Posted on 12/14/2010 4:53:34 PM PST by unixman9627
Called to the difficult and responsible station of Chief Executive of the Provisional Government which you have instituted, I approach the discharge of the duties assigned to me with an humble distrust of my abilities, but with a sustaining confidence in the wisdom of those who are to guide and to aid me in the administration of public affairs, and an abiding faith in the virtue and patriotism of the people.
(Excerpt) Read more at confederatevets.com ...
What was good about it? The men who fought for it, both the soldiers and the officers. The idea that people have a right to form a new government when they conclude their current one no longer serves them.
What good would a Confederacy that survived have done? Well obviously the persistence of slavery would have been bad (just want to make that clear in case you’re a Michael Gerson type of conservative), and who knows, maybe later results would have been disastrous. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a united American nation strong enough to wage WW2. Then again maybe slavery would have ended by other means sooner than expected, and maybe North and South would have reunited peacefully. Maybe we’d have a much smaller federal government.
Who knows how history would have turned out. What if there had been no slavery in the US? Then most black Americans would either not exist, or they’d have come to be in Africa.
I don’t know why you felt compelled to put quotation marks around “defend.” That is no doubt how they saw it, and back then one thought of themself as much a Virginian, or North Carolinian, or Tennessean as they did an American.
I’m not saying I wish the South had won. Considering how many lost opportunities there were for the South, it almost makes me believe they were simply destined or meant to lose. My major point in all of this is that having admiration for the Confederates/Southerners/Rebels doesn’t make one a bad person. Statues of Confederate war heroes should not come down. Lee and Jackson were admirable and honorable. The hundreds of thousands who fought were doing what they felt to be right. One shouldn’t have to apologize for any of these sentiments for beliefs.
You may disagree totally about the Confederacy, but as a conservative I would hope that you recoil at how people are attacked for harmless sentiments like those I just mentioned, and at how they give in and apologize, which only emboldens those on the Left who seek to restrict public discourse to such a point that nothing but their views are deemed proper.
Well, let’s say for arguments sake that slavery would have persisted for 2 or 3 more decades. Sure, that would have been terrible, but do you think it would have been worse than the hundreds of thousands who died, and that many more who were maimed?
I’m glad we at least seem to agree on Hannity. Even though I agree with him on most issues, I find him to be a very unimaginative thinker.
As to the relevance of the Democrats and Republicans ancient (politically speaking) history; I don’t think we are going to see eye to eye here. The Democrats today are the party of big government, racial preferences, and wealth redistribution. Unfortunately that obviously appeals to most black voters. I’d agree that these things aren’t good for them as a community, but it is what it is, and I don’t think that it would make any difference if every black American knew the history of the Democrats. What does that have to do with today when the Republicans are out to starve their children and keep them out of jobs and college?
And MLK is another interesting what-if? What if he had lived? Where would his politics have gone? I think he would have ended up firmly on the Left, and would have supported policies of racial preferences and generous welfare.
What was good about it? The men who fought for it, both the soldiers and the officers.
We're talking about a political or policy idea. Even bad policies and bad political systems can be supported by good people. That doesn't make those policies or systems good. Indeed, it could be argued that the way bad institutions and policies can get decent people of good will to support them makes those institutions or policies worse than they would otherwise be. The attractiveness of unworthy political systems distract people from worthy goals and wastes their virtues on the wrong objects.
The idea that people have a right to form a new government when they conclude their current one no longer serves them.
That people have the right to reject or overthrow a tyrannical government was established by the Declaration of Independence and by our Revolution and others. But how did the Confederacy advance the idea of self-determination and the independence of peoples? I'd argue that this idea that you can simply throw away a political union because it doesn't "serve" you in some sense was probably a mistaken one. You can undertake to change things by working within the system. If that doesn't work you can try to make a new start. But to say you don't need dialogue, consent, negotiation, that you can simply say "I'm out" and expect the rest of the country to cope as best it can, isn't really a good or workable idea or an improvement over what came earlier.
Well obviously the persistence of slavery would have been bad (just want to make that clear in case you’re a Michael Gerson type of conservative), and who knows, maybe later results would have been disastrous. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a united American nation strong enough to wage WW2.
True and true.
Then again maybe slavery would have ended by other means sooner than expected, and maybe North and South would have reunited peacefully. Maybe we’d have a much smaller federal government.
Possibly. The Southern leadership would have wanted to maintain racial segregation (that wasn't just a Southern thing, but it certainly went further in the South than elsewhere) and to keep their labor force in subjugation (as they did for a century after emancipation). They wouldn't reunite with the North without keeping much power over their subjugated population, if even then. They'd have wanted a federal government so weak that it couldn't accomplish anything.
But even if a theoretical agreement could have been reached, the idea that an independent Southern (or Northern) governing elite would submit to a new unified government may be overly optimistic. Do you really think governments and elites surrender power that easily? Wasn't that what the war was about? We don't know what would have happened, but it's at least possible, that like other governments around the world, the CSA would have done what it could to shore up its power. It wouldn't have behaved differently from other governments and wouldn't have given up its power to reestablish the union.
I don’t know why you felt compelled to put quotation marks around “defend.” That is no doubt how they saw it, and back then one thought of themself as much a Virginian, or North Carolinian, or Tennessean as they did an American.
But there were Virginians and Tennesseans who saw the federal government as their defenders. There were those who thought of themselves as Americans first and worried more about their fanatical neighbors. That's why I put "defend" in quotation marks. Maybe I shouldn't have, but we do have to remember that not every Southerner welcomed secession.
Also, I wonder about the rapidity with which everything proceeded. All of a sudden, Virginians and Tennesseans were expected to fall in line with people they disagreed with and feared a few weeks earlier -- the extremists of the lower South. I suspect some people got whiplash trying to figure out just who were their friends and who were their enemies, who was defending and who was attacking.
I’m not saying I wish the South had won. Considering how many lost opportunities there were for the South, it almost makes me believe they were simply destined or meant to lose.
Interesting. I get the same feeling looking at some of the choices rebel Southern politicians made at the time. It was almost as if they were choosing a path that they could have known wouldn't have worked. They just couldn't help it.
My major point in all of this is that having admiration for the Confederates/Southerners/Rebels doesn’t make one a bad person. Statues of Confederate war heroes should not come down. Lee and Jackson were admirable and honorable. The hundreds of thousands who fought were doing what they felt to be right. One shouldn’t have to apologize for any of these sentiments for beliefs.
Okay, but I'd distinguish between heritage and politics. Both are a part of history, but if you're talking about political ideas, and policies, and institutions, you may come up with different questions and answers than if you're talking about cultural heritage, and identity, and belonging.
You may disagree totally about the Confederacy, but as a conservative I would hope that you recoil at how people are attacked for harmless sentiments like those I just mentioned, and at how they give in and apologize, which only emboldens those on the Left who seek to restrict public discourse to such a point that nothing but their views are deemed proper.
Okay. You're right about that. There's another side to that, though. George Washington or James Madison could see the danger in too much government and in too centralized government. They could also see that a government so weak that it couldn't defend the country and enforce the laws was also a danger. Sometimes people get in a "federal government bad" or "federal government good" groove and ignore that there are dangers in too weak a country as well as in too strong a central government.
Of course it was. It was in the speeches and editorials of the secessionists, and it’s revisionism to continue to deny it.
The republic of our founders died in 1865. Glad you approve, by the way out Federal Government just voted to allow buggery in the barracks. Viva la Union. Zieg Hiel! Zieg Hiel !
I guess yo can join now, its safe for you.
How many source documents are you reading? Ken Burns movies don’t count
No it wasn’t, the issue of slavery didn’t even enter the picture until the third year of Lincoln’s war when he couldn’t get anybody to sign up to fight it, so he duped the north with the great emancipation proclamation that didn’t free one slave, AND exempted the five slave holding states in the north.
The secession was caused by over reach of federal government from issues stemming back before 1837...if you’d cracked a book and studied the history of it instead of just reading the secessionist documents, you would get the whole picture...but your mindset to blame the south won’t let you do that.
If the north had been serious about abolition, why did they elect a racist president? Why were five of their states still slave holders? Why was Massachusetts dependent on the Cabots who were slave shippers even up until 1900! You see the slaves only entered the problem when the south told them to take a hike and left their arse dangling with no money to fund their government coffers from all the tariffs from the ports that the south held. The north crashed their manufacturing when the unions (YES, UNIONS)priced themselves out of business and the south wouldn’t buy their products when they could import them cheaper.
In fact the north was full of nothing but hypocrites who decided since they couldn’t make it to strip the south of their slaves.
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world."
By their own words, the secession was all about slavery.
And we came to that conclusion about 150 years ago.
Did you get all those myths from some Cracker Jack box, or did you just make them up off the top of your head? Overpriced union labor in 1837? High tariffs on goods "from" southern ports? Just --- WOW?
Do you know that the tariff rate in 1860 was the lowest in our history at that point in time? Did you know that both Massachusetts and South Carolina representatives in congress voted for those rates? Do you even understand what a tariff is?
The tariff excuse of secession is a myth my friend. Read some history. Read what they said at the time, not what some Libertarian nutbag at Lou Rockwell.com says.
Ah, but he did -- just not directly: "They formed a new alliance, but within each State its government has remained, the rights of person and property have not been disturbed." (emphasis mine)
There was really only one type of "property" at issue, of course.
And: "Through many years of controversy with our late associates, the Northern States" -- about slavery, of course.
And: "With a Constitution differing only from that of our fathers in so far as it is explanatory of their well-known intent, freed from the sectional conflicts which have interfered with the pursuit of the general welfare..."
The sectional conflicts were about slavery. And the the Confederate constitution primarily differed from "that of our fathers" by specifically protecting the right to own slaves.
And: "The cultivation of our fields has progressed as heretofore, and even should we be involved in war there would be no considerable diminution in the production of the staples which have constituted our exports and in which the commercial world has an interest scarcely less than our own. This common interest of the producer and consumer can only be interrupted by an exterior force which should obstruct its transmission to foreign markets..."
Davis is referring, of course, to cotton -- the production of which depended on slave labor. The south predicted that the abolition of slavery would result in "diminution in the production" of cotton, and the Confederacy hoped that the disruption to the "foreign markets" of England's textile industry, would result in British support for the Confederacy.
And: "We have changed the constituent parts, but not the system of our Government. The Constitution formed by our fathers is that of these Confederate States, in their exposition of it, and in the judicial construction it has received, we have a light which reveals its true meaning."
Again, one notes the changes pertaining to protection of slavery.
You might wish that Davis had said nothing about slavery -- but his speech is in fact suffused with the topic. He just was not honest enough to say it outright.
perfect
Like I said, get out a book and read up on what happened before secession, you need to go back some years. If you can’t do that, then there’s no reason whatsoever talking to you about it.
I don’t have to read what someone else did...I went out and got the facts myself and have written extensively on what I’ve found.
And if you too can’t or won’t do that, then there’s no sense in having a discussion with you since you want to stay deluded and mired into false flags.
Yes, UNIONS, there were UNIONS in the north as far back as 1826. And YES, I know they had lowered the tariffs in an attempt to win back the south, but by that time they were just a little TOO LATE! Nobody was buying their BS! And NO, it’s not a myth, much to your chagrin, of course. I’d be willing to bet you never read a blasted thing about what lead up to the civil war and barely know what you’re talking about.
There were trade unions in the 1790’s. Printers were the first to go on strike - in New York in 1794; cabinet makers struck in 1796; carpenters in Philadelphia in 1797; and cordwainers (shoemakers) in 1799.
The Nation Labor Union, (actually a federation- an organization of local unions) formed in 1866. The NLU eventually persuaded Congress to pass an eight hour day for Federal workers. Never very strong, it was a casualty of the sweeping economic depression of 1873.
(http://www.socialstudieshelp.com/Eco_Unionization.htm)
So, yes I know about trade unions in early America (although I did have to refresh my memory about specifics), but I don’t see where they had much of any influence until around 1894 at the earliest when the American Railroad Union struck the Pullman Company.
I would be interested in learning specifically where and how any trade unions had any appreciable impact on production and trade in pre-1860’s America.
Hell, not even the Lew Rockwell people blame organized labor for the Panic of 1837.
Dear diary...
In case you hadn’t noticed, the rebels lost their war and came crawling back into the Union. Jeffy Davis was captured, running for his life, dressed in drag. Some “hero” you have there. Ms. Davis’ high falutin’ words were the usual BS fed to the ignorant Southerners that they were being tread upon, when it was instead the Southern elites who used their largely ignorant “brothers” as cannon fodder for their own dreams of empire and economic slave hegemony.
Better you honor the personage of Robert E. Lee who did not wish to see the South secede and who was, for the time period, the antipathy of the Davises of the South. Lee championed re-unification and saw the folly of what the Southern elites had tried to do.
Translation: "If you cannot agree (submit) with my position, I'll simply ignore your dissent. You understand: I reject your reality and choose to substitute my own".
A intransigent lost cause rebel to the bitter end.
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