[trek]

If the South had won the War Between the States, (as I recall it described as a youth), it would have created Europe in North America. The Republic would have degenerated into a mass of bickering, war torn, parochial States. Do you really think that the 13 States of the Confederacy would have been it? I doubt it. Read the Federalist Papers. The Founders were well grounded in history when they established the Republic.

That said, I have more than a little sympathy with your view that the origins of the Leviathan can be traced in part to the War Between the States. But surely we can work to restore the Republic within the framework established by the Founders.

[breakem]

Pointing out the nobility of the slave states. LOL!

[Hacksaw]

Our resident nutcase, who I will not name, freepmailed me after I reported his abusing of a pro South poster where he said the Southerner would be happy about the DC snipings. The Freepmail was deleted unread.

[Petronski]

...Southerners defending home and country, rather than fomenting a political coup.

Uh, yeah.

[PatrioticAmerican]

This article goes to show that might is right. We can be a civil people, but we can also turn on each other in a heartbeat. Our current government situation also shows that the government can turn evil in a second. Challenge people in power and they turn against those that gave them their power.

[jimtorr]

""Many Southerners avoid using it because of the implication that there were factions in every locality.""

Um, well, yes. You must know that there certainly were many factions.

Secession in the Confederacy was county-by-county. There were large numbers of counties all over the south that never did secede. The eastern half of Tennessee, for example, and what is now West Virginia. Kentucky, as a state, never secceded either.

For that matter, each Confederate State seems to have been its own faction.

[agrandis]

There were (and still are) more differences between Yankees and Southerners than between Yankees and English-speaking Canadians.

That says it all.

[Teacher317]

*breaking out the popcorn for this one*

[ABG(anybody but Gore)]

Bump for later reading.

[x]

The typical Southern community was not divided at all.

That depends on how you define "community." There were unionists in West Virginia, East Tennessee, Northern Alabama, Northwest Arkansas, Texas and even in Mississippi. There was fighting and partisan activity and repression of Unionists by Confederate authorities. By the war's end, every state except South Carolina had regiments in the Union Army.

Rudulph definition of "civil war" is a little too pat. Surely different regions had their different loyalties in the English or Spanish or Russian Civil Wars. It wasn't a case of everyone going out and shooting at everyone else in every town or village, though at times it may have looked like that. And if you lived in the Border States, no one could have convinced you that there weren't two factions fighting for control of the same governments.

It was not a civil war in those parts of the South removed from the border regions. Had it been a civil war, Lincoln's government could have leveraged local support to subdue those states brutally, as it did in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia.

This makes no sense. Lincoln could no more "leverage local support" behind Confederate lines to subdue the rebels than Davis could do so in Southern Illinois or in New York City to securely establish Confederate control there. Once Union authority was reestablished in Tennessee many mountain Unionists who had been persecuted by the Confederate regime were certainly glad of it, though.

Neither habeas corpus nor freedom of the press were ever suspended in the South, even in the most desperate of times. The Raleigh News and Observer wrote after the war "It is to the honour of the Confederate government that no Confederate secretary could touch a bell and send a citizen to prison."

Learn your own history, Rudulph! 4,000 political prisoners held in the CSA.

The governors of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York reported that they could not enforce the draft without 10-20,000 troops in each state.

How about taking a look at the whole picture, North and South? The Governor of Georgia disputed the Confederacy's right to impose a draft and didn't want it to be carried out.

It was because the South still adhered to the transcendence of principle. The South did not believe that the end justified the means.

Nonsense. Whether the issue was slavery or expropriating property or burning down New York, or imposing a draft or suspending habeus corpus or dragging free blacks back to slavery or firing on one's own countrymen or former countrymen, there was no shortage of "end justifies the means" thinking in the old Confederacy.

Look at some of the theories of absolute state sovereignty developed by defenders of the Confederacy, before accusing others of hypocrisy or brutal pragmatism or power worship. For there is enough nihilism and brutal state worship in radical state's rights theories to call such assaults on others into question.

[foreverfree]

bump from a FReeper born and bred in PA but now a south-of-M-D resident

[stainlessbanner]

“It may be that the South won't need to rise again. It may be that all we'll have to do is remain standing while the rest of America falls.”

--Connie Ward

[WhiskeyPapa]

More pitiful crap from the neo-reb rant brigade.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

Immediately, Lincoln moved to secure Maryland. Habeus corpus was suspended and Southern sympathizers arrested in Baltimore.

And all released unharmed, unlike dozens of loyal Union men in the south who were hanged simply for being loyal to Old Glory.

Walt

[rdb3]

America lost the "civil war" because she lost her soul. You opine that those were necessary war measures? Then why were they never employed by the Confederacy even in the dark days of imminent defeat? It was because the South still adhered to the transcendence of principle.

Every time I read stuff like this, I can't help but laugh, then stare at the words with bewilderment. "Transcendence of principle?" What the hell is that?

The South did not believe that the end justified the means. Most Southerners believed that right and wrong and truth were God-given, and not man's creation.

The author would do well not to feign some type of holiness here by mentioning the Father.

Therefore, man had to submit to them. It was not man's place to decide that principles could be abandoned when expedient. Robert E. Lee said it best: "There is a true glory and a true honour; the glory of duty done the honour of the integrity of principle."

There's that stupid word again. Man had to "submit to them?" I'll say! There was a whole lot of "submitting" going on.

Transcendence means "above and independent of, and supreme." To recognize the transcendence of principle is to recognize that there are absolutes, and that absolutes must come from a Creator. It is to acknowledge that these absolutes are not social constructs that have evolved over time or situational posits that can be altered when fashionable. This humility leads men to respect authority, honor their heritage, and submit to the wisdom that has preceded them, acknowledging their own dependence, and not imagining that they are autonomous, without accountability.

The correct definition is given, but the author can't claim its use truthfully with a straight face.

It is chiefly social and familial accountability, enabled by the presence of law written in the conscience of humanity, which restrains the evil that is present within man, thereby establishing civilization.

Really?

The reality of evil within humanity is evident in the corrupting effect of power, since power is of itself neither good nor evil. Power, in its simplest form, is the lack of restraint, while restraint is accountability in some form. Enduring and benevolent civilizations have recognized this and embraced restraints to ensure that human power would not be concentrated to their detriment. The Constitution was a codified restraint of this kind.

Do tell! What was "evil?" And, which Constitution is the author speaking about?

Restraints on the central government are as necessary to protect us from tyranny as the balance between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

But not the "tyranny" of bondage. That's okay if the chain doesn't fit around your neck.

The victors justified themselves to the world and history by brute force and sly obfuscation. The elimination of slavery was trumpeted as the justifying crown of victory. As to saving the Union, is that not like preserving a marriage by beating the wife into submission?

But had the Confederacy won, "brute force" would have still been the practice of the day. The end of slavery was not the "justifying crown," but don't sound so sorrowful over its loss.

The result is the humanist monster-state, and activist judges who reinvent what the constitution means. They have lost the ability to understand and receive it, since they have abandoned the transcendence of principle.

Sigh. "Principle." I would say that the author never had it or his "principle" is misplaced.

Both sides lost. The U.S. lost its character and began the abandonment of transcendent foundations. Dixie lost its will to live. Yet where principles remain- under cold ashes, deeply buried remains an ember of hope. And where there is a smoldering hope, the fire may yet burn again.

Burn again? Well you better come loaded for bear. You're gonna need it.

No mercy.
Coming soon: Tha SYNDICATE.

[uncbuck]

"There were (and still are) more differences between Yankees and Southerners than between Yankees and English-speaking Canadians. "

Last time I was in Dixie, I saw McDonalds and burger King, and the last time I was in Canada I saw Kentcky Fried Chicken made the Colonel's way.

It seems to me that we really aren't that different.

Signed, a Northerner that likes grits