The War Is Over - So Why The Bitterness?

Old Virginia Blog ^ | 10 April 2011 | Richard G. Williams, Jr.

[Davy Buck]

"The fact that it is acceptable to put a Confederate flag on a car *bumper and to portray Confederates as brave and gallant defenders of states’ rights rather than as traitors and defenders of slavery is a testament to 150 years of history written by the losers." - Ohio State Professer Steven Conn in a recent piece at History News Network (No, I'll not difnigy his bitterness by providing a link)

This sounds like sour grapes to me. Were it not for the "losers" . . .

[mojitojoe]

LMAO!! Now that’s funny! How would you know? He or she was banned before you were even a member. You... are an idiot! You can change your IP, do whatever want, you can’t hide your usage of certain words, phrases, your posting style, and your pathetic life that consists of being obsessed with race. Your hatred of Southerners consumes you and everyone knows why.Get over it and Get on Meds.

[mojitojoe]

I must say that Non Sequitur was an eloquent and very observant individual.

___________________
YOU are Non-Sequitur, stop pretending. NS eloquent? Was he eloquent when he went head to head with Jim Robinson and said DADT was ok? Eloquent when he makes fun of ALL Southerners and Texans? Eloquent when he calls Southerners racists? I could go on and on and on. NS was a liberal troll that was zotted TWICE by the owner of this site. NS, give it up, everyone knows it’s you, back with a new name, a new IP and trying to fly below the radar.

[onyx]

I think you’re right!

[mojitojoe]

I know I’m right and I can prove it if I have too. Past posts and present posts prove it. Everyone uses certain words, phrases, etc. It’s NS not a doubt in my mind.

[rockrr]

Wow columbo, I think you’re really onto something here. Shall I call the Inspector? LOL

[phi11yguy19]

again, no. the point of the constitution is to expressly limit the powers granted to the common government. if they had no right expressly delegated to them to confiscate people’s property, then they had no such right. there are no such “implied by the whims of the day” rights within a rule of law that chains the actions of men.

you argued IV.3 in the context of the federal government having a right to abolish an institution that was NOT abolished anywhere in the constitution or laws at that time. you have failed to provide where such an implied right is located in that charter of negative liberties (don’t keep wasting your time because no such right existed). but until you find that magic bullet, you have said nothing of value.

and of course dred scott was a constitutionally-accurate ruling, if that’s what you mean by “good”, which is the only valid way to ask it. in terms of moral “good vs bad”, a different but valid question could be “were the laws that taney had to uphold ‘morally’ good?”, and to that the obvious counter would be “is it the job of the judge to rule as the man perceives good/bad that day, or is it simply to uphold the letter of (and rule by) the law?”

legislatures alter laws, judges uphold them, executive enforces them. doesn’t get simpler than that.

when one branch encroaches upon the duties of the other, then the separation of powers disintegrate and begin their consolidation into a branch. taney understood this and acted constitutionally. lincoln understood this and started the consolidation (being so bold as trying to arrest taney, initiate wars, arrest without warrant, etc. etc.) Congress sat by and watch, that is until they started covering up big L’s tracks with amendments and laws passed without constitutional representation.

got it?

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

again, no. the point of the constitution is to expressly limit the powers granted to the common government. if they had no right expressly delegated to them to confiscate people’s property, then they had no such right. there are no such “implied by the whims of the day” rights within a rule of law that chains the actions of men.

Do you believe that states had the power to regulate slavery within their borders?

you argued IV.3 in the context of the federal government having a right to abolish an institution that was NOT abolished anywhere in the constitution or laws at that time

I argued that the clause gives the federal government the right to govern the territories, and that includes regulating slavery within them.

and of course dred scott was a constitutionally-accurate ruling

So you agree then, that blacks, at least until the 14th amendment was passed, had "no rights that the white man was bound to respect."

And for the third time, have you bothered to read the Record of the Constitutional Convention to which I provided a link?

[K-Stater]

How would you know? He or she was banned before you were even a member.

You just posted a selection of his past quotes. I assume you have more safely stored away somewhere?

Your hatred of Southerners consumes you and everyone knows why.Get over it and Get on Meds.

You seem to have hate and hating down pat yourself.

[K-Stater]

again, no. the point of the constitution is to expressly limit the powers granted to the common government. if they had no right expressly delegated to them to confiscate people’s property, then they had no such right

I might agree with that if you can point to where the words 'expressed' or 'expressly' are to be found in the Constitution.

and of course dred scott was a constitutionally-accurate ruling, if that’s what you mean by “good”

And what part of the Constitution supports the idea that the states determine who can or cannot be a U.S. citizen? Or which supports Taney's conclusion that blacks are "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect?"

got it?

Oh yeah.

[Idabilly]

You can change your IP, do whatever want, you can’t hide your usage of certain words, phrases, your posting style, and your pathetic life that consists of being obsessed with race.

When he dismisses facts as "Southron Mythology" we'll have the old Non Sequitur back. Tell me K-Stater,.. what do you think about this quotes?

"If it is a crime to love the South, its cause and its President, then I am a criminal. I would rather lie down in this prison and die than leave it owing allegiance to a government such as yours."

"The rank and file were chiefly farmers and small merchants, comparatively very few were owners of slaves; but they were all descended from ancestors whose fortunes and blood had been freely spent in the war of the revolution; they volunteered in obedience to the call of their state to resist invasion; they came with a firm determination to do their full duty."

"It is to me simply incredible, that a people so shrewd and practical as those of the United States, should expect us to have discarded, through the logic of the sword merely, the convictions of a lifetime; or that they could be deceived by us, should we be base enough to asset it of ourselves. They know that the people of the South were conquered, and not convinced; and that the authority of the United States was accepted by us from necessity, and not from preference. [snip] The people of the South went to war, because they sincerely believed (what their political fathers had taught them, with one voice, for two generations) that the doctrine of State-sovereignty for which they fought, was absolutely essential as the bulwark of the liberties of the people."

"I love the Union and the Constitution, but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it.''

“There are two world histories. One is the official and full of lies, destined to be taught in schools – the other is the secret history, which harbors the true causes and occurrences.”

"Lincoln's war implied, and the Gettysburg Address set to words, a firm message to the States of the Union - "I love you all, and if you leave me, I'll hunt you down and kill you." The Address was not the sagely comments of a wise statesman, rather the vain, obsessive rantings of a power-hungry demon engaging in a blood-thirsty mission of self-aggrandizement, no matter the volume of corpses required to attain it."

[x]

On the other hand, you offered no support for your "philadelphians were agitated" generalization.

Maybe I should have said "Pennsylvanians," but really you should have learned about these things in school. Google "slave hunters Pennsylvania" or "fugitive slaves Pennsylvania." Look up the "Christiana riots," "Henry Box Brown," or the town of Freedom, PA. If you had learned about Pennsylvanians' fear of slave hunters, you might not think as you do now about secession and the Confederacy.

"Revolutionaries" seek to fundamentally transform their current form of government.

Dissolving the union would amount to a revolution. If you're a Marxist, secessionists might not be revolutionaries in your understanding of the word, but for others -- even for many secessionists themselves -- they were. There was much talk of a "Revolution of 1861" in the spirit of the "Revolution of 1776." If the Confederacy had lasted, there would have been more of that talk, but with the defeat of the CSA, a more legalistic rationale for secession was developed: talk of a slaveowner's "revolution" didn't have much appeal after Emancipation and reunification.

In any case, there was a crisis of the regime, something it wouldn't be wrong to call a revolutionary situation, in 1861. If you lived in Knoxville or Louisville or Baltimore you wouldn't know from one day to the next which flag you'd be living under. You wouldn't know if enough armed men at the right location would put you in the Union or in the Confederacy. Maybe there's another phrase that better characterizes the fear of those days, but until one comes along, I'll stick with "revolutionary situation."

So is fear a reason to legitimize a war?

Fear was a major factor in opposition to secession and a major factor motivating secession. Do you think there would have been secession and war without fear?

[x]

"The fact that it is acceptable to put a Confederate flag on a car *bumper and to portray Confederates as brave and gallant defenders of states’ rights rather than as traitors and defenders of slavery is a testament to 150 years of history written by the losers." - Ohio State Professer Steven Conn in a recent piece at History News Network (No, I'll not difnigy his bitterness by providing a link)

First paragraph and he's already "difnigying."

I guess it is all about race.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Lincoln was not perfectly enlightened by today’s standards neither is it fair to call Jefferson Davis a depraved human being, but it was the Confederacy who admitted that their regime was founded upon a cornerstone of slavery.

[Who is John Galt?]

WIJG?: ...[I] was wondering where the Union enthusiasts might have posted the article, section, and clause of the antebellum United States Constitution, prohibiting the expansion of slavery - or even prohibiting the importation of slaves. Now that would make interesting reading...

BHT: As for the first, it's Article IV, Sec. 3... As for the second, that would be Article 1, Sec. 9... Yes, the Constitution is interesting reading. You should try it sometime. [K-S with similar response, see Post 330]

Actually, I have read the Constitution, and will simply note that neither of the clauses cited 'prohibits' anything. Both authorize Congress to act - and any 'prohibition' passed by one Congress could be reversed by a subsequent (or even the same) Congress. One might just as well suggest that Article I, Sec. 8 ("The Congress shall have Power...To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces...") prohibits a federal military.

With all due respect, gentlemen, the U.S. Constitution prohibited neither the expansion of slavery, nor the importation of slaves.

(As a footnote, not even the 13th Amendment mentions any prohibition on importation. Would any slaves 'imported' after December 1865 be freed immediately upon arrival within U.S. jurisdiction - or refused entry? ;>)

[phi11yguy19]

Do you believe that states had the power to regulate slavery within their borders?

As it wasn't a power the States delegated to the common federal government, with whom else would that reside? Or are we mixing legal vs "moral" questions again?

I argued that the clause gives the federal government the right to govern the territories, and that includes regulating slavery within them.

And therein lies the fallacy. Their right to govern could not infringe upon the rights of the States or citizens within them. Since the territories were "commonly" owned by the states, the common government could not pass a law that allowed Massachusetts men to legally reside within them while excluding (slaveholding) men from Virgina.

So you agree then, that blacks, at least until the 14th amendment was passed, had "no rights that the white man was bound to respect."

Nope, and neither did Taney. That excerpt prefaced his statement about how it came to be that blacks became slaves in the first place centuries earlier; it was not a commentary of the laws of that day, except federally speaking. As non-citizens, they held no federal status, so their protection was a State issue. And States had plenty of laws on their books to exact justice for crimes against blacks, and some of the strictest were in the South.

If you want to have a philosophical, ethical, etc. debate instead of legal, please explain what that would have to do with the overall discussion that Lincoln unconstitutionally usurped his powers and unilaterally waged war on law abiding citizens. But a warning, you'll have to address the morality of using the the most evil of means (a bloody, lawless war) to achieve "good" ends (keeping a political union intact). As the historical record unfortunately shows, Lincoln's "end" waging war on the South was "Union", not slavery.

have you bothered to read the Record of the Constitutional Convention to which I provided a link?

No, and yes. I did not read your link. But among other books I own and have read, Bailyn's complete 2-volume Debate on the Constitution likely includes everything on that site. What would you like to discuss?

[x]

I believe secession despite the Corwin Amendment supports this view.

If Britain had offered after Bunker Hill to repeal all the taxes they'd imposed on the colonies -- or decided after the Declaration of Independence was adopted that they'd never impose another tax on Americans -- the colonists would have rejected their offer.

That rejection wouldn't mean that "taxation without representation" wasn't the main issue and the cause of the war. It was just that too much had happened. It wasn't enough anymore for Britain to back down. The Colonists wanted out of the empire completely.

So it was with the Corwin Amendment. If it had been adopted in 1850, Southerners might have been happy with it. It wouldn't have been adopted then -- it was only as a last ditch attempt to save the Union that Northerners considered it -- but by 1861 it was too little too late.

I could site other examples of "too little too late" -- if the Germans or Japanese had decided after Normandy or Iwo Jima that they'd leave the countries they'd conquered and retreat behind their earlier borders in exchange for peace, the Allies wouldn't have accepted their offer, even though Axis conquest of those territories had been the reason the Allies had fought against them -- but the point isn't that hard to grasp.

You might say that rejection of the Corwin Amendment meant that Southerners who were active in politics thought something else more important than slavery. Someone else would respond that at the time they (wrongly) felt that slavery would be most secure outside the union rather than inside. It's possible that independence had become more important for secessionists than slavery at that particular moment, but what had motivated them up until that point? What was behind the movement? Slavery is a very good answer to those questions.

The funny thing in all this is that people who wouldn't trust a "Yankee" any further than they could throw him, people who always assume that Lincoln had something up his sleeve, also assume that the secessionists took Northerners at their word and rejected a good faith offer by the government to ensure slavery's survival in the South. If you trust Northerners so little, and the secessionists of 1861 trusted them so little, maybe they didn't respond to the Corwin Amendment because they knew (or suspected) that Northerners weren't on the up-and-up, and wouldn't honor it.

[Who is John Galt?]

"The objection that the war is water over the dam and that the problems of the present demand our attention is valid providing that history is all bunk and that there is nothing to learn from our past. But the problems of the present are largely the legacy of the past, and if the past had settled them right they wouldn't confront us at the present time."

I am reminded of the 1990s, and the passage of the liberals' beloved federal "gun bans." It was amazing to me how absolutely clueless they were, in terms of how seriously such a constitutional infringement was viewed by quite a large number of Americans. They had learned nothing from history, and were just as oblivious to the risk of violence and division as were the antebellum northerners, including Mr. Lincoln himself. (Gabor S. Boritt, Director of the Civil War Institute, and Fluhrer Professor at Gettysburg College, details the latter in his "And the War Came"? Abraham Lincoln and the Question of Individual Responsibility.)

[phi11yguy19]

oh, what a breakthrough! you "may agree" with me...

except that since i never "quoted" the words your asking me to identify as having quoted, i miss the point. are you saying the document cannot be explained without also using the exact words used in it? Maybe you should tell the Senate that, hawk-eye, since they explain the 10th Amendment on senate.gov...

The federal government is the recipient of constitutionally delegated powers. What is not delegated remains in the states or in the people.

...and I'm POSITIVE "recipient" and "constitutionally" aren't in there! WHOA, our government doesn't even know as much as you!

When you look up "dumb" in a dictionary, do expect it to be defined as "dumb"?

[Idabilly]

Lincoln was not perfectly enlightened by today’s standards neither is it fair to call Jefferson Davis a depraved human being, but it was the Confederacy who admitted that their regime was founded upon a cornerstone of slavery.

As one reads the speeches and letters of Confederate leaders during the war, it becomes apparent that they certainly didn't believe their main reason for fighting was to preserve slavery. The key issue was Southern independence, not slavery. However, the primary purpose of the federal invasion was always to destroy Southern independence and to force the seceded states back into the Union .

[phi11yguy19]

yup. take the means of self defense from the law abiding citizens, and the threat of retaliation away from lawless criminals, and all human nature’s problems will be solved. liberal logic is beautiful in it’s madness.

not to mention that the history of evil dictatorships expanding their power with the “noble” task of disarming the citizens. i wonder why the founders felt the need to protect such a right...