Posted on 02/25/2007 7:43:34 AM PST by OrioleFan
Yes they were. Just ask the Supreme Court.
Politically packed courts handing down partisan rulings later on said they were; but in 1861 the organic law and Constitution of the United States absolutely did not prohibit a State's resuming sovereignty and leaving the Union.
So you say. But I've read the Constitution and I can't find the part that says you are the ultimate authority on what is Constitutional and what is not. So blather all you want about 'politically packed courts handing down partisan rulings' (though I notice you have no problem with packed courts handing down partisan rulings that you agree with, like Scott v Sanford), the fact is that unilateral secession as practiced by the Southern states was illegal, is illegal, and will remain illegal unless the Constitution is amended or the ruling is overturned.
Assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.
Ah life in Dixie before the invention of NASCAR.
And you all have run off your share, too. Apparently stand watie is bragging he can have people banned at will. Put in a word with him and I might be history, too.
Not at all adult like "Marxian-McPhersonian-Clintonista" was it? </sarcasm>
You are dead wrong. Deliberately, tenaciously wrong, because so many Yankee myths depend on the one essential lie.
Good luck persuading a candid world.
Bad company, but there you are.
Or is it you who are wrong?
Good luck persuading a candid world.
Or do you mean the Southron world? I know that I'll never persuade you because as we all know, you can tell a Southron supporter but you can't tell them much.
I'm mildly surprised that you didn't toss in the Jesuits again. Down on Catholics, are you?
No.
Have you whistled up an Admin Mod yet? Got a hot nuke button on standby for me?
Of course not, I leave that to your side. Besides, if you got tossed then what would I do for entertainment? Getting a rise out of stand watie is too easy.
The Confederacy did establish a 15% tariff on imports, including those from the United States. While this may have seemed like a significant drop from the United States tariffs at the time, the scope of products the Confederacy taxed as imports had significantly widened. Most of those durable goods were not produced in the South.
The Confederacy was no friend to the average Southerner.
No need to wonder at all. In May 1861 the confederate congress passed a tariff that was protectionist in nature in that it placed 25% duties on tobacco produces, 15% tariffs on molasses and suger, and lesser tariffs on other items.
I doubt Adam Smith would agree with your stereotype, which implies a few big winners and many more losers. Reducing the cost of transportation was a universally good thing for both the business types,the people of the State, and the rest of the nation.
Contrast that with the poor inland Southerner who after Secession was suddenly faced with a big increase in his families cost of living due to new tariffs on durable goods from exotic places like...Ohio & Indiana.
But Phil Sheridan and Uncle Billy were. What a bromide. Too much of anything will kill you -- including your doe-eyed hero-worship, cause-worship, and marble-statue syndrome. Remember, the Romans made statues to Caligula and Nero, too.
Of course he would -- I was channeling him!
He was the man who usefully warned his readers about businessmen's conspiracies against the public, so famously.
The usefulness of the Erie Canal to anyone other than New York businessmen was a serendipitous felicity unintended by the authors of the work.
As if reb fans don't worship at the feet of the glorified losers Lee and Stonewall Jackson. I think there's even shrines to the horses of Lee and Jackson.
Uh, no. Try "Adam Smithist."
Things changed after the Civil War with the rise of railroads and corporate industry, but when industry and commerce were still on a smaller scale and less concentrated, corruption and conspiring were most common where government entered the picture.
You haven't contradicted me. I don't see the point about bringing in the (seemingly inevitable) involvement of government in corruption, but the profit motive in business combinations has never needed a governmental spur.
Northerners had so many avenues for commercial or industrial employment that they were less inclined to conspire for foreign possessions than Southern slave owners
This is polemical equivocation, argumentum ex "so's your old man." It does nothing to gainsay my original point, which was actually Adam Smith's.
I pointed out that the weight of business combinations, abetted by government patronage (or vice versa) changed the nature of American society and made it less free.
To argue that something else might have been worse, does not confute me; but instead, it might be more honest if you simply said, "I don't care that we are less free -- I like the benefits! Such as, my section of the country's foot on the neck on your section of the country's." (Which is a variant of Jim Crow, by the way -- chump change for losers buys the pot for Mr. Big, again.)
You get an A for the HTML, but a low grade on your choices of what color to put where.
My point is, the reasons for secession were a lot more varied than people who quote just the Mississippi Declaration and present it as stereotypical would like us to believe. I could have done the same with Robert Rhett's hortatory composition, or with Toombs's speech to the Georgians. The point is, to say "it was about slavery" is to utter a political half-truth, a kind of lie in service of a greater lie.
The greater lie is that Southerners wear a Mark of Cain, and that secession and the Confederacy were illegitimate because they served slavery. They served the People; to say, argue, or merely imply that they were meant to serve slavery alone is a blood libel on the South and so many valiant dead.
LG, this "it was all, all about slavery" is a straw man, "an argument or opponent set up so as to be easily refuted or defeated." Few historians would say that slavery was the only reason for war.
No, it isn't a straw man. It's an actual argument advanced by the red-diaper historians and given the official imprimatur of the National Park Service at the direction of Bill Clinton. This is a significant politicization of ACW history, and it is therefore not a "straw man".
But slavery was the underlying cause of sectional conflict and the secession of South Carolina and the other Deep South states. In that sense, norton, it was the "root cause" of the war.
I disagree. Slavery was a "wedge issue" put forward in a much more complicated, and at the end of the day economically-driven, contest for control of the national agenda. The agenda of the triumphant faction was actually uttered by their founding member's successor in office, Herbert Hoover: "The business of America is business."
Why this particular war at that particular time? Why such violent conflicts between North and South in the mid 19th century? Slavery is the best answer to that question.
No, I disagree. The reason why, is because that was the first moment at which the business party was ready to take power behind a champion who could and would bring them total victory through total means. It was the moment at which their weapons were sharp, their tools of division -- the slavery issue, chief among them but not the only one -- were ready for use on the enemy, and their followers were heated to a fever pitch to go to war to destroy that enemy.
The usefulness of the slavery issue then and now was moral attainder of the enemy. That was its first, second, and third most significant political usefulness.
You're not under any moral cloud because of those "big picture" conflicts a century and a half ago.
That just isn't true. But don't believe me, apply instead for clarification to any of those dealers in moral stigma who are trying to break the "red states"/"Finkelstein box" in two by dealing in Confederate flags and redneck caricatures and dark adumbrations about "Them": Bill Clinton, Kweisi Mfume, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, Abe Foxman, Morris Dees, and the editorial staffs of The New York Times and the Washington Post.
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