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.)
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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.)
So you'd be "happy to see my documentation," but can't be bothered to look up the writers I recommend? Really, in the end we all educate -- or don't educate -- ourselves. I looked into your Claude Bowers enough to determine that he isn't a particularly valid source of information or opinion. If you don't want to do the same with Current or Stampp, that's your problem. Notice, I don't say "that's your job." I'm neither your boss, nor your parent, nor your master. I simply say that you're missing out if you don't consider and investigate opinions that go counter to your own. Simply to ignore or villify anyone who's held a position at a major university over the last 30 or 40 years is a good way to bind oneself to unexamined prejudices and foregone conclusions forever.
It's not surprising that Mark Neely points out that Civil War studies are still a living field with plenty of opportunities for investigation. That doesn't mean that he, or we, should expect such investigations to prove various conspiracy theories or validate century-old theories of Yankee perfidy. There's a lot that we don't know about the Second World War. Pointing that out doesn't mean that the revisionist theories are right.
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams hardly count as serious scholars or students of American history. Adams is preoccupied with taxes to the exclusion of everything else, and doesn't seem to have published much actual history, and Woods's Guide is a comic book version of American history, that doesn't seriously consider opposing arguments or examine evidence that conflicts with its theses. Hummel's work was more substantive, but still wrong headed, relying on speculation and ideology to carry a questionable argument. The usual Rockheads don't count for much either. If you want to write off everything that's come from writers affiliated with Claremont, there's still plenty of writing opposed to your views. Exclude the self-promoting, intellectually third-rate (at least when it comes to history) Rockwell/Mises cult and that's a large chunk of those who support your sort of arguments in print that can even claim to be taken half-way seriously.
What you've latched onto looks a lot like the wave of the past -- the ideas in circulation about a century ago that were quite conciliatory towards the secessionist South, highly critical of the abolitionists, relatively unconcerned about ideas of racial equality, and convinced that Jim Crow was a good "solution" to the "racial problem." Arguing and rethinking will go on forever, but one would have to have missed much of recent American history to embrace the older ways of looking at the Civil War and Reconstruction (older ways that were quite revisionist when introduced, and not always to the liking of those who had actually fought the war).
What we've learned about the agrarian vs. industrial argument is not to view things as naively and neatly divided as some in past generations did. We see now how Jeffersonians, Jacksonians and others on the agrarian side of the line were perfectly willing to use the federal government to achieve their ends. And we can see how tied in with the world economy and the factory system cotton planters were. They were anything but self-sufficient yeomen.
We can't naively take the Confederacy as representative of small government and the Republican-Unionists as big government men after we learn how much control the Confederate government really had over industry and commerce. Granted those were war measures, but so were many of the things done in the North that have been objected to.
And we can't naively take the old Democrat party simply as the party of farmers and limited government, because we know too much of the workings of parties and government to accept such self-definitions. When the time came to expand government and create a welfare state, the Democrats were on the scene doing the heavy lifting, and that needs some explanation. Nor of course was segregation ever a matter of "limited government."
Democrats like Horatio Seymour and Samuel Tilden weren't all about good government and tariff reform. They brandished noble slogans like "This is a White Man's Government" and had a clear racial agenda. Nor were antebellum Democrats like Polk entirely absorbed with decreasing the size of government. Territorial expansion, and securing a future for plantation slavery were also important concerns for them. You can slam Whigs and Republicans for their own faults, but nobody's who knows his or her history is going to take the noble Democrats vs. evil Whigs/Republicans melodrama seriously.
From the days of Madison implementing a large part of Hamilton's program to the times when Lyndon Johnson, Richard Russell and other Southern Democrats formed close business-government alliances, agrarians and industrialists, states righters and centralizers in America have been irredimiably mixed together. I'm not going to say that the Whigs or Republicans or Federalists were good and right about everything either. That's the sort of thing we've gotten away from.
Two or three generations ago a lot of people argued as you do about the Civil War and Reconstruction. That's become a lot harder in recent years with the changes in attitude. Your friends try to help but don't. They pay homage to contemporary sentiments and try to twist the history to make it look like today's attitudes and the Confederacy somehow go together. People eventually see that they don't. So between them distorting the record and you clinging to the old rhetoric that's now no longer accepted or acceptable there's not much left of the argument, even if I wanted to agree with you. You and your pals point in different directions, but for most thinking people today, both your roads are dead-ends.
BTW, I hope you do realize that your star witness, Kimberly Smith views the abolitionists in a far more positive light than you do. I haven't read her book, but here's what her publisher says:
Smith shows that alternatives to reasoned deliberation--like protest, resistance, and storytelling--have a place in politics. Such alternatives underscore the positive role that interest, passion, compassion, and even violence might play in the political life of America. Her book, therefore, is a cautionary analysis of how rationality came to dominate our thinking about politics and why its hegemony should concern us. Ultimately Smith reminds the reader that democracy and reasoned public debate are not synonymous and that the linkage is not necessarily a good thing.
You can agree or disagree with that, but it does add up to a more sympathetic view of the abolitionists than you have been peddling. She apparently thinks the abolitionists were wholly justified in using the arguments they did, and I doubt she'd really cast things in the terms that you do. From what I can gather she distrusts the cold-blooded rationalism of some forms of discussion on the grounds that they exclude the passions which do have a place in life and politics.
In fact, I think you do agree with her that emotionalism has a place in politics -- you just want to deny to your opponents the emotionalism that you indulge in to your own heart's content. That's only human. If one really believes in something, one keeps coming up with evidence to support it. Others may say that it's anecdotal or sentimental, but one keeps at it -- along with presenting other arguments -- in hope that it will make the same impression on others as it does on one's self. That is what you do. It's what the abolitionists did. And it's probably more or less what we all do, myself included. I doubt citing her book adds anything to your argument. She doesn't believe in restricting political discourse to a coldly rational Enlightement mode, and I doubt you really do either. You might appreciate her book on agrarianism, though.
I notice that you still haven't answered whether you would have built the Liberty Place monument to the White Leagues and whether you would have kept it up. It would put an end to much speculation if you did.