Thanks for demonstrating that you've missed the point entirely and made a fool of yourself in doing so.
For over a century your side of the debate has cast itself as the heir to abolitionism and based on that title you stake out a claim to some unnamed moral highground on slavery. You have nothing of the sort and instead come from a tradition of the yankee war machine, its unjustly waged war, its coerced obedience, and its political - as opposed to moral - motives.
Faced with an authentic abolitionist such as Spooner you are repulsed as undeniably the guy was a fringe extremist. But that was exactly what abolitionism embodied, and Spooner as one of it's leaders filled the role of a brilliant yet flamboyant crackpot.
Revisionist yankeeland stole the name of abolitionism as the root of its supposed moral claim to justify an immorally waged war. Only one problem - the real abolitionists were still there and the crackpots pitched a fit when their fringe movement was usurped by political power grabbers to justify their agenda and behavior. That's why Spooner was so mad, and that is why his commentary is so telling - it exposes as a fraud the whole of your side's claim to abolitionism and, by popularly promoted albeit flawed inference, morally-grounded anti-slavery activism.
And as a side note, most political historians tend to include Spooner as a libertarian or anarcho-libertarian philosopher. He's still a fringer, but he's not the same as a leftist anarchist ala the marxian communalism you are probably referencing.
The Blumenfeld book has gotten very hard to find. I don't understand why he hasn't done another edition; there is not one available even at his website. It covers crucial material.
Frank's book has just come out in the last month. I highly recommend it to anyone who aspires to freedom for themselves or their progeny.
These are two books that, IMO, you must have to know truthful American history. Both deal with the Socialist-Unitarian-Communist-humanist-egalitarianist rejection of Christianity. Frank Conner's book goes into great detail in exposing what has been and is being done not only to the South but to civilisation as we know it. In other words, all men and women who are not simply fair-weather Christians MUST read these books!
Is Public Education Necessary? by Samuel Blumenfeld
The South Under Siege 1830 - 2000/ A History of the Relations Between the North and the South by Frank Conner
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SOUTHERN HISTORY WITH THE HAIR ON
A new book titled, "The South Under Siege 1830 - 2000/ A History of the Relations Between the North and the South," by Frank Conner (me) will go on sale Monday (7/15/02). It is a 6 X 9 hardcover book, 752 pages, with bibliography and index, but no footnotes. (However, when discussing controversial material in the book, I generally cite my source.)
The thesis of this book is that various groups of Northern liberals have been waging a nonstop ideological war against the conservative white South from the 1830s to the present, using black civil rights as their primary weapon against us. The book tells what the liberals have done to us; why they said they were doing those terrible things; why they were actually doing them; and what the results have been. When you see that history from 1830 to 2000 laid out in one volume, you see that the liberals had a very different primary motive than that of aiding the blacks. I contend that they have been using the South as their battleground for the past 170 years to discredit Christianity in the US, and replace it with secular humanism (ideological liberalism) as the official religion of the US.
This book exposes the sickening hypocrisy and blatant viciousness of the Northern liberals in dealing with the conservative South. I believe that if you read this book, it will change forever your impressions of the North and the Northerners, and the South and the Southerners.
In its final chapter, the book proposes a fairly-detailed plan whereby the Southerners can --with the resources presently available to us-- mount a lawful ideological revolutionary war (i.e. of carefully-chosen words, not bullets) to reclaim our souls and our region from the ruinous rule of the liberals.
In researching this book, I just followed my nose --as is my wont; consequently, in its pages I gore some hitherto-sacrosanct sacred cows. In other words, this book is politically incorrect. If you like the way things are going in the South, don't buy this book! If you have delicate sensibilities, don't buy this book! If you are an ideological liberal, don't buy this book! For everybody else, there is nothing else like this book on the market-- and there may never be another one like it.
The price of the book is $37.40 postpaid to residents of Georgia; or $34.95 postpaid to everyone else in the continental US. To order it, please send your check to:
Collards Publishing Company
P.O. Box 71996
Newnan, Georgia 30271-1996.
Sorry, no e-mail or telephone orders, or discounts for volume, or sales to booksellers (whom I admire tremendously, but I simply don't have the margin for that built into this first edition), or via other venues.
Frank Conner
For over a century your side of the debate has cast itself as the heir to abolitionism and based on that title you stake out a claim to some unnamed moral highground on slavery.
Thanks for demonstrating yet again that you have no conception of the politics and sentiment of the people of the time. Spooner was an abolitionist and a very radical one at that. Abolitionists only made up a small fraction of the anti-slavery side in that age. The vast majority of anti-slavery people, both north and south, were like Lincoln who favored the gradual elimination of slavery because the understood the political and economic realities. Radicals like Spooner wanted an immediate end to slavery, fire and brimstone for slave owners, and were perfectly willing to destroy the constitution and the nation to reach that goal. To say, as you do, that one could only be pro-slavery or be an abolitionist is like saying that the anti-abortion fight of today one can only be an abortionist or a member of Operation Rescue.
Spooner was the ying to Ruffin's yang. Neither gave a damn for the nation. They were irresponsible radicals and nothing but minor footnotes to the great events of the age.