Confederate States Of America (2005)

One unspoken benefit of a Northern loss in the Civil War is that there almost certainly would have been no Spanish-American War...

I would disagree with that. You would have likely had the Spanish-Confederacy War. The southern leadership in 1860 made no secrets of their desire to expand southward. In fact, when the provisional confederate constitution was sent to the convention for approval in February 1860 the first proposed change was submitted by Alexander Stephens and that was to change the name on it from 'confederate states of North America' to 'confederate states of America' on the grounds that the first name was too limiting.

The U.S. and C.S.A. might eye each other warily across the Mason-Dixon line, but neither would be inclined to entry into needless foreign wars.

If confederate independence had come about as a result of a southen victory in the rebellion then I doubt that that first war would have been the last. You might well have had an armed border and both sides possibly looking abroad for allies, which may have resulted in their being entangled in the European conflicts of the 20th century. I know that Turtledove has done a whole series on this premise, but I think that his scenarios are pretty valid.

And, yes, slavery would have ended in the South before 1900, although, perhaps with forced repatriation of the Negro slaves to Africa, which was Lincoln's preferred solution.

I don't think you can put a date on when slavery would have ended. There is not a single case where slavery ended on it's own, it was always done through government intervention and over the opposition of the slave owners themselves. Given that there can be no doubt that slavery in the south would have lasted as long as southern society wanted it to, that at a minimum would have been needed to amend the confederate constitution to allow it to be ended. When would southern society reach that point? I think it would have taken a while. Many, perhaps most slaves never saw the inside of a cotton field, they were maids, butlers, cooks, grooms, gardeners, nannies and the like. Would the south have been willing to give up their domestic help within 35 years? Maybe, maybe not.

I can see forced repatriation of former slaves, not because Lincoln preferred it (he did not) but because other southern leaders did. Jefferson Davis once was asked what would happen if slavery ended, and his solution was exporting all the free blacks to Central and South America. The idea of all those former slaves running around free was not a popular idea in the south so some sort of expulsion might have been their chosen solution.

And beyond that, it's tiresome to hear people argue that we must withhold judgment on slavery but morally condemn protective tariffs as the devil's work.

I don't think anyone has attributed the Tariff to the Devil, but to his acolytes the Interests, as they were called in the Progressive Era.

I take your point that the argument against the Tariff was an equity argument. Northern money interests impetrated a seemingly endless procession of goodies -- corporate welfare -- even before the Civil War, in the form of protectionist measures, public works, and tax preferences (like the Warehouse Act) that redounded to their particular benefit. Robert Toombs expatiated on this subject, and I posted his complaint here. Likewise, Robert Rhett, in the call of South Carolina to her sister States to secede which he authored, mentioned several of these causes in the call, which I likewise posted, here.

Alexander Stephens, the former Whig from Georgia, spoke at the same meeting as Robert Toombs, when the Governor of Georgia sought the counsel of the State's leading men on the subject of secession in November, 1860; Toombs, a Carolinian, had spoken the night before, and Stephens answered him, especially on the subject of the tariff which, as an old Whig, he defended, even using the phrase "national greatness" as a McKinleyite might do, 40 years later. Stephens's perspective, before secession, was considerably different, and he counseled a union policy; and his remarks, preserved in the record, I reproduced here.

Stephens didn't think the Tariff was the Devil's work, and he argued its reasonableness, and the reasonableness of Massachusetts's senators in having voted with Southern senators to moderate it, as he addressed the Georgia governor and his audience of leading men. Toombs was prominent in the audience, occasionally interjecting a remark as Stephens argued against secession, and Stephens met his comments and objections, as he continued to counsel union. But it's significant that in the end, Stephens went with his State, and the Confederacy, and did his best to support the Confederate cause for the duration of the contest.

But the Tariff everyone was worried about wasn't the moderate tariff that Stephens praised and Toombs had voted for in 1857, but the Morrill Tariff of 1862, which everyone saw coming and which radically recast the tax structure in line with the interests of the manufacturing North exclusively. The North was preparing to push the South aside politically and turn it into a tax milch-cow and economic colony.

It isn't entering a presumptuous moral judgment of the Northern and Southern politicians who struggled over the Tariff, to say that the eagerness of the Northern manufacturing interests to serve themselves at the expense of the agrarian economy was one of the causes of the Civil War.

And beyond that, it's tiresome to hear people argue that we must withhold judgment on slavery but morally condemn protective tariffs as the devil's work. Or to hear them pound away at the idea that Northern racism always makes Southern slavery or racism more excusable or pardonable without considering that sometimes perhaps the reverse is true, that the North may sometimes have the advantage in such things.

Actually, I think the argument about racism was simply that nobody who was white could claim any moral high ground with respect to racial understanding, in the terms of that day, simply because there wasn't much anywhere in the society. We know fifty times what they did about anthropology, and we know that racial differences are not such as to subdivide Homo sapiens sapiens, although such differences, we know, eventually would produce biological differentiation to the point that, like some equids, people of one race could no longer reproduce with representatives of another. People knew about miscegenability, but they couldn't know that the story of Abel and Cain had nothing to do with racial differentiation or that Negroes weren't another kind of people in the varietal or subspecies sense. What they did know was that Negroes were not part of Western society -- they were Africans, no matter where born, just as genetically Iberian creoles born in the New World were European and not Incan or Aztecan in their genetic and social affinities. Race was identity all over the world, and I've posted some of the dozens of words Spanish-speaking genealogists used on baptismal certificates to fix newborns' ethnic patrimony and their places in society.

Or that late 19th century expansionism or Indian wars (conducted by Republican Presidents) are wrong, while the expansionism and Indian wars conducted by Jeferson, Jackson, Polk (and other Southern Democrats) earlier in the 19th century were justifiable and excusable.

As I understand the argument, the comments offered about Phil Sheridan and Billy Sherman were offered a) to emphasize complaints people had about their zeal in killing (the war-crimes argument, which was recognized if not formalized as misconduct, even then -- the revulsion of Santa Anna's officers at his orders to massacre Texians is part of the record), and b) to skewer the Abolitionist moral attack against the South for having been racist and persecutory, by recriminating against the U.S. Army's campaigns against the Plains Indians.

The primary moral argument we've been discussing basically says that, then and now, Southerners were and are homophobic racist Nazi wife-beaters etc., in a peculiarly Southern sort of way -- by which we're to understand that nobody in the South is exempt from this group guilt (can you say, "Christ-killers"?), and nobody in the South can ever answer the charge that the Civil War was justified by Southern moral retrogradation, which called for and completely justified a therapeutic war of liberation to save the Union and human freedom and deliver up the Negro out of the hands of his endogamously hateful oppressors, who can never be forgiven in this world or the next because their race-hatred, their moral malformation if you will, is an enduring social hallmark (can you say, "mark of Cain"?) whose eradication now justifies the total reorganization of Southern society, with or without its People's permission, for the wholesome public purpose of stamping out Southern culture and identity forever, and reshaping its pupae as Northern liberals-manque'. (Can you say, "New Soviet Man"?)

I've vituperated against this form of argument extensively in my posts above to M. Espinola and Non-Sequitur, so I won't go into the details again. I think I explained why the Northern attack on the South is null and void -- it's basically an attack on policy previously agreed to justified by moral representations that are made in isolation and laser-focussed on the South very purposefully, to produce action on the proponents' agenda without effectual resistance. It's a power play, in other words, of a particularly and viciously Sovietizing kind: we're supposed to sign the confession and then sign the invoice for the bullet used to execute us. Which some people like Non-Sequitur like just fine and find hugely entertaining and morally gratifying, but which I've continued to point out is an injustice overall, since Southerners are treated in this argument much differently from anyone else and are in fact getting The Treatment.

In other words, most people don't share your kind of extreme relativism.

Please show that I'm indulging in relativism. I don't think I am. Rather, people who apply one standard to Northern racial codes and another to Southern ones, would seem to be the people expediting situational solutions lit by situational ethics.

They use it to excuse what they've already come to disapprove of, and discard it to condemn what they approve of -- and that is clearly a double standard.

If you think recrimination against someone else's argument using his own standards of moral judgment is a double standard, I think your confusion is understandable. But it isn't really a moral equivocation, when someone attempts to subvert the authority of a morally-based attack by attempting to show hypocrisy in the attacker's argument.

Northerners who nearly exterminated the Plains Indians haven't the moral authority to complain about Southern lynching-parties, is the form of the argument. So to say is not to erect a defense of lynching, or even to sympathize with the Indians really, or even to deplore the disappearance of the buffalo.

If you keep arguing that one institution is forever to be removed from the possibility of condemnation, are you not in some way supporting or promoting or protecting it?

You're doing it again: making slavery THE issue, and sliding past the issue of the rights of the Southerners engaged in it. The fallacy in your argument is that, if I allow myself to be led to a condemnation of slavery, "slavery being bad......," that all the other consequences of the Civil War must therefore flow, unimpeded and uninspected, from my one concession, and I must accept those consequences as necessarily entrained. That's begging the question, "....shall the South be flattened?"

That's the hustle Harriet Beecher Stowe originally retailed to the public in her call to war (and Lincoln himself laid the war at her door), which hustle Abraham Lincoln in turn concretized in policy, and in violence to the Constitution, and on the South.

My question to you still stands unanswered: how would your view of 19th century American history be different if you were avowedly "pro-slavery" than it is with you being whatever it is that you think you are?

I'm sorry if I failed somehow to answer one of your questions; it certainly isn't for lack of activity on the keyboard. Trillions of spinning electrons scream out in agony, and still you are unappeased. Very well.

And again, you're at it again: trying to trap me into admitting, yes, yes, yes! I AM Simon Legree! I admit it!

But I won't admit it, because it isn't true, no matter how you try to close the gap and put that funny-looking Klan hat on my head.

Talking to you is sometimes like talking to a professional poisoner who keeps asking you, "how do you feel?" After a while, it begins to dawn on you: it wasn't the coffee, it was the Tootsie Roll.

Your proposition is that agreement in substance with a Southern "fire-eater" of 1860 makes me the moral equivalent of a slaver -- a moral leper, and someone about whose arguments you'll never have to worry again, because I'll be a marked man -- a pariah, the ultimate ad hominem victory over an opponent. After that, I could say, "Two plus two equals four", and you could simply retort, "Eichmann! Beast!" and that would be that -- discussion over, you win. Yeah, well. Forget it, I'm not eating the Tootsie Roll.

To answer your loaded question, what distinguishes my position from that of an advocate of slavery in the 1850's is that, first of all, I'm a 20th-century man not a 19th-century one, so my bias is against slavery as a matter of public policy. That is, I don't think, objectively, it's a good thing overall as policy, and I don't think a case can be made even for "voluntary" slavery (such as debt-slavery, or sale of self to satisfy debts after the manner of the ancient Germans). Certainly the brutality with which agricultural and mining slavery has been typically administered from antiquity to the early-modern period wasn't justified by educated men's lights in the 19th century or now, a point I made to your side above, in quoting the 1822 letter of the President of the state Baptist convention to the Governor of South Carolina, posted in part and linked above, here. . In fact, let me quote the relevant passage again,

The result of this inquiry and reasoning, on the subject of slavery, brings us, sir, if I mistake not, very regularly to the following conclusions:--That the holding of slaves is justifiable by the doctrine and example contained in Holy writ; and is; therefore consistent with Christian uprightness, both in sentiment and conduct. That all things considered, the Citizens of America have in general obtained the African slaves, which they possess, on principles, which can be justified; though much cruelty has indeed been exercised towards them by many, who have been concerned in the slave-trade, and by others who have held them here, as slaves in their service; for which the authors of this cruelty are accountable. That slavery, when tempered with humanity and justice, is a state of tolerable happiness; equal, if not superior, to that which many poor enjoy in countries reputed free. That a master has a scriptural right to govern his slaves so as to keep it in subjection; to demand and receive from them a reasonable service; and to correct them for the neglect of duty, for their vices and transgressions; but that to impose on them unreasonable, rigorous services, or to inflict on them cruel punishment, he has neither a scriptural nor a moral right. At the same time it must be remembered, that, while he is receiving from them their uniform and best services, he is required by the Divine Law, to afford them protection, and such necessaries and conveniencies of life as are proper to their condition as servants; so far as he is enabled by their services to afford them these comforts, on just and rational principles. That it is the positive duty of servants to reverence their master, to be obedient, industrious, faithful to him, and careful of his interests; and without being so, they can neither be the faithful servants of God, nor be held as regular members of the Christian Church.

Freehold Southern farmers of that period would probably agree more with my position than the reverend's in droves, inasmuch as slavery was a social and economic threat to them, as well as a security threat in counties that had very large slave populations concentrated on relatively few estates. It needs to be borne always in mind that slavery had many opponents in the South, whose economic well-being was threatened by it and by the economies of scale of plantation agriculture.

And I'll make the point one last time before desisting for a while: it is your own hostile bracketing technique that has introduced most of the confusion on this and every other thread that has discussed the American Civil War, as the apologists for Lincoln, the North, the Union cause, and for the Northern industrial class reliably resurrect, dust off, and (cynically, IMHO) deploy anew the moralizing attack used 150 years ago by the ideologues of the Abolitionist movement, for the same reasons and for the same purposes.

Translation: you just can't stand it when someone disagrees with you.

Correction: I just can't stand it when someone knowingly peddles buncombe, just to save his hero's derriere from the revisionist magnifying glass.

We have been called "crackers" (Dial M for Moron) and other than pointing out the hypocrisy its no big deal. In fact if "cracker" refers to an unreconstructed white man, it is a compliment.

And here I always thought it referred to an unaltered one.

As opposed to, lightened and high-centered for ballet and opera.

When none passed, many, like Washington, set their slaves free, making provision for their well being.

Conflict. Your interlocutor upthread said that Washington freed no slaves during his lifetime, but that Martha freed some of his slaves after his death.

Who's right?

The Museum of the Confederacy also has on display the suit that Davis was captured in. It was a gentlemen's suit, not a dress, despite how the Harper's Weekly cartoon portrayed Davis' capture.

Wonder if it's too late for Harper's to publish a retraction and apology for having "lied like a rug" for 140 years?

"Your cronies attack Lincoln for showing less support for slavery and segregation in his time than you do looking back on the same period. For them, he is pro-slavery and racist."

In the first place, why don't you take that up with them? In the second place, would you like to try to parse that again?

Fair enough. I didn't express myself clearly enough. So I'll try again: "Your cronies attack Lincoln for showing not being absolutely committed to emancipation and equal rights throughout his career. For them, Lincoln is pro-slavery and racist. But you (singular) show far more support for slavery looking back on the 19th century than Lincoln did in his own day. So what does that make you (singular)? What should they or anyone else, make of your (singular) opinion? You (singular) justify segregationist policies, that are commonly denounced as racist today? Does that make you (singular) a racist?"

I address this to you (singular) because while your cronies are playing up to modern antiracist attitudes, you cling doggedly to the old way of looking at things. I don't know how much you and they differ in your actual views, but nobody gets sticks as close to the old racial fears and the justifications for slavery as you do. How do you (singular) escape the reproaches that your friends direct against 19th century Northerners? I could understand someone dispassionately making the arguments that you (singular) do, without anyone trying to characterize their views in a more general way. But it's clear to both of us that you are anything but dispassionate about this topic.

"We aren't having this debate in 1860 but in 2005."

Oh, please. We're having it about 1860, the people of whom you want to get your jollies off adjudging by the statutes of today, ex post facto, with a jury and courtroom packed with 150 years of your triumphalism and juridical BS.

There you go again, leaping into emotionalism to avoid having a real discussion. In 1945, there would have been little argument or doubt about Dresden or Hiroshima for most Britons or Americans. The bombings were regarded as necessary to win the war and justified by Nazi aggression and atrocities. If we're looking back today on what happened 50 years ago, we have to ask questions that people didn't ask then. We may come up with the same answers as our parents or grandparents did, but we may not. We'll have to consider ideas and options that people weren't aware of or would have dismissed back then. I'm not saying that we're better than people were a half century ago, but we would have a different discussion than they did. So our discussion about the Civil War can't help but we different from a discussion people had in 1860, and we could well come to different conclusions than people did then.

Take a better example: the leaders of the Japanese government in 1941 fought that their backs were to the wall and their survival at stake. They believed they had to attack the US. That decision is questionable on moral and legal, as well as practical reasons. Looking back from the present, we can see that Japan's fate was tied to the West, and that they made precisely the wrong decision. Similarly, most Americans today would agree that the South's best chance was with the Union, and ultimately with emancipation.

In 1861 or 1941 all that talk about survival had a lot to do with staying on the wrong road and following it to the end. We can understand that for Davis or Tojo options were limited. They inherited their circumstances and couldn't entirely determine them. It wasn't up to them to make the best choices. But even with the limited hands that they were dealt, they didn't play well, and did little to see beyond immediate conditions. And they weren't among those who rose above the assumptions of their time and saw more thatn their contemporaries.

"If you look what I wrote I didn't say one word about whether what post-Reconstruction Southerners did was right and wrong. My point was that what Southerners did after Reconstruction did can't be blamed on Northerners."

Really? The North still enjoyed preclusive control of the national government and agenda, and its propagandists enjoyed strong influence over public opinion from the pulpits of incumbency.

Now you're just not being rational. So far as I could see, the original poster explained post-Reconstruction segregation and repression as a reaction to the excesses of Reconstruction. Now you blame Jim Crow on the fact that Northerners didn't try harder and packed up and left. You would be the first to attack the North if they'd put racial equality over national unity, but can't resist the temptation of blaming them for doing the opposite.

That fits in with your victimization theory of history. The South can't be wrong. It's always the victim of someone else's repression and manipulation. And the motives of the other guy are always self-interested and determined to crush the South. For example:

Black suffrage was intended by the Radicals precisely to destroy the South politically -- not to emancipate anyone or uplift anyone, but to cripple the South forever.

Your buddies complain when people portray the Confederacy as self-interestedly committed to preserving slavery, but you (singular, and often plural) can't resist portraying the other side as wholly self-interested. The veteran who lost a limb fighting for freedom, the teacher or doctor who went South after the war to work with the freedmen: were they wholly motivated by a desire to "cripple the South forever"?

The assumption that no Northerner could have benevolent or disinterested motives is abusive, but nowhere near as insulting as the way you turn adult Southern Whites into eternal victims and objects of pity, rather than people who had will and goals and powers of their own.

Nobody up north rescinded their Black Codes.

The Illinois Black Codes were abolished in 1865. Some states repealed their Black Codes earlier in the 1840s and 1850s. That didn't mean that racial equality was established, but your claim is wrong. You wanted so desperately to deny any virtues in your enemies that you overstepped.

You have repeatedly made statements to the effect that Southern whites and South African whites deserve whatever is coming to them.

Where? When? That's just your self-pitying, histrionic way of twisting things. I simply asserted that one couldn't blame segregation or apartheid on outsiders, unless you want to regard ideas of human liberty and equality as always being the work of outsiders (news to Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry). And then you take this as something very different, because you put things into all or nothing, life or death terms. If you have to accuse people of justifying violence against you at every turn, how strong can your argument be?

That's true, but why do you keep on doing it even after I've called your game and quoted political scientists to you on the subject of Abolitionist agitation and what it was intended to accomplish?

You haven't "called anyone's game" -- except maybe your own. Here's what you quoted:

Abolitionists continued to use narratives for another reason: they thought that sympathy would motivate action against slavery where reason had failed. Abolitionists like Douglass and Stowe thought that by cultivating sympathy for slaves, they could reasonably attack the immorality of slaveholders, but critics responded that they just demonized their opponents.

So abolitionists tried to arouse sympathy for slaves and were accused of demonizing their opponents. You try to arouse sympathy for Southerners and demonize your opponents. What's the difference? How is your rhetoric any more rational or enlightened than theirs? For that matter, in what way was the abolitionists' rhetoric worse than anyone else's in 19th century America? Surely, Southern fire-eaters weren't more dispassionate and reasonable than others of that day.

Why is it "cheesy" to refrain from laying moral judgments against people who operated in a different moral environment?

It's cheesy because you demand that others abdicate their own judgment in the matter and submit to your own version of 1860s morality. You're not withholding judgment across the board. You're making very definite condemnations of people you disagree with, and waiving moral criteria in discussing those you disagree with. You're making the things you dislike into mortal sins and passing over greater offenses as simply a part of the way things were back then. You are moralistic as hell when you want to be, and condemn moralism in others.

I'm not going to condemn someone who took arms for what they thought was a just cause, but there are limits to such tolerance. New Orleans has a monument to a victory of the "White Leagues" over the police in 1874. One can understand why White Lousianans would have fought and why they would have commemorated their battle. But one has to decide if one thinks such a monument appropriate today.

I'd have to say no. Whether we should keep it is open to debate, but if it weren't there, we certainly shouldn't build it now. Whether or not we choose to condemn the streetfight and the monument and the White Leagues, we certainly wouldn't want to spend time praising them. We can say, they were what they were, and forget them.

I've heard enough from you today to last a long time, but you might give some thought as to your (singular) own opinion about such things. Judging by what you (singular) have written, you'd approve of keeping it, and maybe even of building more of the same sort. Your pals might disagree with your (singular) rationale, but would probably find a way to justify the monument.

More than anything, though, you need us to shut up and just die quietly....just a little push in....just a little stab, and then we can rest.....

Yeah, well, bite me, Fritz.

So much of what you write is a mess of angry epithets and abuse and Foghorn Leghorn style bluster. You take a position that no serious scholar of American history would take today, and you throw yourself around and go into contortions and conniptions, and think that you are proving your point, but it's not convincing.

Nobody who's thought seriously about the war has taken your point of view for something like a half a century. And they aren't going to start now. People have learned too much and had to take too much into account to go back to the bad industrial North vs. virtuous agrarian South point of view that was common in the early Twentieth century.

You have a mythic view of history, repeat it at every opportunity, and demand that others accept your myth. But it isn't going to happen. If people don't have to bother with you, it's not because they've slapped some label on you fairly or unfairly. It's because you demonstrate time and time again that you're writing out of the emotions, and not making much of a case for what you believe.

"That a master has a scriptural right to govern his slaves so as to keep it in subjection"

In retrospect, since the neo-confederates love to justify slavery & segregation by way of distorting Biblical quotations, thus in April of 1865, immediately following the surrender of the South, the worst of the pro-slavers should have tasted the very slavery they dished out for at least one year, and then maybe Reconstruction could have been more meaningful.

It is almost inconceivable that CSA - without a Pacific coast - would have entered into war with Japan.

I don't know, the CSA would have certainly have wanted an outlet on the Gulf of California, if not Baja itself. There might have been some wheeling and dealing with the Mexicans to acquire some beachfront property around the Magdalena River of Sonora and the mouth of the Colorado.

The cause of the U.S. entry into World War 2 was the presence of the strong Anglophile FDR in the White House. He developed a "forward strategy" in both Hawaii and the Philippines to try to menace the Japanese and bait them into attacking him. It worked. But it'd be iffier projecting a Pacific, and therefore European war for the U.S. without the CSA. Smaller fleet, smaller bait, and perhaps no Pearl Harbor.

Wonder if it's too late for Harper's to publish a retraction and apology for having "lied like a rug" for 140 years?

Harper's illustrations of ships, battlefields, soldiers, etc. are interesting and informative, but some of their cartoons, like the one about Davis, were quite one-sided. My impression from the limited selections I've seen was that their coverage of the war was not very balanced. On the other hand, what else would you expect given Lincoln's treatment of the press?

Harper's belonged to the MSM of their time. In one issue, they portrayed a Confederate soldier dangling a baby upside down by his foot, another shooting at a child, another dragging a woman away, other Confederates getting drunk, etc. I never spotted anything in Harpers about the looting and burning of Southern homes by Northern troops, but my sample was small.

So I'll try again: "Your cronies attack Lincoln for showing not being absolutely committed to emancipation and equal rights throughout his career. For them, Lincoln is pro-slavery and racist.

They are busy showing the incoherence of the Northern attack on the South. The Abolitionists waged a zealous polemical attack based 90% on emotive propaganda (whose defects I've described above and won't go into again now), but Lincoln took a longer and more devious road. He knew more than the Abolitionists because he was a lawyer with courtroom and political experience. Compared to him, the Beechers and the rest were amateurs.

My colleagues have decided to show Lincoln a hypocrite -- and the North as a whole -- since in the past that has been one fruitful way to stop a crusade. That's what the Catholic Church in Illinois and Indiana did to gut the Klan: they sprung a sex scandal on some leading Klansmen, involving an underage girl. It was perfect for deflating the crusading posture of the Klan as the "protectors of (white) womanhood", knights on white horses, etc.

While not denying the useful dissonance their researches have turned up, with the exception of the Joshua Speed story and similar accusations in which I have no interest except in deflating the canard of the Log Cabin Republicans that "our greatest President was one of us", a canard that goes back mostly to Carl Sandburg, I've thought that trying to follow the actual evolution of his strategy, the one that took him to Appomattox, is a lot more interesting for trying to understand what Lincoln actually did. Historicity beats deconstructing abolitionist rhetoric, for me.

Does that answer your question?

But you (singular) show far more support for slavery looking back on the 19th century than Lincoln did in his own day. So what does that make you (singular)? What should they or anyone else, make of your (singular) opinion?

There you go again -- this is an attack. Don't tell me it's not. And I've told you, ad hominem is not a valid form of argument. But you're going to do that anyway, because you're a liberal committed to defending Lincoln's reputation, and you're going to try to get my privileges suspended as a bloodless votary offering to your brazen godling -- and your own ego, I don't doubt. After all, if you've got a weak argument, silencing the other guy's will do, right? I can't believe you're so incredibly small. Well, forget it, because this bus ain't going where you think it is.

Lincoln dissembled, IMHO, aspects of his opposition to slavery. Someone pointed out once that he did not mention the slavery issue when he was in the House of Representatives, and it was not to be found in his repertory of issues in the 1840's, notwithstanding that the debate was well under way. He took up the issue in 1854 when he began his candidacy for the Senate seat eventually occupied by Lyman Trumbull in 1855, and after that he never delivered himself of any substantive statement on politics without referring to the slavery issue -- I am relying on someone else's scholarship here, but I am comfortable with the reliance. Now, the people who bring this point up seem to be trying to frame an argument of the form, "Lincoln was an opportunist", but I don't think so. I think he analyzed the problems his freeholder constituents (granting him all of Illinois as "constituents" after he reentered politics) and settled on the possible preoccupation of good Western lands by latifundia run by slave labor as the major threat to his constituents' interests going forward. He took the issue up and never put it down.

I don't think Lincoln was insincere about his dedication to the slavery issue. I think he was misdirective, indirect, and frankly misleading about his real platform on slavery. I think he promised to lead the Republicans all the way to abolition, by steps, during the course of which the GOP platform would have to be more "moderate" -- i.e., no slavery in the territories. But I think his real program was the eclipse of the South and the extinction of slavery by force if necessary, a program that he kept close to the vest for three or four years, until he was ready to begin progressively emancipating the slaves during the war. But I don't think he ever, after 1855, had any other end in view than the suppression of slavery and, if that's what it took, the total destruction of the South.

My position that I argue is reactive to that perception of Lincoln's policy -- his true, tacit policy. I argue that Lincoln stalked, assaulted, and destroyed the South pro bono his two great constituencies, the freesoil Western farmers and the Eastern Industrialists.

As for slavery itself, I don't favor it any more than I favor high income taxes, but I argue that what Lincoln did needs to be undone, because he damaged the Constitution in trying to abridge the Southern planters' rights and committed lese majeste' on the People themselves. Lincoln laid a marker, that the People of a State can be wrong because he said so, and he used the Government to overthrow the People. This is the same charge H.L. Mencken made with respect to the Gettysburg Address, which it no doubt tired Mencken to hear praised by people who didn't understand what it meant.

None of that "with charity for all, and malice toward none" stuff for you, eh?

I think you'd have been quite happy looting the flatware out of someone's house, to keep it from being used to support the Confederacy -- right? I can see you now, marching happily along with your little bag of salt, sprinkling it around to kill the soil, because it belonged to some damn Southerner. Ah, happy days -- just one big holiday outing, with "Cump" Sherman!

Off to bed now, will deal with the rest of your post later. But I wanted to notice what you no doubt intended as your coup de grace on my 9,000 posts on FR,

If people don't have to bother with you, it's not because they've slapped some label on you fairly or unfairly. It's because you demonstrate time and time again that you're writing out of the emotions, and not making much of a case for what you believe.

Which, given that my interlocutors and I have dragged in a ton of material in support of argument, given that we've posted diligently in reply to your Claremont-inspired Rushmore reveries on just about every occasion and topic, I think I'm entitled to ask, and to require you to tell me, what it would take to impress you. Why do I get the impression that it would have to be something fairly far north of a Pulitzer prize?

That, or just changing my mind to fall into lockstep with Berkeley's tenured Marxist drones.

"Emotions" -- that was a key sneer-word Theodore White used, in his Making of the President series, to belittle conservative issues back in the 1960's. That, and "primitives", although he stayed away from "Neanderthals" as that would have shown his spleen and his bias too clearly. Now White is safely dead and in hell, and the conservatives he once patronized, ridiculed, and urinated on have come back to form the backbone of American politics.

Interesting choice of attack, echoing White.

Later.

should have tasted the very slavery they dished out for at least one year, and then maybe Reconstruction could have been more meaningful.

Reconstruction had nothing to do with slavery. Good to see you're still trying, though.

Now, the people who bring this point up seem to be trying to frame an argument of the form, "Lincoln was an opportunist", but I don't think so. I think he analyzed the problems his freeholder constituents (granting him all of Illinois as "constituents" after he reentered politics) and settled on the possible preoccupation of good Western lands by latifundia run by slave labor as the major threat to his constituents' interests going forward. He took the issue up and never put it down.

The question remains, did he take it up out of some personal conviction, or as you later said, on behalf of his primary constituencies? The latter seems the very definition of opportunist, whereas the arguments here (by the pro-Lincoln crew) are always in favor of the former.

When none passed, many, like Washington, set their slaves free, making provision for their well being. Conflict. Your interlocutor upthread said that Washington freed no slaves during his lifetime, but that Martha freed some of his slaves after his death. Who's right?

You guys must have a reading problem.

Maybe that explains what is wrong with you guys.

Now, it doesn't say when Washington freed those slaves does it?

It only says that Washington did free and he did, making provision for that in his will, which Martha honored.

So, what do you think of the Declaration's statement that all men are created equal as it relates to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Or,do you take the Confederate view that there were certain men born to be ruled as slaves?

To be redundant, any slave owner cracking the whip while whining that slavery was immoral, is just the same as a Nazi doctor stabbing the skull of an 8 month old baby (its legal long as the foot is still in the canal), and preaching he is really pro life.

So why are you defending the Confederacy?

Oh, because they said that slavery was moral while cracking the whip.

Well, aren't you the American patriot.

The Nazí's like the Confederates, felt what they were doing was moral and they had a right to do so, being from a superior race.

The Nazí's like the Confederates, felt what they were doing was moral and they had a right to do so, being from a superior race.

Paging ~~fortheDeclaration~~ Dr. Goebbels:

I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
A Lincoln!