Posted on 05/12/2015 3:00:03 PM PDT by NKP_Vet
We Sons of Confederate Veterans are charged with preserving the good name of the Confederate soldier. The world, for the most part, has acknowledged what Gen. R. E. Lee described in his farewell address as the “valour and devotion” and “unsurpassed courage and fortitude” of the Confederate soldier. The Stephen D. Lee Institute program is dedicated to that part of our duty that charges us not only to honour the Confederate soldier but “to vindicate the cause for which he fought.” We are here to make the case not only for the Confederate soldier but for his cause. It is useless to proclaim the courage, skill, and sacrifice of the Confederate soldier while permitting him to be guilty of a bad cause.
Although their cause was lost it was a good cause and still has a lot to teach the world today.
In this age of Political Correctness there has never been a greater need and greater opportunity to refresh our understanding of what happened in America in the years 1861–1865 and start defending our Southern forebears as strongly as they ought to be defended. There is plenty of true history available to us. It is our job to make it known.
All the institutions of American society, including nearly all Southern institutions and leaders, are now doing their best to separate the Confederacy off from the rest of American history and push it into one dark little corner labeled “ Slavery and Treason.” Being taught at every level of the educational system is the official party line that everything good that we or anyone believe about our Confederate ancestors is a myth, and by myth they mean a pack of lies that Southerners thought up to excuse their evil deeds and defeat.
(Excerpt) Read more at abbevilleinstitute.org ...
Have you ever read any correspondence from soldiers or read any books written by Southern Soldiers? I recommend “Co. Aytch” by Sam Watkins. Why not take a break and educate yourself?
Again, my post is quite clear.
I believe there multiple arrests, including of city officials, that preceded the arrest of legislators.
Which occurred in response to the invasion.Look at the election map for the year Lincoln was elected and you can see where Maryland's sentiments were--solidly with the rest of the South.
But during the same period, September 1861, long after the rebellion had begun.
Maybe....and maybe not. Don’t forget that on April 29th of 1861 the Maryland legislature voted 53-13 against convening a secessionist convention - dashing the hopes of a sizable pro-South group, but did not vote to end the session
http://blueandgraytrail.com/event/Maryland_and_Secession
Try the Confederate Constitution itself.
Article 1 Sec 9
(I) The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.
(2) Congress shall also have power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy.
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First American Revolution (1775 - 1783) - Good guys won
Second American Revolution (1861 - 1865) - Good guys lost
Third American Revolution (201x - ????) - Tie Breaker?
First of all, state power versus federal power is a very narrow optic. Consider liberty or self-government or public welfare and you'll get different answers than if you just focus on the powers of states.
Secondly, revolutions tend to result in more government and more taxes, even if they begin with a desire for less government and less taxes. We taxed ourselves more and maintained a larger government establishment here after the revolution than the British would have dared to before.
And who's to say that the Confederacy wouldn't have brought more government interference in people's affairs if it had lasted? Maintaining slavery or some alternate system of labor/racial control and keeping up a military establishment against the US would have gone some way to increasing the size of government.
Some people have this crazy idea that history would just have stopped where it was if the Confederates had had their way. They think that things that happened after Appomattox (as well as far worst things) couldn't have found a way to happen if only the devil Lincoln was defeated.
That's just not the way things happen in history. For one thing, there are international currents in technology, economics, and ideas that have effects on all kinds of regimes. For another, as noted above, successful revolutions produce new national elites wedded to the idea of government power and the things they can do with it. And people are more willing to give power to a government closer to home than to one further away.
Also, the big growth in federal power came long after the Civil War. You could argue that it wouldn't have happened if the country had been divided. Sure, you wouldn't have had a powerful Washington DC, but a government in Richmond could be just as willing to exercise new prerogatives.
A lot of the growth of federal power involved trying to cope with problems that the growth of industry and cities and population and the decline of the frontier brought about. You could argue that those changes were a result of the Hamiltonian policies that the Republicans carried out after the Civil War.
But the problem with that is that more agrarian countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada went further in the direction of government control of the economy than the US. We like to think now that "socialistic" tendencies are the result of elites, or minorities, or urban masses, but in fact, at various times in history, ordinary working people from the majority culture have been more than willing to have more government control over the economy. Think of the Populists or the New Deal. Plenty of Southerners supported Roosevelt.
What I've been trying to say, is that you can't just put all the blame for everything on Lincoln or the North, and can't assume that left alone, everything would have remained as it did in the South (you can't assume that everything remaining as it was in the South in 1800 or 1850 would be a good thing, either).
Finally, a lot of these conflicts between central governments and outlying areas also went on in Latin America. I don't know how every single conflict played out, but the decline of big federal projects like Gran Colombia or the United Provinces of Central America didn't make everybody freer or happier. Entrenched local elites were as unfriendly to liberty as the central government was. Maybe more.
Your post: poppycock.
It's the same thing over and over again. Are you finally going to acknowledge that Jefferson Davis and his team were "government guys" and nation builders who weren't above raising an army, invading neighboring states (Kentucky, Maryland), suspending habeus corpus, imprisoning political foes, seizing and destroying property, waging war on civilians, carrying free people off to slavery, and killing hundreds of thousands?
They were what? Hobbits? Little harmless elves? They were a government. They had all of the aggressive and repressive tendencies and drives you see in other governments and then some. A lot of Southerners (admittedly and sadly too few) and most other Americans didn't trust them any more than they trusted pro-Union politicians.
Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, one government to another government. Don't assume it was a matter of libertarian anti-government rebels crushed by the state. There were two governments involved and "tyranny" -- if that's what it was -- wasn't unique to the US government.
What a well-thought-out, cogent rebuttal.
Nope. The mayor, chief of police and other city officials of Baltimore were arrested it mid to late May.
This was in response to MD sedition and attacks on US troops and transport systems, not to some supposed CSA invasion. Although people might have been paranoid enough to think the CSA was coming.
Mencken really didn't like the South, not the postbellum South of his own day. He said some pretty awful things about the Cotton Belt or Bible Belt.
But he disliked the liberals and Wilsonians of his era even more. As a German, he felt like an outsider, so he couldn't resist tweaking American pieties of the day.
Latching on to aristocratic notions of the old South appealed to Mencken as an outsider, a German Nietzschean who felt out of place in industrial and middle-class democratic America.
Being from Baltimore -- far from the centers of New York or Boston, in a way Southern, yet not really Southern -- also complicated Mencken's life and attitude towards the Civil War.
I've read that and nothing in that document indicates that slavery would have died out in a few years. In fact, it guaranteed slave imports from those U.S. states that allowed slavery and which provided quite a few slaves to the deep south. And there are other sections, like Section IX, which guarantee that individual Confederate states could not ban slavery within their borders and that the government could not pass any laws that impaired slave ownership. Or Article III which mandated that any territory the Confederacy acquired would be slave territory. So it doesn't look like the Confederate Constitution was trying to limit slavery, exactly the opposite.
But I would still be interested in hearing about the history books you spoke of which predicted that slavery would have ended within a few years regardless of whether the South had left or not.
I suspect jeffdem is moving the image Southerners had of Lincoln during and after the war back to the beginning of his term. Early opinion of Lincoln focused on him as crude and as a mediocre unknown. Once Lincoln issued a call for troops, though, the meme of "tyrant Abe" was begun, and his opponents could fit every criticism they had of his various policies into that picture.
In my post I wasn't trying to inflame your anti-Southern emotions - you have rehearsed your spiel far too many times already. I have never heard it suggested Jefferson Davis was a libertarian; not sure what you are writing about there unless it is a straw-man argument. Davis and the South got cross-treaded with one maxim: be careful who you choose as enemies - you will become just like them. To an extent they did, but not to the level of depravity of the (Lincoln approved) final solution of Sherman.
Another example was late in the war South Carolina troops were "deserting" the Army of NoVa. Well actually the were heading home after hearing of Sherman's approach. Jeff Davis said that he could do nothing about it.
Imagine that.
So these are not the seeds of a tyranical central government.
Child you have a vivid imagination.
One can disagree with specific actions, but the idea that he's some kind of antichrist because he suspended habeus corpus when Davis did the same thing won't fly. Grant, Roosevelt, Clinton and Bush all were involved with habeus corpus in ways that strict civil libertarians would object to.
Confronted with a crisis, a president has to decide if he or she is simply going to roll over as Buchanan did and let whatever happens happen, or take actions that will be controversial for somebody somewhere.
Where’s the problem in what I said?
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