Posted on 12/02/2008 6:57:32 AM PST by prplhze2000
came across an article from an old issue of U.S. News & World Report commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. What was interesting was that it compared the treatment of the South for decades after the war's end to the millions of dollars and additional support given to Germany and other European countries through the Marshall plan and concluded the South's fate was a drag on the rest of the country as it remained the poorest section of America by far.....
U.S Treasury agents streamed through the South in 1865 grabbing cotton, land, anything that they claimed to have been the property of the Confederacy. They took cotton valued at $30 million. Behind them came hordes of carpetbaggers (With the Wall Street Journal's blessing I'm sure. They'll invent some economic theory to justify it while professing to hate the looters in Atlas Shrugged) from the North to drain away any Southern Capital they could lay hands on..."
The Southern steel industry, doing a booming business in 1900, was virtually stopped in its track, Southerners said, by a rate structure imposed by the North. The rates required payment of price differentials so sharp that it became cheaper for an industry in New Orleans to buy steel from Pittsburgh than from Birmingham. Not until World War II were changes made in this system."
Such policies created a region so poor and under-educated that FDR called the South the "nations number one economic problem" in 1938...
(Excerpt) Read more at kingfish1935.blogspot.com ...
Wrong way around. Article 1, Section 10 conveys certain specific, enumerated, express powers to the federal government. It is not a general, sweeping prohibition, but a very nitpicky, specific cession by the States in favor of the federal establishment.
I defy you to show me words in Article I that say different.
Exercises of state sovereignty are prohibited bu the Constitution in Article 1, Section 10.
Absolutely not. Why are Supreme Court Justices always finding that the States do have sovereignty? You will want to rethink that one. Chief Justice Rehnquist was only the latest in a long line of justices that have contradicted you.
You keep trying to jack up Section 10 to a general prohibition and a general cession of sovereignty, and the black-letter law of the Constitution is against you.
Your hubris is amazing, as is your hubristic sense that you will never, ever be called on this stuff.
Therefore exercises of state sovereignty are not powers reserved to the states by the Constitution.
You need to do some remedial reading of the Tenth Amendment.
You sound like Buzzy Ginzburg in maximum gun-grabbing mode. "If the right does not exist, then can the law be said to harm a right?"
Nowhere in the Constitution are the prohibitions voided by a provision for secession.
Wrong way around again, my totalitarian, armored-myrmidon-statist interlocutor. It works the other way around, or did you miss Hamilton in Federalist 81? He and Marshall (when Marshall argued for ratification in the Virginia ratification convention) both made it perfectly clear that a power that is not conveyed to the federal government, that is not enumerated in the articles of the Constitution, remains with the States and with the People.
Being strict constructions, if we are going to consistent, we must limit ourselves to what the Constitution says, not what it doesn't say.
Dead wrong. What the Constitution does not say, is the whole corpus of our Ninth and Tenth Amendment liberties, powers, and freedoms. Freedom is always the default condition -- that is the meaning of the Ninth Amendment. You would obliterate it to serve your power-madness.
The Constitution, what it does say, is the supreme law of the land, not what Jefferson or Hamilton might have said.
Actually, it wasn't. It wasn't the supreme law of the land in the four States that hadn't yet ratified it, when the ninth State ratified the Constitution and it became operative and binding on the States that had ratified it.
In the other four States, the Constitution wasn't anything. It was less than nothing. It was a piece of paper being argued over. It had no force, its writ ran not.
The ONLY thing that gives force to the Constitution is ratification by the People. And the People have the power to unmake their ratification and secede, just as much as they had power to make it.
Not hardly, your stonewalling to the contrary absolutely notwithstanding.
There stands Lincoln over his pile of dead. People who were alive when he came to office, who had survived every political controversy, until he moved troops into Virginia, to make his discretion a law unto his fellows.
Deny the war. Deny the dead. Deny Lincoln triumphant. Keep denying. Deny, deny, deny -- but there they are. The dead, and Lincoln, and the Constitution he stood on in military boots and rewrote as he saw fit.
You can't celebrate the truth one instant, bellowing your coarse victory yells -- and then deny Lincoln's, and your, responsibility for the carnage at the next breath.
That's bank-robber logic: "That security guard made me kill him!" You with money in hand, dead guard on ground, and it ain't your fault at all.
No jury on this planet would agree with you. Convicted. Gas chamber. Next case.
Keep poking at it, and a big-nosed J.P. Morgan might pop out.
Troops which wouldn't have gone anywhere if the South had not initiated a war by bombarding Sumter.
Deny the war. Deny the dead. Deny Lincoln triumphant. Keep denying. Deny, deny, deny -- but there they are. The dead, and Lincoln, and the Constitution he stood on in military boots and rewrote as he saw fit.
ROTFLMAO!!!!
No jury on this planet would agree with you. Convicted. Gas chamber. Next case.
Imitating Fury and the Mouse does not make you a winner.
It was a union town, and most guys I grew up with simply went to work at the plants. Money was good, education unnecessary. I lived for a while in a town almost identical. Anderson Indiana. Same industrial base. Same stupid union thuggery. Beaumont TX is the same way. I am sure there are towns all over the US like that.
On the other hand, rural towns characterized as "hayseed" or "hillbilly" have surprised me in having vibrant (if small) arts and performing arts communities, higher percentages of educated peoples, folks SHOWING UP for local political gatherings, and a much higher percentage of people who are committed to freedom, liberty, and resistance to encroaching authority, whether it comes from the state or the fed. Guntersville Alabama (home to a huge TVA lake, Tennessee river dammed there) is a great example of a retirement town in which many "yankees" have relocated, but don't bring a bunch of stupid "please tax us" ideas. Auburn Alabama is similar. Bucolic, friendly, extremely pro 2nd amendment, more Southern Baptists than people (LITERALLY!) and an active group of libertarian nuts who just pester the hell out of the local Republican officials. Johnson City TN ditto. I am sure there are tons of them. My kind of place. Sometimes I wonder why I don't just get a teachers cert and move to one of those towns. The quality of life there vs the money here make that a question that repeats more and more often, nowadays.
Venting your bile towards Lincoln and posting opinion masquerading as fact doesn't make you right either. But at least I have a sense of humor.
And the reference wasn't gongoristic, it was Lewis Carroll. Obscure to those who graduated from Southern institutions of higher learning perhaps, but not to the more literary parts of the country. Allow me to improve your knowledge base: The Mouse's Tale
Speaking of things Yankee, did you notice this about the Boston draft riot (in my link above), which was essentially the Irish rioting against the draft and the Yankee establishment but not against blacks.
... the ire of the Irish was generally focused on the elite Yankee ruling class, which bitterly subjugated them. Three decades earlier, a crowd of Yankees dressed as Native Americans had burned down the Roman Catholic Ursuline Convent in Charlestown.
I guess the Yankee Puritan streak was still running strong back then. In the old days when they ran out of witches to persecute, they used to brand Baptists and send them out of state. Tolerant bunch. Cabots and Lowells and all.
And what you ignore is the fact that the majority of the Cabinet suppported the resupply effort in a meeting held on March 29th. Lincoln had two choices - give in and allow the fort to be starved into surrender or to attempt a resupply that would maintain the status quo. He chose the later and it was the confederacy who chose war.
You also well know that the state of South Carolina as well as the Confederacy made it clear that any action on the part of the US Navy to intervene, would be an act of war.
War was their goal all along.
And regarding your offhand comment of “nonsense” when you were reminded that it was the acts of Lincoln, i.e. troop call up and blockade that caused them to secede.
Once armed rebellion had broken out in Charleston it's true that four of the states chose to join it. That doesn't make Lincoln's actions wrong, but it does make Virginia's and North Carolina's and Arkansas's and Tennessee's decisions unwise given what happened to them.
And Dearie, barfing is not very lady like.
How would you know?
thank you for that info
Means nothing. Supreme Court judges frequently find things beyond the what the Constitution says. William Douglas found a penumbra in the Constitution. That's not there either.
You keep trying to jack up Section 10 to a general prohibition and a general cession of sovereignty, and the black-letter law of the Constitution is against you.
No, no, no. There's nothing general about Article 1, Section 10. It's all specific. A state can "secede". They can go ahead and annex the far side of Pluto while they're at it. But after a state has had a convention so its long winded self-interested politicians can put together an "ordinance of secession", this section of the Constitution still stands to prevent the seceded state from entering into a confederation, treaty, engage in war etc. So the secession would have about as much practical effect as the annexation of the planet Pluto. And nothing in a proclaimed secession releases the president of the US from his Constitutional duty to hold federal forts and collect the Constitutionally mandated revenues at the port of Charleston. So once the South Carolina windbags turned their hot air into interference with the proper laws of the land, Lincoln had to act.
I'll stick with Lincoln. Even before Lincoln, that noted big-government statist Andrew Jackson put it well:
But each State having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute jointly with the other States a single nation, cannot from that period possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation, and any injury to that unity is not only a breach which would result from the contravention of a compact, but it is an offense against the whole Union. To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a nation might dissolve its connection with the other parts, to their injury or ruin, without committing any offense. Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right, is confounding the meaning of terms, and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incur the penalties consequent upon a failure.
The 9th Amendment does not negate Article 1, Section 10. The people's default condition of freedom is not injured by the prohibitions. The people still have the freedom to enter into treaties and make war, they just have agreed to limit these functions to the federal level. This amendment does not even mention states, restrictions on states are not equivalent to restricting the rights of the people.
To meet your objections, I'll rewrite the offensive syllogism to be specific.
The 10th Amendment only reserves to the states those powers not prohibited by the Constitution.
A state entering into a confederation with other states is prohibited by the Constitution in Article 1, Section 10.
Therefore a state entering into a confederation with other states is not a power reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment of the Constitution.
My challenge is for you to refute that syllogism only using the Constitution itself, not what our "betters" say about the Constitution. For as conservatives, we should be strict constructionists in the fullest sense, relying fully upon the document itself with our God-given powers of reasoning. What Rehnquist, William O. Douglas, Hamilton, Lincoln, Jeff Davis, Andrew Jackson and others have said does not alter what the Constitution itself says.
Thank you very much. I guess “traitor” depends on whose side of the arguement one is on.
I saved your post to my PC. Enjoyed it a lot. Thought provoking. Someday God willing I’ll make the move out of this crazy area.
In the 1860s many Southern highlanders thought that the lowland planters were more hostile to their way of life than the government in Washington was.
They were probably right about that. Their descendants would probably feel the same way if the rebellion had succeeded.
The law was there, the Confiscation Acts. That gave Lincoln all the legal, Constitutional authority he needed. Your claims of illegality to the contrary notwithstanding.
Under what statue did Lincoln used to seize lawfully held property? If one take's Lincoln 's argument that the states in rebellion were still in the Union, then how could he take away legally owned property from his fellow citizens of the United States?
The Confiscation Acts. That gave the government the authority to seize private property used to support the rebellion without compensation.
Forget the rebel states, please explain how Lincoln and his cohorts in crime stole the legal property of the Unionist slave owners in Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, etc.
The Emacipation Proclamation didn't apply to Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, and Missouri because those states were not in rebellion.
The Dred Scott decision still was the law of the land.
What the heck did Dred Scott have to do with it?
Did Lincoln and company give payment to the slave owners for the seized property? Of course not.
By law they didn't have to.
Lincoln freed the slaves at the point of a bayonet and nothing more. The Emancipation Proclamation was a patchwork rag without any legality to cover up his failure to justify a bloody war to imprison Free States under his despotic Union rule. He needed to ennoble the war after the continuing terrible loses like the Battles at Antietam. Many in the North started grumbling to let go the states in rebellion. Most who would have challenged it constitutionality was already on the other side and anyone else in the North would have faced imprisonment as a traitor under Honest Abe's beneficent rule.
The Emancipation Proclamation had the effect of rendering the Fugitive Slave Laws unenforcable. Prior to that, slaves fleeing the area controlled by the forces of the rebellion legally could be returned to their owners. After the proclamation they were free to flee their owners and remain beyond their control.
As for the purpose of the war, from the Union standpoint it was always for the preservation of the Union. An end to slavery was a happy circumstance of that war aim, but never the primary goal.
Under his power as commander in chief prosecuting a war.
Forget the rebel states, please explain how Lincoln and his cohorts in crime stole the legal property of the Unionist slave owners in Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, etc.
They didn't. Those areas weren't subject to the Emancipation Proclamation. They were subject, however, to the 13th Amendment. In the case of Maryland, they ended slavery within their borders on their own before the 13th. As did Missouri and West Virginia.
Did Lincoln and company give payment to the slave owners for the seized property?
When Congress freed the slaves of the District of Columbia in 1862, they were compensated. But then, they weren't in rebellion.
Lincoln freed the slaves at the point of a bayonet and nothing more.
"War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want."--William Tecumseh Sherman
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