Posted on 05/06/2009 10:35:26 AM PDT by cowboyway
One of the greatest misconceptions of American history is that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Those who subscribe to this belief see President Abraham Lincoln as the benevolent leader who made unimaginable sacrifices in human blood to wipe out America’s greatest sin. While the human sacrifice is indisputable and the sin was monumental, the war’s purpose was not to free blacks from the shackles of bondage. Rather, the Civil War was fought with one purpose in mind: To preserve the Union at all costs. And, to put it in Lincoln’s terms, with no ifs, ands, or buts. You’d better agree with the president, or else.
(Excerpt) Read more at tenthamendmentcenter.com ...
“Imagine ‘sovereign states’”
I can’t imagine the states being anything but sovereign. If they weren’t, why would it have been necessary to consult them before the Constitution became law.
Ultimately, however, sovereignty must reside with the individual. States cannot violate the rights of individuals any more than the federal government can overstep the prerogatives of the states.
I tend to view the Southern successionist cause as less of a legal thing than a matter of revolution. If you believe in the right of revolution, in the right of the people to violently oppose the government when it becomes destructive of their liberty, I don’t see any reason why you can’t believe in the right of states to revolt. Especially if you’re on the patriots’ side in the Revolutionary War. What was that but the states (/colonies) exercising their right to revolution?
Then again, the prevailing power has as much a right to defend itself as we have a right to revolt. One man’s revolution is another man’s treason.
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.
Agree completely. My post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The states are soveregn, but have allowed their respective power to be consistently abrogated over the course of the last 100 years...maybe even as a direct outgrowth of the Civil War.
The history we are making now is no less monumental!
You Judge. Isn't that also known as the "We wuz so stoopid we done fell into Linkum's trap" defense? What the judge also ignores is that Sumter was a federal facility. The Southern states had no legal claim to it.
ping for later read
The Judge references the 'popular vote'. You either didn't read the sentence correctly or you're practicing the standard NS MO of dishonest discourse.
This is killing you ain't it, NS. A well educated yankee judge validating all the arguments that I and others have been having with you for years.
LOL! You lose the point with the very first quote.
“What did we go to war for, if not to protect our [slave] property?” - CSA senator from Virgina, Robert Hunter, 1865
Not sure if you don’t understand the use of brackets in quotes or simply don’t care, but the brackets mean that something was added to the quote. I guess some yankee “historian” had to clean up the quote to make revisionists like yourself happy.
And please, as the documentarian extraordinaire, please document for us that there are NO OTHER quotes from these fine people — at all — anywhere — that would suggest that they never gave any OTHER reasons given for their motivations. Surely you do not believe these were the only reasons — or words — they ever uttered or were recorded?
Can’t do it, can you? LOL!!!!
Silly man.
States pass laws all the time that the fed later contradicts. 99.9% of the time, the state deems the issue of insufficient consequence to drive a break with the federal government. Occasionally an issue arises (once, so far) that the states cannot or will not compromise on. When that happens, they may choose to secede. That was what happened in the civil war. They didnt do it to prove a point, that they could secede. The did it because the issue of slavery was one on which there was no further compromise. So yes, it was fought over the right to secede but why did those Southern states secede? Slavery. You just can’t get past that part.
The good judge would do better to read this part from the same address: "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."
OK, then tell us. What property did the South go to war to protect if not their slaves? Quotes from the period, please.
And please, as the documentarian extraordinaire, please document for us that there are NO OTHER quotes from these fine people — at all — anywhere — that would suggest that they never gave any OTHER reasons given for their motivations.
I'm not aware of any made prior to or during the rebellion. You got any quotes from any of them?
I’m neither and I believe it was a states rights issue.
“Yo, Judge. Unless I’m mistaken, the Brits took a dim view of the colonies ‘secession’ and actually took steps to try and prevent it.”
That has nothing to do with the point at hand.
“If secession was a right in 1776 then why did they have to fight for it?”
Is that an honest question? You could just as easily say natural/human rights don’t exist because throughout most of history governments have failed to recognized them. They don’t have to be recognized for them to exist. Maybe the colonists had no God-given right to declare their independence from Britain, but the reaction of the British leadership could not possibly settle the matter.
Maybe it was a matter of “might makes right” when the colonists won independence. Then again, maybe the British were attempting to use “might makes right” when they fought to keep us under their authority. We tend to think the latter. Maybe we’re wrong. But if you believe in the colonies’ right to revolution, I don’t see why you don’t believe in the Southern states’ right to succession.
You may disagree with the rationale (preserving slavery), or its practicality (no world-striding great, old USA if the South leaves; then again, maybe we’d all be richer and more powerful if we’d stayed with the British all along). But that does not address succession as such. I believe in my right to revolt if a Stalin were to rise to power in America, but I don’t at all think Obama qualifies.
At the time, there were 23 northern States and only 11 southern States. This meant that the option of calling a constitutional convention was out of the question for the South.
However, the southern States had been able to dominate the US Senate, and thus protect their interests. But that power was rapidly declining.
The greatest of the ironies was in the cotton trade. Until the invention of the cotton gin, slavery was only in the realm of the wealthy, a slave costing as much as a racing horse does today. More than half of slaves worked as domestics, and the institution was dying out.
But the cotton gin made slavery a middle class institution. Any man who could grow cotton could, in a year or two, earn enough money to purchase a slave. With the labor of that slave, the two men could produce enough cotton for the owner to buy other slaves. In short order, an entrepreneur could become wealthy.
However, the elimination of at least the pretense of respectability from slavery made it a far more loathsome proposition. Slaves lost any possibility of advancement, which had at least been held out as a possibility before, and became commodities.
And at the time, the international slave trade was mostly extinguished, meaning that “new slaves” had to come from “domestic stock”, children of slaves already living in the United States.
“The importation of African slaves was banned in the British colonies in 1807, and in the United States in 1808. In the British West Indies, slavery was abolished in 1833 and in the French possessions 15 years later.”
So the condition in the South was an unsupportable explosive growth market.
Or C), pokie the poster is once again demonstrating his preoccupation with deviant sexual practices...
But as the judge surely knows, popular vote doesn't elect presidents. It's possible that even you know that. Popular vote is also not a great indicator of margin of victory. Ronald Reagon won the election in 1980 with 50.75% of the popular vote, a bare plurality. But he took 91% of the popular vote and his election is seen as a landslide victory and a repudiation of Jimmy Carter. So by listing only the popular vote, Judge Napolitano was either trying to downplay the size of Lincoln's victory or, given the overall poor quality of the rest of his scholarship, it's more likely he never bothered to check the electoral vote margin to begin with.
This is killing you ain't it, NS. A well educated yankee judge validating all the arguments that I and others have been having with you for years.
Not at all. If anything the miserable quality of the work is making Napolitano look stupid.
No. Stick with what YOU introduced. Prove to me and everyone else that slaves were the ONLY property he was referring to. Hell, prove that slaves were even PART of what he was referring to. I am not chasing YOUR stupid rabbit. It’s your quoted material. YOU prove that it means what the ADDED word makes it mean or drop it.
“I’m not aware of any made prior to or during the rebellion. You got any quotes from any of them?”
Nope. Don’t have to. The point stands. Common sense tells me these folks made many statements. Unless you can prove that they never said anything else in reference to the cause of the war, you can not claim that slavery was the ONLY reason, in their minds, for the war. But please, go ahead and try.
But there are two sides to the issue and you're looking at only one side. On the one side there's Lincoln and the Union, and for him it never was about slavery and he said so on many occasions. On the other hand you have the confederacy, and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the fact that for them the single most important reason for going to war was to defend slavery.
In short Napolitano is wrong. The war was about slavery, he's just looking at it from the wrong side.
OK, so if he never said the war was about anything else then how can I provide a quote to that effect? Tell me that.
Hell, prove that slaves were even PART of what he was referring to. I am not chasing YOUR stupid rabbit. It’s your quoted material. YOU prove that it means what the ADDED word makes it mean or drop it.
Sure you are. Otherwise you wouldn't be off on one of your mouth foaming rants. But scholarship isn't just a Northern tactic. You could provide your own quotes showing other points of view. Toombs and others blathered on about tariffs and such, even though evidence indicates the South actually imported little and paid less in tariffs. Go ahead and trot them out.
Nope. Don’t have to.
You mean, "Nope. Don't know any" don't you?
The War Between the States was fought over numerous causes:
the centralization of power at the expense of the states’ constitutional protections;
the right of states to secede;
tarrifs;
and only much later, slavery.
Among other issues.
The key issues were the Constitutional rights of states and on that, the South was absolutely right.
As Dr. Walter E. Williams has said, if states don’t have the right to secede, then the constitutional protections of states’ rights mean nothing because the Federal government can do anything it wants and there is no way to stop it.
As for slavery, everyone admits that it was horrible and a black mark (no pun intended) on our history. But again, as Dr. Williams has noted, he is much better off today because his ancestors were brought here as slaves than he would be if they had been left in Africa.
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