Posted on 04/25/2023 5:03:33 AM PDT by MtnClimber
I was hearing McCarthy's side of the story when I was a boy, in 1960.
Since then, the situation has grown manifestly worse, regardless of Republican presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush & Trump.
I don't think that before Trump the average American, even the average Republican, understood how hostile our government can be to us.
Regardless of Republican administrations, the Deep State remains solidly radical Democrats.
Wealthy and highly connected liberals living in the Northeast, regardless of what they call themselves.
In 1860, they called themselves "Democratics" and most were from the South, so when the new incoming Republican administration fired them all, they just moved on to Richmond, VA, and kept right on doing what they did before in Washington, DC.
Sadly, Congress later made it impossible for Republican administrations to clean house and so entrenched Democrat bureaucrats have grown ever more powerful and correspondingly corrupt.
But regardless, they always were, and still are Democrats.
Credit Mobilier anyone?
The difference, then as now is that the press usually helped cover up Democrat scandals, while gleefully exposing and exaggerating Republican misdeeds.
But Democrat scandals were serious enough in 1860 that Republicans made cleaning up Washington a major plank in their 1860 platform.
As we fast approach the end of an over 200 year old failing experiment in human freedom, I thought this good man’s decades long effort to warn us might be a fitting finale. In the 1980’s, Larry McDonald and a handful of others predicted this madness!
https://www.bitchute.com/video/DIddb3VSBMEV/
Mostly, my great grandfather’s correspondences during the war only discussed logistics, emotions, morale, health, hopes and fears regarding when the war would be over, whether it would end in loss or victory - the weather, supplies, training, etc..
There were very few hints into his thoughts regarding why the war was being fought. The letters were mostly telling his loved ones how much he missed them and telling them how he’s doing.
A few things though:
1) Whenever he or his family members referred to the war or any battles or troop movements, it was in the context of defending against or stopping Northern attacks - at one point he calls it “this war of Northern aggression”. He never talks about any “cause” other than protecting various southern towns, cities, farms, mills, ports and warehouses.
2) his letters are full of questions about how friends and families are doing back home, many of whom we learned were slaves. There is a sense that - at least in my great-grandfather’s circles - the slaves he grew up with were his dear friends.
My grandmother and her sisters died at various times during my teenage years so I got to talk to them a few times about “The War of Northern Aggression”. They never once defended slavery or said anything good about it. They certainly didn’t think the war was fought to protect slavery.
I can’t remember any details but they seemed to think it was northern politicians imposing unfair taxes on the south that caused the war - not slavery. They said everyone both north and south used to agree that slavery had to be gradually ended by attrition… then suddenly, half way through the war, the North starts saying they are fighting to free the slaves.
I got the idea from them that the existence of the slave population was generally considered to be a horrible curse, forced upon them by the British crown during colonial times.
So I did some reading… here are some things about the history you don’t usually hear about that make me think crushing the South wasn’t the best way to end slavery.
The governors of the various slave-owning British colonies were constantly pleading and petitioning King Charles to receive payment in gold rather than slaves.
But under the terms of many of the charters by which colonial land was granted, the form of payment was entirely up to King Charles, and instead of gold, they were paid in the form of slaves to work the land.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_charters_in_the_Thirteen_Colonies
Here’s something to get an idea of how - both north and south - the problem of how to abolish slavery was known to be complex and difficult - and something that needed to be done gradually. I’m not saying whether that’s true or not - just that it was the prevailing view - in the north as well as the south.
If I had to sum up my perspectives on the Civil War in a few sentences, I guess it would be this:
Slavery has existed for as long as there have been human beings, and it still exists in some parts of the world. Slave trade during colonial times resulted in a huge slave population in what became the Southern United States. Slavery is an abomination and be ended.
But what was it about 1860 that made it necessary for a civil war that cost 650,000 lives and untold pain and destruction? Something triggered that war and it couldn’t have been because slavery didn’t suddenly appear in 1860.
I screwed up the last few sentences - here’s a corrected version”
Slavery has existed for as long as there have been human beings, and it still exists in some parts of the world. Slave trade during colonial times resulted in a huge slave population in what became the Southern United States. Slavery is an abomination that must be ended.
But what was it about 1860 that made it necessary for a civil war that cost 650,000 lives and untold pain and destruction? Something triggered that war and it couldn’t have been slavery, because slavery didn’t suddenly appear in 1860.
Thanks for the reply. One of the miscalculations that Lincoln made with pursuit of the war was the assumption that he could convince the non-slaveholding Southerners to oppose the slaveholding class and join the Unionist cause. The problem here is that once begun, it was hard to see this as little more than a Northern invasion by Northern political interests, even to those who opposed or were indifferent to slavery in the South.
Add to that, Northerners did not want to receive the millions of Black slaves (or ex-slaves) in their states, despite their proclamations of concern for their plight. Some Northern states enacted outright laws to prohibit Blacks from moving there (Oregon being a notable example). There was obvious hypocrisy on both sides, to be sure.
But with respect to the South, they had become a bit too comfortable with the slave institution, and didn’t exactly take actions to phase it out over time, as the North had done (somewhat easier in the North, as it was not a benefit to their economics). It had become so deeply culturally ingrained, which was an added problem. The deeper that goes, the harder it is to remove it.
Why it all finally reached a boiling point by 1860 was because of the political party realignment. Until 1856, you had a general balance of North & South/Slave & Anti-Slave interests in the Democrat and Whig parties. However, this resulted in both parties having almost indistinguishable platforms and it was becoming ever more untenable, until the anti-slavery interests bolted out of both parties, which caused the collapse of the Whigs. Had there not been the three-party split in 1856 (Dem vs. Republican & Know-Nothing) and Fremont won over Buchanan, the war would’ve begun 4 years earlier.
With Lincoln’s election in a 4-way contest (helped by the hard Democrat split between the Southern pro-slave ticket and the Northern semi-soft-anti-slave ticket with Sen. Douglas), especially where Lincoln and the Republicans were seen as so offensive to the South and Southern interests that they were not even on the ballot (with the soft Unionist/ex-Whig ticket of John Bell being the only “acceptable” opposition party allowed on Southern ballots remotely aligned with a possible Republican position).
Although ultimately it was the (right to) slavery that was the breaking issue, clearly the North/Union interests basically did not want a whole section of the country breaking off and away. No country wants to see that occur, regardless of the bone of contention.
Of course, more to all this than can be adequately discussed in a couple of posts. Growing up in the South, albeit of Northern parentage, I’ve been able to see the nuance of the situation between both sides that doesn’t necessarily have me draw the conclusion that one side was the all-good side and the other all-bad. Sadly, in a lot of ways, this could be laid at the feet of the Founding Fathers. Had slavery been outlawed at the start, it would’ve avoided kicking the can of such a divisive (at the time) subject down the road for their descendants to deal with.
But, alas, that would’ve divided the Founders enough that we would not have been united enough to successfully seek independence from the British. In that instance, remaining part of the British Empire, slavery would’ve been forcibly ended by the crown decades earlier here, and that might’ve resulted in a similar war, albeit against a much smaller population in the South. Of course, even President Jackson, the Southerner, stated decades before the Civil War on the prospect of Southern secession or insurrection, that he intended to hang their leaders if they had pressed onward with that. That, along with the aforementioned balance of slave/anti-slave interests in both parties, put off a war for 3 more decades.
“..that one side was [not] the all-good side and the other all-bad.”
That may be the understatement of the century! :-)
she called it....there was a communist threat....McCarthy was not wrong....
she called it....there was a communist threat....McCarthy was not wrong....and she voted for Kennedy.......but she knew the truth.
The anti anti-Communists were largely successful in their campaign to character assassinate Joe McCarthy. To this day the word “McCarthyism” is a pejorative, even though McCarthy was clearly confronting a clear and present danger and threat to the security of the country.
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