But making the claim they are not serious because they don’t follow the consensus view is the rhetorical trick to dismiss a position rather then engage it. This seems doubly true if one takes the view that consensus is not definitionally truth. I don’t get why you are taking such exception to that.
Similarly, rejecting Wilson’s comment out of hand because he was racist seems like killing messengers rather than messages (and a bit of an ad hominem attack more than anything else). Lincoln and a lot of the North was racists. Lincoln specifically said he was not going to war over slavery, why make that claim if the Civil War was all about slavery?
Yes, slavery is hard to separate from the whole history but if slavery was really what the North-South conflict was “all about” then you should be able to directly tie the Tariffs of Abomination in the 1830s to the issue of slavery. Can you?
It’s fair to say that slavery was an issue that was related to and impossible/very difficult to separate from the other sources of North-South conflict but I don’t think one gets to “it was all about slavery”. If that is the case then I think one should be able to model a world where slavery didn’t exists but all the other sources of conflict and disagreement in the political structure equilibrium and the political economic equilibrium and the social/cultural equilibrium would not have still resulted in a Civil War occurring. I am not sure that case can be made.
If such a case cannot be made then “all about slavery” is a rather questionable claim.
But making the claim they are not serious because they don’t follow the consensus view is the rhetorical trick to dismiss a position rather then engage it. This seems doubly true if one takes the view that consensus is not definitionally truth. I don’t get why you are taking such exception to that.
Similarly, rejecting Wilson’s comment out of hand because he was racist seems like killing messengers rather than messages (and a bit of an ad hominem attack more than anything else). Lincoln and a lot of the North was racists. Lincoln specifically said he was not going to war over slavery, why make that claim if the Civil War was all about slavery?
Yes, slavery is hard to separate from the whole history but if slavery was really what the North-South conflict was “all about” then you should be able to directly tie the Tariffs of Abomination in the 1830s to the issue of slavery. Can you?
It’s fair to say that slavery was an issue that was related to and impossible/very difficult to separate from the other sources of North-South conflict but I don’t think one gets to “it was all about slavery”. If that is the case then I think one should be able to model a world where slavery didn’t exists but all the other sources of conflict and disagreement in the political structure equilibrium and the political economic equilibrium and the social/cultural equilibrium would not have still resulted in a Civil War occurring. I am not sure that case can be made.
If such a case cannot be made then “all about slavery” is a rather questionable claim.