Banned sign riles heritage group

A Confederate heritage group says its free-speech rights were violated when a landowner removed a billboard promoting Southern history near the famed Darlington Raceway.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans plans to demonstrate at the State House next month and buy radio advertisements to complain about losing its billboard on U.S. 52, about two miles from the racetrack.

“This is the most chilling thing I’ve seen against freedom of speech,” spokesman Don Gordon said.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans bought the billboard this spring in response to remarks by a NASCAR executive about the rebel flag.

The billboard featured a Confederate flag and a checkered race flag. The message said, “Victory is Great, but Honor is Greater. Defend your Southern heritage.”

The billboard, taken down briefly in May, also listed the group’s phone number and name.

Officials of the S.C. Central Railroad, which owns the land where the billboard stood, said the message was “controversial” and needed to come down.

“It is not in our commercial interests to have billboards on our property displaying messages that might be controversial in the local community, whatever the substance of the messages,” a company spokeswoman said in a prepared statement.

“We made no judgment as to the content of the billboard, but we did understand it to be controversial and therefore asked that it be removed.”

An outdoor advertising company, hired by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, installed the sign just before Darlington’s annual Mother’s Day race. It was removed permanently June 16, according to a July 11 letter from the S.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans commander, Randall Burbage, to fellow members.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans says it is an international, nonprofit historical society. The group, which says it has 30,000 members nationally, has taken positions in defense of the Confederate flag in South Carolina.

In October, NASCAR’s chief executive, Brian France, told the CBS television show “60 Minutes” the Confederate flag was “not a flag that I look at with anything favorable. That’s for sure.”

As it branches away from its traditional Southern fan base, NASCAR has tried to shed its rebel-flag-waving image. The nation’s largest stock car racing organization has started diversity programs and tried to appeal to black and Hispanic fans. The Darlington Raceway, in business for more than 50 years, has served as a pillar of NASCAR.

“A member of the France family said some uncomplimentary things, so we put that billboard up to make a statement and to stimulate new members,” the confederate veterans’ Gordon said. “We really didn’t expect anything like this to occur.”

Attempts to reach NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter were unsuccessful. However, Hunter said last spring that NASCAR did not seek to have the sign removed.

“If we find out NASCAR is involved, you can expect airplanes towing Confederate banners over every NASCAR race anywhere in this nation — forever,” Gordon said.

Mac Josey, vice president at the Darlington Raceway, said he knew nothing about the billboard and did not ask that it be removed. He said the track does not fly Confederate flags, although some fans do.

Wesley Blackwell, chairman of the Darlington County Council, said he heard about the billboard during a social gathering at the Darlington speedway in May. Blackwell said the county did not ask that the sign be removed.

The Confederate veterans group paid Palmetto Outdoor Media more than $5,000 to put up the advertisement, Gordon said. Most of the money was refunded when the sign was removed.

“What if it was a sign trying to bring new members to the NAACP? We all know not a word would be said,” Gordon said.

Palmetto Outdoor Media co-owner Rodney Monroe said his company’s land-lease agreement with S.C. Central Railroad has a section that called for the removal of offensive advertisements.

“We lease the property from the company and we, obviously, crossed the line as far as what was acceptable to them ... and were asked to remove the sign,” Monroe said. “We are not in the business to cause or create controversy.”

Gordon said his group had a contract with Palmetto Outdoor for the sign to stay up through part of next year.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees every American the right to free speech. However, the sign was on private property, and the property’s owner ordered it down.

Bill Rogers, director of the S.C. Press Association, said that removal violated the principle of free speech, if nothing else. The sign did not appear to be inflammatory, he said.

“I can see why they would feel their rights are violated, that if someone doesn’t like the message, they take it down,” Rogers said.

My goodness, two newspaper editorials and the case is closed.

You're pretty quick on the trigger yourself, cowboy.

No need for statistics or documentation.

That always seemed to be your attitude when nolu chan brought the bacon, or rustbucket, or Pea Ridge, or stainless. I was just trying to be considerate of my interlocutor. Or are we playing Wlat's favorite game, "I win"?

Never mind the fact that far from drying up, tariff revenue expanded greatly.

You keep saying that. I guess your fellow-posters who disagreed with you don't count?

They're better-equipped than I to argue tariff stats, so I'll let them, while noting again that original source material, which you referred to in your reply to Domain Master, refers repeatedly to tariffs and business considerations in the debate about secession. Alexander Stephens, whom you referenced, opposed secession in his reply to Robert Toombs in the Georgia secession debate, and I happen to think he was "righter" than Toombs; but your referencing his remarks shows that you know very well that Southerners spent a good deal of time debating the proposition that the Union was a one-way street, or proposed to become a one-way street, in which the North would take advantage of the South economically.

Mind you, it needn't have been actually true, and modern economic analyses and sensitivity tests of the effects of tariffs on Southern States' gdp's might show that the Southerners' apprehensions were ill-founded, but the point here, is that they thought they were correct, and that they acted on those beliefs.

And not just on the slavery question -- your and the Red historians' politically-motivated, Clintonoid "contextualizing" gainsay utterly notwithstanding.

Keep in mind there was a considerable off-the-books trade through military lines with the Confederacy, often involving people connected to Lincoln's circle -- like Ben "Spoons" Butler -- involving raw cotton going north and coffee and other consumer nondurables going south.

Likewise, I'm not sure from following your, rustbucket's, and Non-Sequitur's discussion about what was involved in tariff/customs collections and what wasn't, whether any of that captured the prewar coastwise trade in cotton that was often factored or brokered in or through New York.

Coastwise cotton sales would have been internal "exports" counted as domestic trade, until they were forwarded from New York to Birmingham. If those sales went to New Hampshire instead, they didn't count as exports. But the coastal trade all inured to the benefit of the North, as they were basically offering the planter early returns at a deep discount in lieu of a royal screwing if the Southern cotton factor decided to try to export the cotton himself: he got screwed in freight rates charged by the Northern shipper, or he got screwed by the United States Treasury Department, which charged him an upfront cash penalty for shipping via a foreign-flag shipper who charged him the going, non-subsidized rate. Either way, he was subsidizing, not Northern manufacturers, but Northern merchants and shippers -- by operation of the law.

Contrast the upfront cash impost the cotton exporter had to pay, to avoid the Yankee shippers, with the deal the Yankee merchants got on their imports -- deferred payment of customs, until some convenient time when a customer should appear with ready cash. The exporter had to carry his cost, while the importer in New York was allowed to defer his, and pass it quickly to his customer.

As for the Northern manufacturers, it was no skin off their nose if shippers and/or Treasury were fleecing (no pun) Southern cotton exporters. They were selling domestically anyway -- they didn't care.

And the fact that the Post was a Democrat paper probably doesn't enter into it either. And if you get right down to it, much of it doesn't make a lick of sense.

I grant you Greeley's paper was Democrat, but the Post's editorial line fell right in with that of The New York Times. How "Democrat" is that -- calling for war on the South?

But if you insist, here's another paper, much more Republican-sounding, the Manchester Union Democrat:

The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing....It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No---we MUST NOT "let the South go." [Emphasis in original]
-- Union Democrat, Manchester, N.H., February 19, 1861.

If the Union Democrat is to be believed in the slightest, that "the South gains by this process," then by the operation of logic, what I posted above, and what Robert Toombs told the Georgians, was correct: the North was indeed cleaning up on the South, by the operation of the tariff as it existed, never mind the impending Morrill Tariff that was to be passed the following year.

It was about the Benjamins, your blowhard snarliness to the contrary notwithstanding.

If New Orleans is in an independent confederacy, a foreign nation, then how can goods come into New Orleans and be distributed nationwide duty free? At some point they travel from the confederacy to the U.S. and at that point then doesn't it make sense that the U.S. duty would be levied?

That's a very good point. It shows up the fact that the editorialist wasn't really concerned about tariff revenue from the imports as much as he was sales of tariff-subsidized Yankee manufactures in the South and the West. Because that is where the gouge was biting -- and by the operation of arithmetic, in the South more than in the West, because the center of population was still well east of the Mississippi.

It was about sales of Yankee manufactures, and the protection Yankee shippers and brokers enjoyed in capturing a significant share of the value of Southern cotton production via middlemen's turnstile rents.

So confederacy or no confederacy, the tariff would be collected regardless of whether the goods come in at New York or at New Madrid, Mo. The Benjamins would still come rolling in.

Not to Northern manufacturers, they wouldn't -- they would lose a significant formerly-domestic market -- and not on imports by the South for her agricultural economy. Which was the real point.

You've just been discussing the effect of the war on actual tariff revenue streams, and you seem to be locked in an obscurantist -- but still meaningful -- argument about definitions and categories.

[Me]You are engaging in excessive reduction of the Northern beef with the South to a single issue. The Northern pols like Lincoln did that in their bid to unify the North politically and turn it into a bulldozer -- but the objective was the bulldozing of the South as a whole, not just slavery.

[You, playing Rope-a-Dope] One man's opinion, until you show otherwise?

I've already put up three editorials: You want Republican editorials? How about these statements?

The time is now upon us to test whether we have a government or not; whether a nation of thirty millions of people is at the mercy of a few thousand restless, desperate traitors. Shall we still delay action until there is no government to act, and anarchy reigns supreme?
-- Daily Ohio State Journal [Columbus, Ohio], Jan. 15, 1861

No militancy there. No "kill those rascals" bullyragging in that editorial. Oh, and I didn't catch the reference to slavery. Maybe it was somewhere else.

Lessee, how about Indiana? Good Republican State, even though you spit on it and call it "Hoosierville":

If we concede their demands now it is the surrender of a nation conquered by rebel members. If we make no effort to resist the wrong we submit at once to disunion and national degradation. There is no course left, either for honor or patriotism, but to reclaim by the strong hand, if it must be so, all that the seceding States have taken, enforce the laws, and learn the traitors the wisdom of the maxim that it takes two to make a bargain....
-- Indianapolis Daily Journal, Jan. 17, 1861.

No, no war talk there, either. </sarc> No slavery, either.

I told you that Republican politicians had orchestrated a chorus of sanguinary hostility toward the South, and you pooh-poohed my saying it, and demanded "proofs". Well, there they are -- the Black Republicans, speaking through their newspapers to the People of Ohio and Indiana, more than a month before Lincoln's inauguration, whipping them up and preparing them for an internecine civil war -- as soon as the preliminary red herrings could be disposed of, and the nation brought down to business by Lincoln's April decrees.

So there it is. What do you have to say now, scoffer?

You keep saying that. I guess your fellow-posters who disagreed with you don't count?

Where did they disagree? Rustbucket's figures show that not only is the southron claim that the south paid the majority of the tariff false, tariff revenue grew during the war in real terms, and remained at roughly the same levels when factoring in inflation. Without the southern consumers which y'all claim provided the majority of revenue, and without southren exports which y'all claim provided the bulk of the imports. Figures provided by DomainMasteer back up rustbucket's post, and figures provided by Lincoln show that revenues in 1864 were almost twice those in 1860. So if my 'fellow posters' disagree with anyone it's you and your southron myths.

...but your referencing his remarks shows that you know very well that Southerners spent a good deal of time debating the proposition that the Union was a one-way street, or proposed to become a one-way street, in which the North would take advantage of the South economically.

I've mentioned two speeches by Stephens, actually. In the one you seem to be thinking of, Stephens mentioned the tariff only to rebut Toombs' contention that they were an issue. Stephens pointed out that the tariffs were as low as the southern lawmakers had wanted them to be, and that if the south hung together they would remain that way. In the other speechs I quoted from, Stephens is pointing out how the South had basically run the show for most of the nation's history and could continue to do so in the future. So Stephens seems to be contradicting you rather than contradicting me.

And not just on the slavery question -- your and the Red historians' politically-motivated, Clintonoid "contextualizing" gainsay utterly notwithstanding.

Marxist AND liberal, with a womanizing Southern boob of a president thrown in for good measure. Damn, you're on a roll tonight.

Hyperbole aside, the United States exported 3.13 million bales of cotton in the year prior to the rebellion, and probably sold several hundred thousand more bales to domestic customers. So how much was Butler able to sneak through the lines?

Duh. Because they weren't exports. An export is a good sent overseas. Imports are goods received from overseas. I own a Honda CR-V and a Honda Odessey. The CR-V was manufactured in Japan. That is a Japanese export and a U.S. import. The Odessey was made in the U.S., Ohio I think. That is not an import since it was made here. See the difference?

But the coastal trade all inured to the benefit of the North, as they were basically offering the planter early returns at a deep discount in lieu of a royal screwing if the Southern cotton factor decided to try to export the cotton himself: he got screwed in freight rates charged by the Northern shipper, or he got screwed by the United States Treasury Department, which charged him an upfront cash penalty for shipping via a foreign-flag shipper who charged him the going, non-subsidized rate. Either way, he was subsidizing, not Northern manufacturers, but Northern merchants and shippers -- by operation of the law.

So who was getting screwed? The southern cotton grower, who sold his crop in the field and made X cents per pound, whatever the market was? Or the middleman who bought the cotton and had to get it to the textile mill? Or the mill owner who had to pay for the cotton and the expense of getting it to him? You would have us believe that the cotton grower grew his crop and paid to get it to the overseas consumer before he could get his money. I think it was PeaRidge who used to off the picturesque image of the southern plantation owners sitting on his bale of cotton on the way to England where he swapped for a table or something, and the brought it back home (to get screwed by the tariff no doubt.) Nothing could be further from the truth. The cotton producer sold his crop to the broker who accepted the risk of getting the cotton to market, and who was compensated for his risk and the services he provided when he sold the cotton to the mill owner or whoever. That's the way business works.

A rather ridiculous scenario, if one stops to think about it at all. Why would the cotton exporter care who carried his cotton, since the end consumer would pay the expense anyway? If the U.S. shipper jacked up his price too high then the cotton would not find a buyer in Europe and the shipper wouldn't have a customer. And of course we have the lunatic importer, putting up cash for imports only to stash them in a warehouse somewhere. While down the street you have the smart importer, a Yankee no doubt, who ensures he has a buyer for his imports before ordering them thus preventing the need for warehousing costs and advancing money without knowing when he will get a return on it. Your importer has to be southern, I guess.

The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing....It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No---we MUST NOT "let the South go.

Again a ridiculous position if you think about it. If not U.S. ships then who's? Southern ships? Didn't exist and there was no interest in starting? European ships? Bingo! So what is the U.S. shipowner to do? Tie his ships up and go out of business? Or adjust his rates to make them competitive with whatever the European shippers offered? My bet is on the later. He may not have had the protections he had before, but he made money. He kept his business. And from the southern point of view why should they care who carried the cotton, so long as they got the best price. So once again the fears expressed in your editorial makes no economic or business sense.

If the Union Democrat is to be believed in the slightest, that "the South gains by this process," then by the operation of logic, what I posted above, and what Robert Toombs told the Georgians, was correct: the North was indeed cleaning up on the South, by the operation of the tariff as it existed, never mind the impending Morrill Tariff that was to be passed the following year.

Toombs seems to have been a voice in the wilderness where the tariff is concerned, and even in that speech he had to get his tirade in defense of slavery in before he could turn to minor matters such as the tariff. And Stephens put that fear to rest in his rebuttal.

Why drop off in New York, pay tariff, and then ship it south? And drop that "Warehousing Act" crap.

No. That was the reason.

What other use for the law was there?

Steering imports (in violation of the Constitution) to favored ports -- the ones with lots of warehouses. You talk about merchants storing stuff in New York for later sale. Well how stupid is that?

Stupid like a fox, if you're a New York politician and you want to clone the distribution-center role London had taken on with near-identical laws that the Warehousing Act was modelled on. Because it funnels massive amounts of trade through your local entrepot, that's why. A Jaycee's dream.

Why import something to begin with if you don't have a customer for it? Why put your money up to buy it, go through the expense of shipping it, then pay for storing it, and then look for a buyer? Just how dumb do you think they were?

It's called, stocking merchandise. Wal-Mart and Radio Shack do it all the time. Only New York's warehouse system allowed the merchants to stash there stuff in New York and defer the duties. That's called leveraging your investment -- it's a comparative advantage. Nugatory at free-trade "tariff" rates, it becomes an enormous economic fact of life if you're talking about tariff rates like those of 1828 or contemplating something like a Morrill Tariff.

Other people understand the economics of this better than I, so I'll let them make the argument, and stand aside.

And when the south started the war at Sumter they started it over slavery, and not tariffs.

No, they didn't. They started it over independence, and having a future.

I've mentioned two speeches by Stephens, actually. In the one you seem to be thinking of, Stephens mentioned the tariff only to rebut Toombs' contention that they were an issue.

Stephens was a Southern Whig, and so he approved of tariffs.

Stephens pointed out that the tariffs were as low as the southern lawmakers had wanted them to be, and that if the south hung together they would remain that way.

Yes, he said that. He was also dreaming. He must have seen what Lincoln would do, and he evidently thought it was a good thing. Although he didn't say so.

In the other speechs I quoted from, Stephens is pointing out how the South had basically run the show for most of the nation's history and could continue to do so in the future. So Stephens seems to be contradicting you rather than contradicting me.

Yes, he's contradicting me, and he was also dreaming. He probably didn't realize that Lincoln was determined to break the deadlock in the Senate by creating new States with the sword if necessary, or with his pen.

Stephens was wrong. The South was toast. I'd have tried to do it Stephens's way, and I've often thought he was right about staying in the Union to fight a rearguard action against the Machine. But further reflection on Lincoln's zeal for extraconstitutional night moves has led me to doubt that Stephens had his arms around the political problem the South faced.

Stephens was a Southern Whig, and so he approved of tariffs.

Ex-whig. Current Democrat. But as he also pointed out the tariff rates were "made just as low as Southern men asked them to be, and those are the rates they are now at." And had the southern senators not pulled out of the Congress the Morrill Tariff would never have gotten out of the Senate, just as if had been killed the year before.

He was also dreaming. He must have seen what Lincoln would do, and he evidently thought it was a good thing. Although he didn't say so.

Surely you have some other quote from him supporting your claim? Or are you once again putting ideas in men's heads and words in their mouths without any evidence?

He probably didn't believe in Bigfoot, either. Or men from space. But some people don't need evidence to believe what they want to believe, no matter how ridiculous.

I'd have tried to do it Stephens's way, and I've often thought he was right about staying in the Union to fight a rearguard action against the Machine. But further reflection on Lincoln's zeal for extraconstitutional night moves has led me to doubt that Stephens had his arms around the political problem the South faced.

I have a hard time believing that. You would more likely be like Ruffin, screaming for rebellion and cursing the 'vile, Yankee race.' Of course then Ruffin stayed at home and let others do the fighting until they lost and then he blew his brains out, a heck of a shot considering how small the target must have been. I doubt you would have been that cowardly.

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