Okay, so why would the Union loyalists be treated any differently?
Ah. So I guess might
does make right after all, eh? Good thing then that the Union's might proved greater after the Confederacy chose violence, so that the Southern Unionists did not have to to bow before the new order under threat of Confederate might or else be hounded and burned out of their homes in the end like the old Tories were.
At the time of the Revolution.
Not at first they weren't, and even then it was mainly to spite the UK. But more importantly the UK did not recognize it until after the war was over, and even then it's not like there was a lot of respect there.
The French recognized the US via the Treaties of Alliance in 1778, having taken about as much time to recognize the US as Europe had chances to recognize the Confederacy but didn't (all remaining hope of such that still existed after Antietam was dashed by Gettysburg). Even before that though, the US did gain recognition and help from Morocco in 1777, although obviously the Moroccans couldn't do nearly as much for them as the French did. As for spite, the same would have been true of any British/French recognition of and consequent support for the Confederacy - the strategic goal being undermining the US (something France was especially interested in since they were trying to install a puppet monarch in Mexico at the time of the ACW), something all parties involved understood well (including the Union themselves, hence their ultimately successful efforts to derail international recognition of the CSA).
And of course the UK didn't recognize the US until after it had been defeated in the revolutionary war, they were the country the Patriots were trying to split away from! Are you also wondering as to why the Union didn't recognize the CSA and wouldn't have unless it had been defeated? I have no idea what point you're even trying to make with this argument.
Look, it doesn't matter. That isn't the stated premise the Union had for going to war, which, IMO, weakens the case for them going to war. They kept up that premise for a good long time into the war. The slavery aspect only came into it after the fact, as part of the effort to make them look better for all the shit they did.
Well as it so happens actions speak a good deal louder than words, something believed by the Confederates and Federals alike. Hence the former not accepting even the Corwin Amendment which would've allowed them to keep slavery where it existed (just not expand it), while the latter were unwilling to compromise any further than that (because they knew they could still overturn such an odious amendment given enough time & free states) and publicly engaged in the
de facto emancipation of slaves they could reach immediately after the start of the war.
If by acknowledged you mean acted like a complete ass about it, then went on to tell me to seethe about it more, then yeah, you did that.
You know, I was typing a response to this and the remainder of your post per the usual point-by-point answer scheme I've been doing, but then I realized something: not only are we up to fourteen pages now, but I actually do feel bad for you at this point, which I said many pages back would be the only condition at which I'd relent. As of the last post you've admitted might makes right (you know, that concept you thought so vile you were planning to badger me about it in the future - guess I can now just save some links & screenshots to counter instead of having to refer to anything else we've been arguing), demonstrated ignorance of one of the key factors in the USA's eventual triumph in the Revolution and why that didn't apply to the CSA, and twisted yourself into a pretzel to argue that the Union literally freeing/building camps for/employing & educating slaves from immediately after the start of the war doesn't actually count as them taking a stand against slavery because Lincoln didn't expressly yell about abolition at his inaugural address or something.
This is on top of you having previously explicitly said people should be able to secede no matter what and that their reasons don't matter even if it's to uphold & spread the polar opposite of libertarianism in chattel slavery (what other 'supposition' am I supposed to take from
'because they wanted to leave from what was and should have been a voluntary association. I don't have to agree with their reasons for wanting to fuck off'?), which is obviously mutually exclusive with your implying that Southern Unionists who don't want to join the Confederacy but live in a geographically impractical area to counter-secede as their own state should just be expelled from their homes as the Loyalists were, itself also mutually exclusive with your purported contention that might doesn't make right - a completely incoherent house of cards, you can't hold all three positions and still hope to make any sense. You've put yourself in a corner where you can't even argue from a position of political flexibility & pragmatism,
because you've argued before that it wasn't OK for the Union to censor newspapers trying to foment a riot with fake news - and if that wasn't OK then how on earth can it be cool for the Confederacy to burn Southern Unionists out of their homes under threat of death, something magnitudes more extreme and unjustified (presumably, from a libertarian perspective) than what Lincoln did to those New York papers? On top of all the other occasions you've been proven wrong already. And your defense against all that comes down to trying to dredge up an old issue I already conceded on because you didn't like how I phrased my concession?
Holy shit man, how am I not supposed to feel bad for you at this point? The last time I saw anyone string together a jumble of arguments this embarrassingly uninformed, incoherent and self-contradictory to the point of trying to advance multiple transparently mutually exclusive points was on the first day of my debate club back in high school. And by my own words that means I'm the one who needs to stop now, even though I've already written responses to the first part of your post and don't feel any need to delete them (that'd just make this an even bigger waste of effort on my part). Have a nice day, also I'd recommend informing yourself more thoroughly and thinking your arguments through in the future.
Plenty of Native Americans supported the confederacy, hell the last reb general to surrender was a Cherokee. And I said "To use the question" not to actively implement policy. but I'm sure the guy I'm thinking of would have, had he the chance.
I know, but these weren't the Great Plains tribes which faced genocidal warfare. Even among the tribes of Indian Territory which were largely pro-Confederate, a significant minority remained loyal to the Union and
got sent on their own mini-Trail of Tears for it (2,000 of them died on this march). Still enough survivors were left to form units like the Indian Home Guard regiments that keep fighting for the Stars & Stripes and successfully justified the tribes still keeping any land at all after the Confederacy's defeat - IIRC about half as many Natives fought for the Union as did fight for the Confederacy (~3,500 vs. ~7,500).
Reluctantly doing your duty is not the same as accepting a city's surrender and then gleefully blowing it up.
I'd argue that orders to enslave free blacks during an aggressive campaign are so odious (and would have been understood as such even in the 1860s, this after all was even worse than just selling slaves someone else caught for you, it's tantamount to acting like one of Tippu Tip's slave raiders) that any truly noble man would have refused to follow them and threatened resignation instead - quite like what Grant did to save Lee's own life when Andrew Johnson wanted to have him executed for treason, actually.
Tbh while I never bought that Lee was a closet abolitionist, I used to believe he was still the chivalrous and just 'Marble Man' who represented the best of the Confederacy not just in martial skill but also morally, so learning he did
this a few years ago came as a serious shock & disappointment to me. I still don't believe he's as bad as say, William Quantrill, nor do I think that his statues should be destroyed or that he & other Confederate generals should be dug up & desecrated (I find such actions abominable and have expressed as much on this forum before) but...this is pretty damn bad, and I do believe he had a choice to not do this. Had he instead objected to the orders and threatened to resign if Davis wanted to force it through anyway, I really don't think Davis could have done anything but back down (what's he going to do, fire the guy who's the reason Richmond hadn't fallen yet?), sparing a lot of free blacks grief and himself a dark stain on his honor.
And it only cost us the constitution, the creation of the ancestor of the Modern US IC and the FBI and all the evils those abominations have unleashed on the Republic.....Which has been an oligarchy since Gettysburg.
And that's not ideal, I understand why people don't like it and wish things could have been different, but I still think even that is preferable to there being a country (one oligarchic by design at that) larger than most European nations hanging around trying to conquer & expand chattel slavery (a system which had openly institutionalized horrific abuse, dehumanization, mass rape, the breakup of families, and ridiculously brutal executions for attempted runaways/rebels) as far as Nicaragua and Venezuela. The slave states even had a pervasive secret police apparatus to monitor & clamp down on their slaves for way longer than the US IC has existed and which the latter couldn't match in intrusiveness and sheer cruel malice for a good while, that's why overseers & slave catchers got paid, but fortunately all that too got thrown into the dustbin of history by the Confederate defeat.
...I'll try to sum up & break down my thoughts in a non-huge wall of text format, complete with a tl;dr at the end. OK, so the Taiping Rebellion in China (fought around the same time as the American Civil War coincidentally) got anywhere between 30 to 100 times as many people killed as the American Civil War did on both sides, and even then I still find their cause slightly more understandable and their leader slightly more sympathetic than the Confederacy's - that's how awful those guys were even by the standards of their time:
1) At least Hong Xiuquan, AKA the Chinese guy who claimed to be Christ's brother, was actually insane (not even in a Jim Jones way where he'd always been a manipulative snake that thought the Bible was trash from the start and then went off the deep end as his position grew less cushy & more precarious, Hong was sufficiently brave & a genuine believer in his own nonsense to risk his life from the very beginning of his 'ministry') whereas the Southern fire-eaters were in full possession of their mental faculties, they were just knowingly following an ideology considered evil even by most of their contemporaries while also exempting their social class from having to actually risk themselves in the war they started for it (the Twenty Slave Law), and;
2) The Taipings were rebelling against genuine foreign oppressors (the Manchu Qing dynasty) who had proven to be both monstrously corrupt and incapable of protecting them from exploitation by other foreign powers. The Confederates were themselves the brutal exploiters & oppressors (of their slaves) and were fundamentally fighting because they sensed the disproportionate control they derived from slavery & used to exercise over the rest of the United States was in danger of waning as evidenced by their failure to keep Lincoln from getting elected, even though they had banned him from the ballots in their states and that was their own fault anyway for being such absolute lunatics on the slavery issue that they alienated Northern Democrats.
Tl;dr it's gotta be looking bad for the Confederate leadership when it can be coherently & semi-seriously argued that the crazy Chinese brother of Jesus, who got up to 100 million people killed with his preaching, was still a nicer guy with more understandable & benevolent motives than them.
