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The Civil War cost the deaths of 600,000 Americans - 360,000 northern, 258,000 southern. 40,000 of the Union war dead were African Americans. The southern econo
by skookumchuck 8y ago
The Civil War cost the deaths of 600,000 Americans - 360,000 northern, 258,000 southern. 40,000 of the Union war dead were African Americans. The southern economy was utterly destroyed in the process.
America has already paid a very high and bitter price to end slavery, in the usual currency for freedom - blood.
- jrochkind1 8y agoHow much do you know about the Reconstruction period? Where, after a couple decades where Black people could vote and many Southern state legislatures were majority Black, white terrorism (literally, read up on it) returned the Southern Black population to economic dependency, political subjugation, and daily physical insecurity?
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y agoHalf of America paid that price to keep slavery though, it’s just that they lost. Then that half invested new ways to screw over the same people for another hundred+ years.
- skookumchuck 8y ago320,000 Northern white men died to free the slaves. 258,000 Southern white men died for being slavers. It's a pretty high price any way you want to look at it.
- chickenfries 8y agoThe Union wasn't just executing southerners for being slavers, they were putting down a treasonous rebellion.
- tptacek 8y agoThe other way to look at it is that hundreds of thousands of Southern white men demanded a blood price of half a million lives to relinquish a right to chattel slavery that most of them could merely aspire to execute --- that such was the depth the depravity undergirding slavery reached.
- skookumchuck 8y agoAs I said, the usual price for freedom is blood.
- tptacek 8y agoThat's maybe a good song lyric but not especially useful as an argument here.
- pvg 8y agoFor the values of 'song' that include 'famous speeches by Mussolini/Schrute'.
- skookumchuck 8y agoThere are plenty of historical examples. For just American wars, we have the American Revolution, the Civil War, WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. WW1 is a notable exception.