Posted on 12/22/2019 4:23:47 AM PST by Bull Snipe
"I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton." General William T. Sherman's "March to the Sea" was over. During the campaign General Sherman had made good on his promise d “to make Georgia howl”. Atlanta was a smoldering ruin, Savannah was in Union hands, closing one of the last large ports to Confederate blockade runners. Sherman’s Army wrecked 300 miles of railroad and numerous bridges and miles of telegraph lines. It seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle. It confiscated 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder, and destroyed uncounted cotton gins and mills. In all, about 100 million dollars of damage was done to Georgia and the Confederate war effort.
“Depends on how you define “most powerful”.”
Brings to mind the exculpatory statement offered by Mrs. Clinton’s husband after he fell into the pit he had dug.
No, the didn’t introduce one because it would be blocked by the southern congressman. In fact those congress men, with the help of doughface northerners actually passed a gag rule that stopped Americans from their constitutional right to petition the government for the referees of their grievances. .But you know this.
As far as Eisenhower goes, its one mans opinion. I would also guess he never read Lee’s letter to his son during the secession crisis.
Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for “perpetual union,” so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession.
Robert E. Lee January 23 1861
So even Les acknowledged that secession was nothing but revolution. Which means he was a traitor.
I leap to the conclusion Lincoln and his auxiliaries did not have the votes to peacefully pass the amendment it is sometimes claimed he wanted.
What Lincoln needed to “free the slaves” was war.
But first he would need a pretext for war. Which his navy found in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. I meant to say, the Fort Sumter Incident.
I leap to the conclusion Lincoln and his auxiliaries did not have the votes to peacefully pass the amendment it is sometimes claimed he wanted.
What Lincoln needed to “free the slaves” was war.
But first he would need a pretext for war. Which his navy found in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. I meant to say, the Fort Sumter Incident.
“As far as Eisenhower goes, its one mans opinion. I would also guess he never read Lee’s letter to his son during the secession crisis.”
Your dismissive and disrespectful attitude toward General Eisenhower is a little surprising based on previous claims you have made.
Conceit shows on some people; it doesn’t look good on you.
No it doesn't.
You leap to a lot of things. But Lincoln and the Republicans were not fools. Their goal prior to the rebellion was to keep slavery penned into states where it already existed and let it wither on the vine.
What Lincoln needed to “free the slaves” was war.
If Lincoln fought the war to "free the slaves" then who went to war to "keep the slaves"?
True if Lincoln was out to start a war. But Jeff Davis beat him to it.
The CSA had by far the largest number of slaves in North America.
The South: We’re seceding because you elected a guy who doesn’t like slavery
The North: We don’t think you can secede, but let’s talk about slavery. We’re prepared to guarantee you can keep it
The South: We’ve already left. Get the rest of your Yankee troops out of our forts!
The North: They’re still ours. Wanna talk things over?
The South: We’ll talk, nation to nation.
The North: You’re not a nation.
The South: (starts shooting)
The North: Okay, you wanted a war...Here we come. But not all of us. And we don’t want your slaves.
The South: The Yankees started a war! The Yankees started a war! The Yankees are invading us! We just wanted to be left alone!
Please remove my name from this hot mess. I’ve lost interest in seeing how deep a hole you will dig for yourself.
To all -- I apologize for being off-topic, but in this case I am simply following wherever Joey's arguments might lead. As aforementioned, I am a "counter-puncher;" and you may recall that Joey initiated this off-topic discussion by bringing up a previous discussion he and I had in another thread. This is the first two paragraphs of #250, Joey's first post to me on this thread:
"You might have noticed that Kalamata is a newcomer here, and with all due respect, a formidable poster. He comes to us fully equipped with a huge inventory of relevant quotes, an arsenal of logical tricks, a defensive shield of barbs & insults, and utter disregard for facts or reasons which might falsify his own unique outlook.
"Undoubtedly, Kalamata is thoroughly anti-American, but in the sense of, for examples, a Ken Ham (Ark Encounter) or Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box) -- these people have declared & waged intellectual war not just on the USA, but on the very idea of reality itself as we perceive it, scientifically. Perhaps with some justification they feel assaulted by blatant scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and strike back with their own equally aggressive anti-science ideology/theology.
So, as you can see, Joey is not simply following the topic: he initiated it. You cannot trust Joey to be a straight shooter.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "When Joey cannot find any facts to support his assertions, and he cannot think of a clever comeback, he resorts to sand-box tactics."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "So claims our own Sandbox Olive-boy."
See what I mean?
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "Joey cannot seem to grasp the concept of ‘Daughter Elements’."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "Olive-boy's assault on science begins with his claims that, according to his own interpretations of the Bible, the Earth is only ~10,000 years old. Therefore any scientific evidence such as radiometric decay rates which might suggest millions or billions of years are necessarily false."
Not true. Radiometric dating is necessarily unreliable due to the impossibility of determining the initial quantity of daughter elements.
****************
>>BroJoeK wrote: "However, for purposes of this particular post Kalamata is hoping to obscure his real beliefs behind a smokescreen of technical terms like "parent" & "daughter" elements."
That is basic chemistry that is easily explained, even to the less-scientifically-challenged, except for, perhaps, Joey. Here goes, in my own words:
"When a radioactive element decays, it produces one or more daughter elements. For example, Carbon-14 decays into the daughter element Nitrogen-14, which is stable. Uranium-238 decays into a long chain of daughter elements; the last in the chain, Lead-206, is stable, so there is no further decay. The trick to radiometric dating is to determine how much of the daughter element(s) existed back when the Uranium-238 first showed up on the earth. Did the U-238 show up by itself, and then begin decaying, or was it already mixed with a certain quantity of daughter elements? If it showed up by itself, the quantity of daughter elements produced determines the age. If not, then it is impossible to determine the age.
Now do you see the problem with radiometric dating?
****************
>>BroJoeK wrote: "Like any believer in "operational science" Kalamata is perfectly willing to acknowledge radiometric decay which can be measured today, but not any discoveries which suggest it's been going on for billions of years."
True.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "Joey doesn’t understand physics, either. The existence of our universe, not to mention the existence of life itself, defies the basic laws of physics. The only solution is special creation using laws we cannot comprehend."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "Science has never claimed 100% omniscience, far from it. Science doesn't know all the basic laws of physics and scientists well understand that at certain levels some very strange things can happen, for example, what Einstein called, "spooky action at a distance".
Joey tends to confuse "science" with the interpretations of data by scientists. Big difference!
****************
>>BroJoeK wrote: "So there is a very long list of things science doesn't know, beginning with the most important of all -- where did the Universe come from? Thousands of years ago philosophers and theologians answered that question, and science has never come up with a better answer."
Joey is always good for some useless pontification.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "For the record, there is no such thing as evolution: not in observable science, not in the laboratory, and not in the fossil record."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "And that is a flat-out lie, accomplished with the help of Olive-boy's self-lobotomization and Denial Tactics."
Science must be empirically testable and observable. Evolution fails those tests. If you read Charlie Darwin's silly book, "On the Origin of Species," with an objective mind, you will soon realize there is no science in it – at all!
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "Get a grip, Joey? I never deny science: only pseudoscience, such as evolutionism and big-bangism. LOL!"
>>BroJoeK wrote: "Right, notice now Olive-boy admits to denying not just evolution but also "big-bangism", meaning not just the scientific basis of geology, biology, chemistry, paleontology & archaeology but also of physics and astronomy, at least as it relates to anything happening before ~10,000 years ago."
I love science, and I have studied all of the branches of science that Joey listed. What Joey refuses to admit is, as soon as we venture back before written civilization, everything tends to be based on guesswork. We simply have no scientific way of knowing what happened back then. That opens the door for charlatans, like Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, to make up stories and pretend it is science.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "So, you do believe in Intelligent Design."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "Sure, as you well know but constantly lie about, FRiend, I believe God created the Universe intelligently. I don't pretend to know which events since then were the necessary consequences of God's original creation and which resulted from God's specific interventions, "mid-course corrections" you might say. I prefer to think that God's perfect creation (the Universe) didn't need "mid-course corrections", but will not be disappointed if I learn, in due time, otherwise."
I am not sure what to make of that statement.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "It is strictly a science thing. The geological column shows clear evidence of a global flood"
>>BroJoeK wrote: "And that is a total lie, conclusions arrived at dishonestly for strictly theological reasons."
I admit I was and am astonished at the correlation between the data and the written record of Moses in Genesis.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "I was a theistic evolutionist, until my eyes were opened by scientific data."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "Nonsense, you mean until you drank the koolaid and lobotomized your brain. In fact, your arguments here are at least disingenuous when not outright dishonest."
Joey is nasty and hostile because I reject his faith-based religion of evolutionism. Evolution truly is faith-based. There is not a shred of solid evidence anywhere on earth that supports it. There are plenty of just-so stories, and plenty of highly imaginative drawings and museum mockups, but no evidence.
The following excerpt is from a seminar of some of the world's top paleontologists. The speaker was Colin Patterson, who was the curator at the Natural History Museum in London for 30 years. He was explaining to the scientists present that he had previously asked several groups of scientists if any of them knew anything about evolution that was true, and NO ONE could answer his question, sorta. Read carefully:
"Well, this time that isn't true. I'm speaking on two subjects, evolutionism and creationism, and I believe it's true to say that I know nothing whatever about either of them. One or the reasons I started taking this antievolutionary view, or let's call it non-evolutionary, was last year I had a sudden realization that for over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. Then one morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled for so long."
"So either there was something wrong with me, or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me, so for the last few weeks, I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people."
"The question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff in the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar at the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time, and then eventually one person said, "Yes, I do know one thing. It ought not to be taught in high school.'"
[Colin Patterson, "Can You Tell Me Anything About Evolution? A Lecture by Colin Patterson." American Museum of Natural History, Nov 5, 1981, p.3]
Hear him say it for yourself. This is the Audio:
Incredible, huh?
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "Joey cannot tell the difference between scientific data, and an obligatory kiss of Darwin’s ring. A scientist must be able to rightly-divide the data from the ideology, or he will be in the dark as much as Joey."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "And here Kalamata alleges motives to the authors of a Nature scientific article he quoted from, alleged motives of which there is zero evidence."
There is plenty of evidence in that research, Joey; but the evidence is against evolution, not in support of it. The scientists are obliged to name-drop Darwin to protect their careers from the establishment, but the research reads the same if you remove all references to evolution.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "Child."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "Kalamata often responds to my comments with this single enigmatic deprecation, "Child"."
Only when you are acting like a child, Child.
Mr. Kalamata
>>Kalamata wrote: “That puts you at least in your 80’s Joey; perhaps the 90’s. Hang in there, Geezer.”
>>BroJoeK wrote: “Not at all, there’s another explanation, but I’ll let you ponder what it might be. ;-)
I forgot: you don’t do math.
****************
>>Joey wrote: “I’ll repeat: from the Civil War on the US military was always less racist than the hometowns of most enlistees.”
>>Kalamata wrote: “I would like to see your data.”
>>BroJoeK wrote: “Sure, but you can answer the question yourself by naming any hometown in America where African-Americans were better treated than in the US military, even before 1948 under segregation.”
Show us your data.
****************
>>Joey wrote: “So let’s start here: after the Civil War’s first year, even escaped slaves were paid the same as whites for their service to the Union Army.”
That is not data.
****************
Joey removed the context so he could get in a jab. I reinserted it.
>>Kalamata wrote: “I don’t recall anyone criticizing Lincoln while I served. I didn’t learn the truth about him until this century.”
>>Joey wrote: “So, it turns out you don’t claim that many serving marines were fellow Lincoln-loathers, just some after they retired?”
>>Kalamata wrote: “When did you quit beating your wife?”
>>Joey wrote: “I’ll take that as Kalamata-code for “yes, you are right about that, but I’m just too fricken arrogant to admit it.”
You asked a jackass question, Joey. I returned the favor. That is all.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: “I realize this is a hard concept for you, Joey, but some people do not run away from the truth when confronted with it.”
>>Joey wrote: “Naw, what you really mean is, “Kalamata is eager to adopt flat-out lies that support his own ideological constructs.”
Not me. I have always been a stickler for the truth. Joey wouldn’t understand.
****************
>>Kalamata on Lincoln: “He didn’t give a rat’s behind about slavery.”
>>Joey wrote: “And there is an example of a total lie which Kalamata is eager to believe for his own partisan purposes.”
Show us what you are talking about, Joey. Prove to everyone that I am lying.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: “LOL! Someone needs to get Joey up-to-speed on the definition of crony capitalism. He won’t listen to me — not since I mocked his religion of evolutionism.”
>>Joey wrote: “Nonsense, I pay careful attention to your words and distinguish between those rare truthful expressions and those many which are nothing but mocking lies.”
Can we assume you are still in the dark about crony-capitalism?
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: “More irrelevant statistics. My point is, cronyism was reasonably in check by threats of nullification and secession, until Lincoln’s war against the states destroyed state sovereignty. Just sayin’ . . .”
>>Joey wrote: “No, my statistics are totally relevant, but your point is pure fantasy, based on nothing more than your own partisan wishes.”
Okay, Joey. Show us how they are relavent.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: “Child.”
>>Joey wrote: “Child” being Kalamata-code for “yes, you’re right, but I can’t admit it or my whole argument comes crashing down.”
No, Child. When I use the word “child” it is code for, “Quit acting like a spoiled brat,” Child.
Mr. Kalamata
I believe you are absolutely correct. Have you read this from 1860?
"By mere supineness, the people of the South have permitted the Yankees to monopolize the carrying trade, with its immense profits. We have yielded to them the manufacturing business, in all its departments, without an effort, until recently, to become manufacturers ourselves. We have acquiesced in the claims of the North to do all the importing, and most of the exporting business, for the whole Union. Thus, the North has been aggrandised, in a most astonishing degree, at the expense of the South. It is no wonder that their villages have grown into magnificent cities. It is not strange that they have"merchant princes," dwelling in gorgeous palaces and reveling in luxuries transcending the luxurious appliances of the East! How could it be otherwise? New York city, like a mighty queen of commerce, sits proudly upon her island throne, sparkling in jewels and waving an undisputed commercial scepter over the South. By means of her railways and navigable streams, she sends out her long arms to the extreme South; and, with an avidity rarely equaled, grasps our gains and transfers them to herself—taxing us at every step—and depleting us as extensively as possible without actually destroying us."
[Vicksburg Daily Whig, January 18, 1860, quoted in Dummond, Southern Editorials on Secession, in Kenneth M. Stampp, "The Causes of the Civil War." 1986, pp.65-66]
I have that book by Dummond, and the Vicksburg article is over 1,150 words, with a theme centered around the thought, "Why did we let the Yanks take advantage of us like this? Why have we not been manufacturing our own cloth?", and etc..
Mr. Kalamata
“No it doesn’t (bring to mind the exculpatory statement offered by Mrs. Clinton’s husband . . .).”
Do you even know which statement I was referencing?
The reason I ask: if you do know to which statement I was referring then something must have brought it to your mind. Perhaps my post brought it to your mind. But, you deny that it did.
If you do not know to which statement I was referring then it seems your correct response would have been, “I don’t even know what you are talking about. What Clinton? What statement? I know nothing.”
Your response #687 confirms what you deny.
Note to self: strike jdsteel; strike John Moses Henderson Smyth; add Benjamin Burton. Oompa Loompa Doompety Doo
“Why did we let the Yanks take advantage of us like this?
This may be the answer to that question.
“We are a peculiar people, sir! You don’t understand us, and you can’t understand us, because we are known to you only by Northern writers and Northern papers, who know nothing of us themselves, or misrepresent what they do know. We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities—we don’t want them, have no literature—we don’t need any yet. We have no press—we are glad of it. We do not require a press, because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no commercial marine—no navy—we don’t want them. We are better without them. Your ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own vessels. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides.”
Texas Senator Lewis T. Wigfall
In theory, yes, if you assume the tariff affected everyone equally. But other dynamics were in play. For example, the South could pay to ship protected manufactured goods down from the North, OR pay tariffs on imports. The imports, even with the tariffs, were typically cheaper than heavily-protected Northern goods, so the South paid a high percentage of the tariffs.
It is easy to get side-tracked by assuming the tariffs would affect the Northern consumer equally. But when you read the newspapers and speeches of that day, both North and South, they are almost unanimous in pointing to the North as the beneficiary of the tariffs, and the South as the victim. Perhaps a clue on how that came about can be found in the Confederate Constitution, which specifically forbids crony item-by-item protection of any branch of industry:
"The Congress shall have power- (I) To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises for revenue, necessary to pay the debts, provide for the common defense, and carry on the Government of the Confederate States; but no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry; and all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the Confederate States." ["Constitution of the Confederate States." Avalon Project, March 11, 1861, Article I, Section 8]
The U.S. Constitution doesn't have that clause.
A brief history of the protective tariff includes the super-divisive 1828 tariff that created a nullification/secession crisis with South Carolina, followed by a compromise a few years later that was still objectionable to the South, followed by a complete overhaul in 1846, which mirrored the additional clause of the future Confederate Constitution by removing item-by-item rates and replacing them with an ad valorem schedule:
"As president [James Polk, who defeated the protectionist Henry Clay,] delivered on his promise in 1846 when, under the guidance of Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker, Congress adopted a comprehensive overhaul of the tariff system featuring a moderate downward revision of rates and, importantly, the standardization of tariff categories on a tiered ad valorem schedule.
"This final feature was intended to improve the transparency of the tariff system by consolidating the somewhat convoluted list of tariff items, itself the product of many decades of lobbying and the carving out of highly specialized categories as political favors for specific companies and industries. By converting the tariff from a system that relied primarily on itemized specific duties or individually assigned ad valorem rates to a formal tiered schedule of ad valorem categories in which tariffs were assessed as a percentage of the import 's declared dollar value, Walker further limited the ability of special interests of all stripes to disguise tariff favoritism in units of volume and measurement—different tariff rates assessed by tons of iron, gallons of alcohol, yards of cord and so forth.
"The Walker reforms helped to stabilize many years of fluctuating tariff politics by instituting a moderately free trade Tariff-for-revenue system that lasted, subject to a further uniform reduction of rates in 1857, until the eve of the Civil War…
[Phillip W. Magness, "Tariffs and the American Civil War." Essential Civil War Curriculum, 2017, p.8]
Needless to day, the Southerners were happy campers, that is, until the Morrill Tariff showed up with a return to cronyism:
"Between December 1858 and March 1860, Morrill was inundated with letters from manufacturers and industrialists requesting favorable protective tariff rates against their foreign competitors. Many of these petitions were copied verbatim into the text of the tariff bill. The Morrill schedule also replaced the ad valorem schedule system of Walker with the reintroduction of item-by-item rates. The new schedule utilized an ad hoc mixture of individual ad valorem rates and specific duties, assessed by import units rather than volume, making its administration less transparent. While it is difficult to measure the full effect of the revisions given this change of assessment, Morrill 's equivalent rates pushed most items well above the 1846 schedule and, in several instances, to near-parity with the Black Tariff levels of 1842."
[Ibid. p.8]
So, the division doesn't appear to be about tariffs, per se, but about crony capitalism, a.k.a., corporate welfare, a.k.a. political favoritism. When we see the word "tariff" dominating the antebellum literature, we tend to scratch our heads and wonder why it was such a big deal. But the politicians and businessmen of that day understood that the word typically meant political favoritism that helped the North, and hurt the South.
For the record, the crony-distribution of excess collected tariffs to build railroads, canals, and etc., also heavily favored the North, and more specifically, the politically-connected.
Mr. Kalamata
>>OIFVeteran wrote: “Luckily Lincoln wasn’t using the general welfare clause when he was suppressing the rebellion. He was using the authority given to him by congress when they passed the militia act of 1792”
Baloney.
Mr. Kalamata
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