Posted on 05/19/2015 10:33:26 PM PDT by iowamark
Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world.
The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart over the issue, what hope did freedom have? European powers wasted no time in taking advantage of the debacle. France and Britain immediately each sent fleets of warships with the official purpose of observing the imminent war in America. In Paris, A New York Times correspondent who went by the byline “Malakoff” thought that the French and British observers “may be intended as a sort of escort of honor for the funeral of the Great Republic.”
...the French forced Benito Juárez, the republican leader, to flee the capital and eventually installed the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico.
European conservatives welcomed the dismemberment of the “once United States” and the bursting of the “republican bubble” that, beginning with the French Revolution, had inspired revolution and unrest in Europe. Republicanism had been in retreat in Europe since the failed revolutions of 1848, and some predicted that all the wayward American republics would eventually find their way back to some form of monarchy, or seek protection under European imperial rule. When Lincoln, in the darkest days of the war, referred to America as the “last best hope of earth,” he was hardly boasting...
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Lincoln was in the same position that politicians from the early Republic down to Truman, Eisenhower, Eisenhower Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were in.
Have you really forgotten just exactly who it was that wanted reassurances from national politicians that went against what they really believed (and got them)?
You must have a very short memory.
If Reagan was able to avoid all that, he might be willing to admit that he was lucky in coming along when he did.
And Bush? Not the best example. What you got one year was likely to be an apology or a repudiation of what you got a few years before.
This fellow is a well-informed idiot.
These actions of European powers in the Western Hemisphere are better explained by New England’s consolidation of it’s power.
The new United States was a centralized, mercantile nation run by and for the small Northeast ‘aristocracy’.
The old United States was respected, but the new one was feared.
Of course other nations turned tail and ran.
Hi.
If you know offhand, were “free womb” bills of any import in antebellum US?
I don’t remember any consideration of that idea by the Founders but it seems the idea would have been considered.
Uh huh. You're going to argue with a straight face that while the actual ordinances of secession issued by the conventions are valid documents because they were later voted on by the people, the declarations of causes issued by those same conventions in which they explain the reasons for their actions are just so much hot air, not to be taken seriously, and it's all the media's fault, anyway. I will say you never disappoint in your capacity for willful obtuseness.
Here's the debate at the South Carolina secession convention over their document.
A lot of good stuff there. I particularly like the part where someone asks if they should mention the tariff and Keitt says that this isn't about the tariff and someone else compares this to the Declaration of Independence. (Of course, that was never ratified by the people, either, was it? So I guess it can't really be considered more than an "editorial.")
By the way, the South Carolina convention was called by the legislature as "a Convention of the People." There was no direct popular vote to enact their measure. In fact, all of the secession conventions were Conventions of the People, since the Constitution was ratified in the same way, and only three states put the resolutions of those conventions to a vote. Actually they had to vote twice in Tennessee to get the result they wanted.
Here's a link to the Proceedings of the Mississippi secession convention, in which you can find the committee being appointed to write the declaration of causes, the submission of the final document to the convention, the vote adopting it, and "Resolved, That twenty-five hundred copies of the Declaration and Address of the immediate causes of the secession of Mississippi from the Federal Union, together with the Ordinance of Secession, with the names of the members who signed it, be printed in pamphlet form, and distributed to the members of this Convention." No, not at all an official document, right?
In the Proceedings of the Georgia secession convention, you can find this:
Mr. Nisbet, from the committee of seventeen, to report the Ordinance of Secession, after stating that it was written by Mr. Toombs made the following REPORT, which was taken up, read, and adopted."The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates, and the world, the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years…
You can find the same for Texas here
“You would not were you born a slave.”
The CW wasn’t about slavery. Every damn day, if I don’t get a reaction post from faggot loving Freepers, then the historical imbeciles. i swear Fr has been infiltrated by liberal morons..
“I thank God it failed.”
Can you also thank god about obama? I mean, I prayed hard in 2008 and 2016 that he won;t be elected, but damn...
The lpve of money and power by the north was the cause of ghe war. The same thing that controls the US govt today.
No. Øbozo's success came at all of our expense, just like the "success" of the insurrection would have come at the expense of generational warfare on this continent.
The north was made to hate through the media. Which was controled by the rich, like today. The north wasnt smart enough to see they were being used.
The south didnt wage war against the US govt. TheUS govt did against them. The US govt claimed to be for thd people but at that point refined itself to be for the super rich an against self governance. Obama talked about whites attacking blacks in 1921 today, as if he knows the reason why, if it happened at all. Of course he said it was racism. Only one reason the left keeps attacking whites. To justify more handouts and socialism. He couldnt care less about 1921. Its all about greed and power.
It just occurred to me how you and Lincoln are so much alike; both of you are disgusting slime balls of BS.
You mean the white states ?
They talk about Virginia trending purple. If so ,thats because northerners have moved into the state. Which makes the point the south was right in wanting to leave.
The state legislature is blue.
Many thanks, Bubba, for posting the link to the Texas document. I’ve not seen that before. The document lists the dates of abandonment of the forts in the state, the first comprehensive listing of those dates I’ve seen.
Whoever pieced the document together or reassembled it sometime in the past, might have done it from partial pieces or loose pages as they sometimes got the pieces put together incorrectly. Even so, it is still an interesting document.
I see mention in it of my great great grandfather’s commander in the war, John Salmon R.I.P. Ford, a former Texas Ranger captain who was hell on wheels. They drove the Federals down the Rio Grande Valley to an offshore island alhough the Federals had three times as many men.
They did, and it was.
“than in the Upper South, whose states did not secede until after Fort Sumter),”
Ft Sumter isn’t what prompted the Upper South states to secede. They seceded in response to Lincoln’s April 15th call for 75,000 troops to force the Deep South back into the Union.
Had Lincoln been patient instead of eager for war the Confederacy would have been smaller and not likely to last long. Instead his call for war resulted in a much larger and more powerful opponent.
I surely must be missing something. Care to drop us a hint of how this could be?
His call for troops was in response to the South starting the war. Lincoln didn't start it.
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