TPM - Josh Marshall, good read... "Compromise and the Civil War"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/compromise-and-the-civil-war

By JOSH MARSHALL Published OCTOBER 31, 2017 12:57 PM

I wanted to share a few thoughts about John Kelly’s remarks on compromise and the Civil War.

The first thing to say is that Kelly’s view was the dominant historical narrative in the United States for the better part of a century. It overlapped with and was umbilically connected to the generally poor view of Reconstruction and the sympathetic view of Jim Crow ‘home rule’ in the South after Reconstruction. This view saw the outbreak of the Civil War as a failure of statecraft, self-serving and small-minded politicians taking a resolvable issue and escalating it to the point where the country was engulfed in four years of war.

Plenty of others have noted that this ‘inability to compromise’ or ‘resolvable conflict’ argument is historically inaccurate. But the wrongness of it goes deep into the country’s history, decades before the late 1850s. Indeed, it becomes more wrong as we move through the early 19th century.

During the Revolutionary period, the South had parity with the Northern colonies/states on many fronts. Even the terms of what counted as “south” and “north” were murkier than we think of them today. Delaware and Maryland were slave states, just as Virginia and the colonies to the south were. Many Southern elites in the revolutionary period were at least nominally critical of slavery, seeing it as a unjust but inevitable system. They saw it as a relic of the past and not the future. But that remained the case only so long as the future was pretty far in the future.



snip - much more at the link, well worth the time to read

[Va Lefty]

1. Excellent read and analysis