The CSA as the good guy

The Confederacy as the good guys

The only things they have going for them are the romance of lost causes and states rights. Gone with the wind being the former bnut neither can outweigh the fact that the Confederacy had a fuedal slave economy.

To be the good guys. At some the confederacy abolishes slavery to gain open foreign support or the Confederacy wins which would be difficult without British and French support and Lee is elected President and emancipates the slaves as in Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee
 
Surely its all in the eye of the beholder. Can it really be that one side be totally good and the other totally bad? I do not think so.

The Confederacy had, as we all know, the greatest evil of the day in their domain, Slavery, and it was on this thing that of almost all of the Southern Economy was built but they weren't totally in the wrong. You can argue, quite strongly, that Slavery was the only reason the South wanted independence but they were fighting not only for slavery but for the right of independence, the right to self-government and the right to chose their own futures.

The Union may not have had slavery as widely spread as the Confederacy and may have opposed it in many places but they were not totally in the right themselves. The War from the Union perspective was an attempt to prevent independence and force unity. Whatever way you look at it the Union fought a four year war to prevent the South from independence and self-government.

One side cannot be called totally right and the other totally wrong, it is impossible to do that, however because the Union won it is generally accepted that they were totally right and had the best intentions imaginable when they went to war and the Confederacy was totally wrong and had the worst intentions imaginable when they went to war.

Therefore this thread is more of a perspective based thing rather than a factual based one.
 
Sorry everyone I think were getting out of hand to manage the original question, anyway what if the north had a communist revolution (you see early version my story would have included Joe Stalin as run away from the failed russian revolution and turned american to lead his own revolution-a la Joe Steele) thus the new black appriating south remains democratic.
 
II. They both mistreated each other's POWs about equally, yes.

Jefferson Davis issued a Presidential Proclamation ordering the enslavement of certain POWs and the execution of others. and there are no Union equivalents of Centralia or Fort Pillow.
 
In regards to point I., I don't think the opinion of a group of Southern aristorcrats elected to the Seccession Convention is necessarily representative of the average farmer. Just because they said that slavery was a primary reason, doesn't mean that the majority of the people thought that slavery was the primary reason.

While there were probably as many reasons to fight as there were men fighting, let me point out a few things.

1) Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee held referendums on their Ordinances of Secession. Two-thirds of the voters in Tennessee, three-quarters of the voters in the other two states voted in favor of the Ordinances, so clearly a lot of the common folk thought they had a stake in slavery, too.

2) Prominent Southern politicians, such as Alexander Stephens in his Cornerstone Speech, deliberately attempted to rally the common man, using the preservation of slavery as one of the rally cries.

Why would the people of the South be fighting for slavery, if the majority don't own slaves? Why would they fight so passionately for a cause in which they had no stake in?

In 1860, about 10% of southerners (one third of all families) owned slaves. In 1960, about 5% of Americans owned stock – that doesn’t mean most Americans had no stake in the capitalist economic system.

Slavery was the backbone of the southern economy and its uncompensated loss is one of the reasons the south was so economically troubled in the years after the war. Besides, a man who did not own slaves could aspire to better himself by eventually purchasing one. And even those too poor to ever dream of that would often support slavery, because it meant they were at least higher status than someone and/or they feared what a slave rebellion could do.

Not that everybody in the Confederacy did. As you say, some were fighting to defend their land. Some did fight for the concept of State’s Rights, though the Fugitive Slave law had shown that their political leaders were willing to discard State’s Rights so long as it helped preserve slavery. Others, like their Union contemporaries, signed up because of a sense of adventure or because they didn’t want to be shamed by staying home.

And many didn’t want to fight for the Confederacy. West Virginia sure didn’t. Neither did eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, southwestern Virginia, and much of Texas. The Union army was made up of volunteers, the Confederacy had to institute the draft. 10% of the adult male white population from the southern states fought for the Union, while other did their best to avoid military service.
 
Um, no. The Confederate States were perfectly willing to live in peace with the United States, and indeed made great efforts to do so. As Jefferson Davis himself put it, all the South wanted was to be left alone.

And then Davis put the lie to that by ordering the Confederate military to fire on Fort Sumter.

Plus, if the CSA just wanted to be left alone, why did they invade New Mexico and install a puppet government? Why did they attempt to invade California and Colorado?

--Even if slavery is maintained for a long period, the Confederacy's conduct in foreign policy matters may be such that it is a "good guy" in world politics.

The period south's track record on foreign policy was less than stellar. At various times there were plans or attempts to seize parts of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Central America thought William Walker was such a “good guy” that Nicaragua kicked him out, Costa Rica made his defeat a national holiday, and Honduras put him up against a wall and shot him.

--Even if slavery survived for a long time, the loosely structured, more democratic governmental system of the Confederacy could have served as a stark contrast to the highly centralized, increasingly less democratic so-called "democracies" which dominate the world today. In that way, too, the Confederacy would have been "the good guy."

The problem is that ideal of government had been discarded by the Confederacy long before the end of the war. The Davis administration was dictating prices and profits, imposing an unbacked currency, instituting internal passports and the first draft in North America, ordering the enslavement or execution of certain POWs without trial, instituting prohibition, confiscating civilian firearms, suspending habeas corpus and instituting income tax, nationalizing industry, and by 1863 employing ‘more civil servants than its counterpart in Washington’. It also never appointed a single member of the Confederate Supreme Court; after all, they might have frowned on some of these developments.
 
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