Posted on 04/29/2019 10:09:48 AM PDT by Pelham
Brian Lamb interviews author H.W. Crocker
H.W. Crocker talks about his book 'Robert E. Lee On Leadership: Executive Lessons in Character, Courage, and Vision', published by Prima Publishing. The book profiles the life and career of the Confederate Army General. The author pays special attention to General Lee’s career as a farmer and president of the school now known as Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. He examines the general’s character, vision and spirit and how these principles can be applied in today’s marketplace
They gave up everything that makes a sovereign nation a sovereign nation.
New York and others reserved the right to take back the sovereignty they had given up if they ever felt that it was necessary to do so.
One cannot be responsible for the misconceptions of New York or the other states that they state in their ratification documents.
Actually Lee signed the manumission documents on December 31, 1862. One day before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
...whereas Yankee generals amongnothers kept theirs until after the war was over.
Name one.
I’m further south and love it.
I don’t know what makes people conservative. For me, it was seeing how much was taken out of my paycheck and all the crime happening around me. I do love NYC but it is nice to live among all the conservative gun owners around here. Hope all is well with you.
I spent almost two years in New Orleans and even as a kid hated the climate - too hot plus humid! The higher elevation (plus being inland) made Huntsville a much better proposition.
Congratulations on your new home!
Sure it is.
When a collection of states decides to become independent of that government, that portion of the nation still ruled by that government is no longer their "homeland."
When the try to do so through rebellion then it still is and they're warring against it.
So if a jury found a right to abortion in the Kansas constitution, that makes sense to you?
As I said, a rational judge would have tossed out any such case before it ever got to a Jury. The decision to overturn slavery in Massachusetts was made by the Judge when he decided to allow the case to go forward. What the Jury did was completely predictable once the real threshold had been breached.
They understood what they were voting for and what they were doing.
Not without articulating what they were doing in plain language. If it was their intent to abolish slavery, they would have plainly said so. Any interpretation that overturns the norm without specific language indicating that this is what is desired is a case of a judge writing law from the bench.
Unless you actually have something new to contribute, find something else to talk about.
I can understand your reluctance to discuss this "tale of two Articles". I would find it uncomfortable when a position I was previously advocating has been turned against me by justifying something I consider to be an abomination.
I have the advantage of being consistent in both cases. I say that the Massachusetts Article 1 was deliberately misinterpreted to achieve a result never articulated by the people who approved it, and I say the same thing of Kansas Article 1.
I consider Judges making up crap to be a destruction of law, and it's not a good thing, even if the cause for which they do it is good.
“I think I will let a wiser man than myself answer that question for you.”
Not convinced he is wiser, if he would allow any sized community at any time to part ways with the rest of the country. Union is always a compromise, but it is a compromise that provides a lot of benefits as well. If any community, of any size, can leave any time they are frustrated, then there is no reason to compromise and the country will descend into anarchy. As the Apostle Paul put it:
The fact is there are many parts, but only one body. So that the eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” nor, again, can the head say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body which have no obvious function are the more essential to health: and to those parts of the body which seem to us to be less deserving of notice we have to allow the highest honour of function. The parts which do not look beautiful have a deeper beauty in the work they do, while the parts which look beautiful may not be at all essential to life!
But God has harmonised the whole body by giving importance of function to the parts which lack apparent importance, that the body should work together as a whole with all the members in sympathetic relationship with one another. So it happens that if one member suffers all the other members suffer with it, and if one member is honoured all the members share a common joy. - 1 Cor 12
I would agree that parts of a country should be able to separate when the ability to choose one’s leaders is absent (taxation without representation) or by mutual consent.
No. I'm suggesting a states electoral votes should not be awarded for less than 50% of the vote.
If no candidate achieves at least 50% of the vote in a state because the vote is divided among more than two candidates, there should be a runoff election.
Trial by combat does not prove the winner is correct, and the loser is wrong. It proves the winner is stronger, and that is all it proves.
The Kansas state constitution went into effect in January, 1861.
If you could assemble a jury of voters who approved that constitution and they wanted to decide cases based on the constitution they approved, I would have to take what they said seriously.
Why don't you get started on that now, since you don't have anything new to say about this.
And were not afraid to do so precisely because the Declaration of Independence guaranteed them the right to get those powers back.
You forget. 11 years after the Declaration of Independence. Nobody forgot they had the right to leave.
One cannot be responsible for the misconceptions of New York or the other states that they state in their ratification documents.
The fact that no one challenged their quite public assertion that they had the right to reassume those powers makes the theory that they could not leave, the misconception.
Do you have perhaps some contemporary document (~1787) arguing to the contrary of what New York, Virginia and Delaware asserted was their right? I've got three aces. What are you holding to answer them?
In other words you have no idea what's in the Olive Branch petition that the Continental Congress sent King George in July 1775. And most likely you've never heard of it in the first place.
Well here you go; see how many times they emphasize their loyalty to the King, versus how many times they complain that he wasn't elected:
I too started realizing something was wrong when I noticed my first paycheck. By my calculations they had shorted me quite a lot. I went to the payroll clerk and she told me "Taxes."
That's when I started realizing something was rotten in Denmark. :)
I do love NYC but it is nice to live among all the conservative gun owners around here.
Gun owners are generally good people. I used to lead a gunowners rights organization in my state years ago, and they are the best of America. Police, Doctors, Soldiers, Lawyers, Engineers, and so forth. Good people.
Our group was instrumental in getting concealed carry passed in our state. We have photographs with ourselves in the governor's office when the bill was being signed.
Hope all is well with you.
I think I'm doing well, though I had a good friend die a month ago, and it still bothers me. He was from Allentown Pennsylvania, and he served in the US Army during desert storm. He had a sudden heart attack. Nobody expected it.
Other than that, things have been fine with me otherwise. Still ornery as ever. Like to argue. Runs in the family. :)
If George Washington agreed he wouldn’t have led a rebellion against the government.
So you would have us believe. But if they give them all up then how can you call them "effectively a nation by our modern usage of the term"? Nothing could be further from the truth. Nations have all the powers that the Constitution stripped from the individual states.
The fact that no one challenged their quite public assertion that they had the right to reassume those powers makes the theory that they could not leave, the misconception.
Nobody challenges some of your crazier quite public assertions either. Doesn't make them right.
Do you have perhaps some contemporary document (~1787) arguing to the contrary of what New York, Virginia and Delaware asserted was their right? I've got three aces. What are you holding to answer them?
You've got nothing but a busted flush. Regardless of whatever else states like New York included in their ratification documents, they also included the words, "We, the said delegates, in the name and in the behalf of the people of the state of New York, do, by these presents, assent to and ratify the said Constitution." If the powers that they assumed they had were not powers granted them in the Constitution then they didn't have it. And if they tried to assume powers through means not allowed by the Constitution then they were in rebellion.
Washington knew what he was doing was a rebellion. He didn't pretend it was legal.
“No he wasn’t, that’s why I now think we’ve been sold a bill of goods from people who claim slavery was the motivating factor for causing a war.”
Actually, it was. On two levels.
1 - Pride. The wealthy slave owners resented being told they were evil. If you read Thomas Sowell’s essay on Black Rednecks, it is obvious how being ‘dissed’ was viewed in the South.
2 - Expansion of slavery. The secession documents show the wealthy slave owners wanted slavery to expand, and felt allowing individual states to outlaw slavery unduly restricted their opportunities.
...The feeling of anti-slavery, which it was well known was very general among the people of the North, had been long dormant or passive; it needed only a question to arouse it into aggressive activity. This question was before us. We had acquired a large territory by successful war with Mexico; Congress had to govern it; how, in relation to slavery, was the question then demanding solution. This state of facts gave form and shape to the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North and the conflict began. Northern anti-slavery men of all parties asserted the right to exclude slavery from the territory by Congressional legislation and demanded the prompt and efficient exercise of this power to that end. This insulting and unconstitutional demand was met with great moderation and firmness by the South.”
Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery— the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union...”
SOuth Carolina: “But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution....
...Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection....”
Texas: “The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States....
...In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color— a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states
All that said, I don’t doubt the average Confederate soldier fought almost entirely for “freedom” - to be left alone. My great-grandfather fought for Indiana. Had he been born in Alabama, he’d have fought for Alabama. He was a poor man himself and probably didn’t think deeply about political causes. Very, VERY few northerners fought to “end slavery”. And very few southerners fought to “preserve slavery”.
Robert E Lee - who my great-grandfather named a son after, and how my Dad was named after - fought because his ties to Virginia were stronger than his ties to the Federal government. I don’t fault him for that. I am 100% certain he did what he believed was right. He wasn’t fighting for slavery per se, but for Virginia to be left alone by the Federal government. He and his family, and the entire country, paid a terrible price. For my part, I see no value in blaming either side. I doubt 1 American in 100 today realizes how important the states were to the people living in them in 1860.
When a government refuses to allow you your natural "sacred right" to leave, if you do it at all he will call it "rebellion."
It isn't, but when you lock up newspaper editors by the bushel, you can make the "news" report whatever you want it to report.
“Rich man’s war - poor man’s fight”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.