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Posted on 04/14/2003 8:52:11 PM PDT by Aurelius
The founding fathers of the United States of America knew exactly what they meant by freedom, or liberty, and the liberty for which they fought and established this nation.
I'm concerned that our generation doesn't understand liberty. It is the right to make free choices within the boundaries of laws that protect the citizens. Freedom is the right to live one's life according to one's own choices, also within a framework of laws designed to protect people from one another.
Freedom is not anarchy and it is not "government" or unauthorized control of one set of people by another. Anarchy obliterates freedom because it takes its own as being superior to that of others. Government control is the antithesis of freedom because laws enacted by the few without the consent of the many are the substance of tyranny.
It is decidedly regretful that the Union won over the Confederacy and that the fiction of emancipation of the slaves was used as the cover-up and many people to this very day, if they know there was a War between the Union and the Confederacy, believe that Lincoln freed the slaves and that the North was morally superior to the South ... the former being good and the latter being evil. That such a myth could be foist upon the American people in the first place is bad. That it should persist to this very day is absurd, an evidence of the lack of substance in our system of education.
Union was not the objective of the founders. King George III (the British king, not the present George II) made an agreement with the thirteen individual colonies, not with Washington D.C. or a union called the United States. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights enumerating what government may not do, stated clearly that states' rights prevailed over any government power not specifically delegated to the central authority.
For many years the moniker "states' rights" has meant -- to most Americans -- the right to forced segregation and prior to that, the belief in the benefits of slavery. Actually, at the time the Union was fighting the Confederacy, "northern" states also had legalized slavery. All slavery was ended by the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was credited with freeing the slaves but in actuality, the power of the Christian faith and the idea that one person might own another person were moving like a Bradley fighting vehicle though nineteenth century thought. Slavery was wrong. It would have disappeared from the South under far friendlier terms had the Confederacy survived.
Additionally, the survival of the Confederacy would have prevented America's future ills by prohibiting the federal government from seizing powers that belong to the states via Supreme Court interpretations and opinions that override the original Constitution and Bill of Rights without power to do so, other than that granted by the courts to themselves.
Why is this important? Because the more Union we have the less unity we have as a nation and the less freedom we have as individuals. Just as cultures differ between nations, they differ in regions of large nations.
The plain fact is, the United States was designed to be a confederacy and not a centralized union. The idea of union simply crops out as some individuals saw "needs" that were more in their own ideas than in the facts of the time. What Lincoln did was not to free the slaves as much as to make slaves of us all to the Union system of centralized, powerful government that has now grown into a budding monarchy.
Various documentaries have tagged Lincoln's many failures and then shifted gears to show his outstanding "success" as the man who liberated the slaves. Malarkey. In the 1820's there was a plan afoot by the churches and some states, with the approval of the fed, to buy Liberia (which was done, incidentally, and I think the US would do well to enforce its ownership of that piece of Africa) as a home for all blacks who wished to return to their native land. It could now be used as a base for saving white Afrikaners and others who oppose the African National Congress and other communist/Marxist organizations that are destroying the people and animals of the dark continent while raping its enormous mineral wealth.
As I said, slavery was on its way out long before Lincoln. His contribution, if it can be called that, was not in freeing the slaves but in establishing union over confederacy as the governmental model for the USA.
What we would not have if we had a confederacy as originally constructed is a burgeoning bureaucracy where the idea of control of the masses grows like toxic mold amidst the marshes of government employees and departments, bureaus and administrations so that it is hardly known just how much money the government actually spends, on what, with what results, and at what cost to the people. No federal income tax could have been perpetrated on a confederacy. With a union, it was a cinch, legal or not.
Even at the birth of this nation there were those on hand who wanted a strong central government rather than a free confederacy of sovereign states.
When the Union won, this nation was on its way to a quasi-monarchy or oligarchy that the founders would have found reprehensible, noxious and contrary to the intent of the entire Revolutionary war. The moment much power is vested in or appropriated, unchallenged, by a central government and a central leader, then the freedoms guaranteed to the people become privileges extended to the masses by the elites. That is precisely the opposite of the original intent of creating the US.
If we were a confederacy, then each state would have to debate whether or not we wished to go to war, and Congress would not dare delegate its constitutional responsibilities to the executive branch. Executive orders would be few, far between, issued in emergencies only, and never used as a substitute for legislation that a president feels he might not receive from Congress.
A confederacy would put a sudden halt to the bizarre globalist world. A sovereign nation comprised of sovereign states would never go along with the objectives and tyranny of globalism, so the question of America becoming a part of the Global Village would be totally moot. It could not, would not happen.
Each state could defend its own borders with our neighbors to the south and north of us, protecting the persons and property of the owners and occupants of the land and with undisputed authority to do so. As it is, a whole bunch of ineffective government agencies are figuring out ways not to offend illegal aliens to the detriment and endangerment of our own citizens.
This travesty on freedom is ridiculous and deadly.
Over two hundred and fifty thousand Americans died on U.S. soil in the war between the North and the South or, more correctly, between the Union and the Confederacy.
Oddly enough, our strongest patriots are still in the South. The North is home to most of the liberals who have not only joined hands with the globalists but have led the march toward tyranny and anti-American sentiments that delight our enemies abroad.
In its own way, the war between the Union and the Confederacy not only devastated the South for generations, but it paved the way for all those ills that now plague us by reason of a strong, bloated and tyrannical central government.
Slavery would have been abolished eventually in every state. Public pressure and churches would have eventually caused abolition to come to pass.
What we would not have is slaves of all colors to a federalized regime that is totally out of control by the people who are supposed to be the "consenting governed."
If we don't consent then we are tagged as enemies of the state. More properly, the nation.
Meantime, our freedoms have been absorbed, abrogated or negated by a central government against which there is, absent a time machine, no way to control or downsize.
Thanks a bunch, Abe.
Scary.
Unless you happen to be descended from slaves.
I don't know about a monarchy, but we are very close to being ruled by a handful of urban centers.We very nearly lost the last election to Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee/Madison, Boston, Minneapolis, Baltimore and New Orleans. I don't think the Founding Fathers envisioned the child of their making ruled by ten or eleven cities.
What? You STILL haven't donated to the best site in the world?
Yeah, the poverty pimps that now rule us are really special, aren't they?
...but in actuality, the power of the Christian faith and the idea that one person might own another person were moving like a Bradley fighting vehicle though nineteenth century thought. Slavery was wrong. It would have disappeared from the South under far friendlier terms had the Confederacy survived.
I'm going to go with the author's thesis on this one, but I know that Illbay didn't even bother reading or thinking about this argument. The bell went 'ding', and Illbay salivated. ;-)
Judge rules Va. must allow confederate license plates
Pro-Confederacy Group Seeks Reparations for Civil War Losses
I'll freely admit that I don't like the centralization of federal authority that resulted from the Civil War.
But that the Civil War was not primarily fought over the issue of slavery is rampant revisionism.
The sole cause of the Civil War was the insistence, by a radical group of Southerners, that they be allowed to extend slavery as they saw fit, and that slavery be accepted as a just and moral practice by the entire United States.
The Republican Party didn't form with the goal of ending slavery, it was formed with the goal of preventing the Southern-dominated federal government from forcing acceptance of slavery on the Northern states that deplored it.
Fanatic southerners planned invasions of Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, etc., in order to extend their abominable practice into new territories.
In Dred Scott, the Southern-dominated Supreme Court overturned every law in the Northern states against slavery - forcing slavery to be accepted. A Southern-dominated Congress and a Southern President repealed the Compromise of 1850, and opened all new territories to slavery, if their citizens so chose.
And with that a fanatic Southern governor assembled a gang of thugs and bandits to terrorize the free citizens of Kansas, and to force a pro-slavery Constitution upon the new state.
Like I said, it was all about slavery - and the South's insistence that it had the right to force slavery upon people who found it abhorrent, that led to the formation of the Republican Party, to Lincoln's decision to re-enter politics, to his election as President, and to the decision by the South that they would secede. And not only secede, but that they would enter into open warfare with the North, rather than to be forbidden to extend slavery by force.
Yes, slavery was dying. It couldn't compete in the market with free labor. This was why the pro-slavery forces were so radical - they knew that slavery was a dead instituton, unless they could force the system of slavery on competing regions.
But all of this is too simple, for modern-day historians. They insist upon bringing up all these "real" reasons for the war. The tariffs being the most popular.
But all of these have one major drawback, when considered as reasons for the war. The secessionists never mentioned them. Not in their declarations of secession, not in their debates.
What they argued about, what they shouted about, all they were openly concerned about, was slavery. And how unjust it was that a "sectional party" would try to prevent them from spreading it where they willed.
Slavery was the issue, according to those who actually led the secession. I'll take their words over modern-day revisionists.
I think an examination of the John Brown phenomenon produces some thought-provoking questions in the mind of the astute observer.
You, on the other hand, apparently prefer your strawmen. ;-)
There's an interesting scene in the movie Gettysburg, prior to Pickett's Charge. Armistead is pointing out various Virginians in his division to the Brit officer. The pedigrees of some of the soldiers in the Viriginia ranks was astonishing. I can't believe that all those sons of the Founders were motivated by 'radical notions of forcing slavery on their neighbors'.
It was pretty easy to slander them all after many of them died charging Cemetery Ridge, though.
One aspect of history that I like to ponder is what happens to a society when a conqueror slaughters the best men of that society (as a conqueror often has to do). It was pretty easy to paint the beaten American Indians as dirty drunken thieves after we killed their chiefs and holy men. The Nazis and the Jews, Stalin and the Poles, etc., etc.
I wouldn't gloat too hard on the Confederates, because the gloating puts you in some pretty seamy company.
I'm not a flat-earther nor am I an appease-nik. Build another strawman, jam your hand up its posterior, and run it by the audience. You just might get someone to believe that it's got a brain. ;-)
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