Posted on 12/05/2014 5:44:32 AM PST by TurboZamboni
MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. (AP) — At the heart of this well-preserved antebellum city, sunbeams stream through the arched windows of a grand public meeting room that mirrors the whole Civil War — including its death throes, unfolding 150 years ago this week when Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman launched his scorching March to the Sea.
The first major objective along Sherman's route, Milledgeville was Georgia's capital at the time, and this room was the legislative chamber. Crossing its gleaming floor, Amy Wright couldn't help recalling family stories of the hated "foragers" who swept through then. "They were just called 'Sherman's men,'" she said in a hushed voice.
(Excerpt) Read more at twincities.com ...
Stuff and nonsense. Unless by exist you mean continued thievery from the United states. It wasn't that they lacked the resources, or the will to create an infrastructure - they lacked the interest. Sure, they had the makings for a fledgling economy, if they could survive being devoured by any one of a number of foreign powers. But not enough of an engine to survive for very long, even in the very best of circumstances.
So it was the height of impetuousness for them to have their temper tantrum the way they did. Foolish and bloody.
I found it richly ironic that for a quote on the Constitution you chose one of the main opponents to.....the Constitution ;’)
Frankly I’m a little embarrassed for our FRiend DiogenesLamp - the “Linkum done tricked us” defense is pathetically lame. Maybe he’ll try harder tomorrow.
Of course it was good faith for Lincoln to do what he could to preserve the Union, and ridiculous for you to suggest otherwise.
And your words "gain the upper hand politically" might be appropriate for a dispute over, oh, say, tariffs, but Lincoln was dealing with survival of the United States and its Constitution, which he was sworn to preserve, protect and defend.
He was legally obliged, in all good faith to do nothing less than his best.
DiogenesLamp: "The salient aspect of this effort is to just get the Virginia convention to go home, and then do whatever he felt was necessary after that political threat had been averted. "Honest Abe" indeed."
You scoff and mock that Lincoln hoped to have Virginia and other Southern states help him restore the Union?
In fact, Virginia was key to Founding the Union, and any reasonable person, like Lincoln, would be shocked and outraged to learn Virginians had become so corrupted & eager in 1861 to throw the Union away.
At the time, even such luminary Virginians as Robert E. Lee believed secession wrong and Civil War stupid -- but what did they know?
So, Lincoln believed & hoped, in all good faith there was still enough pro-Union sentiment left in the Upper South & Border States to persuade the Deep South to abandon its temporary-insanity of declaring secession & forming a new Confederacy.
Turns out Lincoln's good-faith optimism was wrong, Southern Fire Eaters were too strong politically, especially anywhere slavery dominated.
But Lincoln turned out to be right about the Border States (Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri), and even in the Upper South, after declaring secession, they found many counties remained loyal to the Union, in western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina and northern Alabama, Mississippi & Arkansas.
So in the end, almost every Confederate state contributed some military forces to help preserve the Union.
Lincoln's good faith in them was very well placed indeed.
;-)
The point being discussed and to which you are responding is not how Lincoln felt about slavery. His hatred of the institution is well known. The point being discussed is whether he believed that the principles of freedom articulated in the Declaration of Independence were meant to apply to slavery, and therefore abolish it.
No knowledgeable and rational man could conclude that the Declaration was intended to apply to slaves. It is simply too great a disconnect to believe that the people who wrote and signed it could intend such a thing while at the same time keeping slaves themselves.
It is too great a stretch of credibility to believe such a thing, and Lincoln was not a fool. Now he may very well have believed that the principles articulated in the Declaration OUGHT to apply to slaves, but it is self deceit to believe what you think OUGHT be the law *IS* the law when it clearly is not.
My friend is no fool. He and all his family have degrees, and most of them are educators and professors. He has also been studying racism and the history surrounding it for decades. It is an issue near and dear to his heart. He made it quite clear that he saw Lincoln's actions as a clever strategy to give him the upper hand in a war he wanted and badly needed. In absence of war, the secession would have become more solid with each passing year as it gained acceptance on both sides. Extended time of peaceable coexistence would definitely have been working against Lincoln.
I am not convinced that what my friend believes is true, but he did get me thinking about the issue from that perspective. The theory has certainly become plausible to me though.
Surmises. Speculations, not rules. Ideas which would seem correct at initial consideration. Do you not follow a thinking process when you contemplate something?
This state can, this state can’t. This state should be disqualified as a state.
The crack about Rhode Island was meant to be amusing. I guess I should have put a smiley face beside it, but I sort of thought it wasn't necessary.
It is certainly a tiny bit of land to refer to as a "state", though a Million people certainly ought to qualify in terms of populace.
Someone should just make it part of Connecticut and get it over with. :)
Answer: none, unless approved by Congress.
No more so than Parliament. If it is a natural right as our founders have articulated, then it does not need permission from any man made body to assert it. It comes from God, not man.
Is your right to own a gun subject to Congress? Is it subject to a majority? Or is it a basic human right?
So is the right of association and it's corollary the right of disassociation.
Well, at least keeping the Virginia portion of it. Again, it's sounding either like a bit of a bait and switch, get Virginia to abandon this secessionist talk and then later go after the friends they were supporting, or an abandonment of this idea of "Preserving the Union" by keeping the most valuable state and letting the rest go.
Is there a third explanation? It appears to me that the strategy must have been to either temporarily mollify the Virginians, or to permanently mollify the Virginians.
Your take on this might be interesting. I'm not seeing as to how this can be portrayed as "principled" any way you go about it.
You are seemingly not groking the nature of this "Monarchy" form of government. It's funny that you are calling it a "Constitution" when it is in fact a "Charter", and this further demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the nature of a charter, as well.
What the King hath granted, the King can taketh away. :) British law did not help them here, it pretty much recognizes that the King (and his representatives) have that right. Those troops that they attacked were the legal authority in Massachusetts. Once again, the parallels with what the confederates did is pretty d@mn close.
As Conservatives we believe that our Constitution should mean what our Founders intended it to mean, and no Founder expressed himself more clearly on this particular subject than James Madison. And no Founder ever explicitly contradicted Madison on this.
Over the last few years of studying the "natural born citizen" issue, I have come to realize that Madison had a tendency to articulate support for one idea when it suited him, and support the opposite idea when it suited him.
I give you the case of James McClure, Held in captivity in France for over a year because Madison, then President and who was acutely aware of the plight of James McClure, refused to acknowledge him as an American citizen based on the Jus Soli principle. (James McClure was born in Charleston South Carolina to an English Father.)
Madison is well known for supporting William Smith's claim to a seat in Congress based on the fact that he was born also in Charleston South Carolina. (Odd coincidence, wot? Lot of Sh*t seems to start in Charleston South Carolina) Given that William Smith was a friend of Madison and James McClure was a problem\threat for Madison, it would appear that Madison's opinion could be swayed by expediency.
Madison was well known to oppose secession. Of course he would assert that it is illegal, but then so was the US Secession from Britain.
If you are trying to make an analogy, I would suggest you pick a Fort that was right smack dab in the middle of an entrance to an Important city where it's presence cannot be ignored. How did the founders feel about British forts in New York or Boston Harbors I wonder?
They leave them occupied too?
Been reading everything you've posted so far. Perhaps you will eventually get to something relevant?
Such a claim is, well, idiotic and demonstrates the abysmal failure of our education system.
Modern college. What can you do?
The truth of the matter is that Lincoln did the best he could with the options presented him, given his long term goal of preserving the Union. To say that Lincoln somehow "tricked" Jefferson Davis into assaulting Fort Sumter is to first, assume Davis was a total numbskull, and second that Lincoln had serious choices to do otherwise.
My friend's claim was that Lincoln was given the option to quietly resupply the fort but chose not to do so. He deliberately sent a message to the Governor informing him that he WOULD resupply the fort and my friend believes that Lincoln knew this would prompt an attack on the Fort because a message had shortly before been sent to Major Anderson stating that he had permission to surrender if necessary.
He said his history professor had told him that it was a very clever and deliberate tactic for Lincoln to get the war he needed to reverse secession. That Lincoln had the "touch" for clever politics is indisputable. According to my friend and his conversation with the professor, Lincoln needed the support of the Northern Newspapers and populace, and as long as there was no conflict, he wasn't going to get it. Most of the North was perfectly content to let the South leave, and it is only BECAUSE of the attack on Ft. Sumter that they were roused to oppose it.
The person who most benefited from the attack was Abraham Lincoln, who would have gone down in History as the man who lost the South.
Had Ft. Sumter not happened, we would have very likely ended up with two separate countries. Peace was Lincoln's enemy and he had the most to gain by shattering it.
My friend believes that Lincoln knew his announcement would provoke the hot heads in South Carolina to give him the tool he needed to win, and they did. I don't know. It's hard to say what a man "knew" but it's probably safe to say that if any man of the time knew how to outsmart a group of people, Lincoln would have been that man.
The argument is circumstantial with no concrete proof, but it certainly is a plausible theory.
And Confederates also sent military aid to pro-Confederate forces in Union states, making them existential threats to the United States itself.
If you are referring to the "Union" state of Maryland, then I will have to point out that it was only a "Union" state because of the actions taken by Lincoln in Jailing dissenters and Pro-Southern sympathizers. From a pragmatic perspective, Lincoln could not let the Capital be surrounded by hostile forces, though he broke a lot of rules in putting his pragmatism into force.
Sorry, sir, but if you hadn't been drinking so much Lost Causer Kool-Aid, you would easily see that all the blame -- 100% of it -- for the death and destruction belongs on the heads of those who first provoked, then started, then formally declared war on the United States while sending military aid to Confederates in Union States, and finally they continued fighting to death, long after their war had become a hopelessly Lost Cause.
This notion that anything is 100% one sided is not an attribute of a serious thinker, but it is completely consistent with the behavior of a cheerleader.
I think the founders had it correct, and that people (even bad people) have a right to self determination. I think this is a fundamental right which is right up there with the right to keep and bear arms in level of importance.
You, on the other hand, seem to believe that the existing government cannot be dissolved without permission from the existing government. You have taken on the mantel of slavery of a different sort. The forced compulsion to remain under the control of people whom you don't want controlling you.
You would think that you might have gotten enough of that stuff coming from Modern Washington to induce you to stop defending old Washington.
And so now I must wonder how New Orleans ever got by for 58 years before the United States came along? 74 years for Mobile Alabama.
Yeah, they were just completely helpless before they had a Federal Teat to suck on.
And you think what I said was nonsense.
So your friend thinks that trying to sneak supplies into Sumter under the cover of darkness, I assume, and under the noses of the rebel batteries would not be seen as a aggressive act but informing the governor ahead of time that a supply effort was going to be made in broad daylight and that only food and supplies would be landed was? Is he serious about that?
He said his history professor had told him that it was a very clever and deliberate tactic for Lincoln to get the war he needed to reverse secession.
So Lincoln set a trap for the rebels and they fell right into it. Wasn't very bright of them, was it?
My friend believes that Lincoln knew his announcement would provoke the hot heads in South Carolina to give him the tool he needed to win, and they did. I don't know.
I submit to your friend that the hot heads in South Carolina needed no provocation to begin a war. Only an excuse.
No more Ironic than Abraham Lincoln citing the event of Independence (four score and seven years ago = 1776) after a just concluded battle to prevent it.
Jefferson's point remains. You do not wring new meanings from the text, you follow original intent.
I am open minded on the idea that Lincoln cleverly manipulated lesser men into an act that he needed. I don't know if this is true. My point was that speculation that this was true is what got me started on the path of questioning the common wisdom about what happened.
The more I learned about the surrounding events, the less I liked what I learned. There are some ugly parts of our history and the war is still haunting us today.
No, it was the height of folly. One of them even tried to warn the others that this would turn the good will they had from the North into a thousand stinging hornets, or some such.
No, that attack played into Lincoln's hand, whereas a longstanding peace would have played into theirs.
As a politician of his times in the 1850s, Lincoln's expressed views were not dissimilar from those of other "moderate" Republicans -- he did not believe in abolishing slavery in the South, but did want it restricted from the western territories, and absolutely disagreed with interpretations of the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision which suggested the Constitution required slavery to be lawful in every state!
As to whether Lincoln considered our Declaration of Independence the source-authority for abolitionism, I'd much doubt that.
The reason is that most ardent abolitionists took their beliefs directly from their understandings of the Bible's views on slavery, beginning with God's leading the Israelites out of Egypt.
Is that clear enough for you?
It’s not ironic or analogous. The slavocrisy may have had the prerogative to revolt, but they didn’t have the moral righteousness of their cause. Lincoln understood and respected the original text and the original intent where the south did not: you don’t rebel unless you have a damn good reason. The south didn’t have one.
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