Confederate Flag Needs To Be Raised, Not Lowered (contains many fascinating facts -golux)

via e-mail | Thursday, July 9, 2015 | Chuck Baldwin

[Team Cuda]

So, let’s try this again for the nth time. The Union did not fight the War to stop slavery. They were very clear that Slavery was not the main, or really even a minor point to fight. They fought to maintain the Union.

The issue here is, why did the South choose to secede? Your point that it doesn’t matter what their reason was as long as they had the right is just an attempt to avoid admitting it was slavery. The legislatures of South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, and Florida) did not share your reticence. They were very clear, and proud (at least in the case of Mississippi) that they were seceding due to slavery.
If they had no problem admitting that they seceded in defense of slavery, why do you have a problem admitting it (admitting you have a problem is the first of the 12 steps, after all).

[ought-six]

“....but you are clearly disputing that slavery was a factor AT ALL.”

Again, you pick and choose parts of commments to try to create wholly new comments.

Read my posts, dude (or is it dudette?). I said that four seceding states cited slavery as a reason for secession. But you, curiously, claim I dispute that slavery was a “factor at all.” Now, how can that be? How can you make the leap from my saying that slavery was a specific (though not the sole) reason for secession for four states, to your incredible conclusion that I said it was not a factor at all?

And where, pray, did I ever “defend slavery?” Or “Jim Crow?” Come on, point it out. Again, you make shit up.

Re-debate “something that was settled 150 years ago?” You mean, like the “truth” that the earth was flat that was “settled” hundreds of years ago? You mean, like the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves is settled fact? Or...well, you get the picture.

In all candor, you need to take a very basic class in reading comprehension. Though, if you are a product of public government schools I can’t really fault you for your ignorance, but must lay blame on the semi-literate government employees who taught you.

[Crim]

“he was in favor of sending blacks back to Africa.”

Yeah so where a lot of freed Blacks:

The Republic of Liberia, formerly a colony of the American Colonization Society (ACS), declared its independence on July 26, 1847. Under pressure from Britain, the United States finally accepted and recognized Liberian Independence on February 5 1862, making Liberia the first African country to gain its independence in July 26, 1847. Liberia is Africa’s oldest democratic republic. Liberia is unique from the other African countries because it was the only country that was colonized and controlled by freed African Americans and ex-slaves from the Caribbean islands who left the United States of America and the Caribbean in 1822.

And this is the republican platform in 1860:

Resolved That we, the delegated representatives of the republican electors of the United States, in convention assembled, in discharge of the duty we owe to our constituent and our country, unite in the following declarations:

FIRST. That the history of the nation during the last four years has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the republican party, and that the causes which called it into existence are permanent in their nature, and now more than ever before demand its peaceful and constitutional triumph.

SECOND. That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the declaration of independence and embodied in the federal constitution, “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” is essential to the preservation of our republican institutions; and that the federal constitution, the rights of the states, and the Union of the states, must and shall be preserved.

THIRD. That to the Union of the states this nation owes its unprecedented increase in population; its surprising development of material resources; its rapid augmentation of wealth; its happiness at home and its honor abroad; and we hold in abhorrence all schemes for disunion, come from whatever source they may; and we congratulate the country that no republican member of congress has uttered or countenanced the threats of disunion so often made by democratic members, without rebuke and with applause from their political associates; and we denounce those threats of disunion, in case of a popular overthrow of their ascendency, as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly to rebuke and forever silence.

FOURTH. That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state, to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends, and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among
the gravest of crimes.

FIFTH. That the present democratic administration has far exceeded our worst apprehension in its measureless subserviency to the exactions of a sectional interest, as is especially evident in its desperate exertions to force the infamous Lecompton constitution upon the protesting people of Kansas–in construing the personal relation between master and servant to involve an unqualified property in persons–in its attempted enforcement everywhere, on land and sea, through the intervention of congress and of the federal courts, of the extreme pretensions of a purely local interest, and in its general and unvarying abuse of the power entrusted to it by a confiding people.

SIXTH. That the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the federal government; that a return to rigid economy and accountability is indispensable to arrest the systematic plunder of the public treasury by favored partisans; while the recent startling developments of frauds and corruptions at the federal metropolis, show that an entire change of administration is imperatively demanded.

SEVENTH. That the new dogma that the constitution of its own force carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with cotemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent, is revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country.

EIGHTH. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no “person should be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law,” it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.

NINTH. That we brand the recent reöpening of the African slave trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity, and a burning shame to our country and age, and we call upon congress to take prompt and efficient measures for the total and final suppression of that execrable traffic.

TENTH. That in the recent vetoes by the federal governors of the acts of the legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, prohibiting slavery in those territories, we find a practical illustration of the boasted democratic principle of non-intervention and popular sovereignty, embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and a demonstration of the deception and fraud involved therein.

ELEVENTH. That Kansas should of right be immediately admitted as a state, under the constitution recently formed and adopted by her people, and accepted by the house of representatives.

TWELFTH. That while providing revenue for the support of the general government by duties upon imports, sound policy requires such an adjustment of these imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country, and we commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to the workingmen liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence.

THIRTEENTH. That we protest against any sale or alienation to others of the public lands held by actual settlers, and against any view of the free homestead policy which regards the settlers as paupers or suppliants for public bounty, and we demand the passage by congress of the complete and satisfactory homestead measure which has already passed the house.

FOURTEENTH. That the republican party is opposed to any change in our naturalization laws, or any state legislation by which the rights of citizenship hitherto accorded by emigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.

FIFTEENTH. That appropriation by congress for river and harbor improvements of a national character, required for the accommodation and security of an existing commerce, are authorized by the constitution and justified by the obligation of government to protect the lives and property of its citizens.

SIXTEENTH. That a railroad to the Pacific ocean is imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country; that the federal government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction; and that, as preliminary thereto, a daily overland mail should be promptly established.

SEVENTEENTH. Finally, having thus set forth our distinctive principles and views, we invite the cooperation of all citizens, however differing on other questions who substantially agree with us in their affirmance and support.

[DiogenesLamp]

Well, you're creating your own soundtrack. If it's making you miserable, then change your tune.

What you are saying is stick my fingers in my ears and pretend not to hear all the marching Fascism going on around me. I don't think that will work. The Fascists will imperil you whether you believe in them or not.

Pushing the cause of slaveholders may not be good for you.

I am not "Pushing the cause of slaveholders", I am pointing out that under the rules in existence at their time, what they did was perfectly in their rights. It is a variation of Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

You, on the other hand, are trying to apply the newly adopted morality of 1865 to the conflict period of 1861. You are pushing an ex post facto justification for an invasion done four years earlier, and for entirely different reasons then those claimed by subsequent supporters.

Find a constructive issue. Or, take up golf or painting. Your happiness is worth some effort.

Sure. As Samuel Johnson said: ""Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

For some reason pastimes don't seem enjoyable when you have a sword of Damocles hanging over you, and be serious. That is exactly what we are facing now. We are the new "Jews", and the Democrats are the New Nazis.

Happiness can become a habit.

A short lived one unless steps are taken to protect it. That statement reminds me of this:

[Crim]

You can dance around it anyway you want (and lord have you tried)...

It was southern Democrats that started the Civil war, it was those same Democrat losers that started the KKK and instituted Jim crow laws after they lost that war.

It was all the same people....there was no switching of parties....Democrats are the party of slavery, Jim crow and the KKK....and you are here to carry their water.

[DoodleDawg]

Isn't that how the colonies left Great Britain?

The colonies tried and succeeded. The Confederates tried and failed.

[DiogenesLamp]

Hey, don't argue with me. Argue with Alec Stephens. He's the one that spent a considerable part of his speech arguing that the Founders were mistaken about blacks being equal to whites. Which means, by definition, that this is what he thought the Declaration said.

So you are suggesting that the opinion of Alec Stephens is the deciding factor regarding what the Declaration of Independence meant?

I disagree.

As far as the Declaration goes, it was written by five men. Of those five, three were anti-slavery, one was a slaveowner, and I've been unable to find information on the position of the fifth with regard to the institution. Franklin had owned slaves earlier in his life, but by the time of DoI (or perhaps shortly thereafter) was anti-slavery.

You are quibbling about trivia. Slave owning Jefferson was the primary writer. The Writers are not the power behind it, that power would be from the Representatives of the States who signed it. There are fifty six of them.

Here you go again. You are weaving and dodging instead of just accepting the hit and speaking the truth. The Declaration was never intended by the States to abolish slavery, it was intended to induce England to let them be free and independent of English Rule.

There are many, many examples of various of the Founders expressing their discomfort with the contrast between the lofty principles expressed in DoI and the realities of American slavery. Including a good many of the Founders that owned slaves. Washington, Madison and Jefferson, for instance.

Subsequently. After the contrast between the words and their own actions was pointed out to them. I have read Washington's essays on Slavery. He evolved. He didn't start out that way. None of them did, not even the populations of the states. Those words in the Declaration are what kicked off the abolition movement. The Declaration was not a manifestation of it, it was the other way around.

None of which, AFAIK, ever stated that they thought the principles of DoI did not apply to blacks.

Their actions spoke. You cannot believe the Declaration applied to slaves while keeping slaves. It is a discordance. A Dichotomy. A cognitive dissonance. It is an behavior incompatible with the idea.

[ought-six]

“It was a pretend secession but it wasn’t a pretend rebellion.”

Then how do you explain the parole documents that Southern troops were issued by the federals after the surrender? Specifically, how do you explain that the parole documents identify two contending nations (the United States and the Confederate States of America), and do not at all EVER mention the various individual states (thus, it could not have been a War Between the States). Those parole papers were official United States government documents. You’d think they’d have known against whom they’d been fighting.

[x]

In the context of the time it was written, it meant they wanted some flowery and noble sounding verbiage to make the document more persuasive. They wanted it to aid their cause, and to appeal to a sense of equality among Englishmen. They did not intend to make it into a condemnation of slavery due to it's inherently unequal nature.

That's a very narrow, legalistic approach. When you start out a document, "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..." and then give a list of self-evident truths, you're laying the foundation for what will come later in the document.

Thomas Jefferson, a philosopher and something of a romantic certainly wouldn't want his words to be taken in as just a flowery and meaningless prelude to a cut-and-dried assertion of the will. He took his ideas seriously. It's ironic that people who claim to honor Jefferson don't due him the courtesy of taking his ideas seriously. Or that people who rebuke the Emancipation Proclamation for having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading” dismiss the morally elevated side of the Declaration.

That was a later and subsequent interpretation starting I believe, in Puritan, Fanatical, Liberal Massachusetts. Whether it be hunting Witches, or Abolishing slavery, or promoting "Gay marriage", whatever they do, they do it with zeal and fanaticism.

They certainly don't have any monopoly on that.

Whether we should have kept those restrictions or not is irrelevant to the fact that the Founders never intended or possibly even contemplated such a thing when they wrote that document. As the courts of the time were found of saying, "Such was not comprehended by the law" of that time.

Well, no. That courts in Britain and America called slavery into question at that time, indicates that the moral rightness or wrongness of slavery was indeed "comprehended by the law" at the time of the Founders. That anti-slavery societies were formed at the same time attests to the same fact.

That other revolutions in the Founders' lifetime included the abolition of slavery likewise indicates that emancipation was a part of the moral climate of the day. One can't say that the Declaration was a pro-slavery document or that ideas about the wrongness of slavery were alien to it.

You had to be able to connect the dots. But the dots were there.

[ought-six]

Answer my question. Come on, do it. Don’t change the subject. Answer it.

[DiogenesLamp]

So who is misrepresenting the past, you, me or Stephens?

As I pointed out to you in the previous message, Stephens' opinion is irrelevant to the concurrent and immediately subsequent history of the meaning and intent of te Declaration of Independence.

Stephens is just another convenient dodge for you because you don't want to admit something which is unpleasant, but remains true anyway.

The Declaration of Independence inspired the larger abolition movement, but that was not it's purpose when it was written, that was a lesser consequence of Jefferson's choice of verbiage.

It's purpose was to assert a right to secede from the English Union.

[Tau Food]

I am not "Pushing the cause of slaveholders", I am pointing out that under the rules in existence at their time, what they did was perfectly in their rights. It is a variation of Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Well, what you've done is taken a side in a very controversial issue and convinced yourself that it is free of controversy. And, it makes you unhappy to find that there are people on the other side of what was always a controversial issue, despite you self-delusion. There isn't any legal basis for your contention that our Constitution affords some of its citizens a right to cancel the United States citizenship belonging to their neighbors or to cancel the rights belonging to their neighbors as guaranteed by the United States Constitution. Secession is just a power play and those who try it should expect a fight. And, of course, they got one.

The fact that secession was attempted in order to preserve the practice of human bondage is unfortunate, but it is part of the baggage that you have chosen to carry. No one is forcing these choices upon you. Pushing the cause of slaveholders is not likely to somehow lead to an outcome favoring liberty. There's a tension there that just can't be avoided.

Pssst. Nobody's going to hang you in a fortnight. Unless you hurt yourself, you're going to be ok. ;-)

[Crim]

I’m not changing the subject...the subject is Democrats and why are you supporting their actions during any period of American history?

Democrats controlled the south before, during, and after the civil war for almost 100 years until the late 60’s....are you disputing that fact?

[ought-six]

Too funny! I’m a Southerner (by the grace of God), though I currently live in Illinois (which is not as bad as some folks think, by the way); and only once in my life did I ever support a Democrat, and that was forty years ago. And I’ve regretted that one time ever since. And I routinely vote in EVERY election, from local library boards to the presidency. So, nice try.

[Sherman Logan]

I agree with your last sentence. It was indeed a behavior incompatible with the idea. Which is why so many of them were made extremely uncomfortable with the behavior.

I find your argument odd. You insist we must ignore the , the plain wording of the document, and instead divine what the signers intended to say. Then you turn around and say the later words and actions of those signers is not relevant to our trying to figure out what they intended it to say.

Contrary to what you seem to believe, I think the Founders were smart men. They knew exactly what they were saying and understood its implications. As you say, the primary writer of the Declaration was a major slaveowner. AFAIK, he has never been accused of being an incompetent writer, saying things he didn’t actually mean to say.

My comments with regard to Stephens were simply that he believed the Founders had been wrong in their beliefs. This was one of the two ways to deal with the disconnection between the principles of the Declaration and the practice of slavery.

Stephens and a good many southerners chose to throw the Founders under the bus, announcing that the principles of the Declaration were quite simply wrong. Since the right to secession or independence proclaimed in the Declaration were dependent on all men being equal, they apparently didn’t comprehend that they were thereby saying the Founders did not have an inherent right to rebel.

The other approach was taken by other southerners, who decided to throw biology under the bus and keep the Declaration. Just decide that Africans aren’t “really” men and the disconnect goes away. You do, however, have to abandon the science of biology, not to mention the Bible.

[ought-six]

Oh, but you ARE changing the subject. Come on, answer my question. Either answer it or admit you talk out of your ass. Either one. I’m waiting.

[ought-six]

And your failure to answer it is a tacit admission that you do indeed talk out of your ass.

[DiogenesLamp]

So, let’s try this again for the nth time. The Union did not fight the War to stop slavery. They were very clear that Slavery was not the main, or really even a minor point to fight. They fought to maintain the Union.

Essentially correct as far as my understanding goes.

The issue here is, why did the South choose to secede?

No, it isn't. Why are some people Catholic and others Protestant? Because that's what they chose to do, and they have the legal right to do it.

The Issue is whether they can exercise a right, even when people disagree with their choice.

Your point that it doesn’t matter what their reason was as long as they had the right is just an attempt to avoid admitting it was slavery.

I have no trouble at all admitting that much of their angst was due to the fact that what they had put much of their money into, and that which provided a heavy portion of their financial income was feeling threatened by Liberal moralizers from the North. (Same as today.) Slavery was a big chunk of their assets and economy at the time, and yes, they were very concerned about their money.

It wasn't their only concern, but it was certainly one of the most important of their concerns. The problem of arguing your position is that it was legal and accepted at the time, and would have continued being accepted had they stayed, and so therefore is just a red herring to provide ex post facto justification for an otherwise unjustifiable oppression of an Independence movement.

Your side keeps the discussion focused on "their reasons" rather than the Union's violation of "their rights."

Nobody wants to be thought of as "bad guys" and so everyone on the Union side wants to focus on the only good thing that they did during the war, even though they didn't intend to do it when they started.

Nobody wants to think about the vast treasure and property robbed from the Southern states, the people they killed, and the oppression which was applied in invading people who didn't want them there.

They want to focus on their rationalization.

[Crim]

“Too funny! I’m a Southerner (by the grace of God), though I currently live in Illinois (which is not as bad as some folks think, by the way); and only once in my life did I ever support a Democrat, and that was forty years ago. And I’ve regretted that one time ever since. And I routinely vote in EVERY election, from local library boards to the presidency. So, nice try.”

That’s why I wonder if you lost your mind or something because it was Democrats in charge of the confederacy, the KKK, and responsible for later Jim crow laws....and you cant change that fact even if you wish to ignore it.

To support the confederacy is to support the people who ran it....Democrats.

I mean really....you might as well blame Republicans for the civil war instead of just Lincoln.

[Crim]

“Your side”

See there is your problem.....you are trying to take sides in a 150 year old conflict.

It's a quixotic farce....tilting at windmills...that will never fall.