[lentulusgracchus]

Southerners are often largely unaware of Confederate home front misrule and oppressions.

Argumentum ex "so's your old man" -- invalid form of argument, of the general form, "but your Honor, he needed killin'!"

The sole issue is whether the Union government and its polemarch, Abraham Lincoln, were justified in doing what they did, which was a war of conquest against free people, and the moral equivalent of enslavement (which they said they abhorred). They were not justified, they had no just cause. Whether or not Jefferson Davis had unpaid speeding tickets or four wives is irrelevant.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

It’s refreshing to see a reb admirer admit that Jeff Davis’s regime might not have been led by angels in the form of slaveowners after all. As far as the legitimacy of the slavers’ rebellion, right makes might which makes more right. It’s not Lincoln’s fault that the Confederacy wasn’t run by a better class of men. They just didn’t make slaveowners and menstealers in the 1860s like they did in the old days of Assyria.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

"moral equivalent of enslavement"

Poor southern slave owners. I'll bekieve in a true moral equivalence when the moral equivalent of slavery involves the right of the moral equivalent of the slaveowner to buy and sell his human property so as to break up the God-established institution of marriage as stated in Matthew 19:

"...he which made [them] at the beginning made them male and female... for this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh"

Thus I do not believe the "moral equivalent of slavery" was really the moral equivalent of slavery. The Confederates never caught on to the fact that there is more in the Bible than "curse of Canaan" and "servants obey your masters".

[Nosterrex]

I was reading Mark Levin's book and his chapter on Federalism. He made the point that the federal government not only allowed slavery, but supported it. If the federal government and the Supreme Court had not violated states rights, perhaps things would have been different. Slavery is the moral argument Statists use to justify their reason for ignoring the 10th Amendment. It does not only affect the states of the Confederacy, but it affects every state and every resident of the United States. We no longer have a federal constitution but a national constitution. We have today what the Founders of this nation blatantly opposed.