VP Beast Butler?

[L Verge]

(12-27-2014 11:57 PM)Linda Anderson Wrote:  As a couple of people have told me recently that the Civil War was not fought over slavery, I decided to do a little research and found a 2011 Pew Research Center poll which found that, "There is no consensus among the public about the primary cause of the Civil War, but more (48%) say that the war was mainly about states’ rights than say it was mainly about slavery (38%)."

http://www.people-press.org/2011/04/08/c...-divisive/

I also found an excerpt in "Salon" from The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson about how the Civil War was taught in the South. It echoes Wild Bill's comment, "Actually, Daniel C, Gene C, and LincolnToddFan are correct as to the historical outlook on the Civil War and Reconstruction, that it was primarily a pro-Southern interpretation in movies and books and articles at least until the North decided finally to win the war and passed the Civil Rights laws of 1964 and 1965..."

"'I grew up in a cocoon,' Herbers says today, recalling his childhood and the version of history he absorbed. It’s an apt metaphor for what happened to any Southerner born before about 1970, and to a good many of those born since. Although the field of Southern history underwent a revolution at the university level in the 1940s and 1950s, the version ordinary Southerners knew in 1970 and even later had not changed appreciably since 1900. Perhaps 1970 sounds like a long time ago, but in educational terms it’s not: 1970 was when a lot of people who are still teaching today learned what they know, and what they’ve passed on to their students. James Loewen, a sociologist and author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” has said that when he speaks to public school educators across the country today, somewhere between 60 and 75 percent say that the Civil War was fought over the issue of states’ rights. Whether the group he’s speaking to is predominately white, predominately black, or racially diverse, the percentage stays roughly the same."

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/16/the_sout...civil_war/

There must be a kink in my brain somewhere (no comments please!), but for the life of me - no matter what path I take, it always leads back to slavery being the cause of the Civil War. To me, it's that red-hot ember that kept hiding under all the rhetoric and finally burst into flames under the guise of states' rights, extraterritoriality, economics, or whatever.

I also think that it was the driving force behind Hollywood's efforts to "recreate" this horrible time for the pure sake of making money -- not setting straight the history. I sometimes wonder what their efforts have done to race relations over the years.

Now, I'd like to pose the proverbial $64,000 question (you youngsters may have to research what that term means to us ancients): What could our forefathers have done pre-1860 to prevent the Civil War?