Posted on 11/13/2004 11:12:00 AM PST by LouAvul
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Based on Margaret Mitchell's hugely popular novel, producer David O. Selznick's four-hour epic tale of the American South during slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction is the all-time box-office champion.
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Considering its financial success and critical acclaim, "Gone With the Wind" may be the most famous movie ever made.
It's also a lie.
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Along with D.W. Griffith's technically innovative but ethically reprehensible "The Birth of a Nation" (from 1915), which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroic, "GWTW" presents a picture of the pre-Civil War South in which slavery is a noble institution and slaves are content with their status.
Furthermore, it puts forth an image of Reconstruction as one in which freed blacks, the occupying Union army, Southern "scalawags" and Northern "carpetbaggers" inflict great harm on the defeated South, which is saved - along with the honor of Southern womanhood - by the bravery of KKK-like vigilantes.
To his credit, Selznick did eliminate some of the most egregious racism in Mitchell's novel, including the frequent use of the N-word, and downplayed the role of the KKK, compared with "Birth of a Nation," by showing no hooded vigilantes.
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One can say that "GWTW" was a product of its times, when racial segregation was still the law of the South and a common practice in the North, and shouldn't be judged by today's political and moral standards. And it's true that most historical scholarship prior to the 1950s, like the movie, also portrayed slavery as a relatively benign institution and Reconstruction as unequivocally evil.
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Or as William L. Patterson of the Chicago Defender succinctly wrote: "('Gone With the Wind' is a) weapon of terror against black America."
(Excerpt) Read more at sacticket.com ...
George Washington
First Inauguration
April 30, 1789
North Carolina ratified 21 nov 1789 (194-77)
Rhode Island ratified 29 may 1790 (34-32)
EXTRACT FROM THE MASSACHUSETTS MAGAZINE FOR MARCH, 1789
Summary of American news and politics.
[After reviewing (1) New Hampshire, (2) Massachusetts, (3) Connecticut, (4) New York, (5) New Jersey, (6) Pennsylvania, (7) Delaware, (8) Maryland, (9) Virginia, (10) South Carolina and (11) Georgia -- the ELEVEN states which had ratified the Constitution.]
"VERMONT. This state has expressed a wish to be admitted a member of the union," etc.
"RHODE ISLAND. This foreign state has again refused to accede to a union with her late sisters. * * * anxious of enjoying the protection of the union, the inhabitants of Newport, Providence, and other places are determined to sue for its protection, and to be annexed to Massachusetts or Connecticut -- thereby to evince to their perverse legislature, that unless they take measures for a speedy adoption of the constitution their boasted sovereignty as an independent state, will ere long be at an end."
"NORTH CAROLINA. This other foreign state, has lately evinced a disposition to become a member of the united states," etc.
SOURCE: The Republic of Republics, 1878, Bernard Janin Sage, Appendix A, p. 5.
STATE OF RHODE ISLAND AND PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS,
In General Assembly, September Session, 1789.
To the President, the Senate, and the House of Representatives of the eleven United States of America in Congress assembled:
"The critical situation in which the people of this State are placed engages us to make these assurances, on their behalf, of their attachment and friendship to their sister States, and of their disposition to cultivate mutual harmony and friendly intercourse. They know themselves to be a handful, comparatively viewed, and, although they now stand as it were alone, they have not separated themselves or departed from the principles of the Confederation, which was formed by the sister States in their struggle for freedom and in the hour of danger....
"Our not having acceded to or adopted the new system of government formed and adopted by most of our sister States, we doubt not, has given uneasiness to them. That we have not seen our way clear to it, consistently with our idea of the principles upon which we all embarked together, has also given pain to us. We have not doubted that we might thereby avoid present difficulties, but we have apprehended future mischief....
Can it be thought strange that, with these impressions, they [the people of this State] should wait to see the proposed system organized and in operation? -- to see what further checks and securities would be agreed to and established by way of amendments before they could adopt it as a Constitution of government for themselves and their posterity? ...
We are induced to hope that we shall not be altogether considered as foreigners having no particular affinity or connection with the United States; but that trade and commerce, upon which the properity of this State much depends, will be preservved as free and open between this State and the United States, as our different situations at present can possibly admit....
We feel ourselves attached by the strongest ties of friendship, kindred, and interest, to our sister States; and we can not, without the greatest reluctance, look to any other quarter for those advantages of commercial intercourse which we conceive to be more natural and reciprocal between them and us.
I am, at the request and in behalf of the General Assembly, your most obedient, humble servant.
(Signed) John Collins, Governor.
His Excellency, the President of the United States.
[American State Papers, Vol I, Miscellaneous.]
SOURCE: The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Jefferson Davis, Vol I, pp. 112-3.
NEW HAMPSHIRE CONSTITUTION
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ESTABLISHED OCTOBER 31, 1783 TO TAKE EFFECT JUNE 2, 1784
AS SUBSEQUENTLY AMENDED AND IN FORCE DECEMBER 1990
BILL OF RIGHTS
Article 1. [Equality of Men; Origin and Object of Government.]. All men are born equally free and independent; therefore, all government of right originates from the people, is founded in consent, and instituted for the general good. June 2, 1784*
*The date on which each article was proclaimed as having been adopted is given after each article. This is followed by the year in which amendments were adopted and the subject matter of all the amendments.
* * *
[Art.] 7. [State Sovereignty.] The people of this state have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and independent state; and do, and forever hereafter shall, exercise and enjoy every power, jurisdiction, and right, pertaining thereto, which is not, or may not hereafter be, by them expressly delegated to the United States of America in congress assembled.
June 2, 1784
* * *
[Art.] 10. [Right of Revolution.] Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
June 2, 1784
* * *
[Art.] 24. [Militia.] A well regulated militia is the proper, natural, and sure defense, of a state.
June 2, 1784
* * *
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MASSACHUSETTS CONSTITUTION 1780
Art. IV. The people of this commonwealth have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and independent State, and do, and forever hereafter shall, exercise and enjoy every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not, or may not hereafter be, by them expressly delegated to the United States of America in Congress assembled.
The Frame of Government
The people inhabiting the territory formerly called the province of Massachusetts Bay do hereby solemnly and mutually agree with each other to form themselves into a free, sovereign, and independent body-politic or State, by the name of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
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In 1777, Vermont's leaders finally declared independence of the New Hampshire Grants not only from Britain, but also from New York. Despite the unresolved conflict with New York and secret negotiations of some political leaders with the British in Canada (Williamson 1949), Vermont actively supported the Revolution. Yet, until its admission to the Union as the fourteenth state in 1791, the Republic of Vermont was effectively a sovereign state. Vermont set a significant precedent, first, because the state was established through secession from another member state of the Union, and second, because the same right to sovereign authority claimed by the Revolutionaries vis-à-vis the British Empire was invoked by Vermont's leaders to justify that secession.
Tell that to Mr. Ed.
The one omission concerned the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Here was an act that clearly reflected the difference in the nation's experience with foreign and domestic war. Congress had agreed to Lincoln's warmaking - his marshaling of men and materials of war, his power to kill the nation's enemies. Yet they refused to endorse his authority to jail those enemies. Accounting for the irony was the contrast between the clear dangers of Confederate soldiers shooting Union officials and the ambiguous and more covert dangers of civilian opponents attacking with words and less obvious weapons. Still, Congress did nothing to stop Lincoln from carrying out his plan. Politics was important here: Americans were sensitive about their liberties; better to stay quiet on the subject and let Lincoln take the heat. [Emphasis and minor edits added.]
Your quote is well-selected, because it shows both the constitutional problem, and Paludan's advocacy of Lincoln.
In the first place, the Congress we are discussing here is a rump. That's the bottom line. This Congress does not represent majority opinion in the United States of America as of the end of 1860 or the beginning of 1861, so a very strong and conspicuous marker needs to be laid, that the (illegal) ex post facto consent of the Congress (I refuse to distinguish "retrospective" from ex post facto legislation, particularly where possible criminality or taxation is involved) was delivered up by a fraction of what Lincolnism, blinking the fact of secession, insists on referring to, in other circumstances, as the whole country. This is not the United States Congress in those terms; this is the Congress of the North.
That said, I won't go so far as to say that all of Congress's actions were invalidated by the absence of the Southern delegations: a quorum was a quorum (whatever that number may have been), a bill was still a bill, and passage was still passage.
That all said, Paludan and you do not put the necessary asterisks by Congress's enactments during this interval, as representing the will only of the Northern States, expressed through what had become a sectional caucus.
Second, Paludan tries to argue around, just as the rump Congress tried to legislate around, the incurability of Lincoln's horseback proclamations and unconstitutional actions. This incurability flows in no small part from Lincoln's own conspiratorial behavior both during the pre-inaugural period and in the days immediately after Congress recessed on March 29th, which was the starting point of Lincoln's vigorous efforts to start a war -- a point that even his personal secretary, John Nicolay, concedes:
As a matter of fact, President Lincoln had not at that date [in March, 1861] decided the Sumter question; he was following his own sagacious logic in arriving at a conclusion, which was at least partially reached on the 29th of March [note the date], when, as we have seen, he made the order to prepare the relief expedition. By this time, [Associate Justice of the Supreme Court John A.] Campbell [from Oct. 1861, Assistant Secretary of War of the CSA], in extreme impatience to further rebellion, was importuning Seward for explanation; and Seward, finding his former prediction [of withdrawal from Fort Sumter] at fault, thought it best not to venture a new one. Upon consultation, therefore, the President authorized him to carry to Campbell the first and only assurance the Administration ever made with regard to Sumter -- namely -- that he would not change the military status at Charleston without giving notice.This, be it observed, occurred on the 1st of April, about which time the policy of Seward favoring delay and conciliation finally and formally gave way before the President's stronger self-assertion and his carefully matured purpose to force rebellion to put itself flagrantly and fatally in the wrong by attacking Fort Sumter.
-- John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion, p. 55. [Emphasis added.]
Paludan's argument, therefore, does not treat adequately Lincoln's responsibility not merely for the specific unauthorized acts in his recitation, but for the larger enterprise Lincoln engaged in, which was the commencement of a bloody civil war with neither a formal mandate of the Congress -- required for a war as opposed to an insurrection (there was no insurrection) -- nor a mandate of the People beyond the vote of the Electoral College, which was not a war referendum, no matter how much Lincoln's most ardent supporters may have wanted to see it as one.
Lincoln had a warrant neither for his preparations for war, nor his proclaimed militarization of the Peoples' Militias, nor his arming and deployment of the Wide Awakes, nor his armed descent on the Southern States in a war of conquest that his faction said was a "civil war" or "rebellion", but which in fact was an international war against the seceded Peoples of the Southern States.
The citizens of the Southern States were no longer, by their own sovereign secession Acts, citizens of the United States: only the United States Government, and particularly the Supreme Court, continued to say so. Paludan's deadly and pregnant phrase, "his power to kill the nation's enemies", says it all: by leaving the United States, the Southern States, having done nothing else, were enemies of Lincoln's party and the industrial faction. The industrialists must have their markets, and the government its fat cow; and so Lincoln and his faction appropriated the instruments of government, beat the nation's plowshares into swords without law or right, and fell upon their prey, to slay and murder, until they held all the South in their hands as a conquered march, and no longer a land occupied by free People.
Government of the People, by the People, and for the People, perished from the United States at Appomattox, when the People themselves surrendered to a government dominated by a faction in the name of a lie.
Does it follow, therefore, that I am a minion-cursed blasphemer against dogma? Will I get the Salman Rushdie treatment? I think the fatwa has already dropped against you, amigo, and the bearded sectaries are following you around with daggers drawn and visions of paradise dancing in their heads.
Sure there were. They were called the Bill of Rights, and there were ten of them, the tenth of which "adverts" that very reservation of rights that you must necessarily deny, or confess your iconic president a tyrant and criminal.
I have previously posted on this thread the fact of life which you dishonestly blink, that without the several amendments and particularly the Tenth, ratification of the Constitution would have failed, and the country would have continued under the Articles of Confederation until a compromise could be found in some later convention.
I thought he was just a common hajji who'd been to worship in Mecca -- er, Pomona.
OH?! You mean the War of Northern Aggression, don't you?
I recall that line of Anthony Quinn's from Lawrence of Arabia: "I am a river to my people!!" <roar of approval, gunfire>
The laws of the United States do not run where the People have exercised their right and power to withdraw from the Union and are no longer part of the United States.
A wife's leaving her husband doesn't give him the right to hunt her down with a weapon in his hand, kill her brother and kids, and drag her back to his trailer-house and chain her to the bed.
Noted and saved to disk.
Didn't Chief Justice Chase refuse to hear cases in Virginia until martial law was removed there?
Government of the People, by the People, and for the People, perished from the United States at Appomattox, when the People themselves surrendered to a government dominated by a faction in the name of a lie.
Positively brilliant. I am in awe.
There was no treason. Treason is defined by the Constitution, and it involves aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States tendered by a person who is a citizen of the United States.
1. Confederates were no longer citizens, and openly declared themselves. They voluntarily and openly alienated their affections. Therefore there can have been no treason.
2. That they were enemies of the United States was the determination of Lincoln and his faction, who waged war against the Southern States to bring them back into the Union by armed violence.
The Congress and the people of the states provided a punishment, namely the 14th Amendment.
Actually, that didn't happen. The necessary votes for ratification came from military governments imposed on the Southern States, whose ratifications were not allowed to be rescinded (according to what law or equity, pray?) by the actual People of some of those States.
The Fourteenth Amendment was never ratified in accordance with the requirements of the Constitution. Furthermore, it was promulgated to a conquered territory whose obedience to the United States was an artifact of armed violence and whose battered and bleeding citizenship was an Orwellian joke.
Single regiment? From The New York Herald, April 28, 1861 from an April 27 report:
Washington is safe! No more than eighteen thousand armed men are at this moment congregated within its limits.
These included many from Washington itself. Apparently over 6,000 Northern troops had reached the capital.
In the same issue is an earlier statement from a general in Virginia:
General Harper [name is perhaps an error?], Commander of the forces at Harper's Ferry, had given the assurance that Virginia would allow no attack on the capital from her soil. The authority for the above assertion is confirmed by a gentleman just from Richmond, as being the sentiment expressed by Governor Letcher.
With that said, coercion can be lawfully applied to those individuals, or states, that unlawfully resist the laws of the United States and the execution of the Constitution.
I understand how that applies to individuals in the United States but not to states or citizens of states that have withdrawn from the Union. And, given the statements against coercion of states by Founders such as Hamilton, I think coercion of states is on shaky grounds historically.
Do you believe that the states would have ratified the Constitution if it had contained a statement that if a state and its people feel that staying in the Union is not in their best interests, well that's just too bad, the other states are going to come after you with armies to coerce you to stay in and do whatever they say?
You are speaking to the deaf. The entire Lincolnian proposition, and to a certain extent the Federalist one, too, was expressed in terms not of the will of the People or the Founders' intent, but of what they could get away with, given their determination to impose a factional victory over the whole country, the purpose of which was to make the many serve the few (precisely the case in the Gilded Age).
Well, that clears up that little mystery -- why Virginia didn't seize the capital when she had the chance, which might have ended the war before it started.
No trials. Ex post facto laws are unconstitutional, as are Bills of Attainder.
Good point! The parties adjudicate their differences. The south didn't do that.
LINCOLN didn't do that - South Carolina and the Confederacy repeatedly tried to resolve the dispute peaceably. The tyrant refused.
No state ever legally seceded from the Union - either under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union or under the Constitution of 1787. The United States of America, born by declaration on July 4, 1776, and sustained by a revolutionary war of independence, has continuously functioned to this day.
I guess North Carolina and Rhode Island & Providence Plantations were in the Twilight Zone. The states were INDEPENDENT since 4 Jul 1776 - some earlier, New York later IIRC. The Constitution specifically limits membership to states ratifying, so how can either state possibly be a member of that union?
As for the illegality of secession, one need only reflect on the words of Chief Justice Chase, who wrote in Texas v White, "The act [of ratification] which consummated [the state's] admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final."
SCOTUS also gave us legalized abortion, legalized racism. They make mistakes, they're not gods.
Enough of your silliness.
Return to your stable and #3stalking.
Conceivably, 3/4ths of the States could amend the Constitution into oblivion.
I guess that settles the issue of "final" and "perpetual", eh?
The perpetual nature of the Union, first defined in the Articles, is subsumed within the intent of the Constitution.
Please cite the clause incorporating the Articles. Are you channeling Jaffa? The perpetual nature, defined by the word "perpetual" was abandoned by the convention, and is nonexistent in the Constitution.
There was no "former union." The Union remained; only the form of national government changed.
NC & RI would beg to differ.
The Constitution, as written and ratified, provided for no "right" of unilateral secession. There were no reservations or conditions on the ratification of the document - it was a "yes or no" proposition.
Your comprehension is bass-ackwards. It doesn't have to provide for a right, it has to PROHIBIT secession. Justices Jay and Marshall would disagree with you assertions of reservations, as both of them signed documents stipulating that the power of self government could be resumed unilaterally at will.
It is the lack of consent which attempts to destroy the Union.
So the union was dissolved when the states seceded. Who fought the war to bring them back in?
I wish I had a nickle every time you guys posted this lie. I would be very rich by now. There were no "reservations" or "conditions" on ratification of the Constitution.
WE the Delegates of the people of Virginia, duly elected in pursuance of a recommendation from the General Assembly, and now met in Convention, having fully and freely investigated and discussed the proceedings of the Federal Convention, and being prepared as well as the most mature deliberation hath enabled us, to decide thereon, DO in the name and in behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will: that therefore no right of any denomination, can be cancelled, abridged, restrained or modified, by the Congress, by the Senate or House of Representatives acting in any capacity, by the President or any department or officer of the United States, except in those instances in which power is given by the Constitution for those purposes: and that among other essential rights, the liberty of conscience and of the press cannot be cancelled, abridged, restrained or modified by any authority of the United States.I take it you think Madison and Marshall were uneducated. As a poster has pointed out to you, your racism is showing - Southerners are not uneducated idiots as you seem to believe.With these impressions, with a solemn appeal to the searcher of hearts for the purity of our intentions, and under the conviction, that, whatsoever imperfections may exist in the Constitution, ought rather to be examined in the mode prescribed therein, than to bring the Union into danger by a delay, with a hope of obtaining amendments previous to the ratification:
We the said Delegates, in the name and in behalf of the people of Virginia, do by these presents assent to, and ratify the Constitution.
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