Activity

@eden-anderson Haha, I was trying to keep my biased feelings out of it. 😛 I actually don’t think what you believe about the Civil War has to do with where you’re from anymore.  I’ve met people from northern states who are adamantly for the Confederacy, and people from the southern states who speak vehemently for the Union.  To answer your question truthfully, I am below the Mason-Dixon line. 😉  I do prefer the South, but it isn’t really important to me which side someone supports as long as they get the facts straight, so I’ll put my non-biased historical facts here; then you can use them to get the history correct, but still keep supporting the North and everyone will be happy. 😛

One thing I’d like to make clear: I definitely believe slavery is wrong. 😉  I’m sure you didn’t have doubts about that, but the wording you used in your post made me want to clarify just in case.

Okay, on to the history.  You’ve got a good start, and are very close to the background of the Civil War, but you’re missing a few facts.  As you know, the Southern states were more interested in keeping their slaves, and the North was more interested in freeing the slaves.  The Southern states felt the North was hypocritical for wanting to free the slaves, because the cotton industry was booming and the Northern textile mills depended heavily on the products from the south.  At this time European countries had started to free their slaves, so there was a lot of “peer pressure” with the politicians wanting to keep up with the times.

Have you ever heard anyone say the Civil War was about “States’ Rights”?  When the northern politicians suggested the federal government should free all the slaves, the southerners protested that such was not under the jurisdiction of the federal government, and laws should be made by individual states.  This was because the Constitution states that all rights not granted to the federal government are left to the states.  So there was the argument about whose job it was to free the slaves, if they were to be freed.  Many southerners did not support slavery, and yet were worried that if the federal government were given the power to free slaves, rather than leaving the power to individual states, the government would continue to take more and more power which had not been originally delegated it in the Constitution.  Robert E. Lee, for example, wished to fight for the North, but supported the South because he was from Virginia, and to Southerners, their States were more important than the federal government.  At the time, they thought of the states as individual countries, and the union as an agreement to work together of sorts.

Does this make sense so far?  Basically there are two ways to look at the same question.  Ask a Northern supporter what the Civil War was about, and they’ll say that the North wanted to free the slaves and the South didn’t want them to.  Ask a Southern supporter what the war was about, and they’ll say the Northern government was trying to take too much power and create laws which should have been left to the states to decide.  Because these laws were about slavery, the southern supporter is really referencing the same thing the Northern supporter is, but they are viewing it from different perspectives.  One thing we can note, is that whether supporting the Union or Confederacy, all historians agree the Federal government came out of the Civil War with much more power than it had before the war.

This post is really long… 😛 I am horrible at condensing points, so I’m sorry about that.  That should do it for most of the history, so I’ll just post this and then work on addressing the plot, if that’s okay.

Have you ever read the Freedom Seekers series by Lois Walfrid Johnson?  It’s my favorite his-fic based on the underground railroad.