Posted on 04/10/2010 6:38:26 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Truth is the first casualty of war. If, by “neo-confederate” you mean States Rights Constitutionalists then you cannot call them liars. For we are indeed in conflict over the same age old Constitutional issues with Obamacare and many other federal power grabs. We believe true Constitutional power resides with the people in the various State foremost. That is, those not enumerated specifically to the Federal government. Certainly not this usurper’s Obama-nation of statist totalitarian corporatists directing every facet of our lives.
Oh, I think he does. We lost our nation quite a while ago, on this commemorative date discussed in the thread and the subsequent progressive erosion of personal liberty.
The reign of terror that got my kinsman Jake Bird murdered by Confederates in Northwest Georgia. The reign of terror that led my GG grandfather in Catoosa County to escape hanging by heading for the hills. The reign of terror that extorted money from one Unionist ancestor in Bradley County Tennessee and persecuted another there because he would not set aside preaching the Gospel of Christ for preaching the Gospel of the Confederacy. And my family got lucky compared to many Unionist clans in the South. I'm thinking about elderly Levi Trewhitt from Cleveland Tennessee who was thrown in rebel dundgeon without trial to rot to death (makes Lincoln's habeas corpus actions look light as feather) I think of Robert Carter of Bradley County who had his eyeballs gouged out of him before being murdered by Confederate trash riding in the wake of a raid by Wheeler. I think of Presley Yates of Catoosa County who was shot in the head by a typical Confederate coward for having the courage to vote against secession in Georgia;s secession convention. I know Sherman's army did not always behave perfectly and It is sad that your family's house was burned down, but I can't work up much outrage over that when the rebs themselves were turning the South into a despotism that could elicit admiration from Stalin.
In the last post when I talked about Confederate trash and cowards, I was not talking about the brave rebel soldiers, but the criminals who stayed at home and ran things in the name of Jefferson Davis. I don’t subscribe to Roland Martin’s broad slander of CSA soldiers.
In our area the starvation was quite real, and very effective and quick. Stalin would have been proud.The post war reality of scalawags, carpetbaggers and general hoodlums had its effect also, and is what lasts in memory. Quantrill, Bloody Bill, and many others of BOTH sides found an excuse for sadistic murder and riot and profit in the chaos. I condone none of it, but am quite proud of my kinsman’s effective response against Sherman’s bummer’s and deserters. There was exactly one Union officer of honor in the whole left wing of the invasion, and he spared my ggg grandfather’s homeplace, because my ggg grandma came on the porch wearing his Masonic apron.
And I have no problem with any of what you describe when applied to the current position we find ourselves in.
Nevertheless, to claim that there would have been a civil war in America in the 19th century if there was no slavery in the South is to be either deliberately lying or woefully uninformed. To confuse the issue by referencing statements which point to Union or Lincoln’s general actual or apparent apathy over the subject, or “the average confederate soldier did not own slaves” ignores this salient fact - a fact that the secession ambassadors themselves pointed to repeatedly when discussing the need for secession.
I’m not challenging any position about the war other than the lie that it was not about slavery.
Appreciate your clarification. I should say that I have never posted that there would have been a war anyway, absent slavery. On the contrary, I have stated that slavery was one part of the entire package of targeted power grabbing by northern oligarchs. In what has bordered on a Marx-Engels type historical analysis of labor and commercial interests of the time, this has been discussed in far more scholarly works than my opinion: the selective export and import tariffs against Southern states, lower representation from Southern states such that they did not have the votes to defeat the tariffs, the actual purpose of the tariffs vs. the English empire’s expansion into Raj India sourcing Southern cotton at higher profit to Southern growers to the growing mechanized English/Indian textile industry, the issue of Westward expansion and the potential for those future states (with even sparser population and much greater natural resource wealth)to be advantaged again over northern interests by slave labor if the question wasn’t “decided” soon, the advent of Southern industrialization (the cotton gin, John Gorrie’s ice/refrigeration machine, advances in soil management that pre-date by over 60 years US soil and water “invention” , etc.)obviating and lessening the need for slave labor and the resultant ethnic upheaval and greater Southern economic power.
It is my view, and the view of many Southrons, that the entire underlying basis of the war was the economic pressures placed on the north by all of these intertwined factors, of which slavery was but one part. From a Constitutional standpoint, the South concluded that the best option was to secede and they also determined they had the legal right to do so, though many tried for quite a while to prevent it and resolve the issues. No part of the current Constitution prohibits secession, and THAT subject was not decided (New England, incidentally nearly seceded during the War of 1812 to join Canada) in the war. Slavery was not decided until an Amendment. The northern oligarchs, springing from a particular segment of powerful post- colonial interests, had the financial means and the economic need to press these issues. Within the leadership in high places there was not the slightest interest in the dispensation of slaves, or for that matter of the poor recent immigrants who came to the north and were pressed into the Union army as cannon fodder, with those surviving then coming home to misery of factory work and indentured company town labor (another kind of slavery not discussed by most scholars as this involved Europeans of all backgrounds). My point has been consistently to observe that the winners of this war got land, seized title, stole property and imposed laws that would make Stalin smile. All in the name of the discovered “moral imperative” that was provided by abolitionists as useful tools of the oligarchs as modern day Moses. A moral imperative that continues to this day in the selective elitist history that serves the needs of the descendents of a Constitutional travesty. And so, today we once again face tyrants who tell us we must adhere to central government over our sovereign state’s wishes— all in the name of a greater “good” that exists for public relations purposes.
There has been a generalization that northerners love blacks as a race (and then despise them as individuals amongst them, especially as they flooded north post war)and Southerners love blacks as individuals and despise them as a race, because of the inherent tragedy and memory of the loss of their society. The duplicity of the northern view continues to this day and has expanded to the politically correct “groups” we see today and the resultant socialism. The Southern view has been distorted by race-baiting liberals who generalize in this way, and yet at their very heart, could care less for the outcome over the “purity” of their own anointed goodness. Thomas Sowell has written on this.
For further clarity, those who cherish our Southern heritage, and who have a much wider knowledge of causality and political outcomes of the war (ie. knowledge that exceeds the self-serving academic selective history as taught by the elitist schools of the northern industrialist oligarchs)have not only the resources of written family records (of the “propertied” classes and other narratives) but also many generations of written historical record of the end results sought by the oligarchs. It is not confusing to the issue to realize and document the stated opinions of vast segments of Northern society and their complete ambivalence to slavery. These segments would fight to save the Union, but assuredly NOT to “free the slaves”- save the Union for the wider plans for domination of the developing country. There is a certain appeal to being the moral “winner” of these kinds of arguments vs. the living factual history that resulted- after all it is so much better to feel good about one’s self even as selective history is perpetuated.
It is particularly annoying to true Southerners as this flies in the face of reality even as it shows that once again the “liberal progressives” are driving our freedoms and our Constitution away, and that for us secession again becomes a definite potential answer to tyranny guaranteed by our Constitution
Tomorrow is Tax Day.
‘nuff said.
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