Posted on 04/15/2010 1:16:02 PM PDT by wolfcreek
Ten years ago, I received an e-mail from a reader who signed him or herself "J.D." "I am a white racist," wrote J.D., "a white supremacist and I do not deny it."
From that, you'd suspect J.D. had nothing of value to say. You'd be mistaken. J.D. wrote in response to a column documenting the fact that preservation of slavery was the prime directive of the Confederacy. "I was most pleased to see you write what we both know to be the truth," the e-mail said. "I never cease to be amazed at the Sons of Confederate Veterans and similar 'heritage not hate' groups who are constantly whining that the Confederacy was not a white, racist government ..."
That argument, noted J.D. with wry amusement, plays well with "white people who want to be Confederates without any controversy."
(Excerpt) Read more at news-record.com ...
All you have to do is read the Articles of Secession. They are very clear.
The pressing and motivating force for secession was the right to extend slavery to the western states. Lincoln had conceded to leave slavery untouched in the old south, allowing it to die a natural death, but would not countenance its extension into the new western states. The south saw that if it did not spread they would eventually be outvoted in congress and... it would then be eventually forced out of existence.
So the war was a war over the western states. And had the south seceded without a shot fired, war would eventually have broken out anyway as the north and south competed for western territories.
So, the north fought to preserve the union. The southern soldier fought for his state. And the southern elite fought in their own words to preserve and extend the slave economy, and to give southern culture its own national expression, and to extend both into the unclaimed western territories.
Pitts has always been a racist...with a plantation mentality.
Hmmm, what can you say about someone who cites a white supremacist as an authority?
True. I think that I heard on a Civil War documentary that Lee freed his slaves prior to the war and that Grant kept his wife’s slaves until the war ended.
The interesting thing to me is that the GOP was formed by a few Christians who were fed up with the Whig party’s unwillingness to take a stand on slavery. So they left and formed their own minority party which was explicitly the abolition party.
They were such a minority that they ought to have had no influence at all on national politics. And yet a decade after the birth of the GOP slavery was gone. And the Whigs were disappeared from history.
From my home page as I’ve been down this road before:
“...The civil war was about slavery. Sorry. The Confederacy was based on it and so was the Southern economy. You cannot rewrite history no matter how much you want to. This effort started at the end of the war and I was shocked to find it still going on today. So for this pathetic revisionism, that rears it’s ugly head here occaisionally, I will enshrine the following from the message to the Confederate Congress April 29th 1861 from Jefferson Davis:
” As soon as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves... Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra-fanaticicsm and whose business was... to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister states, by violent deunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp pairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, which the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public comain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States. In the meantime the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000 at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race, their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of thier own condition, but to convert hundreds of thourands of squrare miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South;... and the productions in the South of cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.”
“...It comes from a speech in Savannah on March 21st 1861 by Alexander Stephens, VP of the Condederacy.
“The (Confederate) Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions- African slavery as it exists among us- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement fo the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away...Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it- when the “Storm came and the wind blew, it fell.” Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth......It is the first government ever instituted upon principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many Governments have been founded upon the principles of certain classes; but the classes thus enslaved were of the same race, and in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. The negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material- the granite- then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is the best, not only for the superior but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed in conformity with the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances or to question them.
Taxation, overreaching, over mandation, all are there currently. NOTHING about this mirrors the Civil War.
I read that OK was a territory that permitted slavery also. There was a location near where I lived that had a large property owned by a wealthy Cherokee named Peters who owned slaves. Wasn’t just whitey.
Question... Why would a white supremist bother to waste his time by writing to a black journalist in order to help him out with his arguements against remembering and recognizing the efforts and sacrifices made by the southerners in the Civil War? The whole concept smells fishy to me, am I the only one?
The bottom line to me is that while slavery and rascism are abhorrent. The Civil War is a part of our history. Those southern states had many fine, brave and heroic men die. While many of those men were slave owners, many more were not. If you honestly believe that slavery was the only issue, then I want you to imagine something. Can you imagine, even for a second, putting on a Confederate uniform, marching, fighting and dying so that your officers can keep their slaves? You wouldn't do it, would you?
Interesting side note: was it really all about slavery?
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=843
I have a letter written by an ancestor in 1783 to his cousin in Ireland. He welcomed the reopening of immigration from the British Isles that came with the end of the Revolution, but noted that the new country was fragile and the future uncertain. The big question was the question of slavery and how to end it on terms acceptable to both North and South. He predicted that if a solution could not be found that preserved the economic viability of the South, a war was certain. He was a southern slave holder.
See the link at #50
There was more to it. (and another issue we currently deal with)
Here’s a helpful hint for these discussions: It doesn’t help your cause to be linking to anti-semitic sites. Although I may make time to read “How the Illuminati Destroyed American Poetry,” because who can resist that?
The age of the machine would of ended it, if other factors/players weren’t in play.
See post #50
Oh yes, we must not say anything negative about the great Rothschild family.
That’s so old a deflection.
You would be wrong on both counts. Lee freed the slaves left by his father-in-law's estate in December 1862, almost 2 years after the secession. The slaves Grant's wife had use of were owned by her father. All Dent family slaves were freed early in 1863. Regardless, Missouri outlawed slavery in January 1865 so there was no way Grant or his wife or anyone else in the state could have owned a slave.
How am I sanitizing history?
And your posit, that ownership of slaves was not illegal under the U.S.Constitution, ignores the Declaration of Independence - “...that all men are created equal , that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - ...”. The U.S.Constitution was instituted government broadly enshrining the principles set forth in the 1776 document.
Historical fact is that the economies of southern states couldn’t function without “that peculiar institution” called slavery. To justify the enslavement of millions of people, southerners had to denigrate black slaves by maintaining that they weren’t truly ‘human’, and not entitled to the rights declared in 1776.
I would not call that sanitizing history!
The civil war was started because of states rights. Slavery was an after thought on the part of Lincoln. Somebody needs to read the correct history books and not the politically correct ones!!!
VERY well said.
Did you actually look at that site?
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