Confederate States Of America (2005)

Yahoo Movies ^ | 12/31/04 | Me

[rustbucket]

I suggest to bone up on King Philip's War. New England's King Philip's War

The outcome of King Philip’s War was devastating to the traditional way of life for Native People in New England. Hundreds of Natives who fought with Philip were sold into slavery abroad. Others, especially women and children, were forced to become servants locally.

Since the Massachusetts colonists eliminated most of the Indians in New England in King Philip's War or put them into slavery, perhaps the Indian on the flag of Massachusetts state flag should have a ball and chain around his leg.

[M. Espinola]

The period I was speaking of took place prior to the King Philip’s War, from the late 1620's through the 1630's.

[capitan_refugio]

"You're just a lying, disinformationist: a race-baiting poverty-pimp, a Jackson or a Sharpton, intent on inflaming a situation for your benefit, hoping to entice me and others to rise and take the bait, to ACCURATELY quote Lincoln - not once - but dozens of times - wherein he calls blacks by a very derogatory term beginning with an 'N' (even calling Tyler such)."

I wasn't talking about Lincoln. I was talking about the self-stated motivation for southern secession. Seven states had purported to secede before Lincoln ever took office. The question is, why? The answers are given by their own Commissioners to the other states. It's really very simple.

"You have to, because slavery was already legal, and protected by the US Constitution - so there was no motivation for the South to secede on that account."

Slavery was permissible under the Constitution, but was still not permanent - even after the infamous Dred Scott decision. If slavery was not the issue, then those southern secession commissioners must have been pretty misinformed - because that is what they preached to their kindred white supremacist almost exclusively - fear of the Republicans and Lincoln dismantling slavery and recognizing the fundamental truth of the Declaration: All men are created equal.

"And this by Lincoln on SLAVERY: ..."

If the slavery issue was not "on the table," then why did the Congress propose the Corwin Amendment, in an attempt to pacify the southern hot heads?

"Lincoln supported PERMANENT, IRREVOCABLE slavery to exist FOREVER as long as he had the MONEY."

Pure revisionism. Say it enough times, and you might even begin to believe it. The proposed Corwin Amendment had ZERO chance of being approved by 3/4ths of the states. Lincoln knew that, but politically he was taking the least contentious course to placate the radical southerners leading the secession charge, until cooler heads prevailed down south. Unfortunately, that never happened.

[rustbucket]

The period I was speaking of took place prior to the King Philip’s War, from the late 1620's through the 1630's.

Think you found a period when the Massachusetts colonists were pure and virtuous? Well, let's look at that period, shall we?

On 26 May 1637, captains John Underhill and John Mason led another retaliatory expedition through Narragansett territory and struck the Pequot settlement in Mystic. Mason's order to his soldiers and Narragansett allies was "Let us burn them." The settlement, comprised mostly of women and children, was desimated. An estimated thirty or forty Pequots escaped. The ones who were captured were sold into slavery in Boston, meeting their fates in the plantations of the Bermuda. In the following weeks, the warriors were hunted down and killed.

I've read elsewhere that some 600 were killed in this raid. The affair was called the Pequot War. It and King Philip's War are not taught very much these days. I wonder why. Inconsistency with American ideals, I guess.

[capitan_refugio]

Roger B. Taney was an angry southerner intent on settling the slavery issue in favor of the southern interests. Consequently, his Dred Scott decision has been almost universally (outside of the League of the South types) recognized as one of the worst decisions ever to come from the court, and a massive "self-inflicted wound."

In fact, Lincoln and the Republicans did obey the DSD, while trying to undo it politically. Of course, that is the essence of American political theory. We are not a nation ruled by an elite tribunal.

[stainlessbanner]

No, Lincoln wanted slavery to end not grow.

More accurately, he wanted to "save the union", regardless of slavery.

[rustbucket]

Here is some more on the Pequot War. Thanks for reminding me of it. I just discovered that there was a Mohican leader named Uncas in the war. Must have been where Cooper got the name. [Link]

Based on archaeological and linguistic evidence, the Pequot and Mohegan Tribes, indian peoples of the Algonquian language group, probably have lived in what is now southeastern Connecticut for several hundred years. Mohegan oral tradition holds that the Mohegan-Pequots, originally the same tribe, migrated into the region some time before contact with Europeans. Anthropological evidence shows that the two groups were very closely related. Just before the outbreak of war with the English, the Mohegans under a sachem named Uncas split from the Pequots and aligned themselves with the English.

At the time of the Pequot War, Pequot strength was concentrated along the Pequot (now Thames) and Mystic Rivers in what is now southeastern Connecticut. Mystic, or Missituk, was the site of the major battle of the War. Under the leadership of Captain John Mason from Connecticut and Captain John Underhill from Massachusetts Bay Colony, English Puritan troops, with the help of Mohegan and Narragansett allies, burned the village and killed the estimated 400-700 Pequots inside.

The battle turned the tide against the Pequots and broke the tribe's resistance. Many Pequots in other villages escaped and hid among other tribes, but most of them were eventually killed or captured and given as slaves to tribes friendly to the English. The English, supported by Uncas' Mohegans, pursued the remaining Pequot resistors until all were either killed or captured and enslaved. After the War, the colonists enslaved survivors and outlawed the name "Pequot."

[x]

I scarcely know what to do with these diatribes coming a week or more after the original discussion. The 19th century style of rhetoric was far from what one would expect from Enlightenment rationalism. Mid-19th century abolitionism differed from late 18th century abolitionism in the same way that mid-19th century politics and culture differed from late 18th century politics and culture.

Was the change deplorable? It was. Did it make that much of a difference? That's doubtful. Some states would resist abolition as long as they could. Some reformers would get mad about that eventually. The slaveowners would respond in kind, hardening in attitudes in order to resist what they were already committed to resist.

It's too much to want everyone everywhere to simply accept slavery forever -- even if the vast majority of people did. Someone would object, and that would become the threat against which slave state communities would circle the wagons.

And the more time the vast majority gave the slaveowners -- the less most people cared about the slaves -- the more like the people who did object would do so in a desperately moralistic tone. It would have been preferable if they had kept their heads, but I'm not going to make the abolitionists the only villains -- if villains they are -- in the piece.

You approve of hot-headedness in the name of interests you agree with, but oppose passion when it acts in the name of other interests. The heritage of 1776 may have meant that when Southerners wanted independence they went about it in the most direct, least compromising way. That same heritage meant that when a small group of Americans began to think about slavery and its wrongs seriously, that they'd take a moralistic and immediatist stance.

I have to laugh at your saying that my way of arguing is "at root fundamentally absolutist, inimical to reasoned discourse, and hostile." You bundle together truly passionate immediatist abolitionists with more moderate politicians like Lincoln, who simply opposed the expansion of slavery to the territories and hoped, like the founders, that eventually slavery would be brought to an end.

But that's what Southern militants did in 1860. They made all opposition to their wishes part of a massive anti-slavery anti-Southern conspiracy. Ordinarily society survives fanatics of one sort or another by recognizing how few they are. When people come to portray all those on the other side of political divides as dangerous fanatics. That's when the trouble started.

I can't help but notice a parallel. You seem to think from the way you write that I am your worst enemy. But the fact that I've put up with your nonsense when many people wouldn't suggests otherwise. So it was in the old days. In the eyes of many Southerners, if you weren't fully for slavery, you were against the South. That's the mindset that produced the war. If we want to refight the war, you're all set and ready to go. But if we want to understand what happened and why, we may need to step back from such attitudes.

I don't blame Southerners of the 1850s and 1860s for acting as they did. In their place I would have done the same thing. I don't blame the Aztecs for fighting to defend their way of life either. But when we talk about the past today we recognize that a lot has changed in time.

I have sympathy for what happened to the Aztecs, but have to admit that Aztec values aren't absolutely the same as ours. We'd feel funny -- I hope -- about asserting "The Aztecs Were Right!" So while I do have some sympathy for the plight of the Old South -- more than a lot of people do -- I can't say that their fight was our fight or that their idea of what was right is ours. And that is apparently what you want. Fortunately for all of us. You won't get it.

You don't directly answer about whether you would have put up the Liberty Place monument or whether you favor keeping it in place. But I think anyone can read between the lines. I don't know if the monument is still there. Though it was there just a few years ago. Here's an old picture:

You can get a newer one (covered with Nazi or anti-Nazi slogans) by googling "Liberty Monument."

[GOPcapitalist]

Slavery was permissible under the Constitution, but was still not permanent - even after the infamous Dred Scott decision.

Funny he would say this given Saint Abe's Corwin Amendment to do what the founders themselves did not do - make slavery permanent.

[GOPcapitalist]

I scarcely know what to do with these diatribes coming a week or more after the original discussion.

Translation: Brace yourself for about 30 paragraphs of hollow platitudes and mindless bloviation that ignores every salient point you just made by attempting to drown them in a sea of banality.

[4CJ]

His [Lincoln's] was no static, dead-hand view of the Constitution. The Constitution was a changing, evolving document yielding to necessity. When slavery was on the way to ultimate extinction, then he could deal with civil rights issues. One can speculate that Lincoln's final public statement (in April, 1865)—supporting suffrage for those blacks who had served in the Army—was made because he feared, as Benjamin Butler said, "a race war ... at least a guerilla war because we have taught those men how to fight."
Mary Frances Berry, "Lincoln and Civil Rights for Blacks," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. II (1980) [http://jala.press.uiuc.edu/2/berry.html]

The adoration of dims knows no bounds. MFB, the same of Civil Rights Commission infamy, the same that refused to leave? The same who asked, "I was just wondering when Strom Thurmond was gonna die?"

[fortheDeclaration]

The Union was the highest priority for Lincoln, but it was because Lincoln saw this nation as the best hope for freedom for mankind.

Thus, Lincoln's desire for the Union do not contradict his views on slavery.

[lentulusgracchus]

It seems that secession was about, at least in part, white supremacy.

Or partial dominance leading to loss of identity, loss of posterity, and group annihilation. Something like that.

When are you going to get around to pederasty and infanticide as motives? Those are juicy, and they can make you feel good as you throw the mud.

[lentulusgracchus]

My, my, how self-righteous those who have never had to face fighting a revolution and building a nation become 200 hundred years after the fact.

I might say the same thing about you. Okay, I will.

Those quotes you thanked me for, prove that

No, I'm sorry, they don't.

[lentulusgracchus]

Your editorial comments do not rise to the level of "corrections."

As in, "do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses"?

When did you start quoting Al Gore and Sidney Blumenthal?

[fortheDeclaration]

My, my, how self-righteous those who have never had to face fighting a revolution and building a nation become 200 hundred years after the fact. I might say the same thing about you. Okay, I will.

It is not I who am questioning the Founders integrity, you and your Rebel friends are doing that.

Those quotes you thanked me for, prove that No, I'm sorry, they don't.

Sure they do, but you can't admit it then your entire world view, of hating America would have to be called into question.

The South did raise again, as a Republican controlled area of the nation.

Thanks to Lincoln and his adherence to the principles of the Declaration, following in the footsteps of Washington himself.

[fortheDeclaration]

Amen to your post!

[rustbucket]

The hard-core neo-confederates would also hate the fact these New England fanatics, under Williams' influence, Rhode Island became a haven for those who suffered from religious persecution, including Jews and Quakers.

Name one.

[lentulusgracchus]

I've heard enough from you today to last a long time,.....

Sorry to oppress your periwinkle sense of what an open forum should be like. It only took me 11 days to reply to your damburst of invective.

.... 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 [the White Leagues monument], 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.

That's a very elegantly worded accusation of racism, directed both to me and to anyone who agrees with me. Why don't you stick it?

So much of what you write is a mess of angry epithets and abuse and Foghorn Leghorn style bluster.

And yours is what? Rhode Island Red?

You take a position that no serious scholar of American history would take today,.....

You ought to get out more. We were having a discussion about ACW revisionism, so the thread is concrete evidence, ipso facto, that other people in fact do take these positions. But for the sake of invective ad plebem to support your ad hominem ("you take a position.....no serious scholar.....blah, blah, blah"), you make a statement not only contrary to fact, but even to the conditions under which were are here met in combat bloviatory. Reality check, bub.

..... and you throw yourself around and go into contortions and conniptions, and think that you are proving your point, but it's not convincing.

Of course not -- to somebody like you. (See? That was a little bitty ad hom tossed out just so you won't feel too lonesome, like you're the only guy who even cares about the form any more.)

Nobody who's thought seriously about the war has taken your point of view for something like a half a century.

But they have, to your frustration. Charles Adams and Jeffrey Hummel, for example, both in the last 10 years. And Thomas Woods, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and John Remington Graham, an attorney writing on constitutional law (and the constitutionality of secession), and Mark Thornton (of the Ludwig von Mises Institute). And speaking of "seriously", why don't you seriously start looking around you? America ain't NYU or Claremont-McKenna, pal.

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.

Please explain to me, when was it that "people learned too much"? Who is this American Thucydides of whom you speak, whose penetrating gaze rendered null and void all the memoirs and personal histories of the actual participants? Signify to us.

Meanwhile, Mark Neely is telling the Abraham Lincoln Association that numbers of subjects haven't been properly covered, beginning with the election of 1864, and that the fashion trend in historiography is such that individual elections don't get looked at much, unless someone is doing a longitudinal survey covering multiple elections. Likewise, a dozen names from the two inner circles of Lincoln's political, legal, and social lives don't have proper biographies out yet. We don't even have the straight story yet on whether Abraham Lincoln was legitimate or not -- and nolu chan just sent me a dozen letters, more, that William Herndon wrote over a 20-year period after Lincoln's death in which he discusses the question of Lincoln's legitimacy -- and you can see him responding to strong pressure to sign off on the idea that by any means necessary, Lincoln must be presented to the public as the legitimate child of an intact family. Dennis Hanks knew the truth, and he wasn't telling..... but look, here is Salmon P. Chase, the biggest of all the Radical Republicans by Neely's estimate, bigger perhaps even that Stevens and "Spoons" Butler, and he hasn't yet had his definitive biography.

Would have been nice to have known that Chase was a Northern "fire-eater"......that casts a positive light on his Texas vs. White decision......as if Robert Toombs had been called onto the bench, specifically to decide Dred Scott and thereby "win one for the Gipper"? We knew Chase was a Republican, but not that he was a bigtime Radical. Did you know that?

There is so much history still to be written, whole areas still to be opened up that have nearly-untouched original documentation waiting for the researcher. But you post up as if the tablets have already come out of Sinai, and there is nothing left to do but bow down and worship.

You have a mythic view of history, repeat it at every opportunity, and demand that others accept your myth.

You and Gutzom Borglum are better representatives of that characterization.

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

As I previously posted to you, your choice of idiom places you in the camp of Theodore White, liberal historian-wannabe of the 20th century.......and propagandist for his value order.

Let me check some of your other posts to see if you said anything in between puffing your chest and venting your spleen.

[M. Espinola]

If old Abe was such a 'pro-slaver' as is being inventing by some who hate President Lincoln, he would have been a rabid, Confederate, plantation slave driver.

Twisting history to take the focus of the real pro-slavers simply magnifies the real views of today's neo-Confederates.