Posted on 08/16/2002 3:44:14 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
How so? It's based upon an authentic citation of Lincoln's speeches themselves.
Further, I don't believe it could even reasonably approach the bias contained in most yankee presentations of Lincoln's views, which tend to reprint what suits their agenda and ignore what does not.
But any fair reading of Lincoln?s words on slavery show that he also opposed it on moral, religious and philosophical grounds as well.
I've long conceded that Lincoln had some sort of underlying moral opposition to slavery so I don't see what your purpose is. As far as I am concerned the debate over his moral position is one over the degree it influenced him, when, and where.
After all, was not the nation physically destroyed by the war to a degree never before and never since seen? Did not Lincoln trample upon the Constitution's plain meaning in order wage that same war?
The reality is that the largest economic expansion in the history of the world occurred in the 30 years after the war.
...which could have been larger had the nation not destroyed a huge chunk of its economy and workforce by war.
It is true that much of the south did not enjoy as many fruits from that expansion as did the rest of the nation. But that was the fault of the south itself for attempting to resurrect their pre-Civil War economic and class systems
Nonsense. The main fault itself lies squarely with the fact that a vibrant southern economy was thoroughly decimated by the physical destruction of the war itself. What you suggest is at most a distant secondary factor, if anything at all.
As to ?trampling upon the Constitution? that is your opinion.
Fair enough, though I contend it is a thoroughly evidenced one with several clear cases of constitutional abuse that are documentable.
I apologize to you if you have not done that, but you know other Lincoln bashers constantly do
It's entirely possible, but I am no more in control of their actions than they are of mine. I?m not sure what quotes from McPherson you have in mind, but I would caution that there is and was a significant difference between ?abolitionism? and Abolitionists.
The quote is a passage where he directly references the abolitionist movement in what he describes as its militant faction - obviously the John Browns, Spooners, and Garrisons. He uses Lincoln and abolitionism interchangably as if they were one in the same. Here's the quote:
"What explained the growing Northern hostility to slavery? Since 1831 the militant phase of the abolitionist movement had crusaded against bondage as unchristian, immoral, and a violation of the republican principle of equality on which the nation had been founded. The fact that this land of liberty had become the world's largest slaveholding nation seemed a shameful anomaly to an increasing number of Northerners. "The monstrous injustice of slavery," said Lincoln in 1854, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world - enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." Slavery degraded not only the slaves, argued Northerners opposed to its expansion, by demeaning the dignity of labor and dragging down the wages of all workers; it also degraded free people who owned no slaves. If slavery goes into the territories, declared abolitionists, "the free labor of all the states will not.... If the free labor of the states goes there, the slave labor of the southern states will not, and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population." - McPherson, article on the causes of the war, history channel website
Since you mentioned the husband of the bi*ch I thought I'd post this for the continuing education of our misinformed brethren:
"Not until the Civil War did I officially join the Unitarian church and accept the fact the Christ was merely a great teacher with no higher claim to preeminence in wisdom, goodness, and power than any other man." –Harriet Beecher Stowe
That high school kids are required to read the dilletantish musings of Henry David Thoreau, who was nothing but an idle sycophant of Emerson, is an abuse of the teaching process. Anyone who will read from a variety of sources about the lives, speeches, and writings of the abolitionists would turn from them in disgust.
The "vibrant" southern economy you speak of was built on slavery. Slave property accounted for over 60% of the privately held wealth of the region and that 'wealth' was destroyed with a stroke of a pen. The actual "physical destruction" is not what kept the south poor after the war. Yes, several cities were badly damaged as was some of south’s limited railroads and industrial facilities. But they were rebuilt in relatively short order. But neither was the source of pre-war wealth in the region. Plantations were the source of wealth and aside from burning down the "big house" there was little critical infrastructure to destroy. The south stayed poor after the war because they insisted on maintaining pre-Civil War social and political institutions that were not compatible with a free labor market economy. They did not encourage education, technology, wage labor or enterprise. With a very few exceptions in the post-war era, the south did not produce people like Edison, Carnegie, Westinghouse, Mellon, Rockefeller, Ford or the thousands of other creative industrious young men who rose from humble beginnings to shape a nation and bring general prosperity to the north. The class system of the south did not encourage such men. Some "southrons" point to those facts with pride, but there was a heavy economic cost to pay for preserving that "culture".
Well, it's an interesting distinction, but I wonder, does it make a difference?
Consider for a moment, if you were a Virginian who thinks there is a movement afoot in the North to impair your political ability to resist tariffs (e.g., the Morill Tariff), work your plantation, and be secure in your bed at night, is there a useful distinction to be made between limousine-liberal spewers like Garrison and Wendell Phillips, both of whom publicly cursed the Constitution and made their contempt for it known? Phillips pulled this stunt in 1842, Garrison in 1851, both of them failing to decline, on principle, the protections of the republic afterward, however, or to seek the protection of some European power.
The point of distinguishing between an abolitionist and an Abolitionist, if you insist on a distinction, would be to show someone on the other side some reason to apprehend the approach of the one, but not the other. But as we have seen from the progress of Republicanism from 1856 to 1868, the fulminations of the most ardent abolitionists were shorn of the trappings of power, whereas the policies of Abraham Lincoln were decidedly not.
From some abolitionists, the Southern planters received incendiary pamphlets and rhetoric. From Lincoln, authentic fire and sword. If I had to choose, I'd name the fire-eaters as the "small-A" abolitionists, and capitalize the title for Lincoln and Grant and their two-million-man army.
As I mentioned to you in a note, I agree that this was Lincoln's motive in taking up the cudgels against slavery. Donald's biography of Lincoln (Lincoln, 1999) adds further evidences from correspondence of Lincoln's motivation, but this quote is expository.
The success of abolition, and its war, was sustained by a Party. The business of finding out which motives for the abolition of slavery and the waging of that war were preponderant and effectual in the coalition of interests and reasons belongs to the historian. Unfortunately, McPherson offers us the aspect instead of a polemicist.
It's too bad the Census of 1860 couldn't have run an excimiating poll on the subjects of slavery, secession, and maintenance of the Union with its "long form" of the day. Then we should know a lot better what we are talking about when we start ascribing motives to large, kaleidoscopic masses of politically active people.
Could you please substantiate and flesh out these statements a little more? It seems to me that a free-labor, market economy was all they had left. Yes, the cost of the war in human capital, because of emancipation, was enormous -- mind you these were sunk costs paid in gold, which had suddenly to be written off. In the case of Texas, as I've pointed out above citing Fehrenbach, the value of the slaves held in Texas in 1860 exceeded that of all the real estate in the state, and in gold it was an astronomical sum, and the reason why a purchase-and-emancipation plan was never a serious contender (Lincoln proposing one untimely during the war, but offering only about 25 cents on the dollar out of the national treasury for the slaves to be thus redeemed).
Besides the sunk costs of the emancipated slaves, there was also the money factor: the entire stock of currency and other debts of the Confederacy were wiped out by law. I think the modern equivalent would be M3=0.
It's tough to be progressive, son, when all you've got to progress with is the remaining cotton in the field that the carpetbaggers haven't stolen yet (oh, yes -- the stocks in the cities were seized by the Union army), and no hands to help bring it in and take it to market (if the market hadn't been burned down).
Education? Technology? How about finding something to eat? First things first, boy.
But you're right, I'm sure; that South sure was retrograde, wasn't it?
IIRC, Rockefeller was already on his way by the end of the Civil War. The first "oil boom" occurred during the War, in the Pennsylvania oil country, which was PARO ("producing at rate of": oilfield usage) about two million barrels per year in 1863. As yet, its use was primarily as illuminating oil, replacing the declining production of whale oil.
The class system of the south did not encourage such men.
How about, "the economic condition -- called 'prostration' -- of the South did not encourage such men....or their relatives.....or anyone I know....."
Come on, Ditto, you're exceeding the bromide speed limit here. Try to keep it between the ditches.
.....and he pivots, jumper, andHakeemgoesupwithhimREEE-JECTEDDDD!!!OHwhattablock....
No basket, Ditto. Would you like to try for the rebound? Don't mind Charles's elbows -- they're always like that.
As was the vibrant northern economy. There was no market for much of the manufactured goods without the South and no cotton for the textile mills. The south stayed poor after the war because they insisted on maintaining pre-Civil War social and political institutions that were not compatible with a free labor market economy
Nonsense. The South stayed poor because all of the capitol available in the postwar years was sent to the developing west. There was no money to loan to Southern industrialists until the 1890s and even then each state was saddled with millions in debt incurred by crooked yankees who were appointed to office when elected officials were deposed by the victors of the war: your rotten radical party you now call the GOP. The Southern states were occupied militarily until 1877 and their political institutions were imported form New England. How you manage to live with a head stuffed so full of nonsense is a mystery. Are all yankees ignorant socialists or is it just you few who visit these threads?
There's simply no way you could actually believe all of this rot unless you wanted to be decieved by the marxists who taught you in college.
However, once the war began, they viewed slavery as the underlying cause and moved more toward the radicals in favoring the rapid ending of slavery. U.S. Grant may have said it best.
"In all this I can see but the doom of slavery. The North do not want, nor will they want, to interfere with the institution. But they will refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance." -
April 19, 1861, in a letter to his father-in-law, Frederick Dent.
Anyone who reads the words of the radicals themselves would have to be Clintonesque marxists not to be disgusted by them. Those lunatics are still considered early saints of the GOP. Sumner, if he were still a republican in the Senate would make Jumpin Jimmy Jeffords look like a conservative by comparison and still, the republicans worship his memory.
LOL. You're starting to sound like Stand Watie or Twodees --- anyone who shoots at your Lost Cause Myth and self-pity is a Marxist. That's ironic as hell since my post extolled the virtues of the northern capitalists who built America into the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. If your neo-confederate dictionary defines that as Marxist, we must live on different planets.
BTW. New York City had no need for coal from Alabama. Pennsylvania is right next store and to this day can provide enough coal every week to bury New York 100 feet deep. As to your mythical geographic advantage of the north, explain to me what advantage New England had in textile manufacture. Their raw material had to travel 1000 miles! Why did the south wait until the early 1900s before they started to build their own textile mills to process the cotton grown right there? Why did Pittsburgh that had coal just like Tennessee but no iron ore become the steel capital? It would be as easy to ship iron ore from Minnesota to Nashville, Chattanooga, or Memphis as it was to Pittsburgh --- maybe even cheaper since you could take the Mississippi the whole way. Where were the southern Carnegies to take advantage of those opportunities? There was no geographic reason why the south could not have joined the industrial age. It was their culture that prevented it. The reason is that southern culture until the last few decades was always about looking backward, not looking forward. And 100 years later, ironically, the regions have somewhat changed positions. Now it is people in the rust-belt who cling to outdated institutions and pine for the “good old days” of heavy industry and refuse to embrace the future as the sun belt has done.
That's pure bunk.
That is a problem. I've looked around for stats on the subject estimated by various persons and studies during the time. One of the most detailed I've seen from before the war was in a speech by John Calhoun given in 1847. He breaks down the northern population by rough estimates and supports those estimates with statistics about various causes and their electoral strengths in previous elections.
You are attempting to reduce economic systems to terms of labor alone. Doing so is fallacy regardless of where it is tried, be it by you or by Karl Marx. While slavery cannot be ignored, to claim that it alone, or any system of labor alone for that matter, is the entirity of any economy is to commit the error of labor theory reductionism.
Slave property accounted for over 60% of the privately held wealth of the region and that 'wealth' was destroyed with a stroke of a pen.
Got any sources of those stats, cause most of the figures I've seen assert that between 50 and 65% of the southern economy's wealth as a whole met physical destruction by the war itself. I believe I even saw one of those stats in one of McPherson's books.
The actual "physical destruction" is not what kept the south poor after the war.
According to the commonly accepted statistic I cited above it was.
Yes, several cities were badly damaged
I think 95% destruction qualifies as somewhat more than simply "badly damaged." Try complete destruction.
as was some of south?s limited railroads and industrial facilities.
Don't forget crops, farms, and shipping.
But they were rebuilt in relatively short order.
Of course, for the most part. That tends to be the case after war. But had they not been destroyed in the first place, they would not have needed to have been rebuilt. The destruction was forgone opportunity.
But neither was the source of pre-war wealth in the region.
The commonly accepted stats, between 50-65%, says otherwise.
The south stayed poor after the war because they insisted on maintaining pre-Civil War social and political institutions that were not compatible with a free labor market economy.
You're committing the labor reduction fallacy again. If you intend to take part in this debate, go learn economic theory.
They did not encourage education, technology, wage labor or enterprise. With a very few exceptions in the post-war era, the south did not produce people like Edison, Carnegie, Westinghouse, Mellon, Rockefeller, Ford
Evidently you've never heard of the Texas oil tycoons, Howard Hughes, or the southern wing of the Vanderbilt family.
The class system of the south did not encourage such men.
Labor reduction fallacy. Go learn some economics because you are strongly resembling the class historians of the political left.
Some "southrons" point to those facts with pride, but there was a heavy economic cost to pay for preserving that "culture".
And on the flip side, there was a heavy cultural cost to pay for yankeeland's industrial economic interventionism. We're still feeling it to this day, or have you not noticed what regions of the country are dominated by adamant defenders of abortion on demand, the normalization of homosexual perversions, the elimination of religion from public life, and the substitution of basic morality with systems of environmental pseudo-ethics, idolatrous atheism, and diversitopian communalist philosophies.
In case you're still wondering I'll give you a hint: It ain't the bible belt.
When an entire section of the country is driven into enforced poverty while its political institutions are taken over by a radical political party backed by the US military and the states of that section are driven into debt with all the proceeds robbed and taken back north where the appointed crooks came from, you can't blame the poverty of the region on anything other than what caused it.
What caused it was your political party. While they were in power, the grossest abuses of authority in the history of this country occurred. The genocide of a race of people was carried out in the western territories while the subjugation of nearly half the country was being carried on as a matter of official federal policy.
Your posturing over what you imagine you know is infuriating. For the love of God, man, get your head out of the sand and do some research. Having your mind made up before you turn the first page is typical of liberals. Surprise me for once and act like a man instead of like a hypnotized sheep.
Actually he appears to be referencing a disturbingly strong trend of the class/labor reductionism brand of economics throughout your argument about the southern economy. You see slavery, labor, class, and very little else.
The marxist movement saw the same thing. Surely you know where that got them.
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