February is American History Month and here at Neatorama, we urge those of you who live in the states to celebrate your country’s past by getting to know a little more about its history. As a result, we’ve decided to bring you a selection of little known facts about American History. While the truth behind many stories may not be pretty, it’s far better to know the facts than to celebrate through myths.
Christopher Columbus Wasn’t Such A Great Guy
The stories of Columbus celebrate him as an all-time American hero who was a genius explorer and first convinced the world that the Earth was round, not flat. In actuality though, the Columbus myth is far greater than the reality of the man’s accomplishments. To start with, Aristotle was the first person to prove the Earth was round and he did so by showing the earth casts a spherical shadow on the moon during an eclipse. By the time Chris was born, most people had accepted this truth.
It wasn’t until the 1828 biography of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving (the same man that created The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) that this myth was born. Columbus simply believed that the circumference of the Earth was much smaller than it actually is and that by traversing the Atlantic Ocean, he could establish a faster trade route to India and China. Essentially, his discovery of the Americas was purely based on an economic scheme. Columbus was not even the first European visitor to the “New World,” as it is widely accepted that the Norse had made the voyage over 500 years before him. Of course, the Norse failed to mistake the new country for India (thus resulting in the title of “Indians” for the native populace) and they also failed to inform the rest of Europe that this giant mass of land happened to be sitting in the middle of the Atlantic.
Columbus was actually a bit of a barbarian. In fact, he was arrested and returned to Spain after being found to be too barbaric a ruler in his role as governor of the Hispaniola colony. 23 people testified about his cruelty --which, given the time period, means he had to be a really, really bad guy. He even refused to let the natives convert to Christianity because Catholic law dictated that baptized people could not be enslaved. Studies show that there were between 250,000-300,000 people in Hispaniola, but within 56 years of Columbus’ voyage, the number was down to 500. Also, another interesting fact, researchers believe his men were responsible for bringing syphilis into Europe and, thus, caused the deaths of as many 5 million Europeans.
The reason for his near-sainthood( literally, as the church considered turning him into a saint in the 1866) goes back even before Irving’s time. Essentially, Americans felt they needed a national hero and at a time when they resented the British rule over the colonies, he seemed like a great icon. By the way, all those pictures you've seen of Chris (including the ones used here), are not accurate. There still has not been an authentic painting of Christopher Columbus discovered to have been painted by his contemporaries.
Sources: Interesting History, Wikipedia, Christian Science Monitor, Columbus in History
Was Jamestown The First?
As you may have gathered from the bit about Columbus, Jamestown was not the first European colony in North America. In fact, the first temporary colony was created around the year 1000 and located in Newfoundland, Canada, by Norse mariners from Greenland. The first permanent colony in modern day America was actually located in St. Augustine, Florida and was set up by the Spanish in 1565. Jamestown was merely the first British colony, and the first colony in Virginia. These settlers were the first European colonists to do one thing though --resort to cannibalism. Yes, during the exceptionally rough winter of 1609, the colonists were forced to eat their feces and their dead to keep alive. While this fact is undeniably dark, it does show the hardships these settlers went through and their dedication to survival.
Sources: PBS, 100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know Image via Bill Barber [Flickr]
Sir Walter Raleigh Did Not Introduce Potatoes or Tobacco to England
Speaking of the English connection to the new world, the famed explorer Sir Walter Raleigh is wrongly credited for two major contributions to English society. He did not introduce potatoes to England in 1586, as the veggies were first grown in Italy in 1585 and had already spread through Europe, including England) within the next year. As for tobacco, Jean Nicot (the inspiration for the word nicotine) introduced the plant to France in 1560, and it spread to England from France before Raleigh would have had a chance to bring it back to his homeland. Also, while Raleigh was certainly a stud (see image above), he did not ever lay his coat down over a puddle so Queen Elizabeth could cross. This lovely story is yet another romantic tale of a past that never existed.
Source: Greatest Historical Myths
Could Our First President Tell A Lie?
By now you probably know that George Washington never really did cut down the mythical cherry tree (this story came courtesy of Mason Locke Weems, a biographer that rivaled Washington Irving in presenting long-lived fabrications about their subjects). But were you aware that George Washington wasn’t actually the first president?
When you think back to history class, you may recall our first attempt at self-governance was chartered under the unsuccessful Articles of Confederation. Under this document, the first official President of the United States of America was actually John Hanson (seen at left). Hanson was actually quite a good leader and accomplished a good amount of work during his tenure, but he is poorly remembered as he led the country under the Articles of Confederation rather than the Constitution. As for Mr. Washington, he is very well-remembered, but not for his flaws. Washington was not generally the great war hero we remember him for. He actually lost ever major engagement during the first four years of the war. He wasn’t even the great president we have been told about in our school lessons. In fact, he was the first president to get caught in a scandal when the Philadelphia Aura reported that he embezzled over $6,000 more than he was permitted to take as his salary during his term as presidency.
Sources: Wikipedia, Marshall Hall, 100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know
No Wars Have Been Fought to Help Victims of Oppression
Many people think that we went to war with the south over slavery and that we fought in World War II to help stop the Nazis. In reality, the goals of these wars were much less noble. The main things that led the Civil War were economic issues and slavery was only a part of these problems. When the economic tensions got too hot, the South fought for its independence and the North fought to preserve the Union. Most Northerners didn’t care about slavery all that much and many Southerners simply couldn’t afford to own slaves.
Even the reasons behind the emancipation proclamation were more political than moral. The so-called Great Emancipator, Lincoln himself, once said, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." The entire speech was merely a way to help de-motivate blacks who were fighting for the South so the North could get an advantage.
Prior to World War II, the majority of Americans were not only uninterested in the plight of the Jews in Germany, but many even supported the forced sterilization of the mentally incompetent, crippled or criminally-inclined. Many states also banned interracial marriages as an effort to prevent the tainting of the races. At least 10,000 Americans were forcefully sterilized, many after being labeled with such vague properties as “sexually wayward,” “depressed,” “deviant,” or “bad girls.”
As a matter of fact, America played a crucial role in Hitler’s rise to power and his efforts to create a “master race.” After funding a number of eugenics scientists in America, The Rockefeller Foundation helped create the entire German eugenics program and they even funded work by the infamous Josef Mengele worked before he went to Auschwitz. Fortunately for us, the researchers believed Americans were not ready to support any “final solutions,” which is why our eugenics program largely stopped at the forced sterilization stage and negligent medical care for the “unfit,” whereas the German program extended into unbelievable horrors. Of course, if the U.S. eugenics scientists hadn’t come up with so many scientific studies and so much research to back their claims, Hitler would have never been able to convince the rational German public to follow his plans.
Sources: Interesting History, HNN
The First Drug Laws Were Racist
Regardless of your opinions on medicinal marijuana and the war on drugs, most people will agree that heavier drugs are not exactly great substances and shouldn’t be easily accessible to the general populace, particularly kids. A little over a century ago, public opinion was quite different and even companies like Bayer were producing opium products. In fact, Bayer invented heroin. These “medical breakthroughs” were even promoted for use on children.
So what would it take for the government to actually illegalize a drug in a time period like this? Racism. The first drug law in America was enacted in San Francisco and prohibited the use of opium in opium dens. The city claimed that they enacted the law because "many women and young girls, as well as young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise.” Of course, using the drug outside of a Chinese opium den was ok.
Sources: Wikipedia on Drug Prohibition, Wikipedia on Heroin History I know you Neatorama readers are a smart breed, so many of you probably already know these facts and others. What’s your favorite little known history bit?
"The reason for his near-sainthood( literally, as the church considered turning him into a saint in the 1866) goes back even before Irving’s time."
Who is Irving?
Thanks,
- Alex
THAT Irving, Alex
Nice post.
Stan
Pick any country, they have all done terrible things.
England - put colonial dissident's heads on pikes
Netherlands - killed dodos for fun, and that whole apartheid thing
France - tested their nuclear weapons in a foreign country without their permission
Spain - well you already covered Columbus
And Krikkit what's your problem...? Have you ever been outside America...? In most places outside Americva it is pick on America day every day of the year! ...Just as it is pick on China day, or pick on Afghanistan day, or pick on Iran day, or pick on North Korea day, or pick on Japan day, or pick on any other country than America that perhaps wins medals or does not win any medal on the Canadian Winter Olympics Day.
America just is not one grain better or worse than the rest of the world. That's all.
:-D
More at 9pm
@Foreigner1, had lunch with a USAn today and we both laughed hard and gloated over the Canadian ice hockey team fail. Everyone gets picked on.
Things founded in racism:
- The Rockefeller dynasty (although probably old John D. didn't have much to do with it)
- America
- American drug law
You can throw Henry Ford in with the racist tycoons along with a few other unsavory individuals. No wonder every Youtube comment thread devolves into a (an American) racist shouting match, it's as American as an apple pie (made from a genetically pure strain of apples)
Let's not get too abstract here. Some countries are certainly better than others, but depending on how you look at it.
America ranks fairly high thanks to places like N-Korea (as they never fail to point out), but only if you consider infrastructure general well-being of the people. According to a recent report from the Central Bureau census, there are 37 million poor people living in America today. North Korea only has about 23 million people so America has produced more poor people.
But then again that doesn't take into account the relativism of poverty or per capita calculations (percentage wise, N-Korea is certainly more impoverished).
But then you can also look at other things such as the environmental track record and involvement in unfortunate conflicts on foreign soil, but N-Korea would come out ahead of the U.S. on both accounts.
So, even a sh$$hole like N-Korea that's doing awful on a national level can come out ahead if you consider the global influence.
Humans do this sort of thing all the time! We lie to our kids (Santa, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy), but we don't think of it as lying. Historians lie, but they simply pass it off as an embellishment of the truth or a literary license to exaggerate. Attorneys lie, but it is just another interpretation of the facts. Commercials lie to us almost non-stop, but it is just business as usual. Most wealthy individuals amassed their fortunes with lies. Politicians lie, because honest politicians are so rarely elected.
I suppose it is somewhat admirable to want the world to be a better place than the truth will allow, but I wonder what it would be like to live in a world of brutal honesty. Perhaps a sociologist can get a grant to study such a scenario, but to get the grant he will probably have to lie.
Ignorance is bliss!
So Washington is, and always will be, the first president of the United States. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to argue semantics (and the semantics don't even agree with them).
Jefferson is a prime example. If you ask people today about Thomas Jefferson you will hear more about him having sex with a slave than anything else.
The only problems you ever run into are when you look up extremely obscure, highly technical things with only one or two editors or something quite controversial.
I've also run into quite a few experts in their field with doctorates who actually enjoy writing articles for Wikipedia.
To the above poster/s bashing Wikipedia. If you think the information provided here is false, then by all means show me the evidence. But simply dismissing Wikipedia out of hand like that is pretty unfair to all the knowledgeable people who put hard work into the site. I think it's also unfair to Jill who probably spent a good deal of time writing this article for us.
And to everyone, I actually love my county, but I think it is important to know about your country, particularly if you live in a democracy.
There are indeed plenty of negative historical facts about plenty of other countries, but it's American History Month, so those things will just have to wait.
Like now, NY was heavily Democratic, but at that time D=white supremacist. He was playing politics with this letter, but often in other places called for the end of slavery. And don't forget Abe's second inaugural address.
The Civil War was certainly about slavery for the Confederacy, and there is record of whites and blacks from every Conf. state except SC fighting for the Union side.
Yes, they called themselves "progressives" and their ranks included H.G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other leftist icons. They were for the most part committed socialists and fascists. The people that resisted them called themselves "conservatives" and "libertarians". Of course, that's another "little known fact" about American history.
I'm always puzzled by those who, in their saner moments, would celebrate truth over falsehood, evidence based history over myths that form the shared narrative of a people. And yet, when given access to historical accuracy, quickly dismiss it's significance and seek to neutralize its impact with claims that everyone does it, others have done worse, America ought not be picked on, and the reminder that America is about much much more. Of course, the worse charge is that those who do the exposing are un-American or worse still, are America's enemies. I notice that the author of today's expose has already assured us that she loves her country.
Any group of people will produce a legacy of conflict and contradiction and it's really irrelevant what else the groups does or is about. If history is, in part, about constructing an evidence-based record of happenings and events, then all of the corrections supplied in this neatorama posting are important and important for people to know.
But in another sense, there's an additional contribution to debunking myths and legends. If a group - say, the U.S. - also has a record of ideals and values, it's important that the country (and it's state) be held accountable to it's own standards. This is where a record of genocide, enslavement, oppression, or exploitation come to have an even greater significance. It's one thing to find a country at fault for the wrongs its done but it's another for those wrongs to violate that country's own high standards.
Gun control and Planned Parenthood
...Largely because of diseases the native population picked up from the Europeans, for which they lacked immunity. Columbus could be cruel, granted, but he didn't slaughter hundreds of thousands of people.
The dude would fearlessly charge on horseback in front of his own front lines during battle, bullets whizzing by him, between the two forces, to rally his troops.
I assure you that I've read extensively on the eugenics movement and stand by everything that I've said. If anyone "needs to learn a bit more history", it's you. It's interesting how every sin of the left becomes a sin of America generally, while every sin of the right remains just that, a sin of the right. The Dixiecrats were southern populists most whom were "New Dealers" supporting every part of FDR's massive expansion of the government. The real "southern strategy" was the multi-generational alliance between northern progressives, who had no problem with racism, and southern populists. In fact, the early labor movement was racist to the core and routinely faulted capitalists/conservatives for not caring what color the workers in their factories were. Read up.
If a group - say, the U.S. - also has a record of ideals and values, it's important that the country (and it's state) be held accountable to it's own standards.
How convenient for the Stalin's, Mao's, Hitler's and Pol Pot's of the world. And, lacking all standards, for the left in general. Of course, your view has - from your perspective - the benefit of lowering the bar for socialism generally and avoids embarrassing comparisons to the obvious successes that America has achieved. Here's a radical thought for you, standards and ideals are what people and societies strive to live up to. And their true measure is how high they set those standards and how hard they strive to live up to them.
This tactic is more a projection of current stupidity into the distant past. But worse, it fails to understand that white racism spanned the ideological spectrum. Not many from the period around the turn of the 20th century through to the Great Depression come out unblemished by racism. This is as true for science (natural and social) as it is for art or politics, labor unions as well as business.
There is a difference, however, as the struggle to see racism, as opposed to race, occurred within the ranks of various left-leaning groups, from American communists to mainline Democrats. To be sure there were some like W.E.B. DuBois who left the U.S. disgusted at the compromised efforts of liberals. And liberals weren't necessarily the best friend of the civil rights movement. But all through this, American conservatives could only alternate between the thuggery of bullies and the whining of those self-satisfied in their white privilege.
Fifty years ago William F. Buckley could write about the virtues of segregation in ways that might find hearty endorsement by more convinced and card carrying white supremacists. Conservatives never apologized. People like Strom Thurmond simply mutated into a less odorous being. It probably says more about the weaknesses of liberals that creeps like Buckley and Thurmond were permitted to remain influential without repentance.
I'm not sure whether it's a measure of the depth of ignorance or the extent of dishonesty among conservatives that they can say with a straight face, liberal fascism. It's modern, morons. There's plenty of blame to go around.
What? Where did you get that from? A bady translated cereal box?
Columbus is not celebrated as a hero. He's celebrated as a navigator and explorer. And ''all-time American'' is just super silly. He's not an ''American'' hero... He wasn't American. Americans did not exist in his day.
WHAT is WRONG with this website??? All the anti-USA cr*p on here is getting really tired.
Again.
I already gave up reading this site before because of all the USA-bashing and pro-Obama garbage.
Came back to see what was up, seemed like you'd got over some of your need to preach. Guess I was wrong.
Adios.
My goodness, history is so very incredible and complex, it can't just be broken down into just two sides!
I'm not surprised. Two different pastures, with each side arguing over which side is greener. It's just all the same F'ing grass.
Heh.
It's clear you're the one who doesn't know their history. "Liberals" of the early 20th century have deeply embarassing racist and controlling history. Just read about FDR's attitudes toward "sub-standard" jobs in the New Deal, when they purposefully tried to drive minorites and women out of jobs. Trying to cover this up with platitudes and changing the subject is silly.
Further, this article reads more like a smear job than actual history. The revelations about Columbus are tired and pointless. As already mentioned, he's celebrated (rightly) as an explorer, and really has only a tenuous connection to the US.
Washington was the first president. Anyone should know that the United States didn't exist until the Constitution was ratified.
Not seeing the forest for the trees is the kindest possible description of this take on the Civil War, and WWII. Good to know that you consider the invasion of Iraq to be about it's technical violations of the cease fire agreement from the original gulf war. Oh, wait...
While these do contain some facts, they're torturiously distorted to acheive some kind of view. I think calling it "america-bashing" is way overdramatic, but what's the point? To wow people with sort-of-not-really revelations? Link bait?
I'll quote from the article just so you'll understand, since you didn't get it the first time "The first permanent colony in modern day America was actually located in St. Augustine, Florida and was set up by the Spanish in 1565."
Here's something everyone should remember: VIRTUALLY EVERY VIOLENT EMPIRE IN WORLD HISTORY HAS CLAIMED THEY WERE ACTING FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE THEY INVADED.
It's worthwhile reading news stories from the time Napoleon invaded Egypt around 1800 to when America invaded Iraq in 2003 back to back. They are damned similar. "They are a threat to us, they are ruled by cruel tyrants, but we will go in and share our good western culture with them."
America is not uniquely bad. There have been many bad empires in history. Life for people who live inside America is not so bad, at least if you're middle class or above, and don't get caught up in our vast criminal justice system, which cages more people than China does.
But the effects on people around the world who feel America's wrath are miserable. We have our troops in 140 countries, do you assume the people want us there? Birth defect rates are up from 3% to 80% in the Fallujah hospital, due to our "perfectly safe" uranium munitions...how's that freedom taste now, with 4 of 5 babies being born mangled?
Those who are generally remembered as the best presidents were generally the most awful. Lincoln was a wannabe dictator who didn't give a shit about black people except as political pawns, and ended slavery in the most destructive, stupid, cruel, and expensive way imaginable. FDR's economic policies dragged out the depression for more than a decade, and he won the election in 1940 on a platform of keeping us out of the war, while at the same time deliberately provoking the Japanese. Wilson's entering of the fratricidal WWI arguably led to both the Soviets and Hitler, etc- not to mention the income tax, which was proposed as a short term war tax they forgot to ever repeal, or the incredibly damaging federal reserve. Eisenhower and JFK were the last decent presidents.
The most deadly weapon of the state is the profound evil of mandatory public education, shoving fundamental lies about history and how society is run down children's throats before they can learn to think. So, thank you for doing your part to reverse this.
I agree that it's important to learn the "good, bad and ugly" about history -- otherwise, how would it ever teach us anything about ourselves, which is what the study of history purports to do?
But if you're going to introduce refutuations of a particular perception of history, you've got to be sure your grounding is solid enough to withstand counter-refutations.
So I agree with commenters who criticize the unmediated references to Wikipedia as a source. I use Wikipedia all the time, and I refer my students to it too, ***but with this caution***:
The argument that Wikipedia contains useful and often accurate material isn't convincing: as with any encyclopedia, Wikipedia should be used as a starting point ONLY and should ALWAYS be cross-referenced (encyclopedias can be biased too -- even the vaunted Britannica!).
It's more responsible to dig further into the sources that Wikipedia lists for its own material and make reference to those that are reliable.
I'm sorry, Jill, but I had to snort when you rebutted the criticism by saying, "Wikipedia was simply an easy place to link readers to for additional information since I can't remember where I learned everything I read or watched." That's just sloppy. If my students told me that, I'd send them BACK to Wikipedia to show me where their "authoritative information" was coming from and evaluate its reliability before trying to pass it off as fact.
Otherwise, thanks for some interesting reading. :) Some of you might enjoy the book "Lies My Teacher Told Me."
1) paranoia - efforts like myth busting American history is an attack on the U.S.
2) projection onto opponents the bad faith of one’s own group (history is about positive accomplishments, i.e. propaganda).
3) use of techniques to neutralize guilt and responsibility (the harm wasn’t too bad, they had it coming, others have done it too, it was done for higher purposes).
4) conflate historical actors, ideas, and events (liberals are progressives are fascists are socialists are atheists are communists are alien satanic shapeshifters).
5) myth busting is dismissed as no big deal, as if it were common knowledge – this generally occurs after spells of paranoia and projection fail.
5) clam that many, if not most, of the wrongs done in history, actually were the responsibility of liberals, progressives, and the left.
It's the last one that adds some sparkle to the idiocy.
It's not a far stretch to claim that many turn of the century social reformers accepted the tenets and maybe the goals of the eugenics movement. Progressives were also not above the prevailing natavistic antagonisms directed a immigrants. But it wasn't political ideology so much as an uncritical acceptance of the science of the day. Progressives could stand by and accept the Plessy decision because science could advance an argument of why segregation was appropriate. Similarly, anxieties about miscegenation and inferior races, the endorsement of sterilization for defective groups, and support for immigration reform, were firmly rooted in the racial science of the day, the taxonomical studies in anthropology and biology and the hereditarian theories of intelligence and behavior. But eugenics and its more macro-oriented rival, social Darwinism, became popular across the political spectrum because they were expressions of modern science. It’s inaccurate to conflate eugenics and progressivism. This isn’t dodging the moral irresponsibility of the left but identifying one the main institutional foundations for the so-called ‘sins’ of the early 20th century: “faith” in science and progress.
Nonetheless, there were many who didn’t need no stinking justification in science for their race hatred or class antagonisms. These were (right-leaning and left-leaning) populists who took their natavism and agrian faith as organizing cornerstones. This populism wasn’t restricted to the south or to Democrats. And it was more than populists (and Democrats). These were also an older middle class of merchants and craft skill who were being squeezed out by bourgeoning corporate business and a mass of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in mills and mines. These were also rock-ribbed Protestants who felt under assault from Catholic immigrant groups. They targeted their opposition to Jews, Catholics, labor agitators, European and Chinese immigrants and blacks, but also urban life, secular thought, and a cosmopolitan ethos.
Try as the Beck-Goldberg variations to impugn the integrity of social reformers like Margaret Sanger or Jane Addams, their claims betray an familiar kind of anti-intellectualism. Margaret Sanger was no eugenicist. Charles Davenport was no progressive. Jane Addams might pursue efforts to ‘Americanize’ immigrants. Madison Grant, not unlike the Pat Buchanans out there today, would just as easily wish to euthanize immigrants.
It wasn’t science or progressivism that culminated in the 1898 racist coup in Wilmington, NC. It wasn’t a liberal elite that led the mobs in 1921 Tulsa who expunged its black population in a mass frenzy of white violence. It wasn’t good government reformers that oversaw the race riots in Chicago in 1919. Those weren’t salt of the earth socialists or communists who celebrated the ritual of violence in Jim Crow lynching.
The problem with all of this is that the so-called ‘sins’ of the right were very much part of the ‘sins’ of the age as well as indicting a lot of what was regarded as mainstream American culture and heritage.
Columbus may have been an explorer (or hustler) but he was a hero to Americans and Italian-Americans. Columbus remains an official holiday.
White unions were a main avenue channeling white racism. White businesses, sadly, did little better, using blacks and immigrants to gain leverage over white workers. I think we need to remind ourselves of who was responsible for employment discrimination, housing discrimination, or school discrimination.
In the runup to the passage of social security, it was southern Democrats channeling a decidedly non-leftists sentiment, that compelled final passage to exclude from social security coverage farm workers and domestics. Both of those occupations were disproportionately held by blacks.
I mentioned that one way to set the context for debunking American historical myths, legends, or history is set the historical record alongside the values and ideals a culture holds up for itself. The U.S. can be held accountable for its racist past precisely because it became a society organized around egalitarian ideals. Nitwits like the anti-Che seem to think this excuses the mass killers of the world. Actually, it makes their crimes (not sins) worse.
Our anti-Che interlocutor suggest a better context: it’s how high we set the bar and how hard we work to achieve it. Alas, in that light, there are some real contradictions around America’s accomplishments. It’s debatable how hard we’ve worked.
i thought maybe someone would actually have an interesting historical tidbit i could read about, but nooooo. i don't know why i even click on the comments anymore.
but to answer the question: my favorite snippet of lesser known history:
upper michigan produced more wealth from copper than all that money that was made from the california gold rush.
Or can you....
"The main things that led the Civil War were economic issues and slavery was only a part of these problems. When the economic tensions got too hot, the South fought for its independence and the North fought to preserve the Union. Most Northerners didn’t care about slavery all that much and many Southerners simply couldn’t afford to own slaves."
Slavery was THE reason the South seceded. (Agreed that the Union didn't fight back for the benefit of the slaves.) Have a look at the articles of secession for the four states that published them: It's all about slavery. Good summaries include:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/07/AR2011010703178.html
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/04/commemorating-confederate-history-month.html
It doesn't matter that most white Southerners didn't own slaves: They still did not want the slaves all around them to be free, to be their co-workers and neighbors and equals.
"The entire speech was merely a way to help de-motivate blacks who were fighting for the South so the North could get an advantage."
There were NO blacks fighting for the South. That is a myth created at the time by some Northern leaders in an attempt to motivate Northern blacks to sign up, and more recently by neo-Confederates to convince people that the Confederacy wasn't racist (it was).
An excellent post on this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/black-confederates-cont/65488/
Please do a little bit more checking next time! Thanks.
If I know that one "fact" to be a lie, what is left to be believed?