My fellow OIF brother, just make sure you NEVER tell anyone that the “Emancipation Proclamation” only freed southern slaves and the last were freed in New Jersey AFTER the war.
Victors write / re-write history.
I am not a “revisionist, sore loser,” etc. I am just an Eastern European Jew whose family was enslaved and murdered... Like 98% of southerners we were never slave-owners nor did we have anything to do with plantation lifestyles.
At the same time I would surely have fought for the south and the Southern cause.
Always fascinated by my many FRiends who attack confederate values and whine about an out-of-control federal government.
Lincoln had no constitutional authority to free slaves in area not in rebellion. Congress passed the confiscation acts during the war which authorized Lincoln to issue the emancipation proclamation.
Lincoln did, however, push strongly and lobbied to pass the thirteenth amendment which destroyed slavery. Before he sent the amendment to the states for ratification he signed it. Which was not necessary, but showed how much he wanted it ratified.
In south Carolina close to 50% of families were slave owning families. If you look at the percentage of slave owning families in the slave holding states the higher the percentage the more likely the state was to rebel.
If the rebels had won a government would have been established that explicitly endorsed some humans as property. Can’t think of a more out of control government than that.
well said.
Some just cannot get past the government/PC Revisionist propaganda. They are willfully blind to the fact that the centralization of power in the hands of the federal government and the denial of the sovereignty of the states has led directly to almost all of the problems we have today from an oppressive federal government, to constant meddling abroad to unsustainable debts that will eventually bankrupt the country.
This was all foreseeable and was actually foreseen.
“I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination.” - President Jefferson Davis The Atlantic Monthly Volume 14, Number 83
“If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free Institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity.” -Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America
“I love the Union and the Constitution,’’ he said, ``but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it.” Jefferson Davis
“I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.” Robert E. Lee in a letter to Lord Acton
This is why all the “slavery, slavery, slavery” from the PC Revisionists and no mention of the economic grievances of the Southern states and no mention of their objections to the centralization of power.
“It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war against states fighting for the independence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery.” Woodrow Wilson