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Endless complaints. |
Posted on 12/31/2004 2:21:30 PM PST by Caipirabob
What's wrong about this photo? Or if you're a true-born Southerner, what's right?
While scanning through some of the up and coming movies in 2005, I ran across this intriguing title; "CSA: Confederate States of America (2005)". It's an "alternate universe" take on what would the country be like had the South won the civil war.
Stars with bars:
Suffice to say anything from Hollywood on this topic is sure to to bring about all sorts of controversial ideas and discussions. I was surprised that they are approaching such subject matter, and I'm more than a little interested.
Some things are better left dead in the past:
For myself, I was more than pleased with the homage paid to General "Stonewall" Jackson in Turner's "Gods and Generals". Like him, I should have like to believe that the South would have been compelled to end slavery out of Christian dignity rather than continue to enslave their brothers of the freedom that belong equally to all men. Obviously it didn't happen that way.
Would I fight for a South that believed in Slavery today? I have to ask first, would I know any better back then? I don't know. I honestly don't know. My pride for my South and my heritage would have most likely doomed me as it did so many others. I won't skirt the issue, in all likelyhood, slavery may have been an afterthought. Had they been the staple of what I considered property, I possibly would have already been past the point of moral struggle on the point and preparing to kill Northern invaders.
Compelling story or KKK wet dream?:
So what do I feel about this? The photo above nearly brings me to tears, as I highly respect Abraham Lincoln. I don't care if they kick me out of the South. Imagine if GW was in prayer over what to do about a seperatist leftist California. That's how I imagine Lincoln. A great man. I wonder sometimes what my family would have been like today. How many more of us would there be? Would we have held onto the property and prosperity that sustained them before the war? Would I have double the amount of family in the area? How many would I have had to cook for last week for Christmas? Would I have needed to make more "Pate De Fois Gras"?
Well, dunno about that either. Depending on what the previous for this movie are like, I may or may not see it. If they portray it as the United Confederacy of the KKK I won't be attending.
This generation of our clan speaks some 5 languages in addition to English, those being of recent immigrants to this nation. All of them are good Americans. I believe the south would have succombed to the same forces that affected the North. Immigration, war, economics and other huma forces that have changed the map of the world since history began.
Whatever. At least in this alternate universe, it's safe for me to believe that we would have grown to be the benevolent and humane South that I know it is in my heart. I can believe that slavery would have died shortly before or after that lost victory. I can believe that Southern gentlemen would have served the world as the model for behavior. In my alternate universe, it's ok that Spock has a beard. It's my alternate universe after all, it can be what I want.
At any rate, I lived up North for many years. Wonderful people and difficult people. I will always sing their praises as a land full of beautiful Italian girls, maple syrup and Birch beer. My uncle ribbed us once before we left on how we were going up North to live "with all the Yankees". Afterwards I always refered to him as royalty. He is, really. He's "King of the Rednecks". I suppose I'm his court jester.
So what do you think of this movie?
So I am still waiting for the Neo-Confederates opinion on what the Declaration says regarding the equality before God of all men?
Which side are you on, the side of the Decaration or the side of the Confederate Constitution?
[Your reply] 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.
I don't know what your kvetch is here. Politicians generally do that. I just quoted you Toombs and Stephens going back and forth about the Tariff, disagreeing between themselves over whether the 1857 Tariff scheme was fair or not, Toombs complaining about the various bounties and protectionist laws, and Stephens replying with examples of other preferences that benefitted the South. Didn't you see that?
And nobody I know objects to portrayal of the leading lights of the Confederacy as being in favor of continuing slavery -- the material is there in black and white, it's incontrovertible. What we object to is the mantra, "it was all about slavery!!," which manifestly it was not, as I showed by posting those speeches and then linking to them again. You'll notice, too, that I refrained from doing what your towel-buddy Non-Sequitur did with me, which was snarkily to insist that I hadn't read a speech, when I had -- and I knew there was more in the speech than either he or ftD had owned up to in discussion, about further causes of secession beyond slavery.
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"?
Oh, stow it, Harriet. The people who came south after the war were either looking for vulture-capital opportunities, or they were carpetbaggers sent by the federal Government, or by the vindictively partisan Union League clubs in the big Northern Cities. But don't take my word for it -- God knows I wouldn't want you to take the word of an unlettered bumpkin who can't frame an argument and never read a book!!! God, you are a piece of work.....try this:
In the autumn of 1866, and through the winter and summer of 1867 strange men from the North were flocking into the black belt of the South, and mingling familiarly with the negroes, day and night. These were the emissaries of the Union League Clubs of Philadelphia and New York that have been unfairly denied their historic status in the consolidation of the negro vote. Organized in the dark days of the war to revive the failing spirit of the people, they had become bitterly partisan clubs with the conclusion of the struggle; and, the Union saved, they had turned with zest to the congenial task of working out the salvation of their party. This, they thought, depended on the domination of the South through the negro vote. Sagacious politicians, and men of material means, obsessed with ideas as extreme as those of Stevens and Sumner, they dispatched agents to turn the negroes against the Southern whites and organize them in secret clubs. -- Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era, p. 198.
Bowers is obviously biased and not wholly reliable, any more than John Nicolay, whom I also quoted on more than one occasion; and if Bowers overlooks the attempts of planters and the calls of newspaper editorialists in the South to try to immobilize the labor force, Harper's Weekly and other Union-biased sources certainly didn't.
Moreover, even the most tapioca-bland, difference-splitting, manual histories of the United States record the factuality of my statement, such as the material in this short history prepared for the USIA/USIS by epitomization from a number of sources by various authors both conservative and liberal, including Charles Beard, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, Curtis P. Nettels, and Arthur M. Schlesinger:
An Outline of American History (1954) Indeed, before the war was actually over, Lincoln had set up governments in Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Some members of Congress, however, disapproved of this action and wished to impose severe punishment on all the Confederate states. One of these Congressmen, Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives, believed, in fact, that southern planters should be kept under military rule for a period of probation. Others were determined to give the Negro the right to vote immediately. Actually, the chief concern of Congress at this time - rather than the readmission to the Union of the southern states - was the condition of the emancipated Negro, and in March 1865, it established the Freedman's Bureau, which was to assume a position of guardianship over the Negro and direct his first efforts at self-support. In 'addition, Congress also formalized the fact of Negro freedom by proposing the thirteenth constitutional amendment which abolished slavery and was ratified in December 1865. ....
....Throughout the summer of 1865, without consulting Congress, for that body was not in session, Johnson proceeded to carry out, except for minor differences, Lincoln's plan of reconstruction. By presidential proclamation, he appointed a governor for each of the various southern states and freely restored political rights to large numbers of Confederates through the use of his pardoning power. Conventions were held in the southern states which repealed the ordinances of secession, repudiated the war debt, and drafted new constitutions. In time, the people of each state elected a governor and a state legislature, and when the legislature of a state approved the Thirteenth Amendment, Johnson recognized the re-establishment of civil government and considered the state back in the Union.....Under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, those who sought to punish the south refused to seat the [newly elected Congressional] southern delegates, and in the next few months they proceeded to work out a plan of Congressional reconstruction quite different from that which Lincoln had started and Johnson completed.
A mixture of motives caused Congress to reject the Johnson plan. ....In 1865, there was a feeling that the time had come for Congress to curb the executive's exercise of powers which, under the necessities of war, it had tolerated. Furthermore, there was some feeling in the north that the south should be punished with severity. This feeling was encouraged by the radicals in Congress......
In addition, it was claimed that the Negro needed protection. As time passed, the idea gained currency that the Negro be given the right to vote and hold office and that he be given complete social and political equality with white citizens. Others, including Lincoln, favored a more gradual enfranchisement with full citizenship rights being first extended to educated Negroes and those who had served in the Union army. But the southern legislatures, created under the Johnson plan, enacted a variety of laws designed to regulate the privileges and rights of the freedmen. To the southerner, confronted with the problem of 3,500,000 Negroes but recently emancipated from slavery, it seemed necessary that the states regulate their activities closely, and they enacted "black codes" of a restrictive nature. To many in the north, this seemed as if the gains of the war were being undone, and northern radicals seized upon the most obnoxious features of these codes to prove that the south was bent on re-establishing slavery.
Gradually, many in the north came to feel that the President had been too lenient, and there developed a wide popular sympathy for the radicals in Congress. That body proceeded to enact over Johnson's veto a Civil Rights Bill in April 1866, and a new Freedmen's Bureau Bill in July 1866, both of which virtually prevented southern legislation from authorizing discrimination. Finally Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment which stated that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." The immediate intention of its framers, of course, was to insure the conferring of citizenship upon the Negroes.
All of the southern state legislatures, with the exception of Tennessee, refused to ratify the amendment. .... The radicals in Congress proceeded to force their plan upon the south and in March of 1867 passed a Reconstruction Act, ignoring the civil governments which had been established in the south. The act divided the south into five districts and placed them under military rule. It provided an escape from permanent military government by declaring that if the people of Confederate states would take an oath of allegiance, ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and adopt Negro suffrage, they might establish civil governments and be restored to the Union. In July 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified and the next year, to fasten Negro suffrage upon the south beyond the power of repeal by a future Congress, the Fifteenth Amendment was passed by Congress and ratified in 1870 by state legislatures. It provided that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." .....
.... Under the Reconstruction Act, Congress, by the summer of 1868, readmitted to the Union over the President's opposition the states of Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. How representative the new governments of these seven reconstructed states were can be judged from the fact that the majority of the governors, Representatives, and Senators elected were northern men who had come south after the war to make their political fortunes. The Negroes gained complete control of the Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi legislatures. In several other states, though they were a minority in the legislatures, they were a strong voting power. The sprinkling of white southern legislators was unable to hold in check the combination of northerners and newly enfranchised Negroes who, although they undertook valuable work in building roads and bridges and initiating good laws concerning education and charities, were, on the whole, incompetent and wasteful of funds.
In despair, the southern whites who believed their old civilization threatened and could find no legal remedy to stop the new regimes, resorted to extralegal means. The use of violence became more frequent as time passed, and the multiplying excesses and disorders led, in 1870, to the passage of an Enforcement Act [a.k.a. the Force Acts, iirc --LG] which drastically punished those who attempted in any way to deprive the Negro of his civil rights.
The increasing severity of such laws and the steady encroachment of Congress upon the police powers of the individual states impeded the process of spiritual reconciliation with the north so necessary for the restoration of a common love of country. It also arrayed the mass of whites in the south against the Republican Party as the party of the Negro and only increased the solidarity of the Democratic Party in that area. As time passed, it was obvious that the problem of the south was not being solved by harsh laws and continued rancor against former Confederates, And in May 1872, Congress passed a general Amnesty Act restoring full political privileges to all but about five hundred Confederates who had been excluded from the right to hold office and from the franchise, Little by little, state after state elected members of the Democratic Party to office. By 1876, the Republicans remained in power in only three southern states. The election that year, one of the closest in American history and one of the most disorderly, made it plain that the south would know no peace until the troops were withdrawn. The next year, therefore, President Rutherford B. Hayes removed them, admitting the failure of the "radical" reconstruction policy, which had been adopted chiefly because the idealistic wing of the party wished to protect the Negro and because the materialistic wing hoped to hold the south for votes, offices, and power. [Emphasis added; lacunae for brevity only. -- LG]
This recitation from a manual history is completely dispositive of your encaptioned complaint about the statement I made. The final outcome was not, manifestly, what the Radicals in Congress had intended, but the highlighted sections above sufficiently well show their will made manifest, and the political results of that will in the South. The Radical Republicans intended to dominate the South, and for a time they succeeded.
Declarations are political documents. Constitutions are legal ones -- and they define the social compact.
Some states rescinded theirs. Indiana never did; a state court ruled the law unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution in 1866. Other restrictive legislation remained on the books and was reinforced by customary and social segregation, which was erroneously found constitutional in 1896 in Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Well Personally, I believe we are all decendents of Adam, and all brothers and sisters regardless of race, and equals - their is no race superior or inferior.
Before proceeding with the Declaration the Confederate Constitution is the federal Constitution with some modifications which addressed the perceived deficiencies with the former Constitution, viz,
it specifically invoked the favor and guidance of God
term-limited the President
granted the President a line item veto power
prohibited protectionist tariffs and duties
prohibited bounties (subsidies)
prohibited federal intervention over state slavery
banned the African slave trade
granted Congress the power to prevent introduction of slaves from non-CSA states or territories
required appropriations to pass by 2/3rds vote
limited bills to a single subject
prohibited payments to contractors over-budget
allowed cabinet members to sit in congressional sessions
and noted that 'each State act[ed] in its sovereign and independent character'.
Regarding the Declaration, the statement, '[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights', refers to natural equality - the same that Lincoln spoke of decades later. The right to govern themselves, that one does not need 'noble' blood to lead. The actions of the founders were decidedly against political and racial equality, and the same men that created the Constitution, voted in 1790 to limit naturalization to whites, and succeeding generations - north and south - also limited the rights of blacks. Women were also limited in some rights, most notably suffrage, but overall not as extensively limited as blacks. IIRC, it wasn't until 1933 that spousal testimonial disqualification (wife could not testify against husband) was abandoned. Legally, women had been second-class citizens well before our founding.
Lincoln himself, in the speech mentioned above, discussed the natural equality of the races, but spoke against 'social and political equality', and believed that the best recourse was to have blacks repatriated/deported. His proposed reward to blacks who served in Union forces was an all expense paid-trip to Panama to dig a canal.
I would tend to give him credit for being aboveboard about his political interest; he was, after all, a professional lawyer and politician (not, however, a "railsplitter").
I'm not saying he was never opportunistic, but I think his embrace of the slavery issue -- or more to the point, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its corollary theory of popular sovereignty (a.k.a. "squatter sovereignty"), which were topical at the moment he came off hiatus in his political career and began running for the Senate, was on the square.
He saw an issue and a need, and he offered his services as a legally-trained politician.
Later on was another story, of course.
either would DO/SAY ANYTHING to get ahead. ANYTHING!
BOTH were guided by SELF-interest. nothing more/nothing less.
free dixie,sw
Since you started by discussing the confederate constitution, which also specifically protected slave imports, then perhaps it's only fair to compare Lincoln with where the southern leadership stood on positions like this? Davis certainly didn't believe in the equality of races, didn;t believe that blacks had any social or political rights that had to be respected. He and his vice-president didn't even believe blacks were suited for anything other than slavery. He had 114 slaves prior to the war and didn't believe that they were any use to him at all. And when asked once what he thought the south should do with blacks in the unlikely event that slavery ended, he proposed expelling them to Central and South America.
The houses were nearly all empty of furniture, with the exception of some old chairs, tables, and the like. In one house was a good piano uninjured. Whatever remained in the buildings was soon in the possession of the soldiers, and as there was nothing of value, it was some little time before they were interfered with. Some ludicrous scenes were the consequences, the men arraying themselves in old hats, bonnets, etc., and parading the streets. This interfered with discipline however, and an order was given that any one found with an article that was taken from a house should be at once arrested. General Patrick, the Provost Marshal, is deserving of great praise for his exertions in this respect. The men for a time took all they could lay their hands on, and tubs, rakes, baskets and pots of all descriptions were carted away, to be thrown in the street at the next crossing. Tobacco appeared to be very plenty, and all the soldiers had their pockets and haversacks filled with it. It was quite a luxury to them, as they had been paying the robbing sutlers from two to three dollars a pound for wretched stuff.
Aw, those fun loving rascals depicted by Harper's!
Others had a different view of it. Nothing of value? The Fredericksburg residents left much behind. From Source:
Over the next two and a half hours, 147 Federal guns let loose 9,000 shells on the city, an average of 60 shells a minute, one every second. Many townsfolk, refusing to believe the Federals would be so foolish as to invade the city and leave the Rappahannock immediately at their back, were caught by surprise. They died in their beds and cellars, sometimes suffocated by fire, or were cut down by shell fragments as they raced frantically through the streets. A thickening stream of refugees fled behind Rebel lines, most with but a few possessions in hand.
That night "the whole heavens [were] lit up by the burning city," an Ohio infantryman, Irishman Thomas Francis Galwey, wrote in his diary. Union troops, let loose by feckless or criminal officers, began looting and burning houses and businesses. "Nearly all the men were drunk," Galwey wrote. The Bank of Virginia was blown up. Household goods, from sewing machines to pianos, were piled up in the streets to be carted away as booty. The whole ghastly scene was illuminated by flames roaring through roofs and windows.
Now from the National Park Service [Source]:
In addition to the damage wreaked by combat action, the town suffered from a more deliberate destruction. Looting had begun the night before as infuriated soldiers who had fought through these streets released their anger. 'They were joined the next day by increasing numbers of troops who regarded the town as a prize of war. One soldier recalled: "Furniture of all sorts is strewn along the streets.... Every namable household utensil or article of furniture, stoves, crockery and glass-ware, pots, kettles and tins, are scattered, and smashed and thrown everywhere, indoors and out, as if there had fallen a shower of them in the midst of a mighty whirlwind."
Finally, from the book Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! by George C. Rable:
The most stringent measures failed to stop the plundering. Courts-martial handed out stiff sentences but to little avail. Imposing fines, forcing offenders to wear barrels shirts inscribed with the word "thief," and even stringing up men to cross bars did little to reduce foraging. Moreover, such punishments were extremely unpopular in the ranks, and woe betide the officer who crossed the line of what enlisted men considered to be acceptable treatment. Enraged soldiers assaulted one martinet with burning fence rails and bayoneted another to death in his tent.[37] With little regard for the conservatism of the upper command, McClellan's troops learned to carry on a far more destructive war than had been conceivable only a few months earlier.
At last -- Jeff Davis and Abe Lincoln agree on something. "Great minds think alike?"
Similar to other cultic neo-Confederate myths:
"Slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War." "
"Slaves were really better off on a Southern plantations, and should have stayed there."
"The only good blacks were those forced to fight for for southern slave masters. "
"President Lincoln started the Civil War because he was an arch racist, fruitcake and a tyrant, coupled with having nothing better to do with his time in the White House."
"There is no such thing as the secessionist neo-confederate movement, it's an invention of 'Northerners' who hate grits."
"The term 'all men are created equal' only applies to hardcore neo-confederates."
"The Emancipation Proclamation was totally unnecessary since Southern slaves would have been freed in 50, 100, 150 years, anyway."
Except that Lincoln's plans depended on voluntary emigration while Davis' plan was forced expulsion.
At a practical level how do you deport 4 million people without their complete support? Face it, even if Lincoln and Davis both were hell bound to kick every black face off the continent neither one could possibly have accomplished it. The logistics involved with such a move would be staggering.
Your inference is your own problem. I've laid out that Southerners had a number of rights that were violently abridged, and in about 300,000 cases, terminated, by Abraham Lincoln's political initiative to take the North-South dispute extraconstitutional and solve it by a trial of arms. That he arranged very carefully to make the South the apparent aggressor is recorded by his personal secretary, John Nicolay, and his very busy hidden hand has been exposed by nolu chan, rustbucket, and other posters to this thread who have brought and posted original documents and eyewitness accounts of the actions that led up to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which Nicolay properly recognizes as the fruition of a subtle policy on Lincoln's part.
We have to recognize Lincoln's responsibility for starting the Civil War, and I personally have been interested in a deeper inquiry, about whether Lincoln came to office with a war policy, or simply defaulted to one when other initiatives failed. That is still an open question -- but it is now a question, and that is a beginning.
To recognize the rights and political aspirations of others is not to advocate them. You have drawn a number of incorrect inferences about my position, on the way to attempting to stifle my voice by fabricating accusations calculated to terminate my posting privileges. You can desist from those charges now.
The important point here, which I addressed in my #2633, is that Lincoln disturbed the relationship of the People to their federal government, which is a current problem of governance that needs to be remedied. But before anything can be done about the remedy, the problem and its origins have to be understood correctly, and the mythography of Lincoln and the Civil War stand in the way of this understanding.
It has to be understood, if we are to address the problems Lincoln and the Civil War created, what exactly it was that the Republicans did wrong in abolishing slavery, what damage they did, and where the equities lay before Lincoln drew the sword to cut the Gordian knot of internal contradictions in American political theory and practice.
To map out the equities requires that we honestly take into account the rights of the Southerners, including their right to security, and that we treat them and their rights seriously. That requires us to lay aside the Abolitionist propaganda that has occupied center stage first in Unionist accounts of the war, and now in the Marxist ones that are being deployed for current political purposes, to attack the modern Republican Party and its conservative backbone.
Saying that Southerners of 1860 had property rights in slaves and a theory with which they justified those rights, is not to say that it is desirable that people be invested with property rights in, and high dominion over, other people today.
You disserve the cause of clear thinking when you attempt to attack me with ad hominem arguments that I am an advocate of slavery. I've been clear on the record on this, that I am not, and that I don't subscribe to 19th-century racial theories. Now, on further reflection and review, don't you agree?
I don't know. The buffalo didn't want to go, either, but Sherman and Sheridan somehow managed that.
It would certainly have been a giant "Trail of Tears" -- but there was also the precedent.
The buffalo weren't expelled, they were exterminated. Even Jefferson Davis wouldn't have gone for that.
It would certainly have been a giant "Trail of Tears" -- but there was also the precedent.
There were about 17,000 Cherokee expelled, there were almost 4 million black men and women. A trail of tears multiplied by over 230.
These were foreign wars against foreign societies.
By introducing this analogy, are you conceding the point that the Southern States had left the Union, and had successfully formed an independent nation-state? And that Mr. Lincoln's War was indeed a war of conquest against the new nation?
It was the theory of the Unionist government, that the States they were waging war on had not left the Union, but were still States of the Union. Lincoln justified his warmaking by speaking of "insurrection" and "rebellion" -- but there was no insurrection, and the populace of the Southern States did not rebel against their State governments, which continued to function intact and unimpeded -- except by the United States Government.
With an army of a million men, or even a third of that kept under arms, it might have been doable, if the hypertrophied logistical train created for the Union armies had been redeployed. It might have been doable.
There's also the question of scaled-down emigration, in view of the severe labor shortage in the South caused by battle deaths: including ex-slaves who died in the Union service, up to 300,000 dead out of the prewar Southern male labor stock of around 4,000,000 all told (not counting the women, since even in the shortage they weren't pulled out of the home).
If you say so.
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