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 ...
No I am not. I am advocating a position where people follow the law, honor their commitments, and stay true to their word. Your false analogy of the husband and wife is the epitome of inaptness.
If you will permit me, I'll suggest that our FRiend's analogy of husband and wife is entirely appropriate, providing we understand that Fire Eating secessionists are the "husband" and our poor troops in Fort Sumter the "wife".
Now, doesn't it all make sense?
Actually, only a few states took actual secession articles to the voters. In most, the legislatures called for the election of delegates to a convention, and those delegates voted secession up or down. In the case of Louisiana, for example, the convention held a specific vote on submitting actual secession to the people, as required by the state constitution, and rejected the idea 84-45.
Either way it was not “chaotic”. The war was chaotic, the secession was not.
Your explanations are unpersuasive. I saw them as a series of non sequiturs. They were simply not sufficient to prove your premise, or even support it very much.
Yeah, they did have the right to abrogate that charter. According to their form of government, that was perfectly legal.
It is starting to get funny reading your arguments while noting your seemingly complete inability to see the parallels with the Confederates in the civil war or how the two events were alike. On the one hand, you simply want the Confederates to be the bad guys, and on the other you want the Crown to be the bad guys, and you are perfectly willing to do logical backflips to marry those two ideas together.
The fact that the Crown far better represents the actions of the Union, and that the Confederates far better represent the actions of the Colonists, is simply something you cannot accept, and so here you are constantly splitting hairs and drawing distinctions without a difference in an effort to rationalize your logical conundrum.
Like I said, it's getting pretty funny. :)
I don't feel like you are taking the discussion seriously, so i'm getting less inclined to do so as well.
Later folks.
No "premise" there, just the facts, sir.
Sure, facts you don't like, and refuse to acknowledge, but facts nonetheless.
For the simple & obvious reason it's not true.
The apt comparison is of Brits to Confederates because both abrogated their previous "compact" unilaterally, "at pleasure", and both started war against Americans.
Of course you don't like those facts, but they remain facts nonetheless, sir.
As has been said on these threads many times, the Founding Fathers were under no illusion that their actions were legal, and they didn't whine that the British had no legal right to oppose them.
That ennui is what occurs when you can’t reconcile your views with reality. ;’)
First, remember, we're talking about Massachusetts in April 1774, a time when no serious rebellion had happened amongst the colony's 300,000+ citizens, only some protests by a hundred activists, the Boston Tea Party.
And yet Parliament used that excuse to revoke the 1691 Charter, punishing all 300,000+ Massachusetts citizens.
So, they felt betrayed and abused by British bad-faith, and essentially refused to recognize Parliament's authority.
Without a working mutual compact acknowledging British legitimacy, Brits must impose it by military force.
Now Rebellion begins in earnest.
Point is, most Massachusetts citizens did not feel they deserved to be mistreated by Britain, and that was root cause of their resistance.
Similarly, in early 1861 declarations of secession by Deep South Fire Eaters came out of the blue for most Americans, who didn't think they deserved to have their country split apart.
When those declarations were followed by seizures and military assault on Federal properties, and threats against Washington DC itself, northerners felt that was too much to accept, and became willing to fight for their Union.
So, at least in my mind, the comparison of 1775 Brits assaulting Lexington & Concord and 1861 Confederates assaulting Fort Sumter seems precise, exact.
Of course, our Lost Causers always jump straight over this part, preferring to focus their attention on, naturally, Uncle Billy Sherman's March to the Sea, just as if that came straight out of the blue, with no previous history to explain it.
In their minds, the Civil War began with Sherman's March, and ended with Pickett's Charge in Gettysburg -- a noble cause, brilliantly fought against overwhelming odds and evil Northern men who were trying to impose Communism on good Southerners only devoted to our Constitution, limited government and private enterprise.
I mean, isn't that a great myth?
You really couldn't beat it, if only even a word of it were true.
Do you disagree?
The original Tea Partiers were prominent citizens. Everybody knew who they were in MA, and the colony's political and legal systems demonstrated they were utterly unwilling to enforce the law on them.
IOW, the Tea Party was supported by MA's citizenry and political class. So in essence it was a rebellion by the colony or most of it.
One can certainly argue that the rebellion was justified, but not that it was only a demonstration by a hundred private citizens.
Well, there was a meeting on December 16, 1774, (note the 240 anniversary coming up!) presided over by Samuel Adams...
"Whether or not Samuel Adams helped plan the Boston Tea Party is disputed, but he immediately worked to publicize and defend it.[65]
He argued that the Tea Party was not the act of a lawless mob, but was instead a principled protest and the only remaining option the people had to defend their constitutional rights.[66]
"By "constitution" he referred to the idea that all governments have a constitution, written or not, and that the constitution of Great Britain could be interpreted as banning the levying of taxes without representation.
For example, the Bill of Rights of 1689 established that long-term taxes could not be levied without Parliament, and other precedents said that Parliament must actually represent the people it ruled over, in order to "count"...
"Governor Thomas Hutchinson had been urging London to take a hard line with the Sons of Liberty.
If he had done what the other royal governors had done and let the ship owners and captains resolve the issue with the colonists, the Dartmouth, Eleanor and the Beaver would have left without unloading any tea...
"Robert Murray, a New York merchant, went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down..."
A few hundred, at most, out of 300,000+ Massachusetts citizens...
Now, that's the way I learned it as a boy -- rightly or wrongly, Tea Party leaders objected to "taxation without representation", and took action to defend their "constitutional rights" as Englishmen.
Of course, you may well argue, and Brits certainly did, that "as colonists, they had no such rights", but from Massachusetts colonists' perspectives, it was Brits who were trying to take their rights away, not Americans wanting to assert some unheard-of privileges.
Indeed, the unusual aggressiveness of the Brit-appointed Massachusetts governor, in enforcing a law which was ignored in other colonies, and British refusal to seek peaceful resolution strongly suggest to me that it was the Brits, not colonists who were "cruisin' for a bruisin'".
Likewise, in early 1861 it was Confederates trying to revoke their 84 year-old compact, and using military force instead of lawful procedures to impose their will on, in one case, Union troops in Fort Sumter.
Do you disagree?
I don’t disagree that Massachusetts colonists believed they were defending their rights, just as English rebels in 1642 and Confederates in 1861 did.
The problem is that defending their rights required, or they believed it did, stepping beyond the established legal and constitutional procedures.
They all believed, and arguably they were correct to do so, that they had no choice, that the existing legal and constitutional procedures no longer protected their rights.
But the minute they went beyond those procedures, they became revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the existing order and replacing it with a new and better (or so they believed) one.
You seem to be intent on demonstrating that the men of 1776 acted constitutionally and the men of 1861 did not. I don’t see it. To my mind, they were both revolutionists. Whether they were justified or not in their revolution was dependent not on whether it was constitutional, since a constitutional revolution is a contradiction in terms, but on the goals of that revolution.
The men of 1776 had as their goal increasing liberty, the goal of the men of 1861 was to prevent an extension of human liberty. To my mind, that’s why the American Revolutionaries were justified in their rebellion, and the Confederates were not.
Anarchy would have to wait until the Confederate Congress was formed and Jefferson Davis appointed president.
No, hardly, only trying to put the right actors in their proper roles, and show the moral equivalency between 1775 British troops marching on Lexington and 1861 Confederate troops firing on Fort Sumter:
So why is all this even important?
Because, as you well know, our Lost Cause propagandists have concocted an entirely different narrative, where somehow they were the victims, they were "oppressed", and they were set-upon by brutal military forces, etc., etc.
Our Lost Causers tell us that they were the 1861 Massachusetts colonists, facing down the might of Yankee/British forces marching on their Lexington & Concord.
So I'm merely here to establish, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Confederates at Fort Sumter played the roles of, not Massachusetts colonists, but rather the British Army marching to establish a new order where they could dictate terms, regardless of old compacts.
So what, exactly, don't you "get" about that?
Sorry, getting tired of the discussion.
I respect your POV, which is at least a new take, but disagree.
Unreal. Really just unreal.
The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one...
Exactly.
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