Confederate States Of America (2005)

Yahoo Movies ^ | 12/31/04 | Me

[Caipirabob]

What's wrong about this photo? Or if you're a true-born Southerner, what's right?

While scanning through some of the up and coming movies in 2005, I ran across this intriguing title; "CSA: Confederate States of America (2005)". It's an "alternate universe" take on what would the country be like had the South won the civil war.

Stars with bars:

Suffice to say anything from Hollywood on this topic is sure to to bring about all sorts of controversial ideas and discussions. I was surprised that they are approaching such subject matter, and I'm more than a little interested.

Some things are better left dead in the past:

For myself, I was more than pleased with the homage paid to General "Stonewall" Jackson in Turner's "Gods and Generals". Like him, I should have like to believe that the South would have been compelled to end slavery out of Christian dignity rather than continue to enslave their brothers of the freedom that belong equally to all men. Obviously it didn't happen that way.

Would I fight for a South that believed in Slavery today? I have to ask first, would I know any better back then? I don't know. I honestly don't know. My pride for my South and my heritage would have most likely doomed me as it did so many others. I won't skirt the issue, in all likelyhood, slavery may have been an afterthought. Had they been the staple of what I considered property, I possibly would have already been past the point of moral struggle on the point and preparing to kill Northern invaders.

Compelling story or KKK wet dream?:

So what do I feel about this? The photo above nearly brings me to tears, as I highly respect Abraham Lincoln. I don't care if they kick me out of the South. Imagine if GW was in prayer over what to do about a seperatist leftist California. That's how I imagine Lincoln. A great man. I wonder sometimes what my family would have been like today. How many more of us would there be? Would we have held onto the property and prosperity that sustained them before the war? Would I have double the amount of family in the area? How many would I have had to cook for last week for Christmas? Would I have needed to make more "Pate De Fois Gras"?

Well, dunno about that either. Depending on what the previous for this movie are like, I may or may not see it. If they portray it as the United Confederacy of the KKK I won't be attending.

This generation of our clan speaks some 5 languages in addition to English, those being of recent immigrants to this nation. All of them are good Americans. I believe the south would have succombed to the same forces that affected the North. Immigration, war, economics and other huma forces that have changed the map of the world since history began.

Whatever. At least in this alternate universe, it's safe for me to believe that we would have grown to be the benevolent and humane South that I know it is in my heart. I can believe that slavery would have died shortly before or after that lost victory. I can believe that Southern gentlemen would have served the world as the model for behavior. In my alternate universe, it's ok that Spock has a beard. It's my alternate universe after all, it can be what I want.

At any rate, I lived up North for many years. Wonderful people and difficult people. I will always sing their praises as a land full of beautiful Italian girls, maple syrup and Birch beer. My uncle ribbed us once before we left on how we were going up North to live "with all the Yankees". Afterwards I always refered to him as royalty. He is, really. He's "King of the Rednecks". I suppose I'm his court jester.

So what do you think of this movie?

[M. Espinola]

Well stated!

Here is yet another direct quote which many neo-Confederates will either reject as the true 'cause' of the slave based Cotton Empire tiggering a civil war in this country.

James H. Hammond, Congressman from South Carolina:

"Sir, I do firmly believe that domestic slavery, regulated as ours is, produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth."

The quote from this Hammond 'revolutionist' continues:

# Hammond again, from later in the same speech:

"the moment this House undertakes to legislate upon this subject [slavery], it dissolves the Union. Should it be my fortune to have a seat upon this floor, I will abandon it the instant the first decisive step is taken looking towards legislation of this subject. I will go home to preach, and if I can, practice, disunion, and civil war, if needs be. A revolution must ensue, and this republic sink in blood."

Let's read this line again, ....A revolution must ensue, and this republic sink in blood."

Talk about communists!

Richmond Enquirer, 1856: "Democratic liberty exists solely because we have slaves . . . freedom is not possible without slavery."

Atlanta Confederacy, 1860: "We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South, who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing."

Come on pro-Confederate heritage types to defend these quotations from pro-slavers.

If slavery 'had nothing to do' with the origins of the Civil War why is it depicted on worthless Confederate money?

[4CJ]

Reprinted typos too ;o)

[4CJ]

My friend, some time last week the warrant issued by the American dictator Lincoln was mentioned, and someone had made the comment about why Lamon never served it. Given that Lamon knew both Lincoln and the Chief Justice, perhaps this might explain why the warrant was never served:

Soon after the death of the Chief Justice, Mr. Lamon, who had been appointed Marshal of the Supreme Court by President Lincoln, remarked to me: "Chief-Justice Taney was the greatest and best man I ever saw. I never went into his presence on business that his gracious courtesy and kind consideration did not make me feel that I was a better man for being in his presence."
Samuel Tyler, LL.D, Memoir Of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, New York: De Capo Press (1970) [reprint of 1872 edition, published in Baltimore by John Murphy & Co.], p. 448

[M. Espinola]

New England does it again!!!!

[nolu chan]

You asked a question. I answered it.

[nolu chan]

In the Land o' Lincoln, after the WBTS, Illinois law required Blacks to post a $1,000 bond to enter the state or own property in the state. Assembling for the purpose of dancing or reveling carried a $20 fine.

Prior to the WTBS, an 1853 Illinois law effectively barred Black people from residing in the state. Lincoln never spoke out against this law.

Ward Hill Lamon, friend of Lincoln, said the Illinois Black Code was "of the most preposterous and cruel severity, -- a code that would have been a disgrace to a Slave state, and was simply an infamy in a free one. It borrowed the provisions of the most revolting laws known among men, for exiling, selling, beating, bedeviling, and torturing Negroes, whether bond or free."

The Illinois Black Code said that any Black found without a certificate of freedom was considered a runaway slave and could be apprehended by any White and auctioned off by the sheriff to pay the cost of his confinement.

There is no record of any Lincoln dissent to any of these Black Codes in his home state.

Article XIV of the Illinois State Constitution adopted in 1848 stated:

The General Assembly shall at its first session under the amended constitution pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state, for the purpose of setting them free."

The architect of "An Act To Prevent the Immigration of Free Negroes into the State" was John A. "Black Jack" Logan. Black Jack Logan was later named a Major General by Abraham Lincoln.

Lerone Bennett, Jr. documented how various newspapers condemned the Illinois laws. Frederick Douglass expressed his outrage. "What did Lincoln say? He didn't say a mumblin' word."

[nolu chan]

Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 384

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Lincoln's emigration aide, the Rev. James Mitchell, said the Proclamation "did not change Mr. Lincoln's policy of colonization, nor was it so intended." On August 18, 1863, seven months after the signing of the Proclamation and three months before the Gettysburg Address, Mitchell said he asked Lincoln if the "might say that colonization was still the policy of the Administration." Lincoln replied twice, he said, that "I have never thought so much on any subject and arrived at a conclusion so definite as I have in this case, and in after years found myself wrong." Lincoln added that "it would have been much better to separate the races than to have such scenes as those in New York [during the Draft Riots] the other day, where Negroes were hanged to lamp posts."

Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 554

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Lincoln appointed and supported the sick, perverted, twisted James Mitchell for years as the Agent of [Black] Emigration, i.e., Commissioner of Ethnic Cleansing.

[nolu chan]

[M. Espinola] "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost." William Lloyd Garrison

LINK

"The Union is a lie. The American Union is an imposture, a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. We are for its overthrow! Up with the flag of disunion, that we may have a free and glorious republic of our own. "

-- William Lloyd Garrison.

[nolu chan]

The U.S. Constitution recognized and protected the trade of slaves between states where slavery was lawful. You must have forgotten.

[nolu chan]

[fortheDeclaration] Must be nice to continue to live a world of self-delusion

As in a world where folks such as Henry Clay are praised to the heavens for mouthing that they are against slavery "on principle." In practice, he and his ilk kept as many slaves as possible and never let them go. What was important, per Lincoln and his apologists, is that his mentor said he opposed slavery "on principle."

LINK

Source: Alexander Stephens, Cornerstone Speech, Savannah; Georgia, March 21, 1861

The Cornerstone Speech was delivered extemporaneously by Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, and no official printed version exists. The text below was taken from a newspaper article in the Savannah Republican, as reprinted in Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, before, during, and since the War, Philadelphia, 1886, pp. 717-729.

[Extract]

But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other -- though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

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SOURCE: Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced Into Glory, 215-17.

The first address, a eulogy delivered in the Hall of Representatives in springfield, Illinois, on Tuesday, July 6, 1852, in honor of his mentor, Henry Clay, brought together the two dominant themes of his life, the grandeur of "the white man's" Declaration of Independence and the need to defent it and keep it White and pure by banishing all Blacks -- be deportation, colonization, emigration -- from what he considered a White Eden.

Lincoln inherited both ideas from Clay and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom said the words all men et cetera with great eloquence and kept their slaves and never stopped apologizing and asking others to repent before it was too late by sending their slaves -- not the capital derived from thesalves -- "back" to Africa. Lincoln was especially indebted to Clay who, he said, taught him all he knew about slavery. I think the word all is too strong, but that's the word Lincoln used, and he was in a position to know what he was talking about. Did he not tell a crowd of White people at Carlinville, "I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay. Doesn't this look like we are akin?" (CW 3:79)

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How could a slaveholder lead a movement in favor of the idea that all men are created equal?

Lincoln anticipated that question, saying that although Clay owned slaves he "ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery" (CW 2:130). The key words here are on principle and in feeling. Everybody knew that Clay was one of the biggest slaveowners in Kentucky and the major architect of the series of compromises that had saved slavery in American, perhaps forever. Lincoln's fellow Illinoisan, H. Ford Douglass, said that Clay "did as much to perpetuate Negro slavery in this country as any other man who has ever lived" (Zilversmit 65). That elementary fact, known to everybody and most especially to Clay's slaves, who slaved and bled and died not in principle but in fact, was unimportant in the Lincoln ledger. What was important, Lincoln said, was that Clay was opposed to slavery "on principle."

[nolu chan]

LINK

"There is a higher law than the Constitution which regulates our authority over the domain. Slavery must be abolished, and we must do it."--Wm. H. Seward.

"The time is fast approaching when the cry will become too overpowering to resist. Rather than tolerate national slavery as it now exists, let the Union be dissolved at once, and then the sin of slavery will rest where it belongs."--N. Y. Tribune.

"The Union is a lie. The American Union is an imposture, a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. We are for its overthrow! Up with the flag of disunion, that we may have a free and glorious republic of our own."--William Lloyd Garrison.

"I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South; when the black man, armed with British bayonets, and led on by British officers, shall assert his freedom and wage a war of extermination against his master. And, though we may not mock at their calamity nor laugh when their fear cometh, yet we will hail it as the dawn of a political millennium."--Joshua R. Giddings.

"In the alternative being presented of the continuance of slavery or a dissolution of the Union, we are for a dissolution, and we care not how quick it comes."--Rufus P. Spaulding.

"The fugitive-slave act is filled with horror--we are bound to disobey this act."--Charles Sumner.

"The Advertiser has no hesitation in saying that it does not hold to the faithful observance of the fugitive-slave law of 1850."--Portland Advertiser.

"I have no doubt but the free and slave states ought to be separated .... The Union is not worth supporting in connection with the South."--Horace Greeley.

"The times demand and we must have an anti-slavery Constitution, an anti-slavery Bible, and an anti-slavery God."--Anson P. Burlingame.

"There is merit in the Republican party. It is this: It is the first sectional party ever organized in this country .... It is not national, it is sectional. It is the North arrayed against the South.... The first crack in the iceberg is visible; you will yet hear it go with a crack through the center "--Wendell Phillips.

"The cure for slavery prescribed by Redpath is the only infallible remedy, and men must foment insurrection among the slaves in order to cure the evils. It can never be done by concessions and compromises. It is a great evil, and must be extinguished by still greater ones. It is positive and imperious in its approaches, and must be overcome with equally positive forces. You must commit an assault to arrest a burglar, and slavery is not arrested without a violation of law and the cry of fire."--Independent Democrat, leading Republican paper in New Hampshire.

[M. Espinola]

I believe the question was did you favour the Confederates winning the Civil War. With the pounds of postings I kind of missed the response, plus the Super Bowl etc...

[nolu chan]

I believe you are mistaken.

To: nolu chan

I believe the question was did you favour the Confederates winning the Civil War. With the pounds of postings I kind of missed the response, plus the Super Bowl etc...

2,112 posted on 02/06/2005 10:51:28 PM CST by M. Espinola (Freedom is never free!)
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To: M. Espinola

You asked a question. I answered it.

2,105 posted on 02/06/2005 9:31:03 PM CST by nolu chan
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To: nolu chan

"Not".... in relation to what?

2,094 posted on 02/06/2005 5:31:09 PM CST by M. Espinola (Freedom is never free!)
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To: M. Espinola

Not.

2,091 posted on 02/06/2005 5:27:26 PM CST by nolu chan
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To: nolu chan

Did you or did you not state you were living on Long Island?

2,084 posted on 02/06/2005 5:03:51 PM CST by M. Espinola (Freedom is never free!)
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[M. Espinola]

"There is a higher law than the Constitution which regulates our authority over the domain. Slavery must be abolished, and we must do it."--Wm. H. Seward.

Seward was correct! Thanks for posting some men of honour & morals for a change. I would have added and abolish the slavers as well, no matter which side of the border.

Do you have a problem with that?

Any group which maintains an economic system of slavery of other men should be totally defeated. Nazis & Japs during the war used slaves and murdered them by the millions, Islamic fanatics would love to enslave all of us, even modern day Confederate secessionists.

"The fugitive-slave act is filled with horror--we are bound to disobey this act."--Charles Sumner. Go for it!

"I have no doubt but the free and slave states ought to be separated .... The Union is not worth supporting in connection with the South."--Horace Greeley.

Thus the South was defeated.

I will not simply reprint everything you have already posted but will ask you again:

DID YOU WANT A CONFEDERATE VICTORY RESULTING FROM THE CIVIL WAR?

[M. Espinola]

Did President Lincoln alter his views on slavery after 1863?

While you are contemplating a long winded spin check out these quotes:

Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, referring to the Confederate government: "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition." [Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist, March 30th, 1861.] Do you defend the above statement ...yes or no?

If the American Constitution stated, on each Thursday of every 3rd week, all townships of over 2000 inhabitants, in all 13 new states, must only drink coffee to support the coffee interests, would you adhere to the 'law of the land'?

[M. Espinola]

Is the reason you are so ardently pro-Southern secessionist is maybe because you reside in one of the states which was involved in fomenting rebellion against the United States government in 1861?

[M. Espinola]

William Lloyd Garrison was correct, if you read his statement in the context there is no union while there is disunion due to the fact of the southern portion of the United States was acting independent as nothing more then a tyrannical slave empire which could no longer be tolerated by men of demanding freedom for all Americans.

[fortheDeclaration]

And this post is as meaningless as the rest of them in changing the historical fact that the South fought to defend slavery against the principles of the Declaration.

The fact that slavery was a knotty issue, one that many felt difficult to resolve, doesn't negate the fact that they did want it eradicated in principle and the South did not.

That princple was that all men were created equal before God in having the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the right to choose who would govern them.

[lentulusgracchus]

Not taking the pro-Confederate, pro-slavery side during the Civil War does not make one a commie loving Marxist swine.

I didn't say it did -- you're punching out a straw man there. But vilifying the South with a particularistic invective that isolates the South and mauls it as uniquely and especially evil, does make you a fellow-traveler. You need to be careful to decline the offer of a ride downtown, if the guy offering is named Willie Sutton.

Reconstruction and the Jim Crow period are valid subjects which should not be swept under the rug.

Yes they are, as long as they aren't part of a larger theme of ostracizing the South and making Southern whites into social and political pariahs because of their values.

Keep in mind, that the attack isn't motivated by the past, it's motivated by the map of the present. It is not intended to elucidate events of the past or provide new information long overlooked, but to shape the public discourse in the present by delivering a massive ad hominem attack not just on a group, but on a whole section of the country because of its values, which lead its people to resist the leadership of New York and New England and the industrial and so-called "new" classes, which last include the academic Marxists and the media liberals.

David Horowitz's critique of the left and (economic, RiNO) right is correct. Go high enough in the money tree, and all the NGO's and causes and political factions fighting over policy come together. That is what the People of the United States are up against, as nolu chan's post above, about the theft of human rights by corporations (or attempted theft, in some cases), attempts to point out.

It's still about Hamiltonianism and the money-State plexus, on the one hand, and Jeffersonianism and the People on the other. The South is the exponent of Jeffersonianism, and that is why the business interests and people like Eric Foner, who want to grow the State, attack the South.

I can't be plainer than that. As for your agreeing with them, you may do so out of your old Beantown biases, but watch out: lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

The last thing you want to do is win this argument. If you do, nobody will ever care what you think again. They won't have to.

[lentulusgracchus]

Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American vision. Until 1861, however, it was the North that was out of the mainstream, not the South.

God-help-us bump.