Posted on 07/26/2021 4:33:01 PM PDT by ammodotcom
The Battle of Appomattox Courthouse is considered by many historians the end of the Civil War and the start of post-Civil War America. The events of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General and future President Ulysses S. Grant at a small town courthouse in Central Virginia put into effect much of what was to follow.
The surrender at Appomattox Courthouse was about reconciliation, healing, and restoring the Union. While the Radical Republicans had their mercifully brief time in the sun rubbing defeated Dixie’s nose in it, they represented the bleeding edge of Northern radicalism that wanted to punish the South, not reintegrate it into the Union as an equal partner.
The sentiment of actual Civil War veterans is far removed from the attitude of the far left in America today. Modern day “woke-Americans” clamor for the removal of Confederate statues in the South, the lion’s share of which were erected while Civil War veterans were still alive. There was little objection to these statues at the time because it was considered an important part of the national reconciliation to allow the defeated South to honor its wartime dead and because there is a longstanding tradition of memorializing defeated foes in honor cultures.
(Excerpt) Read more at ammo.com ...
The democrats paid a heavy price for their pushing the Kansas-Nebraska act in 1854 - and breaking the Missouri compromise.
“ Congress had passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act in May 1854 after aggressive sponsorship by the Pierce Administration and Democrats led by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, including radical pro-slavery legislators.
The Act repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise and triggered the Bleeding Kansas conflict. With widely foreseen risks and immediately negative results, the Act publicly discredited the Democratic Party, fueling new partisan and sectional rancor.
It created violent uncertainty on the frontier by abruptly making slavery potentially legal in territories originally comprising the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase and attractive to contemporary settlers. Settlers were expected to determine the status of slavery locally. This idea appealed to Democratic politicians and to some voters in its shape and intent, but proved unworkable in Kansas where the status of slavery would be violently disputed between more numerous Northern settlers and geographically closer Southern settlers.
Even some pro-slavery legislators and voters, particularly Southern Whigs, felt repealing the Missouri Compromise was politically reckless and attempting to push slavery by law and force into territories where most settlers predictably were unlikely to want it endangered its continued legal protection anywhere, even in the South.
These fears proved prescient.
”
In 1860, the democrats lost the House and the Presidency.
The House already belonged to the Republicans in 1858 not 1860.
Try again. Geez.
The same could be said for Jefferson Davis or the secessionist movement -- or maybe the abolitionist movement for that matter. Or even politicians today.
Your attempt to link these two men is ironic, because Lincoln was himself a very determined segregationist. Segregation is exactly what he wanted. He wanted black people kept away from white society.
Lincoln was impressed with the bravery and commitment of Black troops and moved by the rapturous reception the freedmen and freedwomen gave him in Richmond at the end of the war. He met with African-American delegations in the White House and was impressed by them. Grant may have done the same, but years later it became quite a sensation or scandal when Theodore Roosevelt had Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House.
Lincoln was moving away from the segregationist or separationist ideas he had in earlier life, and while he admitted to having the aversion to Blacks that most of his white contemporaries had, he was able even before winning the presidency to step back from visceral reactions and think about race relations in more intellectual terms, something that others of his day found it hard to do.
In Lincoln's day and for generations afterwards, very few White Americans wanted to live together with African-Americans as equals, but Lincoln's statement shortly before his assassination that the vote ought to be given to some Blacks indicated that he had come to accept that African-Americans did have a place in America.
It appears to me now that Lincoln regarded black people as pawns in his game to attain power and keep it, but what he did was never done for their sake, it was done for his own purposes.
That could be said of any politician, then or now. Indeed, since you discount non-material moral motives it's hard to see what you're faulting Lincoln with. Lincoln wasn't a modern day welfare state liberal who professed to "care" about minority groups or the downtrodden. He wanted people to look out for themselves and thought they had the ability to do so. I suspect we may exaggerate the centrality of African-Americans in Lincoln's thinking and acting. He believed that slavery was bad for the country and was morally wrong and indications are that his belief was sincere.
I do not recognize it in my own postings. Perhaps your perception of it is too subtle for me to grasp. Can you give me a better explained example of where I have done this?
Your method is to discount moral motives at the outset. Then you say you couldn't find any. If you don't see that as circular reasoning I can't make you see it, but others will understand that in human affairs, moral motives aren't absent and that the material and moral motives are hard to disentangle. We fought Hitler because he threatened our position in the world, but our opposition to him and our resolve to win the war had moral grounds as well.
It doesn’t matter, really. Johnny Reb kicked off the fandango while Buchanan was still preezy. January 9, 1861. Did that dastardly Lincoln trick secesh into firing on an unarmed merchant ship too?
So, you admit that slavery could end by means other than a constitutional amendment. That’s progress, sir! Let’s take the next step. Is it so difficult to imagine that the gentle folk sipping on mint juleps while relaxing on the veranda weren’t so confident in the future of their peculiar institution as you are today?
“We are sent to protect, not so much property, as white supremacy, and the great political right of internal self-control-—but only against one specified and single danger alone, i.e. the danger of Abolition rule.”
-Jefferson Buford, Barbour County, Alabama, speaking to the Alabama Secession Convention, on March 4, 1861
Buchanan was of course a Democrat, as was Pierce before him.
If the demoncraps were in control of government then why did the South secede? That makes no sense. Nor is it logical.
Because they thought that Lincoln's election meant that they were losing control of the government.
The Compromise of 1850 was Whig not demoncrap because the South wanted to expand slavery to the West.
It was a bipartisan compromise. Taylor and his successor Fillmore were Whigs. Both houses of Congress were narrowly controlled by Democrats. Henry Clay, a Whig, put the compromise together. Stephen Douglas, a Democrat, got it through Congress. Southern Democrat militants weren't happy with the compromise. Neither were Northern abolitionists.
“You were thinking that 8 states or so were suddenly going to switch sides on the “abolish slavery” issue? How likely was that?”
No, I wasn’t. The first call for abolition in the colonies that would become the United States happened in 1688. Nearly two hundred years before the election of Abraham Lincoln. The fire eaters and their stooges were thinking long term. They were trying to protect the institution of slavery because it was the cornerstone of a way of life they wanted to hand down to future generations.
“Slavery, the very source of our existence, the greatest blessing both for Master & Slave that could have been bestowed upon us.”
-Stephan Dodson Ramseur, future Confederate general, writing from West Point in the wake of the 1856 election
“There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.”
-Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia
“Slavery is said to be an evil… But is no evil. On the contrary, I believe it to be the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region…”
-Congressman James Henry Hammond, February 1, 1836
So Charles Dickens is the authority. Not the leadership of the South at the time. Praise God that this enlightened Englishman could correct millions of Confederate fools who were so badly misled by their ruling class!
From your link:
“It is not at all surprising, such being the character of the Government of the United States, that it should assume to possess power over all the institutions of the country. The agitations on the subject of slavery, are the natural results of the consolidation of the Government. Responsibility, follows power; and if the people of the North, have the power by Congress—”to promote the general welfare of the United States,” by any means they deem expedient—why should they not assail and overthrow the institution of slavery in the South?”
Kind of undercuts the false premise that there was nothing to fear about the future of slavery, doesn’t it?
“We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor—by which our population doubles every twenty years—by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land-by which order is preserved by an unpaid police, and many fertile regions of the world, where the white man cannot labor, are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our productions. All we demand of other peoples is, to be let alone, to work out our own high destinies. United together, and we must be the most independent, as we are among the most important of the nations of the world United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace, than our beneficent productions. United together, and we must be a great, free and prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages. We ask you to join us, in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States.”
Is that another one of those pesky quotes that supports Yankee propaganda?
“People keep claiming that, but the question I would put to you is “Where was it going to grow?”
“I want Cuba . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason — for the planting and spreading of slavery.”
-Albert Gallatin Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi, speaking with regard to the several filibuster expeditions to Central America
“The area of slavery must be extended correlative with its antagonism, or it will be put speedily in the ‘course of ultimate extinction.’....The extension of slavery is the vital point of the whole controversy between the North and the South...Amendments to the federal constitution are urged by some as a panacea for all the ills that beset us. That instrument is amply sufficient as it now stands, for the protection of Southern rights, if it was only enforced. The South wants practical evidence of good faith from the North, not mere paper agreements and compromises. They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble.”
-Henry M. Rector, Governor of Arkansas, March 2, 1861
“I’m well aware that you can find quotes from all sorts of people in the past that can be made to support the propaganda you are trying to propagate.”
I’ve been thinking about what you wrote here. Why would it be that there should be so many quotes from “all sorts of people” contradicting your stance on the cause of the war, if what you say was so patently obvious back then? These are quotes from Southerners who were actually leading the charge to dissolve the union, not foreigners weighing in from abroad.
Were they stupid? Duped? Ignorant? What explains this odd dichotomy.
I stopped taking you seriously a long time ago.
You think the President would have been okay with one navy warship deliberately ramming another navy ship that was non hostile?
How does that work?
And I notice you ignored the other questions of why disguise the warship and sail it far away from the shipping channels while pretending it is a British ship.
Or Porter did not have any separate secret orders to start a war at Pensacola.
So he's just a trigger happy loose cannon? That makes sense to you? A guy almost starts a war and it's just excessive exuberance?
I guess you and I have different views of how the military chain of command works. I don't see a lieutenant deliberately starting a war without cover from above.
Another example of where you don't know what the f*** you are talking about. The Star of the West was carrying troops and munitions. The Wikipedia entry on it used to say so, but last time I checked they had removed that little detail about it carrying troops and munitions.
Local ships had spotted the Star of the West offloading the troops and cargo from the Brooklyn. They arrived in port first and telegraphed the authorities in Charleston.
If you do a little digging, you can finally find some articles that admit the Star of the West was carrying soldiers and war material.
Once again, the early belligerent acts of the war were committed by Union forces.
Slavery was going to end on it's own eventually. If you bother to read Charles Dickens "American Notes", he details conversations he had with Southern slave owners. The takeaway is that many of them wanted out of it, but they didn't know how to do it without causing massive upheavals. He advised them to simply do it.
That’s progress, sir! Let’s take the next step. Is it so difficult to imagine that the gentle folk sipping on mint juleps while relaxing on the veranda weren’t so confident in the future of their peculiar institution as you are today?
I don't think their prime concern was the potential loss of slavery as much as it was the absolute hatred directed at them from Liberal Northern states who regarded them as vile disgusting human beings.
Nobody wants to associate with people who think they are human garbage, but slavery was under no legal threat until at least 1896.
There is also the matter of the ridiculous levels of taxation imposed on them by the Northern states because they controlled the majority in congress.
-Jefferson Buford, Barbour County, Alabama,
And I should care what this non-entity said? Should I go find a conservative nut to represent you? (and yes, there are a lot of conservative nuts. I've met a bunch of them.)
They had already lost control of the government. Lincoln's election was simply an acknowledgement that they would forever after be second class citizens in the Union.
As such it is irrelevant to what happened after 1776. And I don't care about your cherry picked quotes. Propagandists have had 150 years to drag those out of the much and present them as "evidence."
Money talks. Bullsh*t walks. The war was about money and the continuous control of it by the Northern elite who still control Washington DC today with lies and astroturf movements like BLM and Antifa.
There is a reason why most of the "News" services are located in New York. Quicker to get their directions from people who make money off of Washington DC spending policy and influence.
Charles Dickens is an objective third party viewer who hated slavery and was a staunch abolitionist. Have you ever heard of this legal concept called "statement against interest"? They are generally regarded as true, because people usually won't make statements against their interests unless they feel compelled to be truthful.
The Confederate politicians would lie about their true motivation in the same manner modern politicians lie about theirs.
The unassailable fact was that the Southern states would have reaped a huge cash windfall from leaving, and the Northern states would face a serious financial crises as a consequences.
You tell me it's about some moral issue, but when people who have a lot of money at stake tell me that the thing which will make them the most money is a major moral issue, I think their motivation is money, not morality.
Especially after they passed the Corwin Amendment. You simply cannot jive that vote with any moral stance for attacking the Confederates. The Northern states were all so willing to keep slavery indefinitely so long as they could keep their thumb on the Southern state's economic production.
Money. It's always money.
This is like people finding those secession statements from three states, and ignoring Virginia's secession statement, which contradicts what they want to show.
Did you bother to read the economic portion of the statement?
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