Posted on 06/17/2017 6:14:26 PM PDT by plain talk
lorenzo claims lots of things...
Nonsense.
Where the bargains were not to their liking - the Fugitive Slave Clause, to cite an example, northern political and business leadership were openly repudiating and violating the covenants of the Constitution.
And where the bargain was not to their liking - the prohibition on slave imports, to cite and example - Southerners openly repudiated and violated the agreement as well. Lot of that going around.
“And where the bargain was not to their liking - the prohibition on slave imports, to cite and example - Southerners openly repudiated and violated the agreement as well.”
That is an interesting comment. May we see your data?
Lincoln began the address:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.”
Lincoln was saying his troops were fighting a war because all men are created equal. In the context of the times - Dred Scott, Uncle Tom's Cabin, John Brown, Emancipation Proclamation - Lincoln was saying the North was fighting for equality but the South was not.
For those who believed Lincoln's earlier assertions that his troops were fighting to preserve the union, it came as a shock to realize Lincoln was now claiming the federal dead were for the purpose of making voters, jurors, citizens, legislators and PTA leaders of the “merciless Indian Savages” and those bound to service.
And listeners were left to ponder: How much of the Gettysburg text was a pretext for something else? And how long would the pretext survive after there was no longer a need for pretext?
That is without a doubt the most idiotic analysis of the Gettysburg Address I’ve ever seen. Congratulations.
Well, you have the which arrived in 1859. You have the Wanderer in 1858 and no doubt many more. Southerners were importing slaves from outside the U.S. long after Congress outlawed it, and the Confederate Constitution guaranteed imports. So anyone who thinks that it wouldn't have continued in a Confederate state is just fooling themselves.
Others have said the same thing. Only better.
Read what Pulitzer Prize winner and historian Garry Wills wrote:
Lincoln at Gettysburg “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.”
Remember, Wills was an admirer of Lincoln.
And you are not, I'm quite aware of that. And your hyperbole aside, I'm still trying to figure out the whole "violent overthrow of the Constitution" claim. The Wills quote certainly doesn't support that, regardless of what the context of the quote actually is.
Your links are to Wikipedia, which is fine.
The links do salute the legends even as they give reason to question them.
For example, one link includes this:
“Whether the Clotilda story is true, and to what extent it is based on any real occurrence, may never be known. That is why Wanderer is still considered the last documented slave ship to reach America. As historian David M. Potter noted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861,[5] “Apparently everyone in the South in the late 1850s knew someone who knew someone else who had seen a coffle of slaves direct from Africa. But no one who had seen them has left any testimony. One ship, The Wanderer, did bring a cargo of slaves from Africa in 1858, and this bizarre event was apparently reenacted many times in the imagination.””
The link to the Wanderer, a suspicious New York ship built for speed and long voyages, includes this shock about the trial of the illegal importers: “The US prosecutor, Henry R. Jackson, became a major general in the Confederate States Army and one of the defendants, John Egbert Farnum, became a colonel and brevet brigadier general in the Union Army.”
But, your distraction from the earlier debate served its purpose: distraction.
If, and I say if, Lincoln was fighting the war to “free the slaves” as the Gettysburg speech implied, he was fighting to overthrow the constitution of the United States.
The U.S. constitution enshrined slavery. Thirteen of the original 13 states had voted to make the U.S. constitution pro-slavery.
Absolute nonsense. Slavery was ended in the U.S. through Constitutional amendment, which is not an overthrow of the Constitution by any means. You'll have to do better than that to make your case.
“Slavery was ended in the U.S. through Constitutional amendment, which is not an overthrow of the Constitution by any means.”
Good. Good. Good.
It is gratifying when I see thoughtful comments seeping into the debate.
Still, there is the question why, if the Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery, he didn’t introduce the necessary legislation while he was in Congress - or early in 1861 before the Fort Sumter incident?
If a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery had passed early, the war, the killings, the destruction, and all the hard feedlings could have been skipped.
Such an attempted action by Lincoln could have possibly saved over 600,000 lives.
Sad he didn’t try.
I don't think you have thought that through. For example, what was the reaction of the South to the election of a Republican President? What do you think would have been the reaction of the whites in the South had an amendment abolished slavery? What do you think the reaction of the blacks in the South would have been if an amendment abolished slavery? Do you really think the war, the killing, the destruction, and all the hard feelings could have been skipped? The South was going down either way, son. Don't you realize that Taney's decision in Dred Scott meant War?
Dred Scott, a 7-2 decision, was accepted by the South. You seem to be saying Cain decided to murder the South after Dred Scott.
If that's the case - “the South was going down either way”, as you say - then the North really did decide to overthrow the pro-slavery U.S. constitution by using violence.
It is unusual for a northerner to state as bluntly as you did that it was the North that rebelled against the constitution and the “law of the land.”
"On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully."
Let's take a moment to remember that both the USA and the CSA had pro-slavery constitutions. And each had a president that swore to uphold their nation's pro-slavery constitution. Lincoln took the oath twice.
In an earlier post you claimed bluntly: “The South was going down either way, son. Don't you realize that Taney's decision in Dred Scott meant War?”
The South had no reason for war because of Dred Scott so your “meant War” had to refer to a knee-jerk northern inspired war.
Now you claim: “They (the South) created their own “constitution” . . . And then (the South) provoked war . . .”
HandyDandy answers HandyDandy.
You say "The South had no reason for war because of Dred Scott so your “meant War” had to refer to a knee-jerk northern inspired war." That's just "you saying". The South now owned the peculiar institution. Taney's "subhuman" blacks were theirs forever to perpetuate and expand. They couldn't do that while joined at the hip to the North. Remember, it was the South that de-ratified the US Constitution which they had ratified. While you claim the North violently overthrew it. Your argument only works, and even then weakly, if one believe that the US Constitution was pro-slavery. Here is how Lincoln viewed the US Constitution and Slavery. Unfortunately, your mind is closed:
"I believe the declara[tion] that 'all men are created equal' is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest; that negro slavery is violative of that principle; but that, by our frame of government, that principle has not been made one of legal obligation; that by our frame of government, the States which have slavery are to retain it, or surrender it at their own pleasure; and that all others---individuals, free-states and national government---are constitutionally bound to leave them alone about it. I believe our government was thus framed because of the necessity springing from the actual presence of slavery, when it was framed. That such necessity does not exist in the teritories[sic], where slavery is not present." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, "Letter to James N. Brown" (October 18, 1858), p. 327.
Not just me saying it. You said it in your post 415: “Dred Scott, a 7-2 decision, was accepted by the South. No duh.”
There was no reason for the South to leave the union because of Dred Scott. If Dred Scott “meant War” then war would come from other disgruntled latitudes.
It did.
“Your argument only works, and even then weakly, if one believe that the US Constitution was pro-slavery.”
It is. But not until it gets to Article I.
Why do you think the South "seceded"?
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