Posted on 05/10/2010 3:17:06 PM PDT by Davy Buck
"If Lee was a traitor (and I don't believe he was), he would be the only traitor for which a ship in the United States Navy was ever named. He would be the only traitor in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol. He would be the only traitor whose image was used in a positive way to recruit military personnel to fight and win WWII. Quite an accomplishment for a "traitor", wouldn't you say. . ."
(Excerpt) Read more at oldvirginiablog.blogspot.com ...
The arguments in favor of secession are not persuasive. The Southern states did not experience any oppressions or deprivations of rights before they seceded. Secession was instead due to slavery and the South's pride. The South feared that Lincoln's election marked a decisive loss of power that would eventually lead to the admission of additional free states and abolition.
In arguing for secession, pro-slavery Southern leaders projected that an independent, slave-holding Confederacy could dominate the Caribbean and Central America, adding new slave territories and states so as to rival or exceed the North. It was believed that by commanding most of the world's production of cotton, sugar, and tobacco, the Confederacy would accrue much additional wealth and power.
These fantasies and secession should have been rejected. Even with Lincoln's election, the South remained powerful enough to delay or block abolition in favor of gradual emancipation on terms suitable to the South. And even without pressure from abolitionists, soil exhaustion and cotton from Egypt and India would have made slavery economically unsustainable by the 1880s.
Without the Civil War, slavery would have been succeeded by a system of sharecropping acceptable to the South. Indeed, most of the North would have supported a system of sharecropping to keep freed blacks tied to Southern agriculture and out of the North's cities where they would depress wages and bring racial problems.
Without the Civil War, the South would have industrialized and diversified its agriculture. Considering the disruption and loss of life and treasure, secession and war were not just foolish but were virtually acts of suicide by the Old South.
Fulminations these days about "traitor Robert E. Lee" or "dishonest Abe" are ludicrous as the issues do not now merit such passions and attitudes -- if they ever did.
However, anybody from California - when they get out of a A/C cooled jetliner - after landing in the South in July, gets this tremendous urge to dig up Lincoln's body, kick it dead in the a$$ and yell, "What the hell were you thinking?!!! This place is hot and muggy, let'em go!"
N doubt about it, but the South’s rapid growth in recent decades depends on air conditioning. I grew up in Florida without it, but I would be hard put to spend even a week in the summer without air conditioning.
No, he wasn't. He resigned from the U.S. Army on April 20, 1861, and accepted a Virginia Militia commission.
The United States blockaded Virginia a week later, while its voters were considering secession articles. Before Virginia voters gave their assent to secession, Union (and specifically Massachusetts) troops opened combat with Virginia Militia batteries in Norfolk.
The day after the Virginia referendum on May 23d, Lincoln invaded the State, sending Irvin McDowell's army across the river. It wasn't a "deployment", either, but aggression against a former State of the Union now seceded and independent.
Lincoln had delivered Virginia an act of war on April 27, almost a month before the vote and a week after Lee's resignation, by blockading the State. This was violent coercion exerted against a State of the Union, an eventuality contemplated with horror in 1787 by the Framers (they said it wouldn't/couldn't/shouldn't happen), which breaks all compacts and constitutions ipso facto.
One could argue that, regardless of what Virginia voters thought about it, the federal Union was dissolved between Virginia and the United States the minute Lincoln blockaded the State. Lincoln violated Article I of the Constitution and set at defiance his obligation to treat Virginia as a full State of the Union as long as secession had not been yet ratified by her voters. (After all, a nearly-contemporaneous vote of a Maryland secession convention had rejected secession, and a couple of months earlier, a Tennessee plebiscite had likewise rejected secession.)
All of which lifts the onus of treason from the shoulders of Gen. Robt. E. Lee, thank you very much.
Ahem. Argumentum ad populum, a.k.a. "10,000 Frenchmen can't be wrong." Appeal to motive in lieu of support, etc.
They'd have been wrong. He was not a "traitor", on the facts of his case.
No, they didn't.
NINE States, and nine States only, formed the United States of America by, individually and solipsistically, on each State's People's own final-and-unappealable sovereign authority, ratified the Constitution one by one by one.
Nobody oversaw, overruled, guided, or had anything to say whatsoever about each sovereign act of ratification. There was ZERO group, reciprocal, or mutual participation in any ratification act -- each State acted 100% independently of all the others.
That is the first thing that needs to be understood. The mechanism for ratification was very precisian and exact, and for damn good reasons that were argued out in the Philadelphia convention by the Framers.
He-gets-it-exactamundo bump.
Most people have no idea -- although Madison I think it was discussed that, ehrrrrmmmm, "candid" little bit of business in one of the latter numbers of The Federalist Papers.
I'm pretty sure that that bit of knowledge has been actively suppressed by the educracy, precisely because of its implications for the argument over secession and its legality.
There, try that one.
Exactly correct.
People never get it, that Lincoln was not ol' Honest Abe the Railsplitter. He was a RAILROAD ATTORNEY and PATENT ATTORNEY, who'd spent his life being "of counsel" to Northern business interests, the people who crushed Jacksonian America so they could make more money.
People like that never gave a rat's *** about liberty. Alexander Hamilton used up at least two numbers of The Federalist arguing furiously against the Bill of Rights. His theory on liberty and freedom was, "Just trust us!"
Yeah, right, Alex, I'm sure your bag man will give us a fair shake.
Amen!
Bump for treason... the same “treason” being committed by Patriots and Tea Partiers today...
My guess is that THIS thread is long enough. Both sides disagree and as Americans we are allowed to speak our opinions.
In fairness though, I have to ask were MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton traitors for firing on and killing American citizens who were veterans of WW1? Read up on the Bonus Army and another broken promise from our(?) government.
Double shot cannister does a much better job....
Such crap. Nobody was tried for treason because the issue of secession would have come up and exposed the hypocrisy of the entire war of Nortehrn aggression. Secession was legal then and is still legal. Read the USC, says NOTHING about it. Lack of balls is why Davis or Lee weren't tried, nobody could stomach seeing those great gentlemen with nooses around their necks.
I suggest you find another thread to pollute then....
Dittos FRiend. What part of "Free Republic" is so hard for the Empire freaks to understand?
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--all sought to avert it. While the inaugeral [sic] address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissole [sic] the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
Unless you live in a state(s) that votes(or voted in the past) for secession, your opinion means jack squat.
Sure you don't, the fact that you fly off the handle any time someone mentions it is purely coincidental. I have this mental image of you sitting in your lair when suddenly you pound your fist on the table, fling your bowl of gruel against the padded wall, and scream, "My God! Will they never cease reminding us it was all about slavery????"
Union POW camps were indeed hell-holes, as were confederate ones. Both sides could have treated their prisoners better, but didn't. Both sides could have provided decent housing, but didn't. Both sides could have provided adequate food, but didn't. The treatment of POWs on both sides was deliberate and a stain on both. Wirz was the only POW camp commander to be tried for his crimes, and as guilty as he was there should have been more individuals from both sides in the dock with him.
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