Posted on 06/08/2021 7:16:33 AM PDT by rebuildus
I’ve been watching documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’ classic series The Civil War , and I’m loving it! Since coming to the South, my interest in the horrific fight between Americans has increased dramatically.
I’ve also read Bill O’Reilly’s / Martin Dugard’s book Killing Lincoln, which I also enjoyed immensely.
Watching The Civil War, I heard Frederick Douglass quoted many times, which piqued my interest too, so now I’m also reading his autobiography! I definitely highly recommend this one. Too many have white-washed Slavery with an image of happy slaves joyfully singing spirituals. This is the other side, from the perspective of an ex-slave.
In times past, I may have watched The Civil War with a jaundiced eye, suspect that it originally aired on liberal PBS, or that Ken Burns is probably a liberal.
But I’m watching it with an open mind, and though I’m sure some people may tell me that it’s biased and is missing this or that key fact, I find it even-handed, and just as important–HUMANE.
In our mad desire to “win” in the political and cultural arena, I find a severe shortage of humanity among us (“right” and “left”). No, I will not equate the two, and pretend that humanity is equally lacking in the two sides. Many leftists are out of their minds with rage and destructive impulses. Yet, I see too little love on the right side of the spectrum as well.
That’s a problem.
As I watch The Civil War, I’m constantly struck by the good and bad on BOTH sides:
The North stood against the evil of Slavery (that’s a HUGE mark in their favor). Yet, life in northern cities could be de-humanizing, particularly in contrast with more natural and healthy rural living, which the South personified.
And the destruction of states’ rights, which Lincoln started, opened the door to today’s full-on ASSAULT against these rights. Yet nobody can rationally say that any state has the right to sanction the buying and selling of human beings against their will.
The South had a healthy distrust of the corrupting power of the federal government. Unfortunately for them, this distrust was so great that it impeded them from coming together sufficiently within their OWN government to maximize their chances for winning the war.
That so many Americans were essentially okay with a system that treated other Americans as PROPERTY is unsettling, to be frank. Of course, things have not changed all that much: the WHOLE country (North and South) permits the slaughter of unborn children in the womb. So are we any better than the slave-holders?
My point here, is that our hatred for our fellow man blinds us to the GOOD that resides within him. If the North and South COMBINED the good aspects of each, there never would have been a Civil War, and Reconstruction would have gone much better for all concerned, particularly the ex-slaves.
This principle is true of virtually EVERY division we have: black vs. white, right vs. left, rural vs. city, vegan vs. carnivore, “internal” vs. “external” martial arts, calisthenics vs. weight training, etc.
Tribes rule what was once the UNITED States of America, and this same phenomenon is playing out worldwide.
Rise of the “Tribal Chiefs”
Everywhere we see the rise of “tribal chiefs”–those who benefit via money and power from fomenting DIVISION amongst us. We see it all over the Internet–“influencers” who get clicks by insulting people who don’t agree with them.
You probably watch some of them. We all do.
Think about it–is this really productive? Does this place us in a more or less united position? Many of the people doing this call themselves “Christians.” Is this Christian?
Tribes are typically led by “chiefs” who are charismatic, have a way with words, are bold, and insatiable for attention. They cater to our worst instincts. It reminds me of one of my favorite old quotes…
"The palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise"--Thomas Paine
Tribalism is killing our unity, and thus killing our nation and the civilized world. We must overcome it or perish!
I believe healing starts when we recognize the part we are playing in this deadly game. This site will continue to promote the best in natural health, success, and freedom, and it will continue to point out those who are enemies of these, but it will not indulge in gratuitous insults to build our readership.
And I have no illusions–we will not ALL unite. Only those of goodwill, despite our differences. But I believe that will be enough to save our countries, or at least to safeguard those of us who trust God’s grace and the power of a people united.
Patrick Rooney is the Founder of OldSchoolUs.com. He communicates clearly and fearlessly during perilous times about natural health, success, and freedom. To reach Patrick, email him at info@oldschoolus.com.
Dude, you go on and on about the Corwin Amendment and how the North pushed for it. But you do not even understand what was stated in the Amendment. The intent of the Amendment was to make the issue of Slavery a States matter and take the decision out of the hands of the Central Government! Now you call it, “an effort to keep Slavery going”. Sheesh. You are so self deluded it’s pathetic. Please don’t reply.
You are either extremely naïve or extremely cynical, or most likely both at the same time. A last-minute attempt to keep the country together by giving the slaveowners the security they claimed to want didn't make the Republicans worse than the slaveowners who wanted slavery forever (or until God in his wisdom did away with it without anyone putting in any effort). I feel bad about whatever happened to you on your school trip to New York City, but I don't really know why anyone bothers to respond to your nonsensical and hate-filled screeds.
Get your facts straight Reb.
So you think that Christians of 1860 wanted to lay waste to half of the country and slaughter those who chose to leave the union? What sect ever taught that?
“Was the Emancipation Proclamation a lie too? Lincoln didn’t mean it?”
My guess is that you don’t know what’s in Lincoln’s proclamation.
The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in the states that had seceded.
It didn’t free any slaves in the United States, including those portions of rebel states that were occupied by the union army. They had to wait for Congress to pass the 13th amendment and for the states to ratify it. That happened in December 1865, when Johnson was President.
“Did either of those Republican Governors ever go out and beat or kill somebody?”
I don’t know. How would that change the fact these two Republican governors belonged to the Klan?
The point that surely troubles you is that the Klan wasn’t a creation of the Democratic party, despite the bleating of historical illiterates.
“I am not sure if you know this but even actual law enforcement officers are not allowed to cross state lines to capture a fugitive.”
Does the Fugitive Slave Act ring a bell?
“Passed on September 18, 1850 by Congress, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was part of the Compromise of 1850. The act required that slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. The act also made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying escaped slaves.”
It isn’t a coincidence that Karl Marx was a featured writer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, the flagship newspaper of the Republican party and its Whig predecessor. He wasn’t hiding what he was, and a lot of his fellow ‘48er revolutionaries held important positions in the Lincoln administration and the Union army.
Did that trigger you, sparky?
“Across the Atlantic, another man linked the fates of enslaved and wage workers: Marx. Upon publishing “The Communist Manifesto” with Friedrich Engels in 1848, the German philosopher sought refuge in London after a failed uprising in what was then the German Confederation. Hundreds of thousands of German radicals immigrated to the United States in this same period, filling industrial jobs in the North and joining anti-slavery groups. Marx had once considered “going West” himself, to Texas, according to historian Robin Blackburn in his book “An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln.”
Marx was intensely interested in the plight of American slaves. In January 1860, he told Engels that the two biggest things happening in the world were “on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
He equated Southern slaveholders with European aristocrats, Blackburn writes, and thought ending chattel slavery “would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black.”
Marx was also friends with Charles A. Dana, an American socialist fluent in German who was the managing editor of the New York Tribune. In 1852, Dana hired Marx to be the newspaper’s British correspondent.
Over the next decade, Marx wrote nearly 500 articles for the paper. Many of his contributions became unsigned columns appearing on the front page as the publication’s official position. Marx later “borrowed liberally” from his New York Tribune writings for his book “Capital,” according to Nichols.
Like a lot of nascent Republicans, Lincoln was an “avid reader” of the Tribune. It’s nearly guaranteed that, in the 1850s, Lincoln was regularly reading Marx.
In 1860, two major factors helped to propel Lincoln — a one-term congressman and country lawyer most known for losing a Senate campaign — to the Republican nomination for the presidency. First, the support of former German revolutionaries who had become key players in the Republican Party; and second, the support of the party’s newspaper, the Tribune.
Once Lincoln took office, his alliance with socialists didn’t stop. Dana left the Tribune to become Lincoln’s eyes and ears in the War Department, following along with troop movements and telling Lincoln what he thought of his generals. A soldier working in the telegraph office later wrote that “Lincoln waited eagerly” for “Dana’s long dispatches.”
And Greeley continued to urge Lincoln to take a harder line against slavery, to make the Civil War not just about preserving the union but about abolition. Marx did the same in the pages of the Tribune.
In 1863, they got what they wanted when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln moved to end slavery on New Year’s Day 1863. It went on for three more years.
In January 1865, Marx wrote to Lincoln on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, a group for socialists, communists, anarchists and trade unions, to “congratulate the American people upon your reelection.”
He said “an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders” had defiled the republic and that “the workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working class.”
A few weeks later, a reply came via Charles Francis Adams — son of former president John Quincy Adams, grandson of former president John Adams and U.S. ambassador to Britain under Lincoln.
He told Marx that Lincoln had received his message, and it was “accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.”
Notably, Adams indicated Lincoln considered Marx and company “friends.”
He went on to say that the Union “derive[s] new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe.”
Both letters ran in newspapers across Britain and the United States. Marx was delighted, telling Engels it created “such a sensation” that the “bourgeoisie” in private clubs were “shaking their heads at it.”
Lincoln also met with the New York chapter of the Workingmen’s Association, telling its members in 1864: “The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.” Which is perhaps a more eloquent rendering of Marx’s famous rallying cry: “Workers of the world unite!”
Lincoln never took up the mantle of socialism. He believed in the system of wage labor even as he proposed reforms to it; Marx rejected it as another form of slavery. But Lincoln certainly viewed socialists as allies, and Nichols writes, “It is indisputable that the Republican Party had at its founding a red streak.”
Though this fact may be little known now, it hasn’t been a secret to other figures in American history. When the socialist orator and frequent presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs made a campaign stop in Springfield, Ill., in 1908, he told the crowd, “The Republican Party was once red. Lincoln was a revolutionary.”
It was also noted by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In February 1968, at a celebration of the life of W.E.B. Du Bois at Carnegie Hall, King brought up that the co-founder of the NAACP became a communist in his later years.
“It is worth noting,” King said, “that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. … Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
It freed every slave in the United States in those parts still in rebellion when the Proclamation was signed. The rest did have to wait for the 13th Amendment was ratified or their own state legislatures did away with slavery.
It takes a special breed of scumbag to reduce themselves to this degree of slander by innuendo, but there are a few here who never fail to disappoint. I could just as easily ask, "who here appears to be extraordinarily interested in what Marx thinks? Who keeps injecting Marx into the conversation? And just where do his loyalties lie?"
It would be foolish, but no less foolish than our FRiend pelly.
“The South felt Lincoln was trying to provoke an incident.”
You are correct.
And so was the South.
If you form a state militia and go up against the US military as an unit you will be slaughtered. The US military will side with the communists, not all but a chunk of it and they will easily destroy large gatherings of men and equipment. In big unit fight the US military is excellent at destruction. In small guerilla tactics not so much, such as Afghanistan being a current example. Yes they win battles but they also do not win the wars.
Some states will dissolve. Blue states will turn themselves over to the US government and those who are essentially what would be considered Border States in the previous civil war is where the bleeding will be intense. To win you have to take it to a certain group of targets and be without remorse.
I hope you are right in your assessment but must agree to disagree.
I agree. Øbozo spent eight years stripping the ranks of conservatives. Trump did little to revers the trend. And pResident Spitefence is continuing Øbozo’s work at a feverish pace.
In any national civil conflict the military will be ordered to shoot us, not the left.
If Hitler was Black we would all be speaking German.
LOL. There are not that many US military units PERIOD. There are 330 million people in the USA and 1 million in the Army. The US Amy is irrelevant in a general Civil War.. Texas alone could raise an army by itself. A Texas Army 3 times the US Army OVERNIGHT.
Right. The emancipation declaration didn’t apply to States remaining in the union and didn’t free slaves in them.
No that took the 13th Amendment, as I'm sure you know. He was able to free the slaves in those areas in rebellion as a war measure. The government was allowed to seize without compensation any property of any citizen that was used to support the rebellion. That included slaves.
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