Posted on 08/28/2013 8:03:18 PM PDT by NKP_Vet
Sorry, but "Hokum" is what pro-Confederates tell each other, and try to shove down the throats of anybody else who'll listen.
The fact is that up until they began declaring secession in late 1860, the "Slave Power" used the Federal Government in every way possible to enforce and buttress slavery laws even in non-slave states.
So it was the Slave Power which oppressed the nation.
Along with declaring secession, the Slave Power immediately began to provoke, start and formally declare war on the United States -- what could possibly be more oppressive that starting a war on your fellow countrymen?
And while we're at it, the allegedly "conservative South" was first in line to support every liberal-progressive Federal Government expansion for over 50 years -- from it's beginning with Southerner President Woodrow Wilson (1912) all the way up to the presidential election of 1964 -- Johnson versus Goldwater.
Then and only then did the "Solid South" really begin to think more conservatively.
And even then, all southern states voted for Peanut Carter in 1976 and most even for Zippers Clinton both times.
Only in recent years has the "Solid South" become solidly conservative.
For that they deserve huge credit and sincere thanks.
But please, let's not pretend that somehow Southerners were always opposed to the expansion of Federal powers.
The truth is: when it supported themselves, they loved more Big Government.
Is it not the fight against Democrats and their history of evil that we gave in common? The Democrat Party that has migrated North, South, East and West, has had and still has this evil slavery mentality which it has not turned away from before the Civil War; and has changed for the worse - it is worse now than before. We would do better to remind people of the Democrat slaver Party’s history of not only slavery, but of their racism, their KKK, their Progressive to socialists, communism, their hatred for god and Bible, their holocaust of babies, etc. They may now claim that they abhor the likes of the slavery of old, but in reality they just use different methods for the same means; some more ruthless then that of the 1800’s. The Democrat slaver Party as a whole is evil and indefensible, the whole being how they were and how they are (worse) today. Why would anyone want to defend the Democrat slavers of then and now?
I meant God with a capital G.
Just so we're clear, in my life I've lived in five Southern states (Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Missouri and Texas) three Western states (Oklahoma, New Mexico and California) plus two Northern states (New York and Pennsylvania, where I live now).
In the army I was stationed in Germany.
I have traveled on business and vacation in every state except Alaska (sorry Sarah), and have relatives in every part of the country.
So I have no "bias" against anybody.
My acute "bias" is against politically motivated Big Lies, of which there seem to be a large number perpetrated in FR CW threads.
ejonesie22: "The real question will be, while you guys up north are busy still trying to write the history of 150 years ago to your favor..."
We're not trying to rewrite anything.
We're hoping to prevent pro-Confederates from telling lies about their past.
ejonesie22: "...are you going to stay so blind, so dedicated to being 'right' that you will let the nation fail because you don't want to be equated with some 'pro confederates'..."
FRiend, there is no way in h*ck Northerners are going to buy into a heaping pile of pro-Confederate mythology.
It just ain't going to happen, not now, not ever.
So give it up.
But as soon as you begin dedicating yourselves to the real truth of history, as soon as you confess that Southerners have advanced Big Government as much as anybody else, then, then, then we can all agree that things today are totally out of control and need serious remediation.
Then we'll be allies and FRiends, then we can let bye-gones be bye-gones, and I'll buy the first round of beer... ;-)
Thanks, you make excellent points.
Baloney. Leftists are entrenched in every corner of the country. Believing that is a cop-out and failure to accept responsibility for the problems in your own section. I participate on discussion sites that are hosted in various parts of the country including several in southern states. I read the opinions of people - "natives" and otherwise. It is blindly, naively foolish to blame all your troubles on carpetbaggers. Do you believe in the boogieman too?
Pure, no but old American values seem to be holding faster here than elsewhere this day and age.
The simple truth is that if you (editorial you) drive 30 minutes outside of virtually ANY city in ANY of the 50 United States you will find that same proclivity toward a more wholesome culture. ANY state. The south has no corner on the market - although I agree that they do hold those values to a greater degree per capita.
ME: “Now that IS ironic - and sad as well.”
You: Why is it sad, are you a fan of Government over reach?
No. What's sad is that otherwise decent and honorable people would go insane and attempt to blow up the world because they're not getting their way. Fortunately they are few and far in between.
I don’t think I recommended blowing up the world. However I would recommend defending what is right.
And if you note I did not blame our troubles on carpetbaggers, we have our own Utopian types. But western and northern libs empower them...
“You keep trotting out that tired old line like as if it had some sort of relevance or cleverness to it. It doesn’t. That’s known as a non sequitur.”
I’m aware that you don’t like that “tired old line” because you haven’t come up with a way to deal with it.
Feel free to return to your usual habit of scatological insults.
I already dealt with it fool.
It's an inextricable part of who they are...
“I already dealt with it fool.”
Somebody squeezing your head, rocky? Some of what popped out ended up in your post.
Of course you haven’t “dealt with it” in any other manner than your usual name calling.
So I’ll make the problem real simple for you. I’ll start with your premise that slave owning is evil.
Slave owners = Evil
Founders = Slave owners
A=B
C=A
therefore C=....
In math class tomorrow, rocky, you can ask your teacher to explain to you the Transitive Property of Equality and he can tell you what C equals in the example above.
Even television shows manage to throw in a back handed slap in every other episode.
I'd give examples, but I'm sicker than a dog right ow, and can't find my notebook (yes, I actually keep/kept a notebook by my chair for things like this)
Thanks - I saw previews for that one and it looked like something pelham would like so I never wasted my time watching it.
“So, IMO, it is not possible to say that slavery is a sin per the Bible.”
That’s really all that I was arguing. The modern conceit is that slavery is an obvious evil and a sin.
But that view is a modern conceit, nothing more than moral posturing that ignores the moral world of the past. The moral world of the Founders had a greater familiarity with the Bible than most people possess today.
Deuteronomy was the work most cited by the American founders according to Bernard Bailyn in his ‘The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution’. They certainly knew what the Bible had to say, or failed to say, on the issue of slavery. Moderns assume that it contains a clear denunciation of the practice until they are challenged to produce one.
The Founders would also have been familiar with Aristotle’s defense of slavery, which while it wouldn’t carry the moral weight of the Bible would have carried some intellectual regard.
“But then if we take all parts of the Bible literally we can’t wear clothes of blended fibers or eat lobster, and we must not suffer a witch to live.”
I think that you’ll find mentioned in the New Testament that the dietary laws in particular were no longer in effect. But that’s a whole other discussion.
Well, IMO the issue is not that the Bible was right and we are wrong today.
That is perhaps the most difficult issue for me to reconcile with the Bible being the word of God.
Slavery was such an integral part of almost every human society that not one, to my knowledge, ever came up with the theory that slavery was always a moral wrong. Only western civ.
“We would do better to remind people of the Democrat slaver Party’s history of not only slavery, but of their racism, their KKK, their Progressive to socialists, communism, their hatred for god and Bible, their holocaust of babies, etc. “
Good grief.. you really are a product of the public education system, aren’t you?
The party that first had a close connection with radicals and socialist Revolutionaries was in fact the Republican Party. You need to learn who the ‘48ers were... Carl Schurz, Franz Sigel, among others. The Republicans attracted all sorts of interesting support at the time; be sure to look for the Corresponding Secretary for Germany signing this letter:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
I try look at slavery from the standpoint of the slaveholders. These were people who had become addicted to slavery. Often, their families had for generations been supported by the labor they stole from their slaves. They became trapped in a culture of dependency and that's why we hear the explanation that they "knew no other way of life." From the nursery, they were raised and cared for by slaves.
Slavery was a parasitic relationship. The slaveholders became totally dependent upon their slaves for economic and personal support. Many of the slaveholders talked about the need to end slavery, but most of them could not conceive of how they might make their own way in the world without the support of their slaves. So, naturally, they got lazy and did nothing. Then, when they felt that their parasitic lifestyle was being threatened by talk of abolition, they very desperately tried to declare a "secession" so that they could continue to use the machinery of their State governments to protect their indolent lifestyles. The slaveholders felt trapped. One need only read the first paragraphs of Mississippi's Declaration of Secession to sense the level of slaveholder desperation. They felt that they had no other choice, no option but "secession."
Most Southerners now are strongly opposed to slavery. Most now are very grateful that Lincoln and the United States freed the slaves and many now are also very grateful that Lincoln and the United States freed the slaveholders from their parasitic addiction to slavery. Granted, some of the slaveholders couldn't make it on their own and their lives could not be reconstructed. However, most regained their self-respect and moved on. In fact, the South today is providing an example of how this country might best go forward economically.
Is it possible that the Civil War was really just a case of very tough love - harsh, but necessary, for our country's development?
As usual, Lincoln addressed this issue best.
Before proceeding, let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses north and south. ..
When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.
However, what is always and forever evil is declaring evil to be a positive good, much less launching a vicious war to protect an evil institution. I do not include all southerners in this group, not even southerners of the time. But I do that small minority of southerners who worked for and plotted to bring about secession, the Fire-Eaters.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.
Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw and as dry grass sinks down in the flames, so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore the Lord’s anger burns against his people; his hand is raised and he strikes them down. The mountains shake, and the dead bodies are like refuse in the street.
Lincoln also addressed this issue best.
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
You’re right of course but I take a certain amusement by scatological insults who idiotically attempt to dance between the rhetorical raindrops on the issue.
;’)
At the time of the Declaration of Independence, our Founders believed that slavery had been imposed on America by Britain, and that was one item in Jefferson's original list of grievances against the king.
When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, slavery was legal in all 13 colonies.
Even by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 only Vermont and Massachusetts had fully abolished slavery, while Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island began gradually phasing it out.
Slavery in Pennsylvania, for example, did not fully end until 1847.
At same time that some northern states began to slowly abolish slavery, southern Founders like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison all acknowledged slavery was wrong and should be eventually abolished.
Had those views prevailed in the South, there would certainly be no Civil War, and our whole national conversation today would have been much different.
But between the time of Thomas Jefferson and, say, Jefferson Davis, there was a major change in attitude in the South, caused by economic realities and a pro-slavery ideology developed to justify them.
So, where Thomas Jefferson saw slavery as an evil to be abolished, eventually, Jefferson Davis saw it as a positive good to be defended with lives of hundreds of thousands of fellow Southerners.
That's the difference.
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