Posted on 10/11/2017 4:58:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
Perhaps you misunderstood my post. When I wrote California was a welfare state it was in the context of how many of its inhabitants are on benefits. Spain has no benefits. They have Socialized medicine for citizens and limited unemployment compensation if you lose your job but no welfare.
You have a great answer for everything, you must have thought this out for a long time.
I agree that there were monetary interests involved, but they were on both sides. It is true that political power was in play, but one side was using men as slaves to prop up their power.
As for Fort Pickens, Florida had not seceded at that time, so that was not Union firing on Rebel, but soldiers firing on a mob. Not part of the war.
You can talk about loudmouths, but I think Edmund Ruffin had the final say in that. Letters between Beauregard and Anderson, although well known, mean nothing. They were not the leaders of the South or North. Sumter meant nothing to the South except as a prize of their secessionist desires. To the North, it was a fig leaf covering a desire to do nothing. The South stripped that fig leaf away and let loose the dogs of war.
Slavery was the evil in our country and God took the final drop of blood in payment for that evil through the war. I believe that the controlling powers in the South wanted their political power more than they cared about the South or their fellow citizens. They were Democrats then and they are Democrats now.
Its amazing that the “honest” liberal icons of the past recognized the oppression of the south by the “North Eastern power corridor” eg. Joan Baez. I wonder when these icons will be banned and torn down.
Great mini-lecture (sincerely said), thank you.
What about the interplay between the south’s dependence on exports and the north’s ability to place tariffs on imports? With rising northern industries, tariffs were also starting to be viewed as a protectionist scheme and not just simply a revenue source. Since the exchange of goods and capital must ultimately balance any hindrance on imports, especially protective tariffs, to the US would be followed by a decline in exports from the US.
Do you think the situation was similar in some ways to a trade war with Japan as a prelude to a hot war with Japan?
Dr. Williams has written some columns expressing that opinion.
Down here we call that attitude "heart". Or "spirit". They believed and acted.
Didn't do too bad considering what they had to work with. What were they s'posed to do? Wouldn't you get a little pissy about .gov jackin with your livelihood? And I'm sure, knowing my brethren, that there was more than a little "liquid influence" to some calls for action. Which would be published, just like now, cause it's "interesting".
Either way, they were much more credible than us current chickenchit who sit around pissing and moaning on the internet while the left creates their havoc, eh? d;^)
Not sure just yet what ta do bout that.
I have researched it for a long time. A Few years ago I had little interest in the subject, but people informed me of some things that didn't make any sense. The more I looked at it, the less sense it made, and so then I started to see that there was much more to this story than I had originally been told.
I agree that there were monetary interests involved, but they were on both sides. It is true that political power was in play, but one side was using men as slaves to prop up their power.
Both sides were using slaves to prop up their political power. Where do you think that 200 million dollars per year that was funneling through New York came from?
The initial objection from Washington DC was not that the Federal revenues were produced by slaves, it was that those Federal revenues were going to cease. Likewise the middleman fees the businesses of New York were charging for handling all of that Southern shipping were not concerned that the money was coming from slaves, they were concerned that the money was going to stop coming.
As Charles Dickens noted at the time:
"So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."
Charles Dickens added to this in 1862:
Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."
Sumter meant nothing to the South except as a prize of their secessionist desires.
Northern Newspapers had already urged that the guns of Ft Sumter be turned upon Charleston to force them to collect Federal tariffs.
Philadelphia Press, January 15, 1861
"It would be proper, we suppose, to prohibit coast-wise trade to and from the ports of South Carolina, whilst she is in her present attitude of armed defiance of the United States. In the enforcement of the revenue laws, the forts become of primary importance. Their guns cover just so much ground as is necessary to enable the United States to enforce their laws."
That fort commanded the entrance to their primary trading port, and if it was thought that foreign shipping might be fired upon, it would damage their potential to market and ship their product.
Continued US presence in the entrance to their harbor constituted a defacto loss of trade for them. There would be a recurring monetary loss so long as it continued.
Slavery was the evil in our country and God took the final drop of blood in payment for that evil through the war.
He started off his negotiations with the South by offering them what everyone claims they wanted. He offered them permanent slavery.
If slavery was all that they wanted, they would have taken that deal. What they wanted was economic independence from Washington DC. Lincoln would let them have permanent slavery (which they already had in the Union) but he would *NOT* let them be independent of the Control of Washington DC.
You are welcome. I try to point out things about the civil war that don't make any sense if you have only heard the "official" narrative.
What about the interplay between the south’s dependence on exports and the north’s ability to place tariffs on imports? With rising northern industries, tariffs were also starting to be viewed as a protectionist scheme and not just simply a revenue source.
I'm glad you asked me that. This man was quite articulate on that subject during South Carolina's secession convention.
The Southern States now stand in the same relation toward the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation, that our ancestors stood toward the people of Great Britain. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress is useless to protect them against unjust taxation, and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British Parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue -- to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.
Since the exchange of goods and capital must ultimately balance any hindrance on imports, especially protective tariffs, to the US would be followed by a decline in exports from the US.
The Southerners were not going to lessen their exports, and so what happened was that the prices were forced up artificially on imports by the protectionist policies in place at that time. This had the effect of transferring about 40% of the revenue from Southern exports into the hands of mostly New Yorkers.
Do you think the situation was similar in some ways to a trade war with Japan as a prelude to a hot war with Japan?
My recollection is that the trade war with Japan was the consequence of what we perceived to be hostile Japanese actions along the Pacific rim. I think the situation in the United States in 1860 was a case of one side (the North East) siphoning off revenue from trade that the people who produced it (the Southerners) thought should rightfully belong to them.
Dr. Williams has written some columns expressing that opinion.
While I don't remember this specific opinion, I've read some of his commentary about the events surrounding the Civil War, and I find it very insightful. He is a D@mn fine economist, and he can see clearly what was going on at that time.
California can go but they have to leave any forts, dockyards, post offices and post roads and any other property which belongs to the rest of us.
There were truly evil men in the South who did incredibly horrible things to other men, all in the name of their pride and sin. If the North had a sin, it was greed, if the South had a sin, it was thinking they were gods among men who could kill at their whim.
I can deal with greed, I cannot deal with a man who thinks he is a god with the power of life and death. And the leading families in the South thought just that.
As for Lincoln, read the book “Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.” Lincoln was playing for time because slavery and the ideals of slavery were already dying. With automation and newer replacements for cotton, slavery was becoming economically unfeasible. It would have died anyway. Lincoln did not want to take the USA down with it.
If you truly believe all this, why are you still here? Go somewhere else.
-- Oh, Rhett! The rich Yankees keep telling everybody that "freedom" is better than slavery! What evuh will we do!
-- Don't fret Scarlett, when we get all our tariff money back, they'll all see the light and come running.
-- Oh Rhett, I knew it as all about money and control, after all!
___________
The Land belonged to South Carolina before the Union, and it should have reverted back to South Carolina when South Carolina left the Union.
You really are shameless! The "Land" was a sandbar, which was under water most of the time.
It was donated by the state of South Carolina to the federal government, which built up an island and fort on it:
"Resolved, That this state do cede to the United States, all the right, title and claim of South Carolina to the site of Fort Sumter and the requisite quantity of adjacent territory, Provided, That all processes, civil and criminal issued under the authority of this State, or any officer thereof, shall and may be served and executed upon the same, and any person there being who may be implicated by law; and that the said land, site and structures enumerated, shall be forever exempt from liability to pay any tax to this state.
"Also resolved: That the State shall extinguish the claim, if any valid claim there be, of any individuals under the authority of this State, to the land hereby ceded.
Surely, you know that by now. I know you like to lie in wait for people and then hurl massive chunks of your nonsense at them. But if you can't even get this one single thing right and admit it, isn't it time to give it a rest?
Sovereign Citizen.
Fiddle Dee Dee, those confounded Yankees and their tariffs! I do declare it all gives me a touch of the vapors!
Judges 21:25
In those days there was no king in Israel:
every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Now just WHERE did ol' Abe get a crazy idea like THIS???
Oh... wait...
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
(Do I Really need to provide a reference?)
I think it was more in the name of "profit." The entire point of owning slaves was to make money. I am certain that some slaves were abused, but I don't think it was as common or widespread as we have been subsequently led to believe.
If the North had a sin, it was greed, if the South had a sin, it was thinking they were gods among men who could kill at their whim.
If you think the men of the South perceived themselves to be "gods" compared to slaves, the men of the North were as bad if not worse. In the New York riots in 1863 they killed something like 120 blacks by burning, hanging, beating, and what have you.
Indeed, the men of the North hated blacks more than did the men of the South. In Illinois they passed laws barring black people from settling in their state. Lincoln himself was an officer in an organization dedicated to sending black people out of the Country. The hatred of black people by the men in the North verged on psychosis.
Lincoln was playing for time because slavery and the ideals of slavery were already dying.
In what manner was he playing for time when he offered to support the Corwin Amendment that would have made slavery virtually permanent? He said again in August of 1862 that if he could preserve the Union and free no slaves, he would do it.
I'm sure Lincoln's personal opinion was that slavery was abhorrent, but his pragmatism informed him that he would have to tolerate it as a lesser evil to that of losing all the revenue produced by slaves. He said several times that he had no legal power to end slavery, but then he did it anyway.
With automation and newer replacements for cotton, slavery was becoming economically unfeasible. It would have died anyway.
Exactly. No need for a war to free them because economics was going to do it eventually. Nearly 3 million people could have lived if people had just waited. Time would have abolished slavery.
But of course Lincoln's reasons for launching a war were about economic control, not about slavery.
Lincoln did not want to take the USA down with it.
The principle that the USA was founded upon was that people had a right to independence. Lincoln destroyed that principle. Lincoln also radically changed the relationship between the Federal Government and the States. Rather than being a collection of Independent States United in a coalition, the Federal Government became the State, and the states became provinces or colonies of the Central authority.
Our massive Federal Bureaucracy and the practice of borrowing excessive amounts of money to spend it on what the Federal government demands, started with Lincoln. Lincoln created the Federal Leviathan that we deal with today.
That is irrelevant. Had it been a massive warship anchored at that spot in the harbor, it would have been just as objectionable.
It was donated by the state of South Carolina to the federal government, which built up an island and fort on it:
That is also irrelevant. When we declared Independence from Britain, the land belonged to us, Not King George.
It wouldn't do any good. I reference and quote the Declaration of Independence constantly, but they just ignore the principle on which our own government's legitimacy rests.
They don't want to hear about the Declaration of Independence. The best they can present in the form of an argument is "Well it was different when the founders did it."
It is a Hollow argument that does not even address the main point.
I will only take one point because I think we are beating this poor horse past the point of death.
The number of mulatto children born in the south was huge, because male slave owners used those women as personal property. Even if they had men or husbands in the slave camp, their women could be taken from them and used.
And then, the slave owner could, and did, sell those same children to other men, who could use those children and girls, as they saw fit. And they did.
Yeah, the people in the North were racist, killed blacks and hated them. But I am pretty sure there weren’t a whole lot of them trading around the black women and children in back room deals. At least not that I have ever read.
And again, the black man in the north could put on a knapsack and head west, with his family. He could also buy a ticket and head to Africa, with his family. He was free to do that. The back men in the South were not.
You haven't read enough. If you look at the history of abolition, you will notice that most Northern states used the process of "Gradual abolition of slavery." What this allowed them to do was to take their slaves into other states and sell them.
That's what they did. Some let them go, but most recouped their investment by selling them down South.
And again, the black man in the north could put on a knapsack and head west, with his family.
In Lincoln's state of Illinois, they had men that would grab any free black they found, and "Sell them down the river."
But this whole discussion misses what I consider to be a very essential point. When the war started, nobody in the Washington DC government had any intention of freeing slaves. Their intention was to stop the South from having free trade with Europe, and for the first two years of the war they were going to keep slavery in exactly the condition it had existed in the Union for "four score and seven years."
The Union was going to be a Union with legal slavery. Had the South not tried to get away from Washington, Slavery would have continued in the Union just as it always had.
What, do you think the abolitionists, many of which were Republican Congressmen in Washington, would have set on their thumbs and let the Union keep slaves?
The abolitionists were the ones running that train in the North. Lincoln himself understood that when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe and said, “”So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
Like it or not, there was a large group of people, all Republican, who were not going to let that issue go away.
Northern units marched to the war singing “John Brown’s body”. Col Chamberlain wrote letters to his wife talking about their duty to rid the country of the evil of slavery. There were a lot of people who were doing what they were doing because of slavery.
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