Posted on 04/14/2005 6:40:53 PM PDT by kellynla
At Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally wounds President Abraham Lincoln. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Booth, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.
Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene's acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.
On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward's home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln's private theater box unnoticed, and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth jumped to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]--the South is avenged!" Although Booth had broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln's box, he succeeded in escaping Washington.
The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford's Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, he died--the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth, pursued by the army and secret service forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Of the eight other persons eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed.
That is worst cooking in the south BBQ! I would not even walk into a BBQ joint there, not to mention eating there! The place stinks from outrageous odor of vinegar. Cooking on fire was bastardized to no end when the dirty fingers of the English, and German touched it. But that is my test, and they have their own. However, the real arbiter of who's taste is better comes when independent tester of food render their opinions. At any fine food establishment, refined taste never ask for BBQ drenched in Molasses and vinegar, with a side of coleslaw drenched in winger. Give me a break, just writing about that crap makes me puke!
Does the word "sovereign" mean anything to you? Use the word "sovereign" and the word "allowed" in the same sentence.
Our next exercise will be your trying to tell me that the States that ratified the Constitution were not sovereign.
Your statement is incorrect, but at least we've established that you're deeply into power.
Are you suggesting that that is where he learned his cookery?
May I invite you to sample the fine cooking of Fall River on a permanent basis?
What a rant.......but please, follow your inclination and stay away from BBQ, it really isn't good for you and you shouldn't eat it, ever.
More for us.
AS for vinegar, it's good for lots of things in cooking and around the house. For example, it is a potent destroyer of all sorts of molds -- such as the overgrowth that is obviously filling every available space in your none-too-capacious-to-begin-with braincase.
[You] They had no such unilateral powers.
a Sure they did. But if you don't think so, show me where they gave them up. You can't, but you owe it to us to show us in black letters on white paper where the States gave up the power of sitting in convention as a People and resuming their sovereign powers. You can't, but you have to show us.
[Me] There was no rebellion. Italy doesn't rebel against France by telling France to stick it.
[You] France and Italy are both sovereign nations. The confederacy was not.
The States that formed it, were. As soon as they withdrew from the Union, every one of the seceding States were as they had been before ratification, with this exception: the old Union of the Articles of Confederation were no more, so they were completely independent and unbound by any treaty, constitution, or compact.
[You again, betraying weakness] Other than the original 13, states did not join anything. They were admitted, and only with the permission of a majority of the other states.
On the same basis as every other State, including the original 13. Once they were States, they were States. No more, no less, with the same powers and the same degree of sovereignty.
The majority of the other States did not "permit" Texas to join the Union in 1836. Led by the execrable and spiteful Yankee (but I repeat myself) John Quincy Adams (there, I did it again), Texas was a State nevertheless, and exercised her sovereignty outside the Union by contending in arms with Mexico in continuous border disputes, in driving the frontier westward, in keeping and maintaining a Navy, and in accepting the placement of foreign legations on her soil.
It was Texas's actions on its claims in New Mexico that made the Yankees finally see the light: better a State in the Union, than a competitor outside it.
Texas was admitted in 1846, and the U.S. flag was finally hauled up in 1847. But Texas, believe me, was every inch the peer of the United States, a fact which is recognized to this very day by the act of admission: Texans have the right to fly our flag at the same height as that of the United States in every venue and on every occasion.
Furthermore, Texas was no less a State before or after admission, than the United States. Ditto the other 49 States, no matter what Harry Jaffa tells you in the confessional.
You aren't talking to Piedmontese peasants here, bub, no matter how much you wish you were.
Quote it. In full.
Not that I don't trust you -- well, I don't. Not after the repeated episodes of misattribution of material with your buddy, capitan_refugio, the Supreme Court Reporter.
Hey, 'Bucket -- is our boy assuming Godlike powers and proportions again?
Not in the way you seem to think they were.
My statement in correct, but at least we've established that you're deeply in denial.
No, he learned his cookery at Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island, perfected it in Paris and Lyon and New York and Boston and Philadelphia, all before moving to New Orleans, probably out of pity.
No they did not. They never had them.
They were, in their deluded minds perhaps. But in the eyes of the rest of the world they were nothing more than a rebellious part of the US.
On the same basis as every other State, including the original 13. Once they were States, they were States. No more, no less, with the same powers and the same degree of sovereignty.
No, the original 13 agreed to abide by the same restrictions as those admitted later, when they ratified the Constitution. States don't join, they are admitted. They are allowed into the body politic only with the permission of the other states. Same with leaving.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Concurring bump. Well stated.
I would also think that states could not be forced to leave the Union against their wishes. This protects the sovereignty of a state [like Kansas] from becoming a landlocked orphan at the expense of her neighbors.
[You] Not in the way you seem to think they were.
Well, chief, since they were intact in their sovereignty under the Articles and there can be no doubt of that, then perhaps you'd better explain how, in your, Harry Jaffa's, and Lincoln the Conqueror's opinion, they were not sovereign when the Constitution was presented to them for ratification.
What you can't get around is that the bodies that sat down to deliberate ratification were the People in convention, and sovereign in every way that matters, under God and the sun.
You can't stand that, can you? And no wonder -- neither can your theory.
I'll pass your little note to the doormen at Arnaud's, Galatoire's, and all the other better eateries in New Orleans. You'll starve, if you ever go there.
They would not know a good tasting scrod if it swam up and bit them. :)
I was thinking of Article IV, but show me how this Amendment prohibits the People of the States from resuming their powers as Sovereigns under God, and seceding. I don't see it. Did you post it in a very small font? In white?
Black letters, please.
Here, meanwhile, is your hero Hamilton, in Federalist 84, on the question in hand:
It has been several times truly remarked that bills of rights are, in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgements of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. Such was MAGNA CHARTA, obtained by the barons, sword in hand, from King John. Such were the subsequent confirmations of that charter by succeeding princes. Such was the PETITION OF RIGHT assented to by Charles I., in the beginning of his reign. Such, also, was the Declaration of Right presented by the Lords and Commons to the Prince of Orange in 1688, and afterwards thrown into the form of an act of parliament called the Bill of Rights. It is evident, therefore, that, according to their primitive signification, they have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain every thing they have no need of particular reservations.[Emphasis supplied.]
That includes sovereignty, and the right to sit in convention as Sovereign, and the right to withdraw from the Union.
If the People didn't have the right to withdraw from the Union, to avoid oppression, why did Madison keep talking about secession?
Hamilton didn't think it was necessary, but he didn't say it was impossible or illegal: here he is in Federalist 85:
The zeal for attempts to amend, prior to the establishment of the Constitution, must abate in every man who is ready to accede to the truth of the following observations of a writer equally solid and ingenious:
"To balance a large state or society, says he, whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it. The judgments of many must unite in the work; experience must guide their labor; time must bring it to perfection, and the feeling of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they INEVITABLY fall into in their first trials and experiments."
These judicious reflections contain a lesson of moderation to all the sincere lovers of the Union, and ought to put them upon their guard against hazarding anarchy, civil war, a perpetual alienation of the States from each other, and perhaps the military despotism of a victorious demagogue, in the pursuit of what they are not likely to obtain, but from time and experience. [Edited for small typos and added emphasis; the quote is from Hume's Essays.]
Actually, incorrectly.
I would also think that states could not be forced to leave the Union against their wishes.
Wanna bet? Show me in the Constitution where it says that can't happen, and I'll believe you.
The individuals states, from the time of their creation in July 1776, were never endowed with the full range of sovereign authority. In creating the nation-state, called the United States of America, the individual states retained their "internal" sovereignty. "External" sovereignty was exercized by the Union, and has been since that time.
It might be fair, then, to say the individual states were "semi-sovereign."
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