Jefferson Davis' First Inaguaral Address, Feb. 18, 1861

I just did...

Of course you did.

Thanks...nice of you to oblige...

Cool! What jeff davis thread is complete without pictures?!

The documentary evidence that the Confederacy was based on slavery and racism is both voluminous and undeniable. It's unfortunate that the Southern States chose to hang their "State's Rights" hat on such an issue.

Being born in the South, I grew up with my measure of Southern pride.

But it's quite difficult to reason away the fact that the Confederacy's primary basis was a belief in the legitimacy of Slavery and the imagined superiority of the white race. This sentiment is supported by speeches, founding documents, statements, and the like by numerous Democrats at the time, both from the North and South.

The Democratic Party (and its Confederacy) were defenders of Slavery.

The Republican Party was founded on a belief in its Abolition.

I'm not particularly interested in hearing apologists for the bigoted Democratic Party which dominated the South during this period, and for so long afterward.

Southern Heritage is a fine thing to be proud of, but it should also be an opportunity to face some ugly facts.

If Lincoln was a Tyrant, he was made so by the insane adherence of Democrats to the Tyrannical concept of Slavery, which was fundamentally incompatible with Liberty.

Congress kept cowardly punting the issue for 70 years, and the result was a Civil War which ended slavery at an enormous cost in Blood.

Any diligent research will reveal many harsh truths, and it's not particularly pretty, whether one is a fan of the Union OR the Confederacy.

For reference and extensive, documented evidence that the Democratic Party's Confederacy was based on racism, I would suggest American History in Black & White by David Barton...

Some of us don’t feel forced to choose between tyrants. Both Lincoln and Davis were tyrants and enemies of liberty. Lincoln should have been impeached and Davis should have been strung up by his slaves.

neo yankee = American

Both Lincoln and Davis were tyrants and enemies of liberty.

I guess I can agree with that, although I'd like to know what you think Lincoln should have or could have done differently. He was put in the most difficult position which any American President has ever been in...

First of all, there were some things about Lincoln I respect. He didn’t buy into the notion that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter on all Constitutional questions, and that is an attitude and belief that I wish Presidents today would take. But overall, yeah, I admit that I don’t think it was absolutely necessary to wage the bloodiest war in our history.

As to the Confederacy and the South; my major bone of contention in all of this is how it has become (in the last 20 yrs or so) almost verboten to have any sort of respect for not just the Confederacy, but for all of the men who fought for it. Respect and admiration for Lee and Jackson, et al, and the thousands who served under them is treated as a sign of being a neo-nazi or something. Republicans like George Allen and Bob McDonnell run away from and apologize for past remarks displaying admiration for these former heroes. Whatever your thoughts on this specific matter, surely you see that it is not just pointless for such groveling, but also counterproductive. Such surrender to pc sensibilities will not win one black vote, and it cedes to the Left the ability to set the parameters for debate and discourse. You might be okay with the attempt to equate the old South with Nazis in the modern popular consciousness, but you might not like the next target.

Otherwise, of course slavery was a huge part of the Confederacy and a major cause of the Civil War. But most Southern whites did not own slaves. Most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves. They might not have held the highest opinion of black people (but neither did Northern whites), but they certainly weren’t fighting and dying so that a wealthy few could own slaves. To them, it was a fight to resist northern aggression. Are we not to consider this? Should they all be damned?

Finally, while your understanding of the history of the Democratic and Republican parties is admirable, I hope you don’t think it has any relevance today. It brings to mind how some conservative like Sean Hannity will engage in pathetic and hopeless attempts to get blacks to consider the GOP by giving us similar history lessons. They point out that Lincoln the emancipator was a Republican; the pro-slavery party was the Democrats, a higher % of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act, Senator Byrd was in the KKK...as if any of that matters today. It doesn’t. Today all that matters is that the Democrats are the party of big government, redistribution of wealth, and racial preferences in all things public. It has become clear that in order to win more than 15 or 20% of the black vote, the GOP would have to adopt the same positions.

Well, wait a minute, Republicans haven’t exactly shrunk govt even when in charge. They have completely surrendered on racial preferences. About the only politician speaking out against preferences is Democrat James Webb, though his statements are largely empthy rhetoric since he votes for one bill after another that either contains preferences (like Obamacare) or that will lead to more preferences (like the DREAM amnesty), and he in fact supports preferences for native born black Americans.

Still, the point remains that to really have a chance with black voters the unfortunate truth is that the GOP would have to as anti-white as the Democrats, and be just as proud of it.

I’m straying here. Sorry. Anyway, I agree that ugly parts of history can’t and shouldn’t be ignored. But it’s gotten to the point now that only the ugly things can be considered. One can’t respect the men who fought for the South or even consider the idea that states had a right to secede without it absurdly being equated to being a white supremacist.

Few things are black and white. The Civil War led to the end of slavery and that was obviously a good thing. But it also put us on the way to a federal government bigger and more powerful than anything the Founders intended.

But overall, yeah, I admit that I don’t think it was absolutely necessary to wage the bloodiest war in our history.

That's a quaint notion, but I'm not sure there were any other solutions which would have both preserved the union and freed the slaves. I'd be interested in hearing some. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.

As to the Confederacy and the South; my major bone of contention in all of this is how it has become (in the last 20 yrs or so) almost verboten to have any sort of respect for not just the Confederacy, but for all of the men who fought for it.

I totally agree, and do not want to be incorrectly associated with those elements.

Finally, while your understanding of the history of the Democratic and Republican parties is admirable, I hope you don’t think it has any relevance today.

Indeed I do think it has relevance, because the Democratic Party persisted in its racism, disenfranchising, oppressing and murdering blacks for many many many decades after the Civil War, through at least the WWII period.

I have little respect in general for Hannity's shallow analyses, but I totally disagree regarding relevance. If more blacks knew the history of the Democratic and Republican parties from the Civil War era through the Civil Rights era, they would begin to see that they are still being kept on the Democratic plantation of poverty, dependence and malaise.

Maybe then they could understand why MLK was a Republican, and why a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than did Democrats, flawed as it may have been.

How the Democrats have been able to sweep 100+ years of their racist history under the rug, and then garner the undying support of the majority of the black community, is beyond me. I can only suppose that it has to do with the enticing Welfare State which many blacks (and many non-blacks) have become willingly dependent on.

Therefore, IMHO, the history I have referenced is relevant, especially if it is studied in detail over a large expanse of time, and not merely based on one frozen snapshot from long ago.

I have found David Barton's American History in Black and White to be highly informative in exposing the racist core of the Democratic party, which exhibited murderous Tyranny against blacks continuously for a good 100 years after the Civil War.

Ah, but slavery was the law of the land and we are a nation of laws. It was morally wrong and so was the perversion of the Constitution that argued that the North had a right to secede, but the South did not.

http://www.answers.com/topic/on-northern-secession

http://www.answers.com/topic/william-lloyd-garrison

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo42.html

And another 300+ comments about “The South Was Wrong” vs. “The South Was Right” starts.

He expresses no hope in avoiding war, three months before the firing on Ft. Sumter. “War of Nothern Aggression,” my ass. This is a declaration of war. And no, there is no mention of slavery, because he knew damned well that to mention it was to make laughable his appeals to “justice,” “tranqility,” etc. What slave could not read the Declaration of Independence and see within it his own compulsion to lift his bonds?

Lincoln desired nether slavery, nor war to end it. His desired course of action was the truly conservative one: to contain it, until it withers like a vine. While Jeff Davis is expressing that “we may not hope to avoid war,” Lincoln was profusely denying any intent to combat.

Yet I do not claim that Lincoln imagined the South peacefully seceding. He knew full well that secession would inevitably bring war; even if the North had immediately surrendered all its holdings in the South, ordered all Southern-based armies to surrender (and what would become of them?), war would still come: the slave-based economy had already begun to wither. Don’t forget that the present crisis was triggered by the North’s attempts to contain slavery to the confederacy. Certainly, the South would claim the entire Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican cession, and California, and with the Oregon territory 1000 miles isolated from the Union, it too. This is why once the belligerence of the South was demonstrated by their attack on Ft. Sumter, Lincoln knew an invasion was necessary. But all sane men know that the Union did not strike first, but allowed the South to first demonstrate its bloodlust.

Yet I do not claim that Lincoln imagined the South peacefully seceding. He knew full well that secession would inevitably bring war; even if the North had immediately surrendered all its holdings in the South, ordered all Southern-based armies to surrender (and what would become of them?), war would still come:

This is crazy talk. You prove LSD is a dangerous drug.

Yet I do not claim that Lincoln imagined the South peacefully seceding.

Double talk mumbo jumbo.

He knew full well that secession would inevitably bring war;

Secession means leaving, not war.

even if the North had immediately surrendered all its holdings in the South, ordered all Southern-based armies to surrender (and what would become of them?), war would still come:

This is almost funny.

Criticism without argumentation.

What slave could not read the Declaration of Independence and see within it his own compulsion to lift his bonds?

One of the reasons why southern states, execising their 'rights', passed laws prohibiting the education of their chattel.

Creative insanity needs no criticism.

He should have let the South go and abandon Fort Sumter. Had he done so, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennesse woudl have stayed in the Union (they only left because of Sumter). He should have then opened the borders to runaway slaves. The end result would have been a weak, heavily black, Gulf Coast confederacy which would have been highly vulnerable to slave rebellions and slave escapes. As it did in Brazil, slavery would have probably collapsed from its own weight within a couple of decades.

Instead, as we know, he did the following: sent over a million men to their deaths (millions of others were crippled and maimed), suspended the ancient right of habeus corpus, debased the currency, created the first income tax (thus leaving a dangerous precedent), and imposed the first national conscription in American history (another dangerous precedents). While the war did lead to the abolition of slavery, the same folks who seceded were back in the driver's seat in the South by the 1870s and blacks were confined to second-class citizenship for nearly a centruy.

Jeff Davis ping

That's a really nice group.

I have a couple of recordings by the 12th Louisiana String Band & Benevolent Society. I couldn't find them on YouTube, so I looked them up on Google and found the Southern Heritage Music Awards which gives the names of a number of other groups I'd never heard of that sing of the war and the South. Here's a link to the SHMA site: Link

Still living in 1865 aren’t you? You lost, remember?

Establishment conservatives have pretty much surrendered to or even embraced the leftwing view that there was nothing good about the Confederacy and the attempt to resist northern aggression.

The ball's in your court. Just what was good about the Confederacy?

I'll grant that once the Davis regime started shooting and the Union responded militarily a lot of Southerners felt bound to "defend" their home soil, but what good did or would secession and the creation of the Confederacy have served?

Would a slave state rebellion really have made the world any freer?