Replies

No problem, I call 'em like I see 'em. And I see this lot as the supposed moral highground grabbers who would sell their own mothers out to achieve their "righteousness". I don't hold with slavery, but I do feel that the Southern States had the right to decide their own domestic issues for themselves without Washington DC's or Yankee interference. They think that when the 13 States ratified the Constitution that it just became the country called America. NOT SO! The individual States still retained sovereignty, and could withdraw from the Union if the People chose to do so under the 9th and 10th Amendments. Hence the "United States" because they banded together only to render limited power to the Federal Government. Federal means shared.

They are the PC types who will eventually try to rewrite Western Civilization history all in their purported Moral Version. What a LOAD OF CRAP!

I don't hold with slavery, but I do feel that the Southern States had the right to decide their own domestic issues for themselves without Washington DC's or Yankee interference.

Well, that's the whole point, isn't it?

And yet the other side insists on arguing -- though they know better, they've read our posts ad infinitum going back two or three years -- that we are a) advocating slavery, b) apologizing for the institution of slavery as if we wanted it resuscitated, c) arguing and apologizing for institutionalized racism, and d) arguing for the sundering of the United States, like those chuzzlewits up in New England who are sulking in their tents after Bush's convincing reelection victory. (I've still got 'Rat friends sending me breathless accounts of original voting-machine records found in trash dumpsters in Florida.)

In so arguing, they are construing a gigantic argumentum ad hominem against both the original secessionists and us, that they and we are wicked, mismotivated people who want to do badly by black people -- by putting them on a raft for Cuba or something, or putting them back in service on big farms somewhere with chains around their necks.

The substantive argument they offer is the same one articulated by Lincoln, and their problem is that we can now evaluate his contemporary political claims at leisure and in detail, with copious documentary evidence not then available to public opinion -- such as his correspondence with Gustavus Fox, e.g., that someone posted here a couple of days ago, and a more-or-less complete record of his negotiations with the government of South Carolina in the days leading up to the cannonading of Fort Sumter, which can be profitably read side-by-side with his simultaneous orders and communiques to Fox and other players in the business about Sumter and Fort Pickens.

When one begins to survey all this activity and to put together a large-scale, macro picture of Lincoln's policy toward the South, that is when the Lincoln apologists begin to start feeling a little tender -- and that is when the ad hominem stuff starts.

Your constitutional argument is one I agree with, and returning to Lincoln, we can now begin, as H.L. Mencken did independently in an earlier generation, to compare Lincoln's claims about constitutional theory with what the Framers committed to paper, and also with various theories offered by consolidation-minded Federalists that were forerunners of Lincoln's own, and see where Lincoln, Hamilton, Jay, and Marshall embroidered and fictionalized the nature of the Union and the American theory of government as established, not by the authors of the Federalist (who were pleaders ex parte in a political forum, after all), but by the Framers in constitutional convention assembled.

In short, what the People ratified and agreed to in 1789-91 and what Lincoln and Marshall said they did, were two different things entirely.

And on this difference, Lincoln hung over 600,000 battlefield deaths and many score of thousands of other entailed civilian deaths, just to have his way on policy.