Posted on 08/21/2017 4:46:48 PM PDT by euram
In this you are exhibiting the same fallacy of thinking that I have seen many times over the years; The belief that most people know what you know, and see things as you see them.
No, they really don't. They may share some assumptions, but it is very unlikely that they understand as much about this topic as do you.
Anyone who has looked into causes and considerations of the Civil War is aware of the Corwin amendment.
But most people do not look into this. They join this discussion on a whim, and are surprised when people present them with something such as the "Corwin Amendment" of which they had never previously heard. It is only the regulars here on Free Republic that are familiar with the "Corwin Amendment."
I do see that you’ve modified your spin to “tacit” agreement - that’s a step in the right direction!
It is a trivial distinction between the one thing and the other. When a President says he is "not opposed", it is the equivalent of saying "I support this."
All else is sophistry. There is no "middle" position between opposing and supporting an amendment of such serious significance.
The primary difficulty is due to the fact that a false narrative has been drummed into the American people for over 150 years. Overcoming what people have been led to believe, and what they prefer to believe is no easy task.
At our age we have to ask: What do we hope to accomplish by posting or discussing history elsewhere?
I'm motivated by one historical fact: the city of Sodom could have been saved if there could have been found 10 righteous men. Just ten.
It is within reason to think our remnant can educate one percent of Americans to cling to righteous thinking.
Three million people are not going to win any national elections but it might - just might - postpone judgment for some period of time.
With three grandchildren I say it is worth the effort. Moreover, it is imperative.
I initially approached these discussions on the Civil War with the thinking that allowing the states to get away from the Central Control of the Washington DC/New York Axis would be one method of helping to survive what I perceived to be a coming storm.
Most people's response to such a suggestion was "They already tried that, and leaving isn't allowed. Besides they were evil slave owners anyway."
That's when I realized that it was imperative for me to point out that the right to independence did not depend on the morals of those seeking independence; That the Southern states, even though they were "evil slave owners" still had a right to leave a government they felt no longer represented their interests.
By pointing out that they were justified in leaving, I make a better case that mine and other states might at some future date, exercise the same right as outlined in the Declaration of Independence; The right to leave. Now that Odumbo is out and Trump is in, my worry for the future is lessened, but in the process of learning more about the events leading up to the civil war, I realized that we have been greatly misled about the accurate history of what happened.
I still think the right to independence needs to be defended, and so I persist. :)
Also the topic is interesting and I tend to be a contrarian anyway.
Yes, he does good work.
I understand.
But . . . 48 percent of our fellow countrymen recently voted for Madame Mao. That's bad.
And many in the opposing 46 percent routinely vote for the likes of Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, the woman in Alaska, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Marco Rubio, and on and on. Can you count more that five conservative U.S. Senators?
That's bad.
Sure, we want to be optimistic about the future. But 48 percent are gone; and most of 46 percent are unreliable.
We are in single digits. Trump's election was truly a miracle and "miracles do not cluster."
Again, that's bad.
Without winning not just battles, but the war, nothing is “justified”. Just to play Devil’s Advocate.
They tried that, they lost. As with a great many other things, how I feel about the rightness of any particular great cause matters for naught.
Yup. It's bad. One of the reasons why I still persist. You might never know when you need to pull out and dust off this old argument. :)
One can understand how a group of colonies would need to fight a nation that had no precedent for part of their Union seeking independence, but once the paradigm that independence is a right has been established, it should no longer require a war for the principle to be accepted by all who claimed it at their own founding.
If "might makes right" is the only principle being respected, than why do we go through this silly pretense of talking about rights and principles?
I don’t think that it follows of necessity.
One can just as easily argue that if the founders had intended states to be able to leave willy nilly then there would have been a specific procedure described in the Constitution.
And that 48 and 46 percentage groups are only half of those eligible to vote.
Then it's pointless, because you know that's not going to happen.
The specific procedure was described in the Declaration of Independence. No need to reiterate it in the Constitution.
But you are throwing out a red herring by pointing this out. The guys who voted for secession had slavery on their minds--they said as much in a ton of documents. You can talk about States' Rights--but then will you then consider just which rights were being debated?
Don't assume that the two sides of a war share the same rationale in going to war.
The Federal Government went to war to preserve the Union. Along the way, the President decided that the abolition of chattel slavery was a means (perhaps an indispensable one) to achieve that end and preserve the results. Once Emancipation was a matter of policy, Lincoln short-circuited any serious talk of foreign intervention on behalf of the Confederacy. And then the Union Army got 180,000 black men to help swell its ranks.
What was the song at the end of the segments?
“Ashokan Farewell” was the original piece used throughout. My memory is that all the other music was from the actual Civil War era, usually in military band format.
And the 13 colonies that voted to break-away from England wanted to put a stop to slave rebellions - at least that is what they said in the Declaration of Independence.
And once the colonies became states, the states of New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland voted to enshrine slavery into the U.S. constitution. The states of Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia also voted to include it in the constitution.
But that does not mean the first war for independence was wrong or wrong-headed. The founders contended, rightly, they and others were given by the creator the right to institute a new government that - let's use their own words here - “to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
In 1860 the South could have used provisions of Article V to preserve slavery in the U.S. indefinitely if slavery was their only issue. It was not.
I looked up the lyrics and didn’t see the part to the effect “johnny was a soldier” that I thought the woman sang at the end of the segments.
Ah, it’s called “Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier”.
“Don’t assume that the two sides of a war share the same rationale in going to war.”
And don’t assume one side keeps the same reason for killing the other side throughout the conflict. And don’t assume that either side announces at any time their real motivations for war.
It has been said Lincoln had to destroy the village in order to save it.
More frequently it is said Lincoln “fought to free the slaves.”
Yes, there is evidence - Lincoln’s words for instance - that allows one to argue either way to justify the deaths of over 600,000 Americans.
My own view is that the North fought for the same reason the South fought - they determined it was in their own economic and political best interest to fight.
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