| This thread has been locked, it will not receive new replies. |
|
Locked on 04/13/2005 10:44:44 AM PDT by Admin Moderator, reason:
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?
You come closer to admitting the true nature of southern hysteria in the winter of 1860-61, than do your brain-washed comrades.
I have not read about the other southern motivations you mention. Perhaps you could explain the southern position with regard to "pederasty and infanticide"?
Do you have reason to doubt the explanations made by the secession Commissioners? Do you disagree with their rationale? Or do you just prefer to believe the post-war apologia?
I see you have a limited literary experience. I would avoid those two, if I were you.
Actually, it's their stock-in-trade. That's how we end up with neo-reb myths such as, "There were as many slave owners in the north as in the south"; slavery was going extinct in 5-10 years; Lincoln was a (take you pick) "syphilitic-homosexual-drug addled-illegitimate-racist-megalomaniacal-tyrant"; the "War of Northern Aggression"; the "south was right"; Jefferson Davis didn't commit treason"; etc.
Twisted history.
"No Amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any state, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."
The Pequot War was deeply drenched in -southeastern New England Indian inter-tribal warfare, which must be taken into account as well.
Most Indians tribes were notorious for making adversary Indian captives, as slaves.
Name Pequot descend from the Algonquin word "pekawatawog or pequttoog" meaning "destroyers."
'The first of the many wars between the English and the Indians was fought in 1637 between the Pequots and New England settlers.'
'The Pequots were a warlike tribe centered along the Thames River in southeastern Connecticut. By 1630, under their chief, Sassacus, they had pushed west to the Connecticut R. There they had numerous quarrels with colonists, culminating in the murder by the Pequots of a trader, John Oldham, on July 20th, 1636.'
First you posted this:
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?
2,629 posted on 02/13/2005 8:53:50 PM CST by x
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 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, .... 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.
2,633 posted on 02/14/2005 12:35:04 AM CST by lentulusgracchus
[Emphasis added for the obstinate who refuse to take a point the first two times it's put up.]
You've got a real penchant for insults and for accusing people of advocating murder and rapine if they oppose your views, yet you're the first to complain when the tables are turned. If you make all manner of allegations against others, you ought to expect by now that people will wonder how close you (singular) can stick to the old pro-slavery and racist arguments without being racist yourself.But I'm not trying to stigmatize you with that label. People will have to make up their own minds about that. I just point out that your views were common a century or so ago and have been repudiated by most people who have thought seriously about Reconstruction.
2,663 posted on 02/14/2005 5:58:16 PM CST by x
First you recriminate and add an imputation of moral cowardice and hypocrisy: "You've got a real penchant for insults and for accusing people of advocating murder ...you're the first to complain when the tables are turned."
Well, let's see. Speaking of the Abolitionists, I certainly did accuse them of advocating murder. Henry Ward Beecher acted on the ground his sister had prepared. So did John Brown and the Wide Awakes. Which, of course, is not to excuse the Missouri Red Legs who invaded Kansas and shot up freesoiler communities, either -- or Quantrill, later on. But the Abolitionists did do these things.
Thaddeus Stevens, during the war, demanded that the South be "utterly annihilated", to the point of erasure of state boundaries and recolonization with a new population. After the war, he took the lead in impeaching President Johnson and imposing military rule on the South.
William Seward in 1850 supplied a key enabling formulary to the Abolitionist campaign of moral erasure of the South, "a higher law than the Constitution" (speech cached online, here. He was right, but not in the way he meant it, and his rhetoric helped stir the spirit of "a law unto themselves" among Abolitionists generally.
Wealthy New England Abolitionist Wendell Phillips publicly cursed the Constitution in a Boston Abolitionist rally in Faneuil Hall in 1842. In 1959, Irving Bartlett wrote a paper on Phillips and his oratory in the American Quarterly titled, "Wendell Phillips and the Eloquence of Abuse."
William Lloyd Garrison added his own flourish in the 1850's by publicly burning a copy of the Constitution.
John Brown, Ben Butler, and Henry Ward Beecher require no additional comment on their destructive and selfrighteously hate-ridden public careers. And of course, as we've discussed above, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass were among the foremost propagandists of the movement, who attempted to fasten especial, endogamous, and unwashable criminality and moral contemptibility to the South, precisely in order to mobilize public opinion for the bloodbath to come.
So, yes, I stand by my accusation, which is supported by recent scholarship previously quoted.
.....you're the first to complain when the tables are turned.
Of course I complain. I'm not advocating turning half the country into a pillar of smoke with violent retribution of any kind, so there are no tables to turn. I have, in the past, advocated seizing the Ivy League campuses under eminent domain and closing them pro bono publico, but that I advocate for other reasons, as part of another discussion.
I repeat: yes, it is unfair to accuse me of doing the same thing the Beechers did, because I'm not doing what they did -- which was pregnant with moral liability for later results, and would have been so understood by any of their contemporaries.
This is the objective record of the moral assault of the Northern Abolitionists on the South. A countervailing assault by the South on the North was never represented by contemporary discourse, except by some fabulous 1863 Republican pamphlets about "the Slave Power" and its alleged Struldbrug plans to turn the Northern States into citadels of slaveholding by vast, unseen pro-slavery conspiracies, as acting to overreach the North, rather than vice versa.
Southerners, as shown by the speeches of Toombs, Rhett, and other spokesmen cited and quoted above, demanded access to the Territories on an equal basis with Northern freesoilers (fat lot of good it would have done planters, to have transplanted to Nebraska or the Dakotas), and they wanted the fugitive-slave laws and Article IV enforced. Turning Ohio into a slaving "victory garden" was never on the agenda, never mind that Republican political pamphleteers occasionally said it was.
If you make all manner of allegations against others, you ought to expect by now that people will wonder how close you (singular) can stick to the old pro-slavery and racist arguments without being racist yourself.
This is a non-sequitur. The premise and conclusion are not related. This is nothing more than a threat to label me a racist in a public forum, if I continue to mine the evidentiary vein of Republican and Abolitionist propaganda, showing how they, over a period of years, superheated the country's political environment to dissolve the political compact, which IMHO died in the aftermath of the John Brown raid, and then the Union.
So save your labels and your threats of labels; you cannot begin to prove what you threaten to say about me, for the very simple reason that it isn't true. I posted my position to you, as I've cited and quoted to you above. If you continue to accuse me of things, that's dishonesty and bad faith, and I'll have a lot to say about that.
I just point out that your views were common a century or so ago and have been repudiated by most people who have thought seriously about Reconstruction.
I take it that you mean my views on Reconstruction. You can't be serious, to say that there is a consensus in favor of McPherson's position. And simply trying to sweep away all the Southern writers of the last 120 years by crying out "moral impurity" won't work for Reconstruction any more than it will wash for the origins of the Civil War. Either they had a point about the validity of Reconstruction acts and the authority by which the Congress pretended to reorganize the conquered States, or they did not.
So you see, legalism follows your side around like a biting dog, all the way through Reconstruction: just winning a war doesn't make one right. To say it does, of course, is teleology, which would severely embarrass your side of the argument, if the Nazi Reich had won the Second World War. Had the Germans won, you would now be burdened with thinking up reasons why they were right, and dispelling the samizdat of such as Hannah Arendt complaining about the outcome. But of course Arendt would herself already have been conveniently taken care of, so perhaps her awkward moral questions wouldn't arise after all.
As to Reconstruction history, I question the legitimacy of the 14th Amendment, for one thing, precisely because it was passed by rump "state governments" formed by the mass classification of citizenship by the Congress in the conquered States, and exclusion of most of the electorate from the polls, in favor of a politically convenient minority.
The same disability attaches to the 14th Amendment that attaches to the State of West Virginia, frankly, and for the same reasons. The United States Government played favorites about who was a citizen and who could form a State -- playing God with the People, whose creature the United States Government by law and by right was. The Government laid hands on its master, and for that alone deserved to be dissolved.
Even Mark Neely concedes that Reconstruction history has a long way to go. The premature and politically motivated representations by Clintonoid historians, five and ten years ago, that there is a New Historiographical Consensus on the Civil War and Reconstruction, were the work of the academic Left, and the National Park Service initiative to introduce PC "it was all about slavery" exhibits to "contextualize" the Civil War in a bath of liberation and Democratic Party propaganda was no service to the public. Every one of the historians present at the 1998 Clintonoid confab, at which McPherson got his own section of the online "book" produced by the conference, was a Confederate flag-folder. Every single one of them came out against any public display of the Confederate flag outside a museum, a military park, or some other socially constrained, PC-controlled environment. (And of course, if they ever got preclusive control of the military parks, it's even money the Confederate monuments would disappear -- to make the parks into "freedom parks" or some such -- just as they disappeared from New Orleans as soon as a black mayor was elected.)
Part I
There are a number of viciously, ultra-staunch 'Neo-Confederate' groups that go far beyond simply twisting American history for their masked 'cause'.
The following alarming quotes are from, "Who is a true Confederate? by Robert McMullen (Chairman, SIP of Arkansas)
Accordingly, no Confederate can, by definition, be a Republican or Democrat, or a member of any other U.S. political party. It is NOT our government, and it's flag is NOT our flag.
Does anyone really think such contemptible statements were restricted to only those attending pro-al-Qa'ida Islamic mosques, (planted) in America?
We can only hope Homeland Security is monitoring dangerous pack of traitors such as these, around the clock.
2. "The goal of the "Southern Movement" is to liberate our country from foreign occupation forces and restore our full Independence. The offices of the Confederate government are currently vacant due to enemy occupation."
"Enemy occupation!"(??)
Radical, insurrectionist fanatics, or potential domestic terrorists?
"The Republican party destroyed both the United States and the Confederacy, and we live under a defacto dictatorship today because of that Party. If you think they will now save us, you are living under a "strong delusion". A true Confederate belongs in a Confederate political party, NOT a U.S. political party." (Incredible!)
"Is this a beautiful sight? We can long for the day that our skies will be full of such birds when the Confederate States Air Force establishes air supremacy over our free Southern skies. Think big and bold. This is the militia we can have; the State National Guard units of ten or fifteen Southern States who re-affirm their Statehood in the Confederate States of America. This is obtainable politically in the State legislatures, but will require legal political action and patience. But, our States must be coordinated in a loose Confederation and not as independent anarchist States."
"Our children, husbands, fathers, brothers and sisters are engaged in a war that was planned almost a full year before the excuse of 9-11 ever happened. What was this war for?"
"It was to destroy an “enemy” of Israel. Yes, that little country that usurps billions of dollars a year, out of your pockets, as loans but has never repaid one thin dime. How do they get away with that?"
"Zionist Jews view politics as vital for their survival. Jews are less than 1% of our population yet they can get any law passed they want. Haven’t you noticed the pandering of both candidates for President? The queers can get laws passed, the Blacks can get laws passed and even the damned atheist can get laws passed. Why can’t we?"........ Well, well, well... Dig deep enough and the hardcore, neo-Confederate mask also reveals true neo-Nazi doctrine!
Sources:
http://www.federationofstates.org/articals/ap2.htm
www.sipofarkansas.org
www.federationofstates.org
http://www.federationofstates.com/articals/survival.htm
Did you save that as a macro, to invoke on any/every Southern historian born before 1960?
Universally? I don't believe you. And let's say, arguendo, that it's true. Does that make him unusable as a source, so that you can just wave your hand over his writing and pronounce, like a magician or a geophysicist, "ALL LIES, ALL LIES!!"?
I quote and use John Nicolay, who is quite strong in his biases -- to the point of foaming sometimes -- because he is an eyewitness and because he had access to documents and the ability to pull them together and write a coherent, if biased, narrative.
Either the Union Leagues' members were vindictive Republican partisans or they were not. If they weren't, and you have information to contradict my post -- put it up! Quote somebody!
If instead of "vulture capitalist" venturers on the flood tide of opportunistic fortune, as I characterized them, the carpetbaggers were instead Mary Poppinses of timely good help, flown south to repair the damages of war out of endless resources of eleemosynary goodwill, then I'll be happy to see your documentation.
Beard was certainly talented, but he's been dead for half a century, and nobody can seriously accept his good agrarians vs. bad industrialist point of view any more.
What, on your sayso? Did you pass the word on Beard, too? You've been busy! But of course you'll have a better source. Some nice, fresh, crisply-minted Berkeley Marxist? Or maybe just a Marist?
Look up Kenneth Stampp or Richard Nelson Current for more balanced views of Reconstruction that correct Bowers's errors.
Oh, I'm sorry -- I don't accept homework assignments. You've got a better story and a better source? Post away! (That's your job, you see.)
Bowers's frankly melodramatic approach to writing history goes a long way to explaining why you cast everything into simply terms of scheming villains and suffering victims.
No, it doesn't. It only means that our styles are similar. My objections to your attempt to rule him out of order because he's not on your reading list, or UCLA's, or Claremont-McKenna's, or UWash's, or Georgetown's, doesn't cut it. If you want to make a point, make your point. And no, you don't get to bulk-obsolete historians by date. That Neely lecture I pointed you to highlighted what Neely sees as a serious drawback to the contemporary fashion in historiography that is stifling studies of single events -- and biography. Modern does not equal "bulletproof".
.....you'll always see the "Yankees" as evil conspirators and the "Southrons" as noble and weak and bent only on defending themselves. ....
Oh, please.
But you have to believe what you believe. The way out would be to try to understand what history looked like to those you consider villains. But most likely you won't do that, because you need the easy, comforting melodrama of victims and villains.
More ad hominem bulltwaddle. I look at the constitutional issues, and I look to see who overstepped and who didn't. That's what I stand on, and your broad characterization, with its generous ascription of personal infantilism, isn't worth the electrons you buggered to put that up there.
Twaddle.
To ease the fear of the Southern slaver owners that Lincoln would not interfere with their slaves, as he was not legally able to do in the first place.
What Lincoln ran on and intended to enforce was stopping any further expansion of slavery.
But you know this and these attempts to attack Lincoln for his 'racism'and his attempts to keep the Union together by ensuring the South that their constitutional rights would be protected under his administration, are simply attempts to muddy the water.
Is that close to the Sea of Tranquillity?
Yeah, well, misdirection is cured with a can of spray-on Redirect.
But I had to spend some time with it because the cat accused me of slave-brokering and racism. Twice. Real drive-by sicario. But at least it's been handled.
But now, get ready to go 15 rounds toe-to-toe on Reconstruction, on the same theme: if you're not down with Spoons, you're a racist. Sign on with Douglass and Tubman as a born-again do-right, standup guy who wouldn't get caught dead in the same room as a breathing white man, or else you're racist scum.
Something like that.
How are you on the history of the entire membership of the League of the South? The SCV? The UDC? Read any 10,000-word Foner essays lately? You'll be reading those for comprehension and getting back to our amigo with 4500 words on fourth-level unconscious racism and how to treat it with a slave kettle and a $10,000 check to the NAALCP.
And how is your "primary moral argument" distinguishable from this Mark-of-Cain ridden Southern Beast I described, whose immobilization before the Triumphant Forces of Righteousness is the entire purpose of your "primary moral argument"?
You argue Southerners are endogamously bad -- or maybe only culturally polluted by their mothers' milk -- in order to obtain and justify a social sanction to reform them by force, against their will, like cigarette smokers, into "New South" Yankee-Men/Soviet Men, whatever. Let's start there.
Your moral injunctions are actually a claim -- a claim of the right to lobotomize and brainwash. Admit it.
Read his speech again. He is presenting the Confederate Constitution to the public and describing its features, and the feature that he thinks, as he addresses them (I think in Savannah, which was rice-plantation country), that they will care about the most, is the fact that unlike the U.S. Constitution, the new Confederate one has slavery expressly defined in it and constitutionally enabled. He's pointing to the slavery clauses and telling them, "Nobody is going to take your labor force or ability to make a living away."
That isn't quite the same thing as saying, "See, right here -- this is what the war is all about!" Actually, what it was about was the document in his hand, and the South's ability to have one the way they wanted it. That's a political issues of its own, and the predominant issue in the secession of the South: political control of their own destiny (alternative: control by their enemies, and a permanent state of seige and/or permanent domination by inimical combinations).
You and Stephens both emphasize different things about the Confederate Constitution.
But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other -- though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Now, what part of immediate cause do you not understand?
[You, replying] It's not just that they thought had the legal right to own slaves. It's that they constructed moral defenses of slavery and sought to expand the area where slavery was legal, making much of slavery's superiority to free contract labor. And you largely go along with their moves in practical politics, though you may have different opinions on theoretical questions.
No, I don't -- we discussed the unsuitability of large areas of the Middle West, outside the Missouri bottomlands and a few other "peach bottoms", for Black Belt plantation agriculture, or even just about any cash crops. Corn plantations? Maybe, I suppose! But ..... that wouldn't have been what the planters, economically sensitive to the price differences, would have wanted to put in the ground.
So, no, as a practical matter, a move into the High Plains wouldn't have made sense at all, and I'm still a little at a loss why this was a big issue to the planters, who hadn't even filled up Texas yet -- but settlers were rapidly approaching the dry line already, just as they were up in Kansas and Nebraska. I tend to think that it was more a political marker or bellwether issue, a benchmark of "fairness" in future settlement policy.
Maybe people could consider you "post-pro-slavery" in the same way that some Europeans today are "post-communist" or "post-fascist." That is to say they are greatly attached to a form of society that they recognize can't or shouldn't be realized in the present day world.
Still at it, are you? Get the message, I've discussed this enough, my position is clear by now -- knock it off. This drive-by stuff is just ad hominem smearing on your part.
It really rankles you, doesn't it, that I won't agree with you and stand up to you. So you resort to a smear, trying to hang a swastika or some other invidious symbol on someone for not going along.
Your statement isn't founded in reality.
The two situations are not comparable, and the only one assaying a comparison is you -- by moral equivocation, as a form, as you show here, of recrimination.
The North was not "afraid" of the South -- the freesoilers may have labored under the false impression that the Territories would become dotted with cotton plantations if the Taney Court or Kansas-Nebraska really opened up the Territories to slave-operated farms and plantations. But in the years between Kansas-Nebraska and the outbreak of the war, that didn't happen.
The North had little to fear from the South; it was all the other way around, and the North's propaganda campaign was the source of tension.
You can use repression, if you can get away with it, but you can't appeal to universal moral standards if you've already violated them yourself.
There was no such "universal moral standard" as you claim. And your statement amounts to a declaration of open season on anyone who disagrees with you -- precisely the bombast used by the Abolitionists, which led to the John Brown raid and the dissolution of the American community -- or rather, to the recognition that it had dissolved.
You can try to get us to understand why Southerners acted as they did. And plenty of people will understand. But that's not enough for you.
Keep your paint brush off me. I've told you about that.
You want us to approve of that argument from necessity in this case, and to approve of secession and repression in this case, while condemning it in others.
Somehow I hear you champing at the bit to scratch your own moral itch across 150 years at the expense of someone who had all the right in the world, according to his lights, to live as he did. A little cultural imperialism, eh?
I don't care whether you "approve" or "disapprove" -- it's irrelevant. The job here is to keep one's eye on the ball, and not forget that the majority of the People were the ones who said what right and wrong were, and if you deviate from that, you are denying the People their sovereignty and their sovereign right to be wrong.
If you won't concede the People the right to be wrong, then you've established a principle -- a tyrannical one -- that someone else gets to do all the saying, and will you smell the coffee? That isn't going to be you.
The question is whether you are committed to the People enough to stand up for them even when you think they're really wrong about something, or whether you're willing to let someone twist your moral-issue dials and knobs to take the play away from you, the People, and everyone else.
I don't know how to put it more simply than that. You can't scratch this itch and win. Feed those people into the wood-chipper because of your moral snit, and your principles lose.
Few people today will look at the situation honestly and agree with you and with today's generally accepted ideas about racial equality. There's a gap between where you stand and what most Americans believe or want to believe today, that one could drive a train through.
It's a gap in time -- you have to allow for differences that big, in different societies 150-200 years apart. Do you think for a minute I'd sit still for a big Asian contractor running indentured contractors in here from Bangalore? Hell, no.
I've never met anyone as determined to miss the whole point as you. And then throw dead possums and skunks.
Other people probably see by now how you jump to the extreme case of victimization and base your arguments on it.
It was an extreme case. Someone jumped the good guys and stripped them of their freedom and sovereignty, and made them slaves of the State. State in the Orwellian sense, not the Constitutional one. Not the State with the Constitution -- the one with the Organs, and infinite discretion in policy, and personality cults, and memory holes.
When everyone does that -- when everyone thinks their back is against the wall and survival at stake -- then no rational argument or agreement is possible. When one person does it, that person lays down an ultimatum to others "give me what I want or else" with no compromise or rational solution possible.
That's what happened, all right. But the point I've been making up above is that it happened when the Abolitionists, stuffed with their Yankee-minister selfrighteousness, ended the conversation by bringing in the artillery of invective, changing the discussion into a moral micturition contest larded with absolute statements in absolute language, and nothing but bitter condemnation for anyone who didn't "get it".
By this time, doesn't pretty much everyone agree that the best thing for Southerners, White or Black, was to remain in the Union?
Yes. I think Alexander Stephens got it right, in his November 14, 1860 speech to the Georgia legislature which I linked above, alternative link here. That is the speech in which Stephens and Robert Toombs, who'd spoken the night before, engaged in call-and-response.
That would defuse tensions, by allowing Whites and Blacks to spread out, so that you wouldn't have potentially explosive situations where half the population were slaves and half masters or half of the ruling race and half of the subject race.
I don't know. Slavery, except for the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys of California, had just about run out of places to go.....a river valley here and there, and that's about it.
You also have trouble keeping the abolitionists and more moderate Republicans -- and the various factions in each group -- apart. Radical abolitionists did use a highly moralistic language to bring slavery back into public discussion. That was what they set out to do. More moderate Americans were certainly open to compromise. But the serious of political provocations in the 1850s drove both sides further apart. I doubt one can put the blame for that on any one camp or individual.
You underestimate Abolitionist strength in the Republican Party, I think. In 1860, Lincoln was the "moderate" (he said -- I don't think so), and Salmon P. Chase was the red-hot, and he nearly won the nomination. In late 1862, Lincoln almost lost the office to what would have amounted to a palace coup by a group around Chase, and he was threatened again in 1864 because of the danger of defections by Radicals. He handled both crises, but the essential strength of that wing was very great in both years.
If one really believes that something is wrong one is going to use moralistic language to condemn it.
Maybe, maybe not.
You do the same with respect to Alexander Hamilton. You regard him as evil and condemn him in the strongest terms.
I think Hamilton was a supremely egotistical man seized by a wicked idea: I'm so much smarter than these other people. They want a republic. They want liberty, they want this, they want that. Well, screw them. We'll do this my way -- and I'll just tell them they have all those other things. Because getting what I want comes first.
I think Hamilton was a practitioner of natural law, and he was Nature's winner. Soooo..... Worse , he was an attorney, so he could justify anything to anybody and make them think they were stupid even to ask him what he was doing.
a I mean, the guy tried -- and succeeded! -- to con the entire Constitutional Convention! And he hoorawed States and everyone else he needed, into ratifying the Constitution: he and his postmaster buddies held people's mail, interrupted their subscriptions, and then sat around writing letters and columns about them, running them down, selling them the idea that EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE STATE -- NAY, ON THE ATLANTIC SEABOARD was all for ratification. The Antifederalists had a Majority -- and he beat them, unfairly, and never even blinked. What does that tell you?
So what good can come of a con job?
Hamilton was wonderfully efficient. Richard Brookhiser has just written a new book about him -- you can probably find it in 20 seconds with a metasearch, I saw it yesterday -- that lists his virtues and accomplishments, which included founding both the Bank of New York and the New York Post. The problem is, he aligned himself with a Hobbesian principle of government -- even a Nietzschean one -- that served him very well, but not the People's liberty. I doubt that he ever cared about the People; he was too smart to care, too smooth to let slip that he didn't. I think that was Hamilton. And in subserving Hobbesianism and efficiency, he foreshadowed men like Albert Speer and Fritz Todt and Bernard Baruch and John Kenneth Galbraith, who integrated their societies' political and economic Organs into Orwellian war machines.
Now we do hope that politicians will be more open to compromise and peacefully working things out. But sometimes the common middle ground crumbles beneath them. That happened in the 1860s, but it wasn't entirely the fault of one side or the other.
True. And my whole point is, rather than kill 620,000 men on the battlefield, it would probably have been better if the two sides had separated for a while, to hope for a reconciliation later on, as long as the Confederates, against Stephens's better advice, were determined to leave the Union.
A Limp Nose
Alien Mops
Maine Slop
Spain Mole
ISLAM PEON.
Your logic is faulty. Your project your fears to others, and your attempt to denigrate the same are lackluster. You attempt to paint an entire class of people as dirt, or even lower than dirt, based on your racism and hatred. You continue to paint those that advocate lower taxes and limited government, the right of self government -secessionists/Confederates - as knuckle-dragging slobs/Neanderthals, yet praise the advocates of big goverment, higher taxes, government subsidies, white separtism and socialism - Lincoln et al, as the greatest thing since sliced bread or fire. Based on that your heros should be Hoover, LBJ, Carter, Jessee Jackson, Al Sharpton, Humphrey and Clinton.
Lincoln was a Whig - he adored Clay and his policies - Lincoln was no Reagan.
Some of the early New England English colonists were pure and virtuous but there were others who were rat bums.
Speaking of rat bums, the Captain John Underhill from Massachusetts Bay Colony who was one of the leaders of the Pequot village massacre (a bigger massacre than Wounded Knee) was also the person assigned to find Roger Williams and take him to the ship to be banished back to England for speaking his mind. Williams snuck away before Underhill got there and went on Rhode Island. Hats off to Williams.
And yet the southerners weren't interested. Pretty strange doncha think, especially if, as you say, it was "all about slavery."
What Lincoln ran on and intended to enforce was stopping any further expansion of slavery.
Yet he was perfectly content in enshrining its permanent existence into the constitution in a way that would have undermined the Somersett argument with far greater damage than Dred Scott or anything else could have done.
Reagan's domestic spending programs would have sent Lincoln into shock.
Reagan's priority was defeating the Soviets.
Lincoln's was defeating the Confedercy,
both accomplished those worthwhile goals.
No, because the slaveowners were far smarter then their current defenders.
They understood that limitation of slavery would be its eventual death.
What Lincoln ran on and intended to enforce was stopping any further expansion of slavery. Yet he was perfectly content in enshrining its permanent existence into the constitution in a way that would have undermined the Somersett argument with far greater damage than Dred Scott or anything else could have done.
Nothing to enshrine, what he attempted to do was make explicit what was already implicit, slavery was a state issue.
The amendment was redundant and added nothing to the Constitutional protections of slavery already in place.
The slaver owners knew unless slavery had new land with which to expand to, slavery days were numbered.
Lincoln was using the tactics that the Founders had used, isolate slavery, surround it with free states, and let it die naturally.
We used the same tactics on the Soviets, and the internal pressure forced them to collapse, without WW3.
Your boy Dilorenzo advocates compensated emancipation, so, that might have happened in a few years, had the South not bolted from the Union to protect their 'peculiar institution'
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.