![]() ![]() Soldiers fight for many reasons - notably to stay alive and support their comrades in arms - and the North’s goal in the beginning was preservation of the Union, not emancipation. That is not to say that the average Confederate soldier fought to preserve slavery or that the North went to war to end slavery. Today, most professional historians agree with Stephens that slavery and the status of African Americans were at the heart of the crisis that plunged the U.S. New York Public Library Digital Collections Sergeant Furney Bryant, 1st North Carolina Colored Troops ![]() Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution - African slavery as it exists amongst us - the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. In March 1861, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, gave his view: One important way of approaching the issue is to look at what contemporary observers had to say. The role of slavery in bringing on the Civil War has been hotly debated for decades. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |