” The irony was that if the South had not seceded and simply dragged its feet legislatively, it would have taken two or three decades for slavery to end. However, by seceding and initially fighting so hard and well while poor Union generals were in command, Lincoln was forced to try more drastic measures and issued the Emancipation Proclamation after only a few years. The Civil War and seccession was not only a tactical and strategic error for the South, but rapidly brought about just what the Southerners were fighting to prevent.
Marx followed the American Civil War very closely. The freeing of the slaves caused an immediate social, moral and economic revolution, the results of which we live with today.
The logic of Southern secession made so little sense to most Northerners, that they assumed that after the election, the Southern threats of treason and rebellion would stop. Most Northerners did not appreciate that Southerners had little economic vision absent slavery and could not imagine how they could survive. For the Northerners, they had seen great economic growth with free labor and no slavery. But most Southerners were ignorant of the possibilities except for the few very wealthy Southern families who had seen the North and England. They realized that the South could make it economically, but they whose total fortunes came from the ownership value of slaves, might not be in their exalted positions without slavery. At the time, the value of the Southern slaves was greater than the value of all the land, factories, mines, and farms of the South.
When the first Southern States seceded, each appointed a whose job it was to persuade the other Southern States to also secede. In this case Hale was marketing secession to Kentucky which with Maryland were the only two Southern States to reject what they regarded as treason and rebellion. The importance of the quotation however is in his argument which was all based on enmity to racial equality and abolition. Later Southern apologists would argue that the Civil War was fought, not about slavery and racism butt about different philosophies of government. See {623715} .
The early Union military leadership was so poor and timid that it was not clearly demonstrated that a Confederacy was not viable until later in the war, and the Southerners possessed an extraordinary capacity for ignoring reality and self-delusion, that it was not demonstrated until Grant’s major victories and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Southern East Coast that an independent South was not going to be.
Aaron Latham is an American journalist who wrote the article that inspired the movie Urban Cowboy and co-wrote its script with director James Bridges. He also co-wrote the book for the short-lived 2003 Broadway musical version.
