Confederate States Of America (2005)

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[capitan_refugio]

"capitan, you were away from these threads for a month. Were you suspended, taking a breather, or off on a trip?"

None of the above. I am in the process of establishing an LLC.

[rustbucket]

I am in the process of establishing an LLC.

I have one of those. My local county government started taxing LLCs after I formed mine.

[capitan_refugio]

"The large slaveowners may not have been all that strong for secession."

In some areas, for instance, central Louisiana, that may have well been the case. However, the general relationship applies: those states with the highest percentage of slaves as a function of total population were the first to purport to secede.

[capitan_refugio]

"The large slaveholders wanted to preserve their property. The poor whites didn't own many slaves. Perhaps the poor whites feared competition from the blacks if the slaves were freed or perhaps they just needed to think they were superior to somebody (like some posters who denigrate the South)."

In The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861, Professor David Potter observed that,

"In short, the South became increasingly a closed society, distrustful of 'isms' from outside and unsympathetic toward dissenters. Such were the pervasive consequences giving top priority to the maintenance of a system of racial subordination. By 1860, southern society had arrived at the full development of a plantation-oriented, slave-holding system with conservative values, hierarchical relation ships, and authoritarian controls. No society is complete, of course, without an ethos appropriate to its social arrangements, and the south had developed one, beginning with the conviction of the superior virtues of rural life. At one level, this embodied a Jeffersonian agrarianism which regarded landowning cultivators of the soil as the best kind of citizens, because their ownership and their production for use gave them self-sufficency and independence, uncorrupted by commercial avarice - and also because their labor had dignity and diversity suitable to well-rounded men. But at another level, the commitment to rural values had led to glorification of plantation life, in which even slavery was idealized by the argument that the dependence of the slave developed in the master a sense of responsibility for the welfare of his slaves and in the slaves a sense of loyalty and attachment to the master. This relationship, southerners argued, was far better than the impersonal, dehumanized irresponsibility of 'wage slavery,' which treated labor as a commodity."

Pg 456-457

[lentulusgracchus]

If you look back at conservative thinkers of the last three centuries, there's long been a distrust of radical Rousseauvian ideas, and an emphasis on natural law and the rule of law rather than cultural relativism or absolute group autonomy or group self-determination above all.

How conservative are these thinkers you are talking about? Who are we talking about -- Hume? Your challenge was interesting, and I had to read a little to understand exactly what you are complaining about, and unless I misunderstand you completely, you are complaining about precisely the concepts that we have been discussing from the Federalist and other Founding sources, in which, quite precisely, the People are identified as the repository of sovereignty, contrary your complaint and quite in agreement with Rousseau.

Where the Framers and Rousseau part company is on the subject of direct participatory democracy and Rousseau's (not altogether unfounded) mistrust of representatives. (We see in the weekend's headlines, for example, that 10 of the people voting to return Vioxx and Celebrex to FDA-approved, merchantable status have been discovered to have been heavily compromised by long-term consulting relationships to the firms whose products were involved. Likewise, in posts above, we discussed the outrageous advocacy for the railroads by a sitting Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in the 1880's. And need I mention the name of Rep. Ozzie Meyers, author of the deathless motto, "money talks and bullshit walks"?)

But the Framers, like the authors of the Articles of Confederation before them, relied on the principle of representative government, as did the Confederacy. So I am at a loss as to why you would bring in Rousseau and offer him as a figurehead of my thinking, as opposed to "all good men who think" (which I've pointed out to you is just your shucking and jiving for your side), unless you mean to say that my posts evince a hostility toward representative government. I will admit that in my misspent youth, it occurred to me that technology had recently made it possible to transcend the narrow boundaries of Greek and "Rousseauvian" direct democracy and allow great use of initiative and referendum through telecommunications; but more recently, it has occurred to me that technology also affords more opportunities for advanced ballot-box tampering, as has been documented as having been perpetrated by Democratic county election officials in Florida in the 1990's and 2000.

All that said, I don't recall having posted any attacks on the idea of Congress or legislatures.

Some times the valuation of procedures and precedents and universal principles may go too far but there were real reasons for emphasizing law and comity rather than sheer will and self-assertion.

That is my current problem with Lincoln and the Abolitionists.

Those who've taken the path of radical relativism and absolute will have generally come a cropper and caused much pain in the world.

I follow you on "absolute will" -- fascism, authoritarianism, absolutism -- but you are going to have to tell my what you are talking about with "radical relativism", which sounds like the kind of stuff they do on Dick Wolf TV series.

I'd also like to know how you see authoritarianism in my posts. The People are sovereign -- and they are at leisure subject to the will of Providence to decide any policy or value that their pleasure listeth. But the Framers believed that too, and agreed with Rousseau, and I agree with all of them. Your side is the party interjecting permissions from other political entities and asserting the right of a military tyrant to modulate the People's will.

I don't know how we can condemn radical Rousseauvian ideas in other parts of the world while we exalt them at home.

You'll have to show me how I exemplify Rousseau's radicalism. You've lost me. You don't mean that "noble savage" stuff? I don't believe that for a minute, I haven't talked about that. As for direct democracy, see above.

[lentulusgracchus]

directly refute those quotes by neo-confederates

Would you please refrain from using this inaccurate label for the people on this board who favor reexamining Lincoln's war record? Just because one is a Southerner and no Lincoln fan, does not mean that he necessarily desires the breakup of the Union. Although the longer you keep posting like that, the harder it becomes to argue for the Union's continuation.

[lentulusgracchus]

That is why the the Preamble to the Constitution reads, .....

We've been over that.

1. The Preamble isn't law. It's a declaratory scoping statement, and not part of the social compact itself.

2. The Preamble was written by Hamilton et al. before the Constitutional Convention substantially changed their offering from an amalgamated nation-state to the federal system we have today, and the People further modified the social compact by adding the Bill of Rights as sine qua non for the ratification of the Constitution.

The People of the United States are NOT amalgamated. Rather "People" is a plural form, as well as singular, because of its collective nature. The Framers invariably wrote "people" as a plural, to mean an individual people of a State, or all the People of all the States.

But we explained that to you.

[lentulusgracchus]

The states have never possessed the full range of sovereign powers. Could they declare war, individually? Could the negotiate with foreign powers, individually? NO

When King George III ceded sovereignty to the States, they were already under the Articles of Confederation -- which, by the way, stipulated to the ultimate sovereignty of the States. Which sovereignty they resumed in toto, resuming the powers they'd delegated to Congress and the Union (which existed only in the Congress), when they seceded from the Perpetual Union of the Articles, to ratify the Constitution, receding them to the new Union.

You just run down the States because you're a tyrant-worshipper.

Kiss the hand, boy. Kiss the foot. Just don't call yourself a free American. You're a subject in your own mind, so you'll never be free.

[fortheDeclaration]

It would seem that the politicans (following the new theories of Calhoun) were more interested in the political power of slavery and its expansion, then those who actually owned the slaves.

I would also not make too much of a single letter, which may or may not express the majority opinion of slave owners.

If the letter is correct, then the political leadership did the South a great disservice by its reckless disregard for both the slave ownder and poor white laborer.

Yet, someone had to put those politicans into power.

[lentulusgracchus]

Yet, someone had to put those politicans into power.

The same people who thought Ozzie Myers was really going to serve them when they elected him.

If you want to go on about the low quality of 19th-century politicians, you might look at the career of a prominent Republican, Roscoe Conkling of New York. Big Lincoln backer, he.

[fortheDeclaration]

They were not sovereign within the Confederacy either.

The idea that one could join a union and then withdraw at a whim, is utter nonsense.

[fortheDeclaration]

Alright,let us say that it was the poor quality of southern leadership that led the South into a ill-advised attempt to secede.

So why are so many on these threads attempting to justify their decision to drag the South, slaveowner and poor white into diaster?

It is they and not Lincoln who are to blame for the South's woes.

[fortheDeclaration]

All this element is capable of is high pitched verbal bedlam, anarchy & the rule of mobocracy.

Amen.

One poster, is making a major issue on not being able to vote on the Georgia state flag!

In a war against terrorism and these guys are worried about state flags!

[fortheDeclaration]

straight from the guy who thinks Ronald Reagan didn't cut taxes but rather shifted the tax burden onto the poor, aka the same guy who thinks Saint Abe's income tax and exhorbitant tariffs were small potatoes, aka the same guy who just advocated free government handout giveaways of all the land of the United States.

Now where did I ever say that the tax burden was shifted to the poor?

But, once again, were the taxes higher on the middle class after 8 years of Reagan or not?

Where did I say the tarrif was 'small potatoes', it just pales in comparsion to a personal income tax.

As for giving away the public land-why not?

That is not Marxism, that is the ownership society being put into place by Bush today.

You guys really do have reading problems don't you.

[fortheDeclaration]

That does not mean that slavery was not the political reason why secession was attempted. Politics was the political reason for secession. And secession wasn't attempted -- or else, you can show me how much revenue the State of Mississippi returned to the United States Treasury in 1863.

Where is the Confederacy today?

It only lives on the vivid imagination of the neo-Confederates.

It was a rich man's war, but the poor man's fight. You just denied that -- calling me Howard Dean!

I was calling you Dean for your anti-American rant.

-- about the Union war effort. Wanna explain all those Yankee stand-ins? The New York draft riots? Funny how the Yankee army had such a strong Irish and German accent.

So, who disagrees that the war was a tough sell on both sides?

Only it was not the North fighting an invading Army deep within her borders.

It is easier to understand why the average Northerner did want any part of the war since it affected him so little, but for the Southerner he was looking at Union armies enter into his lands.

Now, if they were against secession, they would view those armies as Armerican ones (correct view) but if for secession, as invading ones.

[lentulusgracchus]

Persons considering your source would do well to consider:

1. That while Potter is a pre-PC historian untouched by the politically-driven South-bashing revisionism, the work cited was actually completed posthumously, in 1976 (Potter having died five or six years earlier), by Donald Fehrenbacher, another of your West Coast liberal, South-bashing historians.

2. Potter's book, completed by Fehrenbacher, was praised as a manual reference by James McPherson in the introduction to his own polemic, Battle Cry of Freedom -- a suspicious endorsement if ever there was one.

[M. Espinola]

Being cognizant historical facts relating to either the pre or post Civil War period are thoroughly useless for the mavens of 'confederate' disinformation, the following data is solely for thinking conservative Americans.

'Slaves were the largest single investment in the South, and the fear of slave unrest ensured the loyalty of nonslaveholding whites to the economic and social system. It was to defend the right to maintain slavery that the Southern states eventually went to war.'

Also, 'The Northwest looked to Congress for free homesteads and federal aid for its roads and waterways. The South, however, regarded such measures as discriminatory, favouring Northern commercial interests, and it found the rise of antislavery agitation in the North intolerable. Many free states, for example, passed personal liberty laws in an effort to frustrate enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. The increasing frequency with which “free soilers”, politicians who argued that no more slave states should be admitted to the Union, won elective office in the North also worried Southerners.' source

Keeping in mind 'their' favourite line: 'The origins of the Civil War had nothin ta do with slavery, it was all taxes, you duumbyankeeeeezzz.. aaahhhh!!!!.. :)

Now presenting some unmasked words from the high priest of the modern 'confederacy' of malcontents:

"It should be clear to anyone who has been paying attention to politics in recent years that the modus operandi of the statist and imperialistic neoconservative cult that now dominates the Republican Party is not to debate its intellectual opponents but to wage campaigns of character assassination against them." by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The voice of rebellion has spoken: "..the statist and imperialistic neoconservative cult that now dominates the Republican Party.." Wonder who this extremist insurrectionist voted for?

Here is a hint. "SIP tells its members to vote in the Federal election by voting against both the Democrat and Republican candidates by voting for a third party candidate." source

[lentulusgracchus]

Where is the Confederacy today?

That's not what I asked you.

But it is teleology -- an attempt to settle all questions by pogoing up and down while chanting, "We won! We won!"

I was calling you Dean for your anti-American rant.

Quote me saying something that remotely resembles an "anti-American rant". Go on -- you can't.

Unless you equate America with monopolies and trusts and cartels and union-busting and wage-breaking and using employees like rolls of toilet paper and throwing them away. That what America means to you? You some kind of Newport tennis bum, kissing butt on the vacationing Vanderbilts, or maybe handling their SLAPP suits for them?

Just wondering.

Only it was not the North fighting an invading Army deep within her borders.

Operative word, invading.

[M. Espinola]

"the harder it becomes to argue for the Union's continuation."..in 2005? Planning a little insurrection, maybe?lol

When will you Sir directly refute those quotes by those confederates (happy?), along with Robert E. DiLorenzo.

[lentulusgracchus]

Posting to each other now?

It's standard procedure around here, that if you are going to call people names, you do it to their faces by pinging them to the derogatory post.

The only person I don't do that for is capitan_refugio, who forfeited that courtesy by his own discourtesies on other threads, and by posting misleading and mislabeled material -- in essence, by lying about the discussion then in hand.

You'll notice that I'm not pinging him to this post. Like I said, he forfeited the courtesy by abusing the board.