Posted on 08/11/2015 1:11:21 PM PDT by iowamark
What caused the Civil War? That seems like the sort of simple, straightforward question that any elementary school child should be able to answer. Yet many Americans—including, mostly, my fellow Southerners—claim that that the cause was economic or state’s rights or just about anything other than slavery.
But slavery was indisputably the primary cause, explains Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
The abolition of slavery was the single greatest act of liberty-promotion in the history of America. Because of that fact, it’s natural for people who love freedom, love tradition, and love the South to want to believe that the continued enslavement of our neighbors could not have possibly been the motivation for succession. But we should love truth even more than liberty and heritage, which is why we should not only acknowledge the truth about the cause of the war but be thankful that the Confederacy lost and that freedom won.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.acton.org ...
DegenerateLamp's already been there, done that. ;')
Please do not bring any news from the present world here to this sacred ground.
I don't use google. to Fascist for my tastes. On bing, (also fascist, but most powerful competitor) the second entry says this:
The Union Jack, or Union Flag, is the national flag of the United Kingdom. The flag also has an official or semi-official status in some other Commonwealth realms...
Your google-fu is weak grasshopper.
Let me guess, your next argument will be that the Colonies broke away from the British Kingdom in order to preserve their "peculiar institution".
My argument is that it doesn't make a d@mn why they left, it is the fact that they had a right to leave for whatever reason d@mn well suited their fancy.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
It's called being "free" rather than "subject" to the will of others.
And you really should stop defending King Georgie. He didn't consider the matter settled, he just took a break to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo.
The Colonies were obviously lucky to have a powerful military force occupying the Union they were leaving, but the Confederates didn't have such luck.
Unfortunately for the United Kingdom of the British Empire, when they did have time to send the Greatest Navy in The History Of The World to finish up the pesky little matter of those uncouth american rabble-rousers, they ran into Old Hickory.
Virtually the only battle we won in that conflict, and that after the war had been long over officially. Again, had the British been as fanatical as Lincoln, we would have been made once more part of the United Kingdom. We got our @$$e$ kicked in that war.
Come to think of it, now I am not even sure if Old Hickory considered himself a northerner, a southerner, or just plain an American.
Well, he owned 200 slaves, and ran a plantation in Alabama and another in Tennessee. For his time period, that was pretty American all right.
For many people arguing his side, facts tend to be malleable depending on what they need for their argument of the moment.
Everyone seizes on that phrase "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of independence to prove that all those slave holders who wrote and signed it intended to abolish slavery. That they continued to hold slaves is dismissed or excused away because it simply contradicts the narrative they want to push; That the war was fought by the Union to abolish slavery rather than for the ignoble cause to oppress and subjugate a people who wanted independence.
As the 1860 crowd well knew slavery was a very common institution and the vast majority of Presidents before Lincoln had been slave owners at some time in their life. The notable exceptions that I know of being the Adams family and Franklin Pierce.
Many people have a difficult time comprehending the zeitgeist of that era. Many don't even try. They simply apply their anachronistic modern notions so they can feel smugly superior to people who grew up with a different world view.
Doesn't cut it and you know it. You're making up stuff, fabricating it out of thin air. Link me to "British Union", or stop using the term. Bing, Google, don't make no never mind to me. Link it, or stop using it. "British Union".
I think what happens is that the reasons for secession and the war get conflated.
Secession occurred over slavery, over the Deep South deciding that they needed to separate from the increasingly belligerent abolitionist faction in the North. John Brown's aborted slave uprising and the widespread support he received in the North was the most blatant example of a decades long campaign of hatred against the South. Thomas Fleming wrote a good book on that subject A Disease in the Public Mind
And while Lincoln wanted slavery to end, his announced reason for going to war was to preserve the Union, something which he reiterated many times. But in the modern mind the Civil War becomes a war launched with the intended goal of ending slavery. Now this is an interesting thought, because they in effect are saying that Lincoln decided to engage in slaughter and destruction in order to further a political goal, something Obama hasn't quite yet managed to try, although there's still time. And with respect to Lincoln and Obama I've been trying to figure out if the emancipation proclamation is any different from an executive order. But I digress.
In resorting to war Lincoln was doing something more in line with Buchanan's long forgotten Utah War and Andrew Jackson's threatened invasion of South Carolina over nullification. Both of those were exercises in the national government using military force against territorial and state governments to compel compliance with already existing law, they weren't attempts at using military force as the means to change already existing law, which is what a war started to end slavery would have been.
Well the usual term is the "United Kingdom" which came out of the Acts of Union of 1707
United Kingdom Monarchs (1603 - present)
The Stuarts The Hanoverians George I (r. 1714-1727) George II (r. 1727-1760) George III (r. 1760-1820) George IV (r. 1820-1830) William IV (r. 1830-1837) Victoria (r. 1837-1901)
George III of the United Kingdom
"George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 1738[a] – 29 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death. He was concurrently Duke and prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg ("Hanover") in the Holy Roman Empire until his promotion to King of Hanover on 12 October 1814. He was the third British monarch of the House of Hanover, but unlike his two predecessors he was born in Britain, spoke English as his first language,[1] and never visited Hanover.
"His life and reign, which were longer than any other British monarch before him, were marked by a series of military conflicts involving his kingdoms, much of the rest of Europe, and places farther afield in Africa, the Americas and Asia. Early in his reign, Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War, becoming the dominant European power in North America and India. However, many of Britain's American colonies were soon lost in the American Revolutionary War. Further wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France from 1793 concluded in the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815."
Yeah, we all know the usual terms. My favorite is the United Kingdom of the British Empire. This evening was the first time I ever heard of the “British Union”. DL made it up in a desperate attempt to zeitgeist the Revolutionary War with The War of the Rebellion. He is attempting to unequivocally equate The Union, to the United Kingdom of the British Empire, in order to force his square argument into a round hole by his newly minted coined phrase. See my tag line.
If the need to "Preserve the Union" is the higher principle involved, then how could we have broken from the British Union?
Well there are parallels in the two wars. Suppose that someone were to propose to you the following:
A Virginia Governor writes a letter to a Virginia general who is commanding the rebel army. In this letter the Governor bitterly complains that his slaves are being freed by the opposing army, and he wants the general to do something to stop it. Name either the governor or the general.
Most people would likely name the general as Robert E Lee, but it’s not. It’s his wife’s great grandfather George Washington. The Governor was Thomas Jefferson, and the forces freeing the slaves were the armies of the Crown.
In both cases there were subordinate states that announced independence from their mother governments. In both cases those mother governments objected violently to having their subjects and territory reduced and they used military force to put down what the rebels. In both cases there were emancipation proclamations by the mother governments.
“If the need to “Preserve the Union” is the higher principle involved, then how could we have broken from the British Union? “
The American colonials didn’t regard preserving the union to be the highest ideal. That was the position of George III and later, Lincoln.
It's nonsense of course, but so is any attempt to compare the Revolutionary War with the War of Southern Aggression.
I guess the term "American Union" would simply be beyond your ability to comprehend? You seem to put great stock in the trivia of which words are used to describe something, and OMG it's a great leap from the "United Kingdom" to the "United States." Obviously they are completely different things, and whatever the one thing is, the other must not be.
You talk about wasting people's time, just how much time have you wasted objecting to the usage of the term "British Union" because you do not like how it sounds, how it makes you uneasy in regards to what the "Union" did in the Civil War?
You remind me of that old lawyer's saw, "If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If Law is on your side, pound the law. If neither the Facts nor the Law is on your side, pound the table."
That is what you are doing. You are pounding the table because you don't like the comparison between the British Union and the American Union in regards to subjugating a free people.
You assert it is "a square argument into a round hole" but you desperately wish this were so. What is entirely too uncomfortable for you is the fact that it is the same sort of hole as it was in 1776, and whether it be square or round, the argument will fit as well as it did before.
Only the cheerleaders have changed. The salient facts remain the same.
I NOW what my rights really are and am quite well versed in the FACTS of the War of Northern Aggression. Unfortunately, some people let others (lawyers) do their thinking for them.
A lot of what we do today is Lincoln’s fault. He set the standards of being above the law of the land. Lincoln , in spite of what many think, was no Saint!
Sorry FRiend, but by now you should begin to grasp how little you really know about these events, and how much of what you think you know is just flat wrong.
A good example is the often ballyhooed Morrill Tariff reason for secession.
So, once again, let's review the facts:
For overall historic tariff rates see here.
For Morrill Tariff history see here.
For Smoot-Hawley Tariff rates see here.
And one final point should be mentioned: the wealthiest of all wealthy Southern planters were sugarcane growers in mainly Louisiana.
They were so wealthy because, beginning in 1789, Congress passed tariffs protecting US producers of sugar from foreign competition, tariffs which, in one form or another, remain in effect today.
Point is: all these complaints about allegedly high tariffs, Morrill especially, are pure smoke-screen intended to obscure the real reason for secession: protecting slavery.
The key point you're ignoring is that both Presidents Buchanan and Lincoln did not consider any declarations of secession to be valid, lawful or constitutional.
So Lincoln did not consider there was a legitimate Confederacy at all, and New Orleans was just one more port in one more Deep South state which illegitimately claimed to be part of a new Confederacy.
That's why Lincoln intended to continue all US Federal functions (i.e., the mail) throughout the South, regardless of what Confederate leaders might say.
And that's precisely what Jefferson Davis could not tolerate -- an assault on "the integrity and jurisdiction of our territory", for which Davis had already announce his remedy:
Thanks for getting down in tall grass and mud with our FRiend Diogenes Lamp.
There's no doubt in my mind that DiogenesLamp is one sick puppy, whose overheated imagination has rendered his mind delusional, as you suggested earlier.
Just be careful you don't get so deep in his muck than you yourself can't climb back out, FRiend.
There, fixed it for you. Yes, you're welcome.
The choice to start war was Jefferson Davis' to make, and he did so.
He then refused to end the war for four years, on terms of anything less than total defeat and unconditional surrender.
Speculation ends with Lincoln’s direct wording in the first inaugural:
“The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts”.
He is speaking of the forts which are only needed to force tariff collection.
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