Posted on 02/12/2018 3:57:10 AM PST by harpygoddess
It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of the people, can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies.
~ Lincoln
February 12 is the anniversary of the birth of the 16th - and arguably the greatest - president of these United States, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Born in Kentucky and raised in Illinois, Lincoln was largely self-educated and became a country lawyer in 1836, having been elected to the state legislature two years earlier. He had one term in the U.S. Congress (1847-1849) but failed (against Stephen A. Douglas) to gain election to the Senate in 1856. Nominated by the Republican party for the presidency in 1860, he prevailed against the divided Democrats, triggering the secession of the southern states and the beginning of the Civil War. As the course of the war turned more favorably for the preservation of the Union, Lincoln was elected to a second term in 1864, but was assassinated in April 1865, only a week after the final victory.
(Excerpt) Read more at vaviper.blogspot.com ...
Total rubbish because that's not what Founders' believed, regardless of how often DiogenesLamp repeats it.
Instead, Founders believed in two requirements for disunion: 1) necessity as in 1776 or 2) mutual consent as in 1788.
No founder ever supported a unilateral "right of secession" at pleasure.
To our Founders such a move would be considered rebellion, insurrection, domestic violence, invasion and/or treason.
And they were against those, regardless of how often DiogenesLamp claims otherwise.
The Brits have German accents? I don’t think so!
More like they pragmatically did what they thought was necessary to present a stronger front against the possibility of England changing it's mind about their secession.
But you dress up their motives very prettily.
They had already fought one terribly destructive war against Britain and were not willing to fight another, just as destructive, with each other over slavery.
Especially since most of the states in 1787 were still slave states. The "free" states would have been greatly outnumbered.
And continue to do so today.
This is what I have come to realize. The power block that influenced Lincoln to launch a war against the South to preserve it's money dominance, and which involved itself in all the corrupt dealings subsequent to the Civil War, is still in power today.
They are in fact the "Deep State" and "Establishment" that we are currently fighting. They want to run the World from the Washington/New York corridor, and the media is just their tool for maintaining dominance of the Federal Government.
It certainly is aggression if, like Guantanamo Bay today or Fort Sumter in 1861, that fort belongs to the United States.
As for their "most important harbors" I think DoodleDawg disposed of that argument in post #487 above.
And just for good measure, I repeated it in post #489.
So your case is dismissed, councilor.
What it says, and what it's effects would be, were not so obvious when it was passed, but the law did in effect create the conditions where New York monopolized the shipping trade and the vast bulk of all import commerce.
Southern Independence greatly threatened that New York commerce.
I agree.
In truth, the south, which featured some of the richest individuals on the planet (at the time of the rebellion) but had no free-standing infrastructure to speak of, literally ate itself alive in order to continue its war against the Americans. The only way that they could have conceivably “won” the conflict was to catch the Americans off balance early on. It almost occurred a couple of times but but that door soon closed forever.
Even in the unlikely event of a confed victory they would have been so weakened that they would be vulnerable to attack by any number of Brits. But one thing would remain clear - to Americans they would always be regarded as spoilers who wrecked a nation for vanity.
Wasn't Canada already doing this? Were there any calls for war with Canada over this?
2. The CS attempts to expand southward (Cuba or Central America), Britain says no way are we letting a slave country expand. They form an alliance with the US and war begins.
Are you aware that at this time in history the entire Caribbean and much of Central and South America had the bulk of all slave operations?
I think the US component of the Slave trade comprised something like 3% of the total.
Why didn't that same law allow New York to monopolize export commerce as well?
Southern Independence greatly threatened that New York commerce.
Simply not true.
But Kettell certainly did have intentions in his presentation of those facts.
Kettell's intention was to show that Northerners & Southerners depended on each other, especially since as Texas Senator Wigfall expressed it:
DiogenesLamp: "It proves that the bulk of European money was coming from Southern exports, but all the money was being filtered through New York.
It showed me something that clearly did not make any sense unless someone had cleverly manipulated conditions to produce such a result."
But it doesn't prove what you claim because the real facts show "the South" produced far less than the fanciful percentages you pretend.
Proof of that is shown in 1861, when 100% of Confederate exports were eliminated from Union statistics.
And what did they show -- 70% or 80% "Southern products"??
Well, yes, it was over 80% of US cotton exports, but in total 1861 exports declined only 40%, meaning the Confederacy represented only 60%, at most.
And you disagree why?
.
Most southerners were Dutch and German.
Brits were mostly in Virginia.
April 12 comes before June 10. The Union sent their troops and warships to Charleston in early April. Besides, the battle of Big Bethel took place in Virginia, which you may or may not have noticed was part of the Confederacy by this time.
Union troops invaded, and that is what caused the fight.
Two Union soldier deaths at Fort Sumter, April 14, 1861.
The Confederates did not kill those soldiers. Error on the part of the Union forces in Sumter is what killed those men. They were killed accidentally when their symbolic cannon firing (after all hostile action had ceased) went badly wrong.
But I can see why you would want to grasp at straws to justify the Union invading.
It wasn't the reason the Union went to war with the South. Money was the reason the Union went to war with the South. "Freeing the Slaves" was just mid-war propaganda aimed at securing support for the war from the liberal kooks in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the North. (And as you said, to undermine the South militarily.)
Just as Lincoln traded a cabinet appointment to win the nomination in Chicago, so too did he trade something which he claimed he did not have the power to trade, for support in his war to stop the South from Trading directly with Europe.
There is no rational explanation for the behavior of Lieutenant David Porter and his secret orders from Lincoln except to deliberately mislead the Confederates as to the intentions of that war fleet and troops.
Even the Northern Newspapers identified it as a deliberate trick to give Lincoln an excuse to start the war he needed to protect the monied interests that backed him for the Presidency.
The Atlantic slave trade was ended by Britain in the 1860s.
Agreed with that last bit.
The problem is you have no evidence -- zero, zip, nada evidence -- to support your alternative hypothesis that any more than the top 1% of the top 1% cared about making, say, Charleston, SC, into the new, New York.
DiogenesLamp on black Confederate soldiers: "They attempted it at the end, but by then it was too late. "
In fact they refused all such suggestions so long as they believed there was even the remotest chance of victory.
Even at the very end they did nothing remotely as serious as the Union's nearly 200 colored regiments.
DiogenesLamp on emancipation: "It's disingenuous to pretend it was important to the Unionists.
They didn't get rid of their own slavery until six months after they got rid of the South's Slavery..."
Well, Northern states had no slavery in 1860, so you're talking about Southern states which remained loyal to the Union and were therefore subject to the Constitution's protections for their "peculiar institution".
For those states slavery could only be abolished by constitutional amendment, which was done in 1865.
All of which DiogenesLamp fully understands, but just enjoys mocking the United States, regardless of how truthful.
DiogenesLamp: "At one time I believed they got rid of slavery because they believed that men should be free.
Now I suspect they only did it because they wanted to break the South's economic power, to impoverish it's wealthy, and to create a political class that would support them in elections."
You well know that all Northerners believed the men should be free, that's why they all abolished slavery before 1860.
But Northerners also knew the Constitution protected slavery where it was legal and so it could only be fully abolished by constitutional amendment, which they did as soon as it was possible.
As for trying to "break the South's economic power", Confederates already did that to themselves, by embargoing cotton exports and so forcing their European customers to find alternate sources in India and Egypt.
So the South never again enjoyed the high prices and demand for cotton they had before 1860.
The Union didn't do that, Confederates did it to themselves.
Which you well know, but just enjoy mocking the truth so much, it doesn't matter, right?
Actually, Confederates did attack the United States, many times, and formally declared war on May 6, 1861, weeks & months before the Union did anything serious in response.
For details, note my post #515 above.
My numbers in post #361 are totally accurate, and you can verify that by checking my source.
DiogenesLamp: "...it was the North that started the War. "
Regardless of how often you deny it, or how loudly, the facts remain that Confederates first provoked war, then started war, then formally declared war and prosecuted war in Union states until hundreds of thousands of soldiers died, refusing to stop fighting for any terms better than Unconditional Surrender.
So the war is on them, and those of you who lie to defend them.
DiogenesLamp: "The South had no benefit to be had from War. "
Total rubbish, because Confederates benefitted almost instantaneously from their war, when four Union states switched to join the Confederacy doubling their population and military potential.
Without those four new states the Confederacy would have no hope of withstanding the Union, war or no-war.
That's the real reason Jefferson Davis ordered his assault on Fort Sumter.
Everything else was just excuse, not reason.
DiogenesLamp: "The North was going to lose millions of dollars if they didn't have one.
The prospect of losing that money (and the possibility that other states would join the South) is why the North went to war."
Your hypothesis may fit some facts as to why Democrat "New York Power Brokers" switched sides to join Republican resistance to Confederate onslaughts, but the vast majority of Republicans were motivated by other concerns, first & foremost, preserving the Union.
I keep repeating what the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE explicitly says.
If they didn't believe that, why did they write it down and send it to England?
I'm ignoring nothing because that's irrelevant to this discussion -- US GDP nearly doubled between 1860 and 1865, then doubled again by 1892.
At the same time, US Federal spending excluding war-debt payments remained pretty constant at roughly 2.5% of GDP (today's Federal spending is north of 20% of GDP).
But the issue is: was "Gilded Age Corruption" after 1865 worse than before 1860?
The answer is: there's no statistical evidence it was, but even if corruption percents remained the same, then along with GDP and Federal spending dollars would statistically double by 1865 and double again by 1892.
But I'm further suggesting that after 1861 we saw the beneficiaries of Federal corruption change from 100% Democrats to now include some Republicans and that is what caused the endless Democrat caterwauling about alleged "Gilded Age Corruption".
DiogenesLamp: "In 1860, the Republicans *were* the Democrats.
Big City, Liberal, Wealthy, colluding with Government, protectionist, tax and spend.
Yup, Democrats."
No, Democrats have always been Democrats, and certainly by 1860 pretty much the same people as today:
Republicans, then as now, were a vastly different group: more rural, small town, small business, Christians, anti-slavery, pro-manufacturing, pro-Union.
Yup, Republicans.
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